SQL Analytics Powering Telemetry Analysis at Comcast

Comcast is one of the leading providers of communications, entertainment, and cable products and services. At the heart of it is Comcast RDK providing the backbone of telemetry to the industry. RDK (Reference Design Kit) is pre-bundled opensource firmware for a complete home platform covering video, broadband and IoT devices. RDK team at Comcast analyzes petabytes of data, collected every 15 minutes from 70 million devices (video and broadband and IoT devices) installed in customer homes. They run ETL and aggregation pipelines and publish analytical dashboards on a daily basis to reduce customer calls and firmware rollout. The analysis is also used to calculate WIFI happiness index which is a critical KPI for Comcast customer experience. In addition to this, RDK team also does release tracking by analyzing the RDK firmware quality. SQL Analytics allows customers to operate a lakehouse architecture that provides data warehousing performance at data lake economics for up to 4x better price/performance for SQL workloads than traditional cloud data warehouses. We present the results of the “Test and Learn” with SQL Analytics and the delta engine that we worked in partnership with the Databricks team. We present a quick demo introducing the SQL native interface, the challenges we faced with migration, The results of the execution and our journey of productionizing this at scale.