Microwave Engineering Europe - January/February 2009 - (Page 11)

TEST & MEASUREMENT 11 solution allows you to get closer to your customers and gain critical insight into the markets you serve, consider UACN’s Service Assurance for Voice Services application. A carrier has just deployed a new VoIP service. Knowing uptake rates, failure rates and performance trends over time will be critical to this new service introduction. Given that this carrier is serving a diverse group of customers with very different demographics and presumed usage behaviors, it will be important to understand how these different behaviors will impact network resources and associated quality measures. Starting with a high-level service and market monitoring dashboard, the carrier can quickly answer questions that pertain to service uptake and quality, based on actual customer trafﬁc: “What is the service uptake in the last 2-hours?” “What about instant messaging?” “What is the average MOS score of our service?” “What is the average PDD for all the 911 calls in the last 5-minutes?” “What is the average packet loss in each of our high-valued sub-markets?” But what happens as usage patterns change throughout the day, given that some network resources become overloaded while others go underutilized? According to one estimate, a 15 percent underutilized capacity due to data discrepancies in a 10,000 element network could cause approximately $6 million in unnecessary capital costs and approximately $36 million in lost revenues (source: IMS Implementation Guide, US Telecom). Using UACN’s Service Assurance for Voice Services module, this same operator can drilldown from a failed call log report to the actual messages involved with a given session — all the way down to each leg of the call. Knowing this, the VoIP operator can now isolate the problem and ﬁx it. The other advantage is improved customer satisfaction. Knowing which markets and how many users are affected gives operators the opportunity to proactively alert high-value accounts and customers of the potential problem. By proactively tracking services that fail, the VoIP operator can identify which network elements are having the greatest negative impact on the service performance. This type of analysis typically involves historical data, which can also prove very useful to illuminate potential network design issues. In many cases, the problem is actually outdated element ﬁrmware or an improperly conﬁgured Figure 2: High-level dashboard display showing interconnect performance by carrier, country and destination. hardware — which the system integrator or network equipment manufacturer may have missed during acceptance testing. But, this could cost the operator if not identiﬁed and ﬁxed. Improving both sides of the interconnect market Interconnection with customers as well as with suppliers is an integral part of service delivery for all carriers. Even Tier-1 service providers with an extensive global footprint need to interconnect with other carriers and with large wholesale customers. Critical to this model is the ability for operators to know the quality of services obtained as part of their service delivery chain, as well as the quality of services delivered to their wholesale customers and downstream interconnect partners. In an effort to better control and ensure true end-to-end quality of experience, operators today need advanced tools to isolate problems that span multiple interconnected networks owned and operated by different carriers. In the past, interconnection had been implemented at the circuit switch level and enforced using service level agreements (SLAs). With the advent of IP, interconnection is typically carried out by the Media Gateway where services such as voice are converted from the IP domain to the interconnect partners’ domain (e.g., IP domain to TDM). Moreover, there is also a growing trend in which VoIP calls are bypassing the PSTN altogether, terminating their calls in another IP network. Technically, there are many challenges that need to be addressed when it comes to managing interconnect, ranging from interworking between carriers, to the use of different signaling and media protocols, to other issues such as trans-coding. Operationally, there are challenges in performance and call quality, customer satisfaction, troubleshooting and problem isolation, security and capacity management. From the perspective of a carrier who is using interconnect partners to complete the service delivery chain, their selection criteria is based upon the partner who can deliver the highest volume of calls at the lowest possible cost. Interconnect Services for UACN, which is an additional module as part of the UACN framework, can help operators address many of the issues surrounding interconnect by removing the guesswork and helping operators make business decisions based on actual performance. For example, the Interconnect Services module can answer questions such as: “How many call attempts are we sending them?” “What is the average MOS per call for G.711 codec?” “What was the average PDD for all the interconnect partners for the last 5-minutes?” “What is the average packet loss when routing calls to Australia?” With better information come better decisions. And with least cost routing, carriers are rewarded with greater proﬁtability. Using Interconnect Services, carriers can rank interconnect partners on performance indicators such as call failure ratio, ASR and NER. Knowing a given interconnect provider’s ability to handle calls at a given quality, along with pricing information, allows network operators the ability to select interconnect partners as a function of quality and cost. Tektronix is a registered trademark of Tektronix, Inc. All other trade names referenced are the service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies. Microwave Engineering Europe ● January/February 2009 ● www.mwee.com http://www.mwee.com

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Microwave Engineering Europe - January 2009 News Contents Comment Using KPIs to Ensure Quality in a Converging Network Amplifier Error Vector Magnitude Characterisation Using High-Speed Modular PXI Instruments GPS: Making a Play for Femtocells Accelerating Global WiMAX Adoption: The Move to Picocell and Femtocell Base Stations Addressing PA Efficiency for Multi-Mode Wideband Handset Applications Wi-Fi: Mobile Feature or Fundamental RAN? Products Calendar

Microwave Engineering Europe - January/February 2009

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