ISSUE 05 2014
INTERVIEW
47
scale to meet regulatory conditions. On top of that complexity, CSPs also have to support an increasingly diverse range of subscriber behaviours and connected devices, while new applications and content – very often originating from third parties and OTT companies – all make their own demands on the underlying infrastructure.
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Finally, there are the relationships that a CSP has to negotiate with its technology suppliers and equipment vendors. Each network is more than the sum of its parts and products that might perform perfectly well when isolated under test conditions in the lab can all too easily create problems in other parts of the infrastructure when everything is finally connected. Tracking down and identifying these anomalies – and then challenging the vendor concerned to re-engineer their product – adds time, costs and even more complexity for a CSP’s engineering team at critical points in the network build-out cycle.
Addressing and resolving these issues have turned into a very successful business for network performance specialist Astellia. Using its probe-based network and applications monitoring technologies and analytic tools, Astellia is now helping its 200-plus CSP customer base around the world to extract meaningful and monetisable information from their big data.
LTE Today recently sat down with Thierry Jacq, Astellia’s business marketing manager responsible for its LTE product range – which is already supporting several major LTE deployments around the world. The discussion began with Thierry identifying some of the key issues in the LTE environment that CSPs are now seeing with the potential to affect both QoE and network efficiency.
New services = new network behaviours
Thierry Jacq
“At the most fundamental level, one of the most important challenges has probably been the bringing together of IP network principles with the new radio techniques of LTE,” he says. “Even though huge effort has been
expended by the various standards committees involved, the real world always behaves differently as theory is turned into practice. A number of CSPs and their engineers and vendors – at least in the early days of network rollout – were surprised by the eventual throughput of the RAN and ended up having
he technical terrain of LTE – involving both new radio technologies as well as an all-IP network – raises enough uncertainties about end-to-end performance as networks are rolled out at speed and on a massive
There might be fewer elements in an LTE network, with a much flatter architecture but, given the highly inclusive, end-to-end complexity of the overall LTE environment, unexpected anomalies are always going to occur
to upgrade routers across their transport networks to cope with the increased traffic. There might be fewer elements in an LTE network, with a much flatter architecture but, given the highly inclusive, end-to-end complexity of the overall LTE environment, unexpected anomalies are always going to occur. What’s important is that anomalies are recognised as soon as possible and the causes identified and eliminated.”
For Jacq, it’s the impact of those anomalies on the many new rich digital services being offered over LTE – and their effect on longer term revenues and brand loyalties for CSPs and their OTT partners – that demand new and more sophisticated approaches to performance testing and management: “As CSPs move into these new service areas, increasingly delivering apps and content on top of basic connectivity, the addition of each of these to product bundles means that there are more chances of the unexpected happening and things going wrong. We recently had one CSP customer who started offering a dropbox storage service to their subscribers who found that upload speeds were terrible, making the service effectively unusable. The core network worked, the RAN worked, but after using our probes it was discovered once again that a router involved needed upgrading.”
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