One challenging aspect for operators has been identifying areas of network congestion through the various levels of the service network, to gain specific insight into patterns. Part of the problem has been difficulty with collecting the necessary data from different silos in an efficient manner.
"One customer told us they had a person entirely dedicated to the task of collecting the information, cross-referencing it, and turning it into usable data," said Pete Koat, CTO of Incognito Software Systems. "It took a tremendous amount of time and resulted in decisions being made based on potentially outdated as well as inaccurate information that often missed crucial patterns hidden in the big data itself."
Useful information could drill down far enough to include CMTS service area maps to the geographic location, interfaces per CMTS, and all subscribers connected to those interfaces with the goal of obtaining details about congestion patters by region, CMTS, and even the interface into the subscriber home. If consumption and congestion patterns can be tracked on a per-subscriber basis, the operator can match the information with a corresponding service level agreement (SLA).
"There are many ways for the operator to extract or monitor subscriber details," Koat said. "We recommend using a lightweight push method for obtaining the subscriber usage data over IPDR directly from a CMTS or IPDR proxy."
Beyond SLAs, operators can utilize this information to manage and plan for capacity expansions. This requires visibility into the way subscribers are currently utilizing bandwidth, but also historical patterns and the ability to predict future trends, Koat said.
"There are different methods of generating and collecting this data, and it's important that this process does not impede service quality," Koat added.
Another challenge is that as more and more services are moving to the cloud, it becomes even more difficult to determine what the end user experience is like and what services might be impacted. To ensure quality, operators will need tools that go beyond network diagnostics and follow a service from start to finish, said Gregg Hara, VP of business development for Centina Systems.
"If any services are impacted by an issue, what customers are impacted?" Hara said. "Strategic service assurance can provide better analytics that can help an operator with the health and status of the network, capacity, and things that can be done to trend and better plan for the future."
The end goal will be a dynamic network capability whereby if capacity on a particular link has decreased, it will be automatically increased or the data load moved elsewhere, Hara said. "There (also) could be a customer portal so a business customer could see their capacity is decreasing or availability is decreasing on a link while bandwidth utilization is going up. They could increase to a 50 Mbps service with an order online and the processing would occur automatically," Hara said.