Language Shifts from Session to Subscriber in Service Assurance Space

Test and measurement companies provide a good barometer for measuring the market readiness of new services just by the way they think about them

Another exhibitor at NXTcomm, Sunrise Telecom, also will be trying to change the language around testing and agrees with DuFour about the ineffectiveness of throwing bandwidth at performance problems.

This practice, along with current management and troubleshooting solutions, do not take into account issues related to service quality in an IP-based environment, particularly in a mobile environment.

Michele Campriani, general manager of Sunrise Telecom’s Protocol Product Group, said management and troubleshooting solutions present one of the significant barriers for mobile operators that are trying to introduce mobile data services such as video chat, presence and gaming. This is because most are tailored around voice services.

“In our recollection, we have never seen a time when [the] lack of test and monitoring solutions has presented such a problem for the industry,” Campriani said.

At NXTcomm, Sunrise Telecom will be demonstrating the Mobile X-Ray monitoring and analysis platform it introduced last month. The platform helps mobile operators diagnose and manage next-generation mobile data services deployments by correlating essential information from the network, services, subscribers and user devices. It uses an intelligent data collection and correlation architecture that takes real-time input from distributed probes, and translates them into critical information designed to help the operator make better and faster decisions about their MDS network.

The company will also focus on that language and communications barrier between probe-based monitoring systems and the operations support systems that can turn the data they collect into meaningful measurements of quality-of-service.

“You can no longer assume that if QoS is good, the service is good,” Campriani said. “Hence there has been a natural decoupling between the service delivered and the network infrastructure. Until now, the roles of OSS and probe-based network monitoring in a carrier network have been isolated activities, often conducted by independent departments.”

Campriani said OSS has always been concerned with obtaining information from the nodes and providing network-level information, while probe monitoring is concerned with extracting information from network traffic and from the services themselves. “The problem for the OSS is that it must now map network elements to services, which it was not designed to do. OSS vendors and probe-based monitoring vendors must now work much closer than before for successful introduction of data services.”

Another way to change the language of test and measurement and the service assurance these tools provide is to use the language of money. OSS Observer reported that the global service assurance market will grow from $2.19 billion in 2007 to $3.03 billion by 2011, while Frost & Sullivan estimates that the VoIP test and monitoring market alone will grow from $379 million in 2006 to $1.9 billion in 2013. And the test and monitoring market for the other real-time service, IPTV, will grow from $74 million to $725 million in the same time frame.

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