Ben Franklin famously quipped that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. That is certainly true of telecommunications. The adage long predates telecom but, like every aspect of Franklin's working and personal knowledge, shows great prescience and forward-looking insight. With competitive pressures as they are, preventing a major network problem is vastly preferable to allowing a glitch to interfere with a customer's QoE and potentially jeopardizing that customer relationship. Furthermore, repairing network glitches, especially during off-peak times when overtime hours can seriously rack up, is an expensive game. Better, of course, to prevent the problem from appearing from the get go.

How can we do that? By keeping an eye on the health of our network. Maintaining a strong program of network monitoring and fault management can only be beneficial, and may well be behind the wisest dollar your company ever spent.

This month, Pipeline takes a look at what it means to maintain network health. You'll see analysis of network monitoring and fault management, as well as the potential for self-healing networks. You'll hear from experts with NetScout, NetCracker, and LineSider, as well as some intriguing in-depth commentary from LTC International. We'll check in with Joe Savage from the FTTH council on the state of the physical network as fiber links up more and more homes, enabling more and more applications to be delivered to the end user.

We hope you enjoy the issue and that you remember that every bit of attention you can pay to the health of the network is attention well spent.