Online videos now make up more than 82% of all consumer internet traffic — 15 times higher than it was in 2017 — (Cisco).  If there is one thing that can overwhelm your network performance, it’s video; unless you plan for it, and ensure your video quality monitoring capabilities allows your customers to play streaming services, anytime and anywhere, with the best viewing experience. YouTube viewers watch over one billion hours of videos on its platform every single day and are responsible for generating billions and billions of views (YouTube, 2021). With the rapid evolution of networks ..read more

What is Metaverse? In this blog we explore Metaverse in 5G, the impact it will have on use cases, and how we can ensure it delivers the required service experiences to consumers and enterprises in the future.  What is Metaverse? It has been described as a 3D version of the Internet, where you spend your digital life, in parallel with the physical world.  You can shop, play, work and socialize as you do in the physical world, but in a world that can immediately extend or replicate the physical world for a particular experience. It appears that in the near term the significant drivers ..read more

Why Pay More? Network operators have no choice but to keep up with network evolution. It’s really a “Evolve or Die” situation as competitors will embrace new network performance tools as they become available. All this continuous tool sprawl has resulted in many operators with ten or more network monitoring tools to manage an ever-evolving network and ensure mission-critical network performance and to remain competitive. Over time, this has resulted in increased cost for managing networks for licenses, tool specific hardware and software that places a burden on your network operating budget. C ..read more

In the Beginning In the early days, device health, ping tests, traceroute, and utilizing the command line interface (CLI) were the main tools to discover network performance issues. . As networks continued to scale and grow in complexity, and as applications migrated to the cloud, these tools became only a small part of an overall network performance management solution. The next evolution of network performance tools resulted in a plethora of fragmented sets of third-party monitoring and troubleshooting tools. By themselves, they performed adequately, but unfortunately did not coalesce with e ..read more

Managing a network requires continuous evolution to keep up with the network technology changes. The number-one challenge faced by network operations teams is a lack of end-to-end network visibility, according to Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) research. The teams have an incomplete picture, especially as networks scale and grow in complexity and as applications start to migrate to the cloud. Device health, ping tests, traceroute, and mining the command line interface (CLI) aren’t no longer sufficient. Network managers must have a baseline for what is normal and acceptable. EMA rese ..read more

The advice ‘don’t shut the stable door…’ is one of the most long-standing English proverbs. A form of it is found in John Gower’s enormously long Middle English poem Confessio Aman-tis. Here is the passage: “For whan the grete Stiede Is stole, thanne he taketh hiede, And makth the stable dore fast.”  I’m sure you know what it means: To try to prevent or rectify a problem after the damage has already been done. How does this apply to my network? The saying for network operators should be: “There’s no point in improving your network visibility after a breach has occurred” Sadly, m ..read more

The Twilight Zone Defined as an area of little visibility an area just beyond ordinary limits. Made famous by the Twilight Zone show that entered into the shadowy tip of reality: you’re on a through route to the land of the different, the bizarre, the unexplainable. My most vivid memory of this show was “Nightmare at 20,000 feet” with William Shatner who sees a gremlin trying to destroy the wing of the airplane he is flying home in. He is unable to convince anyone else on the plane that this is happening because the gremlin is invisible to anyone else. In the end, the plane lands and the di ..read more

It’s time to get your head (and your network) INTO the cloud By Roger Boivin   Why Networks are Moving to the Cloud Conventional telecom network management requires manually configuring, monitoring and troubleshooting individual devices. Cirries estimates that more than 90% of network outages are caused by human factors and more than 70% are caused by manual network changes. As networks continue their unimpeded growth, the risk of human error also increases exponentially. The deployment of 5G is expected to exacerbate this deluge of network data to unprecedented levels that makes network ..read more