Carriers are seeing challenges with their operations from a predeployment and test perspective as well as monitoring. Moreover, these CSPs are grappling with network monitoriing costs which are scaling in a linear fashion with traffic growth. Heavy users could be using 10x more data on LTE over 3G for example meaning if something isn’t done, monitoring costs will go through the roof. This is why many carriers are going probe-less in their network monitoring departments.

Network turn-up time and dealing with the complexity and cost of HetNets is a challenge as well. Likewise, RAN optimization is another other pain point carriers are dealing with.

Finally, 4G extensions like VoLTE, LTE-A and MIMO are other areas of carrier complexity. In fact vanilla VoLTE may not be enough to get consumers to purchase a solution in the new era where Facebook and WhatsApp are a single company. This is why you need to be able to monitor your VoLTE network in a granular fashion.

These are many of the challenges JDSU is focusing on – trying to help carriers manage their networks in a real-time fashion at a much lower cost in a probless manner while maximizing customer experiance through effective assurance.

They beleive that the typical industry real-time definition of 10-15 minutes won’t cut it in an NFV/VoLTE world where subscribers react instantaneously on social networks. “In this NFV-world you need to not only have dynamic services but dynamic customer experience management/service assurance,” said Tara Van Unen, Sr. Manager, Strategic Marketing. I had a chance to catch up with her as well as JDSU’s Michael Tschirret and Paul Gowan here at MWC earlier today.

We discussed how carriers are dealing with increased OTT pressure forcing them to find new ways to generate revenue from their networks. This is why CSPs are looking to use big data to take service assurance data to boost marketing functions. JDSU is delivering Smart Data – part of their xSIGHT solutions for real time intelligence. The premise according to the company is you need open-systems to ensure you can have flexible solutions which work with one another to provide a better carrier ROI.

“Customer experience has to have the ability to react while the customer is still using a service,” said Van Unen. She continued by saying with hundreds of alarms going off across a network how can you manage what you need to do with a correlated view?

Tara Van Unen and Paul Gowans of JDSU

This is why they have a multirelational real-time view of the service customers are experiencing.

40% of customer churn has to do with service issues according to Van Unen which is why the company’s solutions make logical sense to consider in your network.