Customer experience assurance highlighted at TM Forum Live

NICE, France – The days of just monitoring network performance metrics to gauge overall performance have given way to much more consumer-facing indicators designed to go beyond service assurance and into gauging customer experience. This trend toward evaluating how the end-user experiences network services falls under the umbrella of quality of experience, which, along with customer experience assurance, were prominently featured during the TM Forum Live event this week.
To get a better understanding of customer experience assurance, let’s take a look at what test and measurement firm Viavi is bringing to the space. Viavi officials were on hand during TM Forum Live to demo Release 1.1 of its XSight portfolio.
On the consumer side, the need for customer experience measurements is driven by the proliferation of services that require different types of network resources. For instance, a voice call or a text message would be considered differently from a voice-over-LTE call or a video stream.
“[Communication service providers] are trying to improve the subscriber experience by allocating network resources to subscribers based on application-specific requirements,” Viavi explained. “This approach calls for rapid analysis of application usage and QoE. … Existing technologies for this analysis – such as deep packet inspection – have been increasingly hindered by data encryption or local regulations aimed at protecting consumer privacy.”
To solve those challenges, Viavi uses a centralized analytics platform designed to gather details from distributed agents, which passively analyze real-time traffic.
“This capability is especially important,” Viavi reps said, specifically to VoLTE deployments. “As a fundamental communication service – with low user tolerance for quality issues – this is now a data application. As the subscribers increase the share of time they spend on over-the-top services [like Skype, for instance] with different demands on the network and unpredictable behavior, the need to analyze user plane data in real time becomes vital to optimizing QoE.”