The 3 most important things for mobile phone users in today’s world are: speed, availability, and coverage, particularly for cellular data services.
The 1# most important thing for mobile operators is customer satisfaction.
There are infinite technical challenges in mobile networks with wide coverage and a large user base, that can affect an operator’s ability to provide its users with the best customer experience. Operators constantly deal with technical issues regarding network capacity, call quality, network coverage, data upload/download speeds, and more. These factors are directly related to customer satisfaction ratings. In order to address those issues quickly and cost-effectively, operators need to maintain a high quality network monitoring system.
What Does Network Monitoring Have to do with Customer Satisfaction?
Mobile Operators constantly invest in improvement of service, whether by routine repairs and maintenance, by upgrading network infrastructure, or by deploying new base stations in locations with low coverage. Each of these activities affects the service provided to end-consumers. Frequent call drops or slow download speeds create frustration among subscribers, and if it persists over time they facilitate churn. Maintaining superior quality of service is key to any operator’s success, and efficient mobile network monitoring is crucial to achieving that.
So how does network monitoring help operators keep customer satisfaction high?
Well, probes and other monitoring devices provide network engineers with visibility to network components. When a failure occurs, or an overload of certain coverage area (like during a large public event), a notification is sent to the network operations center. Real-time response and management of issues in the network can prevent problems which in turn may cause degradation in customer satisfaction.
When problems are only detected after a long time, or due to customer complaints, consumer satisfaction declines. This type of infrastructure management still exists today in many places worldwide, with utilities such as water supply, electricity networks, and various municipal services.
Proper network monitoring mechanisms can prevent all that by providing real-time information on the network’s status so problems in the network will be visible and attended to in time.
Out of many monitoring methods being used by MNOs worldwide, we will discuss two in which we specialize here at Modulo Communication Systems: SS7 /Diameter network monitoring, and a relatively new type of non-intrusive monitoring with Network Packet Brokers.
Monitoring the Signaling network in SS7 and Diameter
Network monitoring is essential for mobile operators in many aspects, especially for keeping track of the Quality of Service (QoS) for users in different service areas,
Mobile Operators use probes to inspect the flow of traffic data from their network. Probes provide quick access to view any changes in network data, evaluate networks response and trigger predefined actions, such as notifications to network administrators if an abnormality is detected. Monitoring is done on all types of traffic, across the various network elements and interfaces.
Mobile network monitoring provides protocol traces, call statistics, CDRs, information on bandwidth utilization and many KPIs. It can also potentially be used for marketing purposes, such as sending subscribers location-sensitive messages. For example, if a subscriber is at or near a certain shopping mall, they can receive a message from their operator telling them about a sale in a certain shop or give them a free parking coupon as a benefit from the mobile operator.
Modulo’s Signaling Probe Unit (SPU) is a high-performance, high-density protocol monitoring probe for monitoring SS7/SIGTRAN or Diameter traffic. A simple API allows operators to use the data collected by the probe any way they want; monitoring data procured by the probe can be saved to a database for analysis, can be used to trigger alerts, and more. Learn more about Modulo’s SPU here.
Monitoring Traffic Using Network Packet Brokers
Enterprises today process increasingly high volumes of data, as well as more and more different kinds of data such as voice and video communications. With the increase in the amount and variety of data being transferred, organizations require more security, more servers (or cloud services), and more monitoring abilities.
Network Packet Brokers (NPBs) provide increased visibility and organize traffic for faster and easier monitoring in a network, right down to the link layer. They achieve such visibility by brokering network traffic from multiple sources, aggregating it, and manipulating it to allow easier and faster access to the data for monitoring devices on the network.
A good NPB:
- Provides full visibility down to the link layer for monitoring and intelligence tools analyzing network traffic
- Filters traffic according to predetermined rules
- Executes traffic manipulations such as aggregation and load balancing.
Modulo markets Packet Brokering solutions based on Austria-based Cubro’s NPBs. To learn more about our line of products, visit our Packet Brokers & Aggregators product page.
If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us at sales@modulo.co.il.