Reader Forum: Caution, exploding devices! Maintaining network quality in the face of gadget proliferation

Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly Reader Forum section. In an attempt to broaden our interaction with our readers we have created this forum for those with something meaningful to say to the wireless industry. We want to keep this as open as possible, but maintain some editorial control so as to keep it free of commercials or attacks. Please send along submissions for this section to our editors at: dmeyer@rcrwireless.comor tford@rcrwireless.com.
When it comes to mobile networks, “more” is the word of the times: more smartphones, more tablets, more video, more music, more games and more social media. Data traffic on mobile devices now exceeds an exabyte worldwide. Unfortunately, mobile operators face a paradox: they must keep increasing adoption of mobile data and devices to generate profits for investors. Simultaneously, they must also keep the user experience consistently high. Overshadowing it all, reactive response to customer troubles no longer makes the cut – customers want their device to work, now, and if it doesn’t, they will quickly and easily take their money elsewhere.
How can operators possibly resolve all these competing directives?
Many organizations are betting on 4G/LTE and its promise of increased capacity and speed at a lower cost. However, simply dumping bandwidth into the environment may not be the answer. In Europe, limited spectrum availability is making it difficult to deploy in the region at all. In any case, an operator cannot simply flip a switch and move all its traffic over 4G. New technologies must fit within the existing mobile environment. At the same time, adding bandwidth without a true understanding of network and application performance, resource utilization and customer experience may not actually improve quality.
A bright spot: Next-gen service assurance
Surprisingly, service assurance holds the key to resolving many of these issues. Once viewed as a necessary evil and the domain of network geeks vigilantly monitoring packet loss on voice traffic or jitter in video streams, service assurance has stepped into the spotlight. Rather than focusing on one particular service or network protocol, next-gen solutions take a more holistic and comprehensive approach. By capturing – and correlating – data across all technologies, services and applications, they provide end-to-end quality analysis for every communications event.
Holistic solutions boost the standard benefits of great service assurance, including faster troubleshooting and advanced SLA verification. More importantly, they provide quality metrics from the customer viewpoint, enabling operators to understand the subscribers’ experience with each application and network resources they use. For example, they show whether or not a subscriber could successfully read e-mail while walking from a 4G hotspot to a parking lot with GSM coverage. They can detect problems associated with users attempting to upload pictures to their Facebook pages. They can also reveal the impact of streaming for subscribers who are using a new music application.
Understanding network performance and customer experience from end-to-end is a significant improvement from the narrow, silo-based monitoring systems many operators still use today. Rather than simply over-provisioning and waiting for networks to clog, mobile service assurance solutions can proactively and predictively pinpoint how and where resources should be deployed. These solutions must provide actionable intelligence that organizations can use to meet the quality demands, even as device proliferation continues to strain resources.
For example, the action of mapping applications to network resources will reveal chokepoints that degrade quality. If video is consistently performing poorly in a specific area, optimizing that portion of the network will generate significant positive results. Validating communications events across different pieces of the network will reveal interoperability issues. Simply improving handovers between protocols could significantly boost quality of experience. If a specific smartphone requires more peer-to-peer resources than others, operators could then create a premium plan that enable upselling and improved revenue.
The actionable intelligence generated by holistic, next-gen service assurance can improve strategic decision-making across the organization that would reduce revenue leakage, illuminate buying trends, shape new service offerings and develop alternative revenue models.
Mitigating complex issues
There is no doubt that maintaining a quality experience in the mobile world is complex. Simply managing the handovers between different technologies, the variables in QoS metrics for different applications and the way different smartphones communicate with the network is extremely difficult. The fact that the number of transactions is on an exponential growth curve only magnifies the situation.
In the end, however, subscribers don’t care how hard it is to assure their continuous quality-of-experience.
People are increasingly reliant on their mobile devices in their daily routines. They use more services to conduct business and buy more sophisticated devices every day. Unfortunately, the burden is on the service provider to make sure everything operates smoothly and seamlessly. A recent survey conducted by Harris Interactive revealed that nearly half of smartphone users blame their mobile network operator for service problems. Clearly, organizations looking to keep their subscribers – and the incremental revenue that sophisticated services generate – must commit to a framework for assuring quality across all applications, regardless of the underlying network technology.
Above and beyond simply monitoring quality of service, today’s operators must think in terms of optimizing their infrastructure investments, so they can proactively and predictively meet the evolving demands of users and a growing scope of gadgets. Likewise, service assurance solutions need to deliver the right analysis tools, as well as new insights, that will not only improve the customer experience but also expose more efficient ways to profit from the explosive potential of mobile communications.