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Guaranteeing service quality and consistency across the entire LTE lifecycle
I
t’s fast becoming clear that new strategies, processes and tools for test, measurement and service quality management are going to be needed if LTE and the new service and business models that it can support are to realise their full commercial revenue-generating potentials in the shortest possible timeframes. While LTE presents its own unique all-IP engineering chal- lenges – a major discontinuity from the well understood 2G and 3G environments – there are many other factors at work in the industry today that are accentuating the already intense pres- sure to roll out services quickly, cost-effectively and at high levels of quality and availability. For a start, the old walled garden mentality must be considered firmly dead. The emerging new world of content and applications-based ser- vices relies on being able to interconnect reliably and securely with an increasingly diverse range of third party entities. As this value chain gets longer and multi-dimensional, so too do mobile service providers become far more exposed to customer dissatisfaction and churn. In this context it’s essential that test and service quality manage- ment systems and procedures can cope not only with much more complex and data-heavy sets of performance feedback in real time, but that it’s also easy to drill down to examine specific services and applications - as well as individual customer experiences - in more granular detail. Throughput is of particular importance here – as also is latency, where the absence of traditional Radio Network Controls in the LTE architecture presents its own particular set of new problems.
DELIVERING CONSISTENT QoE ACROSS MULTIPLE ENVIRONMENTS
This issue of eroding boundaries extends to guaranteeing the customer’s own quality of experience as they move between the different wireless and network environments – 2G, 3G, 4G and even WiFi – with what is hoped to be a seamless experience. As far as most customers will be concerned, they’ve paid for connectivity any time, anywhere and delivering that means that service providers need test and measure- ment solutions that can identify handover and interoperability issues quickly and transparently. With traffic patterns getting increasingly
‘bursty’ in nature, thanks especially to the viral nature of much video content and the demands this
M5 TravelHawk Analyzer – the only portable multitechnology product currently on the market
places on finite spectrum and backhaul capacity, having the right tools and systems in place for service monitoring means that scarce resources can be allocated and optimised to provide the maximum return. Without information of this kind – presented in appropriate ways to the appropriate decision makers – it will become increasingly dif- ficult to keep an ever more fickle customer base.
REENGINEERING THE SERVICE LIFECYCLE In many ways these underlying changes add up to what would in any other industrial sector be considered a complete reengineering of product, plant and supporting processes. The product itself now comes in a near infinite number of versions with shorter and shorter lifecycles; the factory has had to become largely automated and increasingly rely on third parties for both its raw materials and for product innovation – while cost pressures continue to mount and the customers become more discerning. It’s through this inclusive lifecycle strategy that EXFO is now supporting the LTE com- munity. With its Nethawk portfolio of analysers and simulators to handle troubleshooting and its BrixMobile solutions to provide a full set of service assurance features, EXFO helps both vendors and service providers through- out the whole reengineering lifecycle – from
initial R&D conformance testing and rollout troubleshooting to mature service assurance and maintenance activities.
Providing users with deep insight into net- work and service performance from a variety of different perspectives as appropriate – and with the power and reach to correlate events and spot anomalies – EXFO products deliver the kinds of scalability needed in such highly dynamic and complex value and technology chains. In addition, its portable test gear is currently the only multi-technology product on the market, simplifying the issues involved in supporting a more diverse – but necessarily seamless – access and core network environment. n
“Customers have paid for connectivity anytime, anywhere – service providers need test and measurement solutions that can identify issues quickly and transparently”
EXFO Europe Ltd. Toll-free: +800 2255 3936 (+800 CALL EXFO; from most European countries) Sales: +44.2380.246.810
Email:
Orders.EXFO.Europe@
exfo.com
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