Editor’s Note: In an attempt to broaden our interaction with our readers we have created this Reader Forum for those with something meaningful to say to the wireless industry. We want to keep this as open as possible, but we maintain some editorial control to keep it free of commercials or attacks. Please send along submissions for this section to our editors at: dmeyer@rcrwireless.com.
Pilots read and gather information from many instruments mid-flight, but when they make announcements, they only talk about what passengers actually care about. Just like customers don’t need to know how planes fly, as I previously said, they also don’t need to know about mach speed vs. true airspeed. All passengers want to hear about is the flight’s arrival time and the local weather.
Mobile networks also provide their “pilots” with a lot of instrumentation to monitor network health, but while raw technical data loosely correlates to customer quality of experience, mobile operators must further process, combine and transform this information into more meaningful service quality indicators.
It is equally important to automatically generate alarms when these service quality indicators are outside pre-defined values. This ensures quicker response times if a network outage or performance degradation occurs, and can even trigger corrective actions before subscribers notice that something went wrong.
Obtaining real intelligence via automation is part of the equation. To solve network performance problems, mobile operators need to first be able to clearly visualize the most relevant data. That requires unifying reporting interfaces so different teams inside the organization can clearly monitor and act on any problems. Drill-down mechanisms must also be available, so mobile operators can actually troubleshoot the problem once a quality indicator is affected.
By leveraging existing network performance data and transforming it into real intelligence, mobile operators can easily “fly” their networks with customer quality parameters as KPIs. Automation is the key to allowing mobile operators to perform in ever busier skies and more challenging conditions.
Avoiding storms
Ask any pilot; they will say the best way to deal with a storm is to avoid it. They will check their radars, examine their planned routes and see how they can avoid any storms.
Now, ask a similar question to an IP packet engineer, and he might tell you: “I do not even know what my next hop is. How can I possibly know if there are storms ahead? I just go wherever I’m told.”
Airplane flights are much more predictable than data packets in a network. Moreover, the convergence of mobile service to IP converged services such as voice over LTE actually adds to the complex statistical behavior of the network. Nevertheless, there are certain traffic patterns that can be detected within mobile networks, such as expected daily averages and peak traffic in busy hours, and those can help operators at least remember to bring an umbrella in the event a storm does strike.
The ability to learn such patterns is important for mobile operators, as deviations from such statistical patterns — or abnormal behaviors — can indicate more subtle (or intermittent) mobile network performance degradation. So, the service assurance approach must be able to leverage historical data, automatically draw network baselines and sound the appropriate alarm should a deviation occur.
It should also be able to use this same historical data to extrapolate into the future so that mobile operators can predict bottlenecks and act before they create negative ramifications. Operators can also use this trending capability to allocate capital expenses more efficiently in the network, investing only where and when it is necessary.
Business vs. economy class
Do airlines treat business passengers the same way they treat economy passengers? Of course not. They offer services according to the demands of each market. For example, business passengers typically want comfort and service, whereas economy passengers will sacrifice that level of quality for lower costs.
Mobile operators also have VIP customers. These subscribers may be large organizations, or they could be important, high-paying customers who demand nothing but the best. Given these stakes, the skies could go gray for mobile operators mere seconds after a network interruption if one of these VIPs is negatively affected.
Mobile operators should be able to troubleshoot their customers’ problems — especially those of the VIPs — very quickly, and ideally, personally. One of the ways to do that is with call trace data, which allows network optimization engineers to see specific quality indicators for individual customers.
Combining geo-data with detailed mobile network visibility will provide mobile operators with a whole new level of QoE visibility. Knowing what happened, where it happened and why it happened — all at an individual level — creates a whole new spectrum for mobile operators’ relationships with their subscribers.
Such a powerful combination also allows mobile operators to diagnose even more complex network or service performance problems. For instance, they could detect whether a certain problem is related to the handset model a subscriber is using, an application or the network (or a combination of these).
How to keep mobile networks soaring
Aviation enthusiasts appreciate the physics, mathematics and engineering involved in making an airplane fly. Similarly, we, network enthusiasts, understand very well how difficult it is to keep electromagnetic waves under control, and we appreciate the incredible web of technologies that work together to make mobile communications viable.
However, we cannot hide behind the complexity of mobile networks to discount or explain away the quality of service issues that subscribers face. At the end of the day, all mobile subscribers want is to make a call when they press “send.” They don’t need to know about the nuances of network connectivity or performance management.
The contradiction between the complex services provided by mobile operators and customers’ expectations forces mobile operators to drive their businesses toward delivering the network coverage and QoS that customers expect. This is a significant challenge, though, because, like airlines, mobile operators rely on a very complex chain to deliver their services.
That’s why unified service assurance is so valuable. It can aid in reducing mobile network service downtime and degradation, providing subscribers with a more transparent experience and reducing churn. It also allows for gains in operational efficiency, so mobile operators can keep operating expenses and capex under control, even with the exponential growth in size and complexity of the service delivery chain.
Most mobile operators, like airlines, need to ensure back-end technology remains transparent so that services appear to customers as magical. Airlines today rely heavily on advanced avionics and other electronic control systems to get passengers wherever they need to be, safely and quickly. For mobile operators, unified service assurance and automated performance data analysis provide the same benefits, allowing mobile networks to fly and customers to communicate instantly.
Editor’s Note: In an attempt to broaden our interaction with our readers we have created this Reader Forum for those with something meaningful to say to the wireless industry. We want to keep this as open as possible, but we maintain some editorial control to keep it free of commercials or attacks. Please send along submissions for this section to our editors at: dmeyer@rcrwireless.com.
Photo copyright: peshkova / 123RF Stock Photo
