By
Michele Campriani and Scott Lukes of Accanto Systems
The mobile consumer has finally won. In almost every country, mobile subscribers are flocking to the new generation of rich-content mobile data-based services such as Flickr, Twitter, real-time gaming and location-aware applications that are -truly- making a difference in everyday life. To launch these services, however, operators are being forced to massively upgrade their networks to all-over-IP architectures in order to provision and mange them. Unfortunately, this migration to all-IP has presented huge problems for operators, as the monitoring and troubleshooting competencies, equipment requirements, and most importantly, linkages between the Network Operations Center (NOC) and Customer Care (CC) have changed dramatically.
Operators now understand that the metrics that define a good customer experience for voice do not necessarily have meaning for IP-based services. One of the reasons is that in the IP-based world, there has been a
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The metrics that define a good customer experience for voice do not necessarily have meaning for IP-based services. |
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Until now, the roles of the OSS and Network Monitoring Systems (NMS’s) in an operator network have been isolated activities, often conducted by independent departments. The OSS has always been concerned with obtaining information from the nodes and providing network-level information, while the
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natural decoupling between the service delivered and the network infrastructure. For instance, every core network node may be operating fine, but if the services or access elements have issues such as abnormally high TCP retransmission rates, DNS resolution anomalies or HTTP failures, the customer will have a negative experience. Also, because of this relationship between the service and network, it is especially important that the NOC and CC become more tightly coupled. When a customer calls with a support issue, it is important that it be resolved at the CC-level before it becomes a NOC issue, as trouble tickets must now be solved in hours, not days or weeks. Aligning CC and the NOC requires careful integration of the OSS and Network Monitoring.
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NMS is concerned with extracting information from network traffic and from the services themselves. The problem for the OSS is that it must now map network elements to services, which it was not designed to do. The problem for the NMS is that it was designed to look at services and evaluate their quality, but it does not communicate with the network elements. As an example, take a traditional “Fault Management” solution from an OSS vendor: the system is able to detect hardware problems affecting the network elements, but even if they detect that a particular node has a problem, they are not able to determine which service has been affected.
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