END-TO-END SERVICE ASSURANCE STARTS AT THE NETWORK
The future of business and residential communications and entertainment is based on the convergence of IP-based voice, video and data services. Both wireline and wireless service providers are transitioning to next-generation IP/MPLS networks. These next-generation networks provide the foundation for converged services, such as voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP), IP video, enterprise connectivity and metro Ethernet.
Providers see many benefits in transitioning to next-generation networks, including lower capital and operational expenses, a more efficient delivery of dynamic service packages that increase the average revenue per user (ARPU), and less customer churn. However, providers face new service management challenges as they must focus on service quality and meeting high customer expectations. Adding to these challenges, providers increasingly need to monitor the performance of each service across the network to validate they are meeting technical, business and customer needs, and to ensure that the interaction of these revenuesensitive services are properly managed and adjusted to accommodate demand and service anomalies.
To succeed, providers have to differentiate their service offerings on quality, rather than merely competing on price. End-to-end network and service visibility is a requirement for meeting performance and quality objectives and ensuring stringent SLAs. Without the necessary visibility, providers are at serious risk for crippling service degradations and outages, which lead directly to an escalation in customer care costs, eroding profit margins, increased customer churn and severely damaged reputations.
The network core is the heart of the service delivery network and where successful providers’ service assurance strategies start. To effectively guarantee end-to-end SLAs and meet customers’ requirements, providers must implement a service assurance solution that provides visibility from the provider edge and to end-users, while allowing segmented views of service quality for problem isolation. By continually monitoring the performance and quality of real-time IP services, and not just the physical network devices, EXFO Service Assurance’s BrixNGN provides the most effective service assurance solution.
With BrixNGN, providers can continuously collect, correlate, analyze and visualize critical quality of service (QoS) and quality of experience (QoE) data from the network core to the customer endpoint for capacity planning, verifying service turn-ups, and identifying, diagnosing and quickly resolving network as well as service performance issues before customers are impacted—thereby guaranteeing quality.