By: Jesse Cryderman

Remember when cellular service was just voice? Even after the advent of text, assuring the delivery and performance of both was relatively cut and dried. But nowadays, much like the loosely accepted Moore’s law of computer processing, the evolution of mobile communications seems to accelerate each year. Providing mobile service has never been more complex.

The exponential growth in data and voice traffic, brought about by new services and applications like broadband entertainment, gaming, video conferencing, and peercasting, has created significant strains on network resources. Business services are increasingly delivered via mobile, and the expectations of customers in both the consumer and enterprise segments have increased — they want a personalized, broadband-enabled experience.

The networks themselves are rapidly changing. As communications service providers (CSPs) transition to the Internet Protocol (IP) realm, they must ensure quality of service (QoS) across multidimensional, heterogeneous networks while managing several in parallel and making seamless handoffs. And although competition continues to mount in all directions, many of the services that are consumed originate from third-party sources.

Unfortunately for CSPs, the old saying “Perception is reality” rings true with their customers. If there’s a problem with a service the provider is typically the first line of defense, fielding the trouble ticket and bearing the brunt of a poor user experience. CSPs have to look at monitoring and measuring differently than they did in the past and go beyond simply confirming the setup and teardown of a voice call. Today there is an elaborate orchestration that must occur to ensure a positive experience.

NetScout, a leading provider of unified service delivery management software, is poised to help CSPs take on these challenges and enable them to look at the totality of their network operations and services in a manner that is comprehensively centered on the end user.

Scouting NetScout

With nearly 30 years of experience, NetScout has distinguished itself with end-to-end wireless service assurance, and is deployed by more than 20,000 enterprise environments and 148 service providers worldwide, including every major mobile operator in North America. The Massachusetts-based company’s innovative packet-flow technology offers trusted, real-time performance intelligence for networks and applications as well as users.