NEW ORLEANS – Fresh off a series of acquisitions, NetScout Systems was on hand at the Cable-Tec Expo to emphasize the importance of service assurance in the highly competitive cable and telecom markets.
In July, NetScout completed a $2.3 billion acquisition of Danaher’s communications business. NetScout got Tektronix Communications, Arbor Networks and parts of Fluke Networks, in an effort to expand its service assurance and cybersecurity offerings.
Mike Serrano, NetScout senior product marketing manager, told RCR Wireless News the acquisitions “really open up our portfolio for the carrier market. It gives us a broader ability to serve carriers in the service assurance arena.”
Serrano pointed out that in order to maintain a competitive edge, a service provider needs to know whether customers are satisfied with the service they’ve purchased.
“In today’s highly competitive environment, if you’re going to rollout a service, the quality of experience is absolutely critical,” Serrano said. “We allow you to come in and instrument around key elements in that network, see how they’re performing. … From a planning perspective, it allows you to see if you’ve provisioned enough capacity.”
Serrano explained that the Fluke portion of the acquisition adds RF and Wi-Fi spectrum analysis capability that “allow technicians … to actually plan where to best put access points, to diagnose existing problems with access points or even out in the field. We’ve added a very impressive set of tools.”
Specific to Wi-Fi rollouts, Serrano drew a straight line from network planning tools to driving down capital expenditure. He said early carrier Wi-Fi rollouts were based on estimated bandwidth needs.
“They were over-provisioning bandwidth between the access point and the edge network,” Serrano said. “They thought people would go into coffee shops and start watching movies. Customers were going into those coffee shops and downloading quick emails, reading headline news. All of a sudden the operator was able to adjust their capex portfolio.”
Serrano explained that the Tektronix portion of the acquisition allows for real-time edge monitoring; in the cable space, that means operators can perform video-session monitoring and see problems as they’re occurring.
“In the cable space, it allows us to go out over that cable plant and tell operators exactly where to roll trucks,” he said.
