Telecom Network Assurance, Service Assurance & Remote Test/Monitoring Systems

Dittberner Associates
May 1, 2006
170 Pages - SKU: BCEQ1351633
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Telecom mergers are so commonplace these days that the headlines rarely surprise us anymore.

However, one recent merger, Alcatel's acquisition of Lucent Technologies is a defining moment of sorts, for Lucent is the home of Bell Telephone Laboratories, formed in 1925 and pioneer of the telecom industry.

The owner of an incredible 28,000 patents, Bell Labs invented Unix, the transistor, the laser, and circuit switching technology.

Of course, it wasn't as if one fine day Bell Labs submitted a patent defining the entire circuit-switched telephone network. No, the building of that network was an evolutionary process encompassing thousands of patents from Bell Labs, Siemens, Marconi, and many other contributors.

Well, 80 years later, it seems telecom history is about to repeat itself.

Just as it took decades for 20th century folks to engineer and groom the PSTN network into what it is today, we are now in the 21st century trying to engineer and groom IPpacket networks -- originally designed to carry best-effort internet and email traffic -- into reliable, high-quality carriers of real-time voice, video, content, and data services.

We are years away from that goal. True, companies like Vonage have succeeded in delivering voice over broadband service, but the quality of VoIP over broadband is still too inconsistent to make a significant dent in mass markets.

Likewise, carriers such as SaskTel have launched video service over DSL to markets of 35,000 homes, but no carrier has yet succeeded in scaling telecom-network video to reach millions of subscribers.

All these goals are attainable, of course. It's just that huge engineering efforts and many years of refinements will be required.

So what telecom technology will take us there? Frankly, our cup overflows with network technology, server technology, and industry standards. What's needed more than new telecom infrastructure are software and processes to better manage the infrastructure that already exists.

Network management, then, is telecom's ticket to tomorrow. Telecoms desperately need network assurance and service assurance innovations to help maintain high quality customer experience for today's complex services that cross multiple technologies, vendors, and interconnect partners.

Network management can also deliver the value-add required to reproduce the robust, real-time, and high-quality attributes of the PSTN in the highly-versatile content delivery engine we know as IP.

Given what we've said, Dittberner believes network management is a highly strategic area for future telecom investment.

Opportunities abound. Dittberner sees the network/service assurance and remote network testing & monitoring market growing from $2.8 billion in 2005 to $3.7 billion in 2010.

Here are major highlights of our analysis:
  • Service Quality Management on the Rise -- The traditional network assurance methods of fault and performance management provide no direct measure of actual service quality as perceived by the end user. Now, companies such as Vallent and Telcordia are introducing advanced Service Quality Management (SQM) solutions that analyze services though superior service modeling and correlating feeds from performance management, signaling, and network probes. SQM is particularly geared to the needs of 3G operators as they attempt to improve the QoS of MMS and other sophisticated services. Dittberner believes the SQM application will experience the fastest growth, going from $174 million in 2005 to $416 million in 2010.
  • Performance Management Eclipses Fault Management - Fault management will always be necessary, but its significance is diminished in the IP-services era since performance management system are stepping up in their role as guardians who proactively monitor and predict problems so they can be corrected before network or service outages occur.
  • Wireless to Remain the Key Market Driver -- Wireless operators are the biggest buyers of assurance solutions, making up 52% of market revenues. Thanks to the growing complexity of 3G service delivery, Dittberner foresees even more growth by 2011 when the wireless operator sector will comprise 55% of the market.
  • Entry of Large Test & Measurement Firms into Signaling Arena. Recent mergers have brought two very large test & measurement companies, Tektronix and Anritsu, into the assurance business. Those companies acquired OSS vendors skilled in SS7 signaling -- NetTest and INET. In addition, Tekelec joined the fray, acquiring French signaling vendor, Steleus. These moves underscore the power of signaling as a crucial technology for analyzing service quality analysis in a customer-centric way. Combined, the new companies also aim to put great pressure on industry leader, Agilent Technologies.
  • Infotech Giants Buy Assurance Vendors but Target Enterprise IT. A flock of big-name, infotech companies -- IBM, HP, EMC, and ComputerAssociates -- paid huge sums of money to acquire assurance vendors Micromuse, Peregrine, Smarts, and Concord Communications. Besides paying too much, Dittberner also believes none of the infotech giants has plans to become a significant telecom OSS player. Instead, their focus is likely to remain on the enterprise IT battleground.
  • Small Vendors Pioneer SLAs, Radio Optimization, and Mobile Service Experience Analysis.We found three small companies making significant new contributions to the assurance industry. Oblicore is making good headway in the SLA reporting sector; CommProve has developed a highly scalable approach to gathering and analyzing radio network quality data; and finally, startup Olista has developed a unique method of optimizing the mobile data services experience.


 

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