According to an industry survey, more than 61% of network issues are discovered first by end-users compared to 39% that network operations first detect. In a 5G era, carriers need a proactive approach to service assurance to ensure they deliver on the hype of 5G low latency use cases. 5G is a game-changer for service assurance by requiring a true 360-degree service assurance that integrates a 360-degree view of both the customer experience and network performance.
How 5G is Different
All MNOs will be feeling the pinch when it comes to accelerating network traffic. A typical hour for a network operator would see 19M WhatsApp messages, 15M YouTube videos played, and 247TB of data shared on social media. With 5G broadcasting, autonomous vehicles, and 5G private networks, manufacturing will only increase the network load as MNOs seek to deliver ubiquitous indoor and outdoor coverage and raise the bar on the customer experience during sell-out sporting events. This requires networks to be designed and operated to offer customers a dedicated and differentiating quality of experience.
Customer Experience Backed by Network Performance is Required
A new approach to measure network performance and monitor customer experience in a cost-effective way is essential to achieving 5G outcomes. To achieve 360-degree service assurance requires end-to-end visibility and analysis from network design and automation, service delivery, service experience to customer experience.
Service assurance spanning the end-to-end lifecycle is important because it allows an MNO to follow their customers’ experience and map that to various segments of the network. For example, today, customers are not just using the mobile network for their handset. Instead, they’re continuing their user sessions across enterprise WiFi, residential broadband, and private networks. Customers expect a seamless transition of these sessions across access networks and ultimately deserve that seamless mobility without any connection drops. Therefore, MNOs need end-to-end mapping of the customer experience across all access and core networks to accurately discern how well they are delivering on their service KPIs.
The same applies to having a complete view of all network domains. MNOs will only understand if an issue relates to the WiFi, fixed, or mobile network if they can map it to the specific network domains. Gaining a 360-degree view of the network also allows MNOs to proactively test and measure performance across multiple points in the network. This enables MNOs to quickly quantify the problem to a particular segment in the network and build a golden chest of data sets to transform network performance management from reactive to proactive.
360-degree Service Assurance Transforms Network Performance Management from Reactive to Proactive
MNOs will fundamentally have a very new metrics-based platform for monitoring the network whereby they can monitor both the control plane and user plane across all dimensions. MNOs will have a next-gen service assurance platform that is customer-centric and focused on bringing the "experience of the customer" to them every minute. The experience factor is built by understanding user application analysis as never done before in mobile industry mapping to signaling analysis for every call/transaction. The new approach to service assurance from Mobileum is driven by delivering a cost-effective solution with a minimal infrastructure footprint yet providing a complete 360-degree view of customer experience holistically across all access networks. This will then provide the data sets to generate the actionable insights that can correlate a problem that happened today versus a problem that occurred a week ago. MNOs will be able to determine if there is a relationship between the two and ask if we can predict if the problem will reoccur and, importantly, prevent the problem from occurring? Therefore, having complete coverage of the network from both a customer and a network standpoint and the corrective actions and recommendations will be essential to avoiding outages or downgrades in the network.
Mobileum’s Service Assurance solution is bringing the future of 360-degree service assurance to leading MNOs across the world. The solution provides all the capabilities required to monitor network KPIs and application performance, measure end-user service experience, and deliver the actionable insights needed for network performance management. Key benefits include:
Contact us to learn more about gaining the benefits of 360-degree service assurance.