With MNOs embracing virtualized network functions and cloud telecom technology in the 5G RAN and core, service assurance must change.
Service assurance is a vital function for all telecom networks. Successful service assurance depends on highly skilled technicians working with limited data to detect and fix network issues, keep performance high and to meet service level agreements. This architecture was acceptable when problems could be fixed over the course of multiple weeks or months. Today, customer expectations are that anything less than 100% uptime means loss of revenues or loss of customers for the MNO.
The evolving mobile network has three pillars:
These dynamics make a new model of service assurance critical for MNOs. That’s what Rakuten Symphony’s Naren Narayana talked about in a recent interview with Guy Daniels of TelecomTV.
By leveraging its Symworld platform, Rakuten Symphony has created a service assurance offering to meet these new demands.
Part of the reason why a new service assurance paradigm is needed, Naren told Guy, is that technology transitions for telcos have historically taken decades. Moving from 1G to 2G and from 2G to 3G are good examples. In other industries, the transformations take place in 6 - 12months. Virtualized networks and cloud telecom are pushing MNOs to transition faster and one of the impacts is revamping the service assurance infrastructure.
Naren explained that Symworld offers service assurance for this new era. The Symworld service assurance suite of services is called Symops Service Assurance and it offers a full set of services for network planning, building, operating and management. Symops delivers:
The Symops suite runs on Symworld Cloud, a platform that is designed for telco environments to deliver cloud-native microservices across many applications.
The Symops Observability framework is at the heart of the solution providing end-to-end visibility across the fault, log, performance, and traces for applications, network functions, network elements, clusters, and bare-metal systems. The benefit of the observability framework is that it helps with problem deduction, reduces meantime to repair, provides proactive monitoring and enables building of closed-loop scenarios.
The launch of Symops is the start of a new era of service assurance which will provide the functionality and observability needed to meet the demands of today’s networks. Hear more from Naren’s TelecomTV interview here.
