There are plenty of sexy stories about how big data is changing the way operators look at customers. But it’s also changing the way they look at their networks.
As big data analytics becomes an increasingly important component of the telecoms landscape, we’re starting to hear terms like “network visibility” - which, in oversimplified terms, is network monitoring on steroids. It’s the ability to see not just every nook and cranny of the network, but what customers are doing on it, and then responding to it.
And once you have that capability in place ... well, use your imagination.
The difference between traditional network monitoring and network visibility is the difference between circuit-switched networks and IP networks, says Scott Register, senior director of product management at Ixia.
“With circuit-switched networks, you monitored things like call set-up speed, call quality, things like that. Now we’ve evolved to packet-based solutions, which changes the way you think about what you’re monitoring, the end points and what you pay attention to,” he explains.
Register adds that telcos are also undergoing a fundamental shift from monitoring network infrastructure to monitoring the actual data traffic, but their performance KPIs were still based mainly on the performance capabilities of the infrastructure components.
“Now with network visibility, we’re more concerned with things like network experience,” he says. “So I have however many users on my network - what are they doing, and what is their QoE? Are they using email, or watching movies, and how are those apps performing?”
“Even for call quality, you still measure things like dropped calls, but as you move into HD voice and VoLTE, the ways that you measure QoE and user experience changes significantly,” says Register. “That requires you to not only see the data, but also understand what’s going on and what it means.”
Changing parameters
Andy Huckridge, director of service provider solutions at Gigamon, agrees that network visibility involves a shift in focus from the network elements themselves to the traffic running over them.
“Network visibility adds in so much more: greater insight about the network links and the way they are being used, the type of traffic the network links are carrying, and more recently insight about the subscribers and how they are using the network services and interacting with them,” Huckridge says. “By introducing a visibility fabric, information from all across the network can be gathered, allowing a much wider view of what’s going on with the network.”
Andrew Hodson, sales director for Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Korea at Tektronix Communications, puts it even more simply: network visibility is about looking at customer experience rather than technology behavior. And that capability goes far beyond simply creating richer customer profiles.
“Although network visibility can be a contributor to customer profiles, the real value is the insight you ascertain from customer behavior and customer experience,” Hodson says.
Customer-driven
The objective, says Register, is to have that insight all the way down to the application level. “It’s this idea of subscriber intelligence, understanding different types of users and how they use their handsets differently - for example, iPhone 6 users vs iPhone 5 users, maybe they use video differently, or their usage patterns are different,” he says. “If you understand that, and you can tie users to handsets and apps, you can plan your capacity better and market things to them - maybe special data packages. But you have to understand what they’re doing at the application level to do that.”
The customer insight angle cannot be underemphasized here - telecoms customers have become so empowered in recent years that customer experience has become the single most important metric for operators.
“Although they may not be consciously aware of it, customers are driving the need for [network visibility],” says Hodson. “They’re demanding better performance from operators, by which they mean fewer dropped calls and a data experience on par with using a laptop on a fixed network and so on. Their expectations will of course vary, but if they’re consistently unmet they become a churn [motivator].”
And unfortunately for operators, he adds, the most valuable customers often have the highest customer experience expectations: “I’m sure you can do the ARPU maths on that!”
Huckridge at Gigamon says there are other factors driving the need for better network visibility, such as exponential traffic growth, the need for better resource optimization, and more efficient spending on monitoring tools. “The portion of a carrier’s budget spent on tools is sizeable, so by optimizing the data before it passes to the tools, great efficiencies can be made - which allows a carrier to spend capex elsewhere on the network.”
Huckridge adds that network visibility “can help a carrier to understand the often hard-to-link interdependencies when rolling out several new technologies at the same time.”
Use your imagination
Once network visibility is implemented, the next big question is: what do you do with it? The answer, says Hodson of TekComms: whatever you want.
“The application of such data and the value you can derive from it is almost limited only by the operator’s imagination,” he says.
Potential apps include (but are not limited to) retention and higher customer satisfaction by enabling proactive and reactive fixes to problems (either before the customer notifies the operator of the problem or before the customer even notices the problem itself), targeted network capacity investment, and identifying trending OTT apps to inform your marketing strategy.
You can also zoom in on apps when they’re not performing well, says Register. “Say users of a particular app are complaining, either via the help desk or on Twitter, because that app isn’t performing well. How do you track that down? If you have visibility monitoring that allows you to zoom in on specific apps, you can use an analytics tool to look at just the app that’s giving you trouble.”
Operators can also leverage those capabilities for more proactive network security, Register continues.
“For example, smartphone malware is becoming more prevalent. If a user downloads malware, handsets can be turned into zombies to launch DDoS attacks,” he explains. “Malware can extract data from the handset and send it on the C&C [command and control] channel back to a server collecting that data from infected users. You can bring down whole sections of the network that way, especially the radio link. So operators want to be able to see that process early. You can look at that C&C channel and see that all these devices are communicating with the same server - are they watching a live video stream, or is it a coordinated attack? You can look into that app stream and detect it early before damage is done.”
Challenges? What challenges?
Implementing network visibility has its challenges, of course - but they’re less related to technology and more related to the operator’s big-data strategy, says Hodson of TekComms.
“The main challenges involve establishing a group to agree on the strategy and build the business case to capture the visibility required, and identifying which of the many different sources of information will enrich and not pollute the ‘data lake’ with data that provides little or no value but many have a significant impact on the capex investment required,” he says. “Operators also need to think about designing a method of mining the data to serve different constituents such as marketing, networks, customer care etc.”
For Register of Ixia, one major challenge is budget management. “Our customers tell us over and over that their monitoring tools spend can’t grow at the same rate that their bandwidth grows. You look at the growth of subscribers and the growth of bandwidth per subscriber, and if you go from 1x to 10x data traffic in four years, you don’t want to be spending ten times as much on monitoring, especially with ARPUs going down over time.”
Gigamon’s Huckridge is more upbeat, saying the challenges are few, and minor compared to the payoff of implementation.
“Implementing greater network visibility essentially pays for itself with a Day One ROI. Analytic tools can be optimized, cost of call center calls can be reduced, with network transport and elements right-sized. It might be that the chief challenge may be choosing which new technology project or which new tool to implement with the leftover capex budget thanks to a more efficient and operationally advantageous network management regime!”
This article first appeared on Telecom Asia Big Data Insights Supplement March 2015 edition