Do you remember that we recently discussed monitoring VoLTE Customer Experience?
What's happened since then? Allow me to share an update with you. This post is the first in a series in which we shall discuss issues concerning the delivery of optimized service assurance in emerging virtualized and hybrid networks. We will share tips and best practice guidance, so that you can prepare your service assurance solution for the new world of virtualized telecoms infrastructure.
As you may have noted, network outages and service degradations caused by network failures have been increasing in frequency in recent years. Some of the largest Tier 1 operators with a focus on service quality, such as Verizon, AT&T, Telstra, and Vodafone in several countries, including the UK and Germany, are among those reporting recent impacts to voice or data services. Based on current trends, we can expect that reported network failures will be even higher again in 2016, as user demand continues to grow on capacity constrained and increasingly complex networks.
Operations centers and engineering departments looking to reduce downtime face a challenging environment, as the financial pressure to reduce both costs and time-to-market with new services continues.
From a technical perspective, deployments of VoLTE and Voice over WiFi have introduced new elements, entities and interfaces across the network, with higher performance requirements than circuit-switched voice and legacy services. Identifying the fault domain when troubleshooting these services can be much more difficult than it was with previous generations of services, because of the complexity of the interactions between the IMS and the client device, and also because of the self-healing nature of IP. From an operational perspective, the all-IP network is not just an evolution to LTE, it is a revolution, and the shift now underway now underway to a virtualized environment built on NFV will be yet another.
For service assurance vendors, the right question is: how do we help our customers ensure that one side-effect of all this change is not even more risk of outages and poor customer experience? In the coming weeks, I'll be discussing some issues relating to network outages that can emerge when deploying a VoLTE network. Stay tuned for more!
To learn more about network impact due to virtualization or VoLTE implementation, register for the upcoming webinar “Can you identify the causes of your IMS network outages?”
