CSPs make advances in assuring critical services
As critical services across private and public sector industries become more dependent on communication service providers' (CSPs’) networks to function, and service requirements and customers’ expectations rise, CSPs have been making advances and investments in service assurance.
13 Aug 2021
CSPs make advances in assuring critical services
As critical services across private and public sector industries become more dependent on communication service providers’ (CSPs’) networks to function, and service requirements and customers’ expectations rise, CSPs have been making advances and investments in service assurance, as this excerpt from TM Forum's recent report 'Orchestrating broadband as a vital utility' explores.
Service assurance, a key component of customer experience management (CEM), addresses how services - and the networks and applications supporting them - perform for customers. For critical services, the stakes are high because a failure can result in life-threatening consequences or societal disruptions and economic losses.
Ideally, service assurance systems should present a real-time, holistic view, where visibility into events and data about the impact on customers are available in real time at a granular level, down to the individual customer or device, according to the TM Forum Customer Experience Management Maturity Model.
Applying CEM best practices to critical services
The zero-touch operations and autonomous problem resolution capabilities needed to support critical services are well described by the maturity model. It calls for not only communications service providers (CSPs) to provide a real-time view of customer experience performance, but also the operator’s ecosystem partners.
As CSPs address network complexity while supporting critical services, their ability to provide live, granular visibility into and control over network and service performance from the customer and service down to the virtual machine and container level becomes critical. The maturity model helps define the path to this level of control from customer, service and network points of view.
From the model’s perspective, service assurance, service fulfillment and customer experience monitoring are components of the overall customer experience. They are part of one continuous, automated process and lifecycle that emphasizes on-demand services, continuous improvement of service assurance across networks and ecosystem partners, ecosystem-wide scripted customer support automation, and a real-time view of customer experience.
The graphic below shows a small sampling of the best practices outlined in the maturity model. Ideally, service assurance systems should present a real-time, holistic view, where visibility into events and data about the impact on customers are available in real time.
Service assurance, a key component of customer experience management (CEM), addresses how services - and the networks and applications supporting them - perform for customers. For critical services, the stakes are high because a failure can result in life-threatening consequences or societal disruptions and economic losses.
Ideally, service assurance systems should present a real-time, holistic view, where visibility into events and data about the impact on customers are available in real time at a granular level, down to the individual customer or device, according to the TM Forum Customer Experience Management Maturity Model.
Applying CEM best practices to critical services
The zero-touch operations and autonomous problem resolution capabilities needed to support critical services are well described by the maturity model. It calls for not only communications service providers (CSPs) to provide a real-time view of customer experience performance, but also the operator’s ecosystem partners.
As CSPs address network complexity while supporting critical services, their ability to provide live, granular visibility into and control over network and service performance from the customer and service down to the virtual machine and container level becomes critical. The maturity model helps define the path to this level of control from customer, service and network points of view.
From the model’s perspective, service assurance, service fulfillment and customer experience monitoring are components of the overall customer experience. They are part of one continuous, automated process and lifecycle that emphasizes on-demand services, continuous improvement of service assurance across networks and ecosystem partners, ecosystem-wide scripted customer support automation, and a real-time view of customer experience.
The graphic below shows a small sampling of the best practices outlined in the maturity model. Ideally, service assurance systems should present a real-time, holistic view, where visibility into events and data about the impact on customers are available in real time.
To approach this level of sophistication, the practice of service assurance has evolved substantially in a short time.
Momen explained that as service assurance became the focus, NOCs have evolved, becoming service operations centers (SOCs) to monitor the lifecycle of each service. But he added that service assurance is still evolving.
Now, CEM is the prevailing need, and the closer to real time the better.
Sustaining this granular view is becoming more complex along with the heterogeneity of networks, devices and virtualized functions that services must traverse or utilize. Also, multiple processes exist to manage faults, changes and complaints, all having the same goal to ensure quality of service. “It is very difficult to solve this problem if there isn’t good correlation,” said Momen.
CSP engineers are evaluating AI-based technology to handle the growing volume of events, identify anomalies, sort out root causes and apply fixes as rapidly as possible.
Live views & controls
A next big step for many CSPs is to provide customers with more customizable live views of services and networks in ways they can consume.
She adds that CSPs are beginning to provide customers with tools to create their own live dashboards and meet the needs for immediate information about their services on a customer- or application-specific basis.
CSPs have invested in their ability to deliver far more responsive, automated, and predictive networks and services with an eye toward Industry 4.0 uses cases including critical services, like power distribution. Both through partnership with critical infrastructure providers and new business- and consumer-facing developments in software-based networks.
The following examples show how operators are establishing a foundation for supporting critical services at a large scale and providing real-time views and controls to customers and other end users.
China Mobile supports intelligent power grid
China Mobile launched 5G services in 50 cities across China in November 2019 and cooperated with stakeholders in various industrial verticals to develop 5G-specifc use cases. One such partner is the China Southern Power Grid (CSG) which is partnering with the telco to use 5G to create an intelligent power grid.
The project’s goals, outlined in this case study, included creating an automated power distribution network, integrating CSG’s power grid management system with China Mobile’s 5G network slice management platform, enabling intelligent physical infrastructure inspection and expanding intelligent collection of consumption data.
To meet CSG’s industry-specific needs, China Mobile had to undertake a major transformation initiative. This meant rearchitecting its network to support critical applications and integrating cloud, network, and edge components; leveraging new software defined networking capabilities; automating operations and maintenance processes with a new digital platform; and implementing a network-as-a-service platform to empower customers to co-create services. The primary key to supporting critical services, however, is providing certainty.
With critical infrastructure like power grids, operations must be very predictable and nothing can be left to chance.
Verizon deploys intent-based networking
Verizon’s Dynamic Network Manager 2.0 (DNM 2.0) provides a view of how complex software-based networks can be, yet how capable when automated deliberately and extended to customers via self-service interfaces.
“DNM 2.0 is a unified interface for managing physical, virtual and cloud services,” Raju Sharma, Director, Edge AI, NetworkCustomer Assurance, Verizon, explained in this case study. It gives enterprise customers the control to provision, activate, monitor, troubleshoot, and change their services all in one place and visualizes the relationships between a customer’s products and services. To shield users from complexity, DNM 2.0 uses intent based networking. Users provide business intents, rather than complicated and proprietary procedures, and can choose from multiple wide-area-network (WAN) interfaces, including 5G slices. Any service on the platform can be managed with application-aware routing, QoS, and security policies from a single console or pane of glass. DNM 2.0 also reduces complexity for users by presenting only actionable or critical information, according to Sharma. High importance network events are presented in a common operations dashboard where users can “take action with a single click, and address network issues before they become problems,” she explained. Actions are automated using a vendor-agnostic rules engine which selects a workflow and scripts or commands to execute, based on the underlying network infrastructure components.
Verizon also designed DNM 2.0 with an API-first architecture, based on TM Forum Open APIs. Customers can use these APIs to build their own real-time monitoring and control applications, develop application and automation pipelines, and add their own automation to move toward zero-touch networks and services.
Windstream extends control to customers
One of the major challenges CSPs face in supporting networks and applications for critical industries is shifting from a static to a dynamic network model. Customers want and need substantially more on-demand choice, control and automation. Windstream’s new programmable, autonomous network aims to give business and consumer customers a new level of dynamic control over their services. Windstream created an intent-based, self-configuring and self-optimizing virtual infrastructure with a goal of simplifying the customer experience.
Windstream customers can define and manage services, including SD-WAN, business broadband, managed security, and Wi-Fi, and can access network controls, for example, to prioritize and ensure network quality for specific applications. Nichols said Windstream’s goals have included exposing prioritization, traffic blocking and shaping, policing and other controls to customers as simply as possible. Going forward, the CSP will continue to develop its ability to predict potential service degradations and network failures through large scale data analysis. These types of real-time, granular controls are needed for supporting critical services and also help pave the way to autonomous networks and zero-touch operations.
Collaboration required to move forward
Ultimately for CSPs, the most important aspect of supporting critical services is collaborating with customers.
Ibrahim Gedeon, CTO, TELUS, agreed, saying, “It is a new business model and we have to dovetail with the end clients’ transformation.” He added that experiences for customers must become frictionless, and services must have practical purposes, like cost reduction.
“5G has to make or save money for our customer,” Gedeon said, explaining that automation must extend end to end to create sustainable end points that support and nourish customers’ evolving needs and growing demand for multi-access broadband connectivity and related services. Taken collectively, CSPs are transforming to be better, faster, smarter, more efficient and highly automated. The work done over the past decade to advance virtualization, cloud native technology, software-defined networking, and real-time CEM is converging, catalyzed both by new market opportunities and competition.
As critical services across private and public sector industries continue to become more dependent on CSPs’ networks to function, service requirements and customers’ expectations are rising to their most stringent degrees. CSPs must be able to operate their networks as critical infrastructure utilities while also underpinning other critical industry’s services and infrastructure management. Automated CEM, service assurance and service fulfillment, advancing towards predictive and preventive capabilities, will prove crucial to any CSP’s ability to orchestrate increasingly complex broadband networks.
“A decade ago, we were traditional in nature, and we looked after the network in terms of fault or network alarms,” according to Mohammed Fahim Momen, General Manager, OSS & Customer Insight, Robi Axiata. “Each alarm was dealt with by NOC [network operations center] engineers trained on telco network domain specific skill sets for handling particular tasks, whether it impacted customers or not.”
Momen explained that as service assurance became the focus, NOCs have evolved, becoming service operations centers (SOCs) to monitor the lifecycle of each service. But he added that service assurance is still evolving.
“NOC functions and assurance functions are being merged,” Momen said. “It is all becoming intertwined because even a NOC engineer has to understand the direct correlation between customer experience and his action in terms of monitoring, detecting and rectifying service-related issues."
Now, CEM is the prevailing need, and the closer to real time the better.
“Now we can see the real-time experience of customers,” he said. “We can monitor the experience of each and every customer and can see instantly if an experience degrades at all for a customer and then to a great extent identify the reason of that degradation and take actions to fix it.”
Sustaining this granular view is becoming more complex along with the heterogeneity of networks, devices and virtualized functions that services must traverse or utilize. Also, multiple processes exist to manage faults, changes and complaints, all having the same goal to ensure quality of service. “It is very difficult to solve this problem if there isn’t good correlation,” said Momen.
CSP engineers are evaluating AI-based technology to handle the growing volume of events, identify anomalies, sort out root causes and apply fixes as rapidly as possible.
“Millions of alarms and customer- and service-centric data are generated every hour, every day, so AI will help substantially,” Momen adds.
Live views & controls
A next big step for many CSPs is to provide customers with more customizable live views of services and networks in ways they can consume.
“It used to be you’d struggle to get reports or to build new reports and KPIs,” said Maria Eugenia Armijo Marchant, Integration Specialist Solution Architect at Telecom Argentina. “Now we can build and rebuild customized dashboards in hours, even just for a specific event.”
She adds that CSPs are beginning to provide customers with tools to create their own live dashboards and meet the needs for immediate information about their services on a customer- or application-specific basis.
CSPs have invested in their ability to deliver far more responsive, automated, and predictive networks and services with an eye toward Industry 4.0 uses cases including critical services, like power distribution. Both through partnership with critical infrastructure providers and new business- and consumer-facing developments in software-based networks.
The following examples show how operators are establishing a foundation for supporting critical services at a large scale and providing real-time views and controls to customers and other end users.
China Mobile supports intelligent power grid
China Mobile launched 5G services in 50 cities across China in November 2019 and cooperated with stakeholders in various industrial verticals to develop 5G-specifc use cases. One such partner is the China Southern Power Grid (CSG) which is partnering with the telco to use 5G to create an intelligent power grid.
The project’s goals, outlined in this case study, included creating an automated power distribution network, integrating CSG’s power grid management system with China Mobile’s 5G network slice management platform, enabling intelligent physical infrastructure inspection and expanding intelligent collection of consumption data.
To meet CSG’s industry-specific needs, China Mobile had to undertake a major transformation initiative. This meant rearchitecting its network to support critical applications and integrating cloud, network, and edge components; leveraging new software defined networking capabilities; automating operations and maintenance processes with a new digital platform; and implementing a network-as-a-service platform to empower customers to co-create services. The primary key to supporting critical services, however, is providing certainty.
“In the 5G era, if operators hope to succeed in empowering industry digitalization, they will face the challenge of providing industry customers with deterministic network assurance experience,” said Liu Yu, Project Manager, Division of Networks Management Supporting, Network, China Mobile.
With critical infrastructure like power grids, operations must be very predictable and nothing can be left to chance.
Verizon deploys intent-based networking
Verizon’s Dynamic Network Manager 2.0 (DNM 2.0) provides a view of how complex software-based networks can be, yet how capable when automated deliberately and extended to customers via self-service interfaces.
“DNM 2.0 is a unified interface for managing physical, virtual and cloud services,” Raju Sharma, Director, Edge AI, NetworkCustomer Assurance, Verizon, explained in this case study. It gives enterprise customers the control to provision, activate, monitor, troubleshoot, and change their services all in one place and visualizes the relationships between a customer’s products and services. To shield users from complexity, DNM 2.0 uses intent based networking. Users provide business intents, rather than complicated and proprietary procedures, and can choose from multiple wide-area-network (WAN) interfaces, including 5G slices. Any service on the platform can be managed with application-aware routing, QoS, and security policies from a single console or pane of glass. DNM 2.0 also reduces complexity for users by presenting only actionable or critical information, according to Sharma. High importance network events are presented in a common operations dashboard where users can “take action with a single click, and address network issues before they become problems,” she explained. Actions are automated using a vendor-agnostic rules engine which selects a workflow and scripts or commands to execute, based on the underlying network infrastructure components.
Verizon also designed DNM 2.0 with an API-first architecture, based on TM Forum Open APIs. Customers can use these APIs to build their own real-time monitoring and control applications, develop application and automation pipelines, and add their own automation to move toward zero-touch networks and services.
Windstream extends control to customers
One of the major challenges CSPs face in supporting networks and applications for critical industries is shifting from a static to a dynamic network model. Customers want and need substantially more on-demand choice, control and automation. Windstream’s new programmable, autonomous network aims to give business and consumer customers a new level of dynamic control over their services. Windstream created an intent-based, self-configuring and self-optimizing virtual infrastructure with a goal of simplifying the customer experience.
“The industry has done a disservice by exposing this complexity of how networking works to customers,” said Art Nichols, VP of Architecture and Technology, Windstream. “We need to make it simple for end users.”
Windstream customers can define and manage services, including SD-WAN, business broadband, managed security, and Wi-Fi, and can access network controls, for example, to prioritize and ensure network quality for specific applications. Nichols said Windstream’s goals have included exposing prioritization, traffic blocking and shaping, policing and other controls to customers as simply as possible. Going forward, the CSP will continue to develop its ability to predict potential service degradations and network failures through large scale data analysis. These types of real-time, granular controls are needed for supporting critical services and also help pave the way to autonomous networks and zero-touch operations.
Collaboration required to move forward
Ultimately for CSPs, the most important aspect of supporting critical services is collaborating with customers.
“Enterprises have a high expectation of what we can deliver,” Terje Jensen, Senior VP and Head of Global Network Architecture, Telenor, said at the FutureNet World online event in April. “We need to work together throughout the chain of providers in a more collaborative fashion and not where I give a piece and you have to take it further.”
Ibrahim Gedeon, CTO, TELUS, agreed, saying, “It is a new business model and we have to dovetail with the end clients’ transformation.” He added that experiences for customers must become frictionless, and services must have practical purposes, like cost reduction.
“5G has to make or save money for our customer,” Gedeon said, explaining that automation must extend end to end to create sustainable end points that support and nourish customers’ evolving needs and growing demand for multi-access broadband connectivity and related services. Taken collectively, CSPs are transforming to be better, faster, smarter, more efficient and highly automated. The work done over the past decade to advance virtualization, cloud native technology, software-defined networking, and real-time CEM is converging, catalyzed both by new market opportunities and competition.
As critical services across private and public sector industries continue to become more dependent on CSPs’ networks to function, service requirements and customers’ expectations are rising to their most stringent degrees. CSPs must be able to operate their networks as critical infrastructure utilities while also underpinning other critical industry’s services and infrastructure management. Automated CEM, service assurance and service fulfillment, advancing towards predictive and preventive capabilities, will prove crucial to any CSP’s ability to orchestrate increasingly complex broadband networks.
