End-to-End Service Quality Management for Mobile Broadband

Editor's Notes

• #2: Assalamu Alaikum & Hello Everybody! my name is Muhammad Imran Awan and I would like to warmly welcome all of you for this ½ an hour session where we’ll try to speak about the management & monitoring aspects of MBB service so that our customers can receive a sustained & superior quality of various MBB related services & applications. While I understand you had been listening a lot since yesterday about the business and commercial aspects of Mobile Broadband from various experts , so probably this session would be a bit of change as we’ll be talking a bit technical here, but I can assure you that it wont be that much technically deep to bore you-:) And before we jump into the content, let me mention that you should please feel free to ask any questions during the course of my presentation or at the end of this session, or even later you can approach me at my email address which should be available at the conference website….
• #4: SQM is one of the Assurance processes under Operations domain, and this how eTOM defines it: “” and that specific service under our discussion today as you know is MBB, so we’ll try to understand during the course of this presentation how we can effectively monitor, analyze and improve the quality of MBB & related services.Another related term which I would like to quickly mention is the Service Level Management, the so-called SLM, which primarily comes from ITIL domain and is usually defined as “” so probably by the end of this presentation we’ll also try to see how the service providers can leverage their SQM capabilities to externally commit & contractually manage a set of differentiated Service Levels for their customers, potentially as a value-added sellable service.Backup:eTOM defines “Customer QoS/SLA Management” as:Monitoring, managing and reporting of delivered vs. contractual Quality of Service (QoS), as defined in the enterprise’s service descriptions, customer contracts or product catalogue.We might be using the terms of SQM, Service Assurance, QoS Monitoring quite interchangeably
• #5: Data services are the fastest growing revenue stream for mobile service providers. Its expected that almost 66 percent of the world's mobile data traffic will be video by 2014. Handset Video calling, Video Media sharing across enabled handsets, and use of mobile broadband on notebooks/netbooks for video streaming will drive its adoption, And as a result Mobile providers need to focus on a strategy for real-time QoE!Introduction of Convergent Network services (e.g. spanning across Fixed & Mobile technologies) also mandates the need for End2End SA/SQM practices & mindsetto be adopted, along with better automation and least human intervention
• #6: Due to the increasing saturationand rising competition in Telecommunications market, CEM is becoming much more relevant & indispensible for Telecom Service Providers in general. Service Providers today find themselves confronted with the growing challenge of setting themselves apart from competitors and securing the sustained loyalty of their customers at the same time. Despite freeoffers to attract and retain customers, eye-catching promotions for advanced smart phones, SMS “for life”, and unlimited data packages,tariffs and service plans across mobile markets are broadly similar. Consequently, it’s increasingly difficult – and expensive – to establishclear competitive advantage. With this in mind, service providers are refocusing attention on the subscriber experience!
• #7: Due to the increasing saturationand rising competition in Telecommunications market, CEM is becoming much more relevant & indispensible for Telecom Service Providers in general. Service Providers today find themselves confronted with the growing challenge of setting themselves apart from competitors and securing the sustained loyalty of their customers at the same time; however since the maximum growth potential lies in the broadband services domain so this is where we have the utmost need of maintaining the customer experience to prevent revenue leakage through churn!
• #8: If we look at the key factors and areas which are mandating the need to have a Proactive Service Assurance approach & toolset for MBB Service providers, these include “”. With service providers increasingly providing streaming and real-time mobile data services (e.g. Mobile TV), it is imperative to report on end-to-end service quality parameters – namely latency, packet loss and jitter/delay-variation.High growth rates for mobile Internet imply diligent capacity planning not only for the packet core elements (GGSNs and SGSNs) but also for the supporting switching and routing devices down to the interface levels. Capacity and Design improvement decisions like this have to be made proactively:“My West Region GGSN seems to be getting the most Internet traffic. Are the supporting switches and routers well equipped for the next year?”
• #9: The lack of linkages and cross visibility between mobile packet core and IP core networks The lack of integration between the different organizations and toolsets assigned to manage various parts of the networksThe problem is that there are times when systems report that everything is working as it should while customers contact call centerswith problems. At the heart of the limitations of network-centric monitoring are two interrelated issues: service diversity, and diagnosing and resolving problems
• #10: In many Service Provider organizations, no-one actually owns the subscriber service experience as neither have a view into neighbouring domains... Segmented operations and tools!
• #11: SP are asking today How do I manage new content-based services that span NETWORK & IT OPERATIONS/Datacenters?Once we have setup the right practices and tools to proactively monitor the end2end Mobile Infrastructure performance, it is equally & increasingly more important to thoroughly monitor the performance of Mobile Applications & Services (hosted internally or outside) in order to measure & report on the E2E Service Performance for Mobile Broadband service value chain. Now there could be multiple options to actually monitor the performance of Application services; it could include PDP Context Analysis, Deep Packet Inspection, Gathering GTP data from user & control planes etc. all this could be handled by a suitable APM application software which can then provide processed KPIs data to an E2E SQM application. In case of internally hosted business Apps, we could perform Application availability & response monitoring thru simulation/software probes and the results could be exported as KPIs again.
• #12: Service Quality management is an overlay function/system which requires a well defined, integrated and optimized Resource Provisioning, Fault & Performance management practice and toolset to be in first put in place as depicted in this block diagram; Performance Management has a special role to play here as this where we get the proactive view of how the resources and services could be behaving in near future, by using predictive trending on performance & capacity issues. And the good news is that all of these underlying functions & systems are usually present at most service providers, though in silos; however the evolution towards and E2E Service Quality Management approach & toolset is something not always there and hence this is on the agenda of our discussion today.The purpose of a TSC is for the SQM solution to be dynamically catalog driven for creation of service models and service definitions, as to be used for service impact calculations resulting from network/technical events. CRM integration could be included to provide the customer impact information when certain network resources or services are under a problem condition. And as I had just mentioned on the first slide that having an E2E SQM capability is one of the prime requirements for further being able to offer Service Levels and manage the SLAs & Customer Experience effectively….
• #13: KPI: “A measure of quality performance of network resources, e.g. a GPRS PDP context Activation Success Rate in areas where subscribers don’t have direct visibility.”KQI: “The measure of a specific aspect of the performance of a product, product components or service elements and is drawn from data from a number of resources.”QoE views could be created per subscriber types e.g. quality of email service for Blackberry subscribers, or quality of browsing for USB Data SIM customers etc. etc.
• #14: Currently in most service providers there is a lack of business-centric metrics available for consumer/broadband services that would help product management and marketing better plan these services and reduce customer churn; a rightly integrated and optimized SQM solution could help in this regard with necessary business service information enrichment. Also the solution could include dashboards for corporations that purchase enterprise data services (private APNs), enabling these corporations to view the performance of the respective private data service they have purchased from the carrier. It could also include a high level view of packet core performance that the service provider could offer to MVNOs. This enables the operator to build trust among existing customers and also offer reporting capabilities as an incentive for potential wholesale customers; or could be potentially sold a value-added premium service.
• #15: Currently in most service providers there is a lack of business-centric metrics available for consumer/broadband services that would help product management and marketing better plan these services and reduce customer churn; a rightly integrated and optimized SQM solution could help in this regard with necessary business service information enrichment. Also the solution could include dashboards for corporations that purchase enterprise data services (private APNs), enabling these corporations to view the performance of the respective private data service they have purchased from the carrier. It could also include a high level view of packet core performance that the service provider could offer to MVNOs. This enables the operator to build trust among existing customers and also offer reporting capabilities as an incentive for potential wholesale customers; or could be potentially sold a value-added premium service.
• #17: Empowered with this comprehensive e2e visibility, service providers will be able to more quickly troubleshoot and focus on the root causes of service degradation issues before customers are negatively impacted. This will also help them proactively plan the network capacities keeping in view the subscriber behavior and usage of the services offered.Such a holistic Service Quality Assurance approach should help the MBB service providers to prevent the ongoing explosion of data traffic volumes result in increase of their Operational Costs and decline of quality of services and customerbase.