Viavi Solutions has announced the availability of Release 1.1 of its xSIGHT customer experience assurance (CEA) portfolio for telecoms. Communications service providers (CSPs) are striving to deliver optimal quality of experience as network usage escalates and applications diversify. Even within broad application categories such as voice, multimedia messaging, video entertainment and productivity, apps and services utilise the network differently. CSPs are trying to improve the subscriber experience by allocating network resources to subscribers based on application-specific requirements. This approach calls for rapid analysis of application usage and QoE on the network. Existing technologies for this analysis – such as deep packet inspection – have been increasingly hindered by data encryption or local regulations aimed at protecting consumer privacy.
xSIGHT is a CEA portfolio including a centralised analytics platform fed by agents distributed throughout the network. The agents passively analyse traffic in real-time, build network and application performance metrics and selectively store traffic for troubleshooting purposes. This capability is especially important for Voice over LTE (VoLTE) as a fundamental communication service – with low user tolerance for quality issues – that is now a data application. As subscribers increase the share of time they spend on over-the-top (OTT) services with different demands on the network and unpredictable behavior, the need to analyse user plane data in real time becomes vital to optimising QoE.
“xSIGHT is designed differently than alternative solutions, addressing not only immediate technological requirements of mobile broadband networks, but broader operational ones as well,” said Sameh Yamany, the chief technology officer of Viavi Solutions. “While other systems may provide after-the-fact processing of metrics, xSIGHT’s architecture allows users to receive multi-dimensional analytics in real time, so quality issues may be addressed during or perhaps even before the user experiences them.”
