Language Shifts from Session to Subscriber in Service Assurance Space

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 the real-world environments that an element or network can support.

So says Andre DuFour, product manager at Agilent Technologies Inc. “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.

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, does 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 operators make better and faster decisions about their MDS network.

The company also will 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 always has 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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