 | | Michele Campriani
Manager, Protocol Products Group
Sunrise Telecom |
As a test / monitoring equipment vendor, we have a very unique perspective on emerging trends and challenges that operators are (and will be) facing.
One such challenge, which has surprised us in its severity and its impact on both wireless and wireline operators, has to do with managing service quality and ‘customer experience’ when introducing new data services in a converged (e.g. legacy + IP) network environment. In particular, the ‘traditional voice’ equation of “if the network is OK = QoS is OK = customer experience is OK” is no longer true for data services.
In any converged network migration, there has been a natural decoupling between the service delivered and the network infrastructure. Thus, if the operator is to provide a high quality of experience to their subscribers, they have to transition from a network-centric view to a service-centric view, and ultimately to a customer-centric view. This is much harder than it might appear.
The first step in establishing a customer-centric view is the coupling of the OSS and Probe-based monitoring systems. Until now, the roles of OSS and Probe-based monitoring in an operator network have been isolated activities, often conducted by independent departments… the OSS has always been concerned with obtaining information from the nodes and providing network-level information, while Probe-based monitoring is concerned with extracting information from network traffic and from the services themselves.
The main shortcoming of the OSS is that it must now map network elements to services, which it was not designed to do. Likewise, the main shortcoming for Probe-based Monitoring is that it was designed to look at the services and evaluate their quality, but it does not communicate with the network elements. As an example, take a traditional “Fault Management” solution from an OSS vendor: the system is able to detect hardware problems affecting the network elements, but even if they detect a particular node has a problem, they are not able to determine which service has been affected.
It has become apparent to many operators that integration of OSS and Probe-based monitoring systems is required to bridge this gap. Such integration not only allows mapping of the network elements into the services provided, but also provides information on the services and their quality… even if no faults
were detected by the OSS. Most importantly, such an integration provides “Closed Loop Management”, where instead of having the OSS simply signaling the fault, since the two systems are now integrated, the operator can troubleshoot from the point the fault was actually detected.
While Sunrise Telecom has enjoyed some early success in its partnership with OSS vendors, it is abundantly clear to us that more work needs to be done in this area, which will require companies (and internal operator departments) that never had a reason to talk, to work with one another closer than ever before. This is a classic example of the adage that “the overall system has the ability to be much larger than the sum of its parts”.
Michele Campriani is currently the General Manager of the Protocol Products Group in Sunrise Telecom. Previously, he was Director of OSS solutions for HP’s Communication Media and Entertainment Business Unit.In this role, he was responsible for the OSS product and solution portfolio and for the HP Consulting OSS practice on a worldwide basis. He drove the growth and profitability of the business through the success of a set of OSS solutions that have been delivered to several Service Providers around the world.
From 1997 until 2000, he was business development manager of the EMEA region of the HP Openview Telecom Division. During this period, he helped establish HP as a leading OSS provider in the region.
From 1994 until 1997, he was an eminent member of the advanced research lab of HP in UK, and greatly contributed to several HP innovations in the area of Network and Service Management for Telecom companies.
He received a Master’s degree in electronics engineering from the Politecnico di Milano in Italy
Posted
06-25-2008 10:38 AM
by
Josh Goldfein