The coming era of network visibility

John C. Tanner
26 Mar 2015
00:00

Changing parameters

Andy Huckridge, director of service provider solutions at Gigamon, agrees that network visibility involves a shift in focus from the network elements themselves to the traffic running over them.

“Network visibility adds in so much more: greater insight about the network links and the way they are being used, the type of traffic the network links are carrying, and more recently insight about the subscribers and how they are using the network services and interacting with them,” Huckridge says. “By introducing a visibility fabric, information from all across the network can be gathered, allowing a much wider view of what’s going on with the network.”

Andrew Hodson, sales director for Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Korea at Tektronix Communications, puts it even more simply: network visibility is about looking at customer experience rather than technology behavior. And that capability goes far beyond simply creating richer customer profiles.

“Although network visibility can be a contributor to customer profiles, the real value is the insight you ascertain from customer behavior and customer experience,” Hodson says.

Customer-driven

The objective, says Register, is to have that insight all the way down to the application level. “It’s this idea of subscriber intelligence, understanding different types of users and how they use their handsets differently - for example, iPhone 6 users vs iPhone 5 users, maybe they use video differently, or their usage patterns are different,” he says. “If you understand that, and you can tie users to handsets and apps, you can plan your capacity better and market things to them - maybe special data packages. But you have to understand what they’re doing at the application level to do that.”

The customer insight angle cannot be underemphasized here - telecoms customers have become so empowered in recent years that customer experience has become the single most important metric for operators.

“Although they may not be consciously aware of it, customers are driving the need for [network visibility],” says Hodson. “They’re demanding better performance from operators, by which they mean fewer dropped calls and a data experience on par with using a laptop on a fixed network and so on. Their expectations will of course vary, but if they’re consistently unmet they become a churn [motivator].”

And unfortunately for operators, he adds, the most valuable customers often have the highest customer experience expectations: “I’m sure you can do the ARPU maths on that!”

Huckridge at Gigamon says there are other factors driving the need for better network visibility, such as exponential traffic growth, the need for better resource optimization, and more efficient spending on monitoring tools. “The portion of a carrier’s budget spent on tools is sizeable, so by optimizing the data before it passes to the tools, great efficiencies can be made - which allows a carrier to spend capex elsewhere on the network.”

Huckridge adds that network visibility “can help a carrier to understand the often hard-to-link interdependencies when rolling out several new technologies at the same time.”

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