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

Coming into NXTcomm, the language of test and measurement companies is changing. It is being driven partly by the requirements of service providers responding to the need for understanding the customer experience and partly by the internal shifts that represent vendors’ moves from supporting lab-based technologies to live network services.

In other words, when test companies make this shift, services are becoming real world and the focus on measuring the number of sessions a network element is capable of supporting morphs to a focus on measuring the number of subscribers acting in real-world environments an element or network can support.

So says Andre DuFour, product manager at Agilent Technologies. “Until recently, our conversations with network equipment manufacturers [around triple play services] was very lab-centric and removed from the end user,” DuFour said. “Recently, the language and mindset began shifting from the abstract concept of protocols to the subscriber.”

Specifically the language refers to subscriber emulation. DuFour said network equipment manufacturers are no longer satisfied with seeing how many protocols or sessions their equipment can support and want to model realistic customer behavior that simulates people coming onto and leaving the network and how they use the services while on there.

And new network services require test capabilities that go beyond measuring packet loss and jitter. Joe Haver, wireline program manager at Agilent, said the end user doesn’t even notice the 45 percent re-transmission on their broadband Internet service, but would notice even a fraction of that with VoIP and video services.

“Service providers are adding more services that are sensitive to degradation and affect the quality of experience,” Haver said. “The good thing is, service providers learned lessons from their original VoIP rollouts and are testing more first.

In response, Haver said that Agilent will be coming out with new capabilities at NXTcomm and beyond that expand on the company’s current capabilities for testing quality of experience. Agilent will try to show why test and monitoring tools are even more necessary today and why service providers cannot delay investment or avoid problems by applying more bandwidth.

“Some service providers don’t budget for test and monitoring tools and just overbuild the network to add bandwidth. But with real-time services, bandwidth doesn’t solve your problems, it only masks them,” DuFour said.

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