How Wireless Service Providers Can Make Carrier Ethernet a Competitive Advantage

By Juan Prieto, Product Marketing Manager – Mobile Solutions, InfoVista

As the amount of mobile data traffic continues to grow, wireless service providers (WSPs) are increasingly looking to Ethernet backhaul to cope. Next-generation Ethernet backhaul offers the opportunity for WSPs to raise margins by lowering the cost per bit of managing mobile data traffic. However, as WSPs are already beginning to realize, managing Carrier Ethernet performance is extremely complicated, largely because of high QoS demands associated with the various types of services traveling over mobile networks and the many technical options available to deploy new network infrastructure.

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Assuring VoIP Services over NGN Networks (Part 2)

By Amy Lind, IDC Research Manager, Consumer Broadband and Mobile Services

In response to my previous blog post about VoIP service assurance and performance, I wanted to provide a few solutions that service providers are implementing to deal with issues such as monitoring VoIP quality and service delivery, and addressing the added complexity of VoIP delivered over next-generation networks.

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Assuring VoIP Services over NGN Networks (Part 1)

By Amy Lind, IDC Research Manager, Consumer Broadband and Mobile Services

Voice communications are an essential aspect of conducting business in today’s increasingly global business environment. The proliferation of next-gen voice networks coupled with growing business demand to more effectively control costs, manage complexity and achieve greater productivity gains are factors causing many enterprises to consider migrating from traditional TDM telephony services to emerging IP-based voice communications solutions. According to IDC’s 2010 WAN Manager Survey, 74 percent of enterprises reported using a VoIP service, and 66 percent of respondents that have not yet deployed VoIP indicated they intend to do so within the year.

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Futurecom Recap: The Necessity of Service Quality Visualization in Latin America

By Juan Prieto, Product Marketing Manager – Mobile Solutions, InfoVista

Last month, I attended Futurecom in Sao Paulo, where I was given the exciting opportunity to speak on the importance of service quality visualization for wireless service providers (WSPs). In this presentation, I discussed select challenges of Latin American WSPs, according to analysis by Ovum, and highlighted a few pertinent statistics of their market for the next five years.  In particular:

• 52% of WSPs predicted an increase in mobile broadband connections
• 397% predicted increase in data revenues
• 15% predicted decline in mobile average revenue per user (ARPU)
• 5% decrease in prepaid subscribers [...]

The Future of Online Internet Traffic

By Marc Lippe, Director, Worldwide Field and Corporate Marketing, InfoVista

Recently, Analysys Mason analysts Rupert Wood and Terry Norman led a webinar on future data traffic trends and the big picture across fixed and mobile. According to the analysts, trends currently developing in the industry will more than likely decrease Internet traffic rather than increase it. They noted that Internet traffic is largely driven (75%) by the amount of data that consumers access in their daily lives. And although the majority of it is video-based, with services like YouTube, Hulu and Netflix growing in terms of per capita usage, total traffic has remained fairly static, primarily as a result of the growth in mobile traffic. [...]

InfoVista Featured in Gartner’s 2011 Application Performance Monitoring Magic Quadrant

By Cyril Doussau de Bazingnan, Product Marketing Director, InfoVista

InfoVista is pleased to have been included in this year’s Application Performance Monitoring (APM) Magic Quadrant.  Gartner recognized our product suite’s support of three out of the five dimensions it has defined for APM functionality, namely end-user experience monitoring, application runtime, architecture discovery, modeling and display, and application performance analytics.

APM has become increasingly important for business service providers looking to build application awareness into their managed service offerings and performance management practices, so that they can provide enterprise customers with the actionable visibility they require to better understand business-critical applications and network data traffic. [...]

Webinar: The Importance of Ethernet Backhaul Performance Visibility

By Marc Lippe, Director, Worldwide Field and Corporate Marketing, InfoVista

In an upcoming webinar, Patrick Donegan of Heavy Reading and my colleague, Juan Prieto, will be discussing how a tailored service performance reporting portfolio can help wholesale Carrier Ethernet providers achieve market differentiation through network and service quality visualization. The webinar will explain how and why they can increase their bottom lines by equipping mobile service providers with performance visibility and differentiating their offerings based on metrics other than simply price, such as Quality of Service (QoS). [...]

Service Assurance In Mobile Backhaul Networks

By Patrick Donegan, Senior Analyst, Heavy Reading

As some of the world’s leading mobile operators continue to remind us in their quarterly results, the roll-out of packet backhaul has been key to mitigating potential cost escalation associated with the transition from a voice centric to a data centric revenue model in mobile services. Many operators that are making that transition successfully draw attention to the critical role that is being played by the transition to packet backhaul.

As of the end of June 2011, Heavy Reading estimates that there were more than 350,000 cell sites in live service with Ethernet backhaul – more than 10% of the global total. We predict that 3 million cell sites, or 78% of the global total, will be in live service with Ethernet backhaul by the end of 2015. [...]

Do you Take Your Smart Phone to Bed?

By Chris Waters, Business Analyst, InfoVista

The common smartphone originally emerged as a means to converge mobile phone, pager, PDA, computer and fax capabilities into a single device. When coupled with major applications like a calendar, email, calculator, clock, note pad and games, the appeal naturally took hold.

Today, the smartphone’s universality continues to grow exponentially. The iPhone, BlackBerry and Android (among others) have created identifiable apps their users (primarily 19-35 years old) relate with such as DrunkDialer, Learn to Kiss, iFart, and The AcneApp. Kick to Pick even allows your unborn child to choose a name with a random kick. Needless to say, many seem to be unable to disconnect from their smartphones, an unnatural but accustomed companion. Studies by Pew Research Center and Ericsson Consumer Lab in 2010 reported that 65% of end users even sleep with their smartphones, and 35% reported using their phones even before getting out of bed in the morning. [...]

How Service Providers Can Meet Enterprises’ UCaaS Performance Expectations (Part 3)

By Kathleen Ayres, UC Product Marketing Manager, InfoVista

Following up on my previous posts on how service providers can ensure high quality Unified Communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) for their enterprise customers, here is my third and final tip: monitoring the pay-as-you-go, elastic nature of multi-customer UCaaS delivered from a virtualized data center demands a level of granular visibility and responsiveness to a dynamically changing infrastructure not previously seen in traditional service delivery.

Equally as important as implementing a cross-domain, unified solution such as the one I have described in the previous truth discussion is implementing one that can adapt to the constantly changing environment that is the modern cloud. With cloud based Unified Communications & Collaboration (UC&C) services, a virtualized compute platform on which customers’ applications will run in the data center adds an additional layer of monitoring complexity that must be addressed. For example, a compute platform, such as Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS), consists of up to 40 chassis per platform, with up to 8 blades per chassis. Each blade running VMware’s ESXi hypervisor hosts multiple virtualized UC&C applications. Each service customer subscribes to one or more UC&C applications. And these virtualized UC&C applications can dynamically move from one ESXi host to another ESXi host running on a different blade. The move might be triggered due to an operator action or to blade failure.  Additionally, new virtualized UC&C applications could be deployed automatically as a result of new customer activation through the self-service cloud portal. [...]