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