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Carl Sagan once said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Indeed, flying around the world would have been considered magic just a few generations ago. But now, thanks to technology, around-the-world flights happen every day.
What’s interesting, however, is that the amazing technology that makes global travel a reality rarely plays any role when customers select an airline. Cost, flight times, hot meals and in-flight entertainment are much more important than are the airplanes themselves when passengers are making their choice.
Today’s mobile operators have a lot in common with airlines. They help people communicate around the world, rather than travel, yet their customers don’t know much, if anything, about the intricacies of how those interactions are possible. By examining how customers select an airline, mobile operators can gain valuable insights into how they, too, should cater to customers.
The key is to unify their service assurance practices, gaining centralized visibility into mobile network performance — that is, monitoring the “in-flight experience” from a single window, rather than monitoring the experience of each plane separately. This will allow the operator to react to problems quickly, and even anticipate them before customers are impacted. That means that when mobile customers press the “send” or “enter” buttons on their connected devices, mobile operators are able to keep the magic happening!
The ‘how’ behind flight
Airplanes fly — and they do so very graciously, carrying tons of cargo and hundreds of passengers. Nowadays, if someone asks any passenger in a flight how they feel about flying, they will probably misunderstand the question and discuss how comfortable their seats were, how good the meal was or even what movies they were able to watch.
Aside from some rare enthusiasts, most passengers don’t care about how airplanes get from point A to point B. The act of flying is taken for granted, regardless of the science and technological achievements that make each flight possible.
The very backbone of airlines, including all the back-office systems, support structures and software components that build the service delivery chain to make flying viable, is rarely ever considered by passengers. This complex chain remains hidden from the passenger; it is virtually transparent to them.
Yet, each airline has hundreds, if not thousands, of flights that depend on this service delivery chain each day. It is a challenge of incredible magnitude for airlines to closely manage each part of the chain and see how various components affect the overall end-to-end quality of experience. Failure to properly manage this chain can result in poor reputation or loss of customers and revenue. In a low margin, highly competitive market such as aviation, this is simply unacceptable.
The best mobile network is … invisible
Mobile operators are in a very similar position. In fact, one could say that mobile operators run multiple “airlines” at the same time — their networks. And their challenge is more than just getting voice and data packets from point A to B, it is getting to point B while traversing different types of networks along the way. It would be like a passenger changing flights midair.
Mobile networks, like airplanes, are a wonder of modern technology. Enabling people to communicate with anybody, anywhere, instantaneously, should be praiseworthy in and of itself. Yet, mobile operators are often measured on rather simplistic factors, such as perceived speed and throughput. Other typical customer questions are: “Is the service available where I am, when I need it?” “Do I experience any performance degradation like dropped calls?”
Customers usually don’t care how voice and data transfers work, or how complex these networks are. They just want them to work. The best network services — like the best flights — are the ones customers don’t have to think about, the ones where the technology is virtually invisible.
So, how can mobile operators deal with these challenges?
Efficiency to deal with complexity
Providing a transparent experience for the customer is a two-fold challenge. The first part is intrinsically related to the way in which mobile operators design and deploy their networks, where resources are located and how redundant they are. As with airplanes, in which multiple redundant computer and propulsion systems ensure that equipment failures don’t lead to a crash, key components of the mobile network should be resilient and redundant to avoid single points of failure.
The second part is unified network performance monitoring. Problems are unavoidable, no matter how well mobile networks are deployed. So, to keep the service delivery chain invisible, mobile operators must monitor across all network domains to ensure individual links, as well as the entire chain, are working properly and to quickly solve problems before they impact subscribers.
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 ensure a seamless customer experience.
Indeed, service outages and network degradation are not easy to detect or to solve. For instance, dropped calls in the radio access network may be related to dropped packets or mobile backhaul network delay, or even an overloaded mobile core or core IP elements. If different teams can only see these networks individually within their monitoring systems, it could take several hours or even days to notice “cross-domain” issues, let alone resolve them. And, unfortunately, these issues are often found only when complaints arrive at the help desk.
Today, mobile operators have to deal with a combination of new and legacy networks, as well as introduce next-generation technologies like LTE, voice over LTE, pico cells, Wi-Fi offload, software-defined networking and network function virtualization. With each of these new deployments, additional congestion and complexity are also added. How do mobile operators keep all of these elements running together as a cohesive service delivery chain?
If mobile operators want to maintain proactive service assurance among their ever-growing mobile network complexity, they need to consolidate their network performance monitoring systems. Failure to do so will result in more frequent and prolonged service outages, with a strong negative impact on churn.
Experience also shows that, by adopting a unified network performance management practice, mobile operators can streamline their operational processes. For instance, a centralized performance view allows different teams to collaborate within an organization, including operations, engineering and marketing, resulting in less network downtime and smarter operating expense.
Rationalizing the service assurance tools and practices is the only cost-efficient way for mobile operators to holistically manage the service delivery chain, avoid excessive churn and keep opex under control as their networks become exponentially more complex. We cannot help airlines offer better meals in their airplanes, but we can certainly help mobile operators work their magic, to offer a seamless customer experience, increase their operational efficiency and obtain a real competitive advantage.
Photo copyright: peshkova / 123RF Stock Photo
