Helping Your LTE Network Fly to New Heights with Better Service Assurance

Just as pilots have a dashboard of tools to track a plane’s status, mobile operators often have multiple tools to manage and ensure the quality of different parts of the service delivery chain. However, while these tools offer some visibility and information about each particular network domain, they cannot provide the end-to-end information needed by mobile operators to help them create a seamless customer experience.

The best approach is for mobile operators to consolidate their “in-flight dashboard” into one network performance monitoring system, to generate cross-domain network performance visibility. Once this raw, technical data is in-hand, mobile operators can process, combine and transform this information into more meaningful service quality indicators and apply it toward improving customer KPIs.

Failure to properly monitor the customer “in-flight experience” through one consolidated window increases the likelihood of more frequent and prolonged service outages, generating a strong negative impact on churn. A centralized performance view also allows different teams to collaborate within an organization, including operations, engineering and marketing, resulting in less network downtime and smarter OPEX.

Consolidating service assurance

Closely tied to end-to-end performance monitoring is unified service assurance. Mobile operators are managing new and legacy networks, as well as adopting next-generation technologies like Wi-Fi offload, pico cells, software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV). Not only does all of this technology need to integrate with existing network infrastructure, but each new deployment also creates subsequent traffic and complexity concerns. The challenge for mobile operators is to get these network elements working in sync, as part of a cohesive service delivery chain.

To relate the challenge back to flights, airplanes tend to behave predictably, even though it may seem to passengers as though turbulence and other in-flight events happen unexpectedly. Data packets in a network, however, are not quite as predictable. Moreover, the convergence of mobile services to IP converged services such as VoLTE also adds to the complex statistical behavior of the network. Nevertheless, there are certain traffic patterns that can be detected within mobile networks and planned for, such as expected daily averages and peak traffic in busy hours.

The ability to learn these patterns is important for LTE mobile operators, as deviations from these statistical patterns can indicate mobile network performance degradation. So, the unified service assurance approach must be able to leverage historical data, automatically draw network baselines and flag any deviations.

Service assurance should also be proactive. As part of the process, historical data is leveraged to extrapolate into the future, so that mobile operators can predict bottlenecks and other network problems, and then act before they create negative ramifications. Operators can also use this trending capability to allocate CAPEX more efficiently within the network, investing only where and when it will drive significant returns.

For this reason, unified service assurance produces gains in operational efficiency, so mobile operators can keep LTE network costs under control, even as the service delivery chain grows in size and complexity.

LTE networks: Soaring higher and higher

Today’s airlines have transformed the extraordinary nature of flight into an everyday occurrence. Planes fly gracefully through the air, even while transporting tons of cargo and passengers, but it takes a lot of effort to make flying appear so magical. Without advanced electronic control systems, these flights would not be as fast or as safe as they are.

For mobile operators, the challenge is similar. They use end-to-end network performance monitoring and unified service assurance practices to offer the best service to customers, and it’s because of these two solutions that they’re able to continue offering new services to customers, without sacrificing the performance that users have come to expect.

As mobile operators look to the future, it’s important that they borrow a lesson from aviators. It’s natural for aviators to want to climb higher and move faster. Consider that in 1949, 25 years after the first full flight around the world, the “Lucky Lady II” made some history of its own by completing the same journey as the “Chicago” and the “New Orleans” – but this time, without stopping! And it finished the trip in just under four days, instead of 175 days.

So, what new heights will LTE networks reach?