4G and the Customer Experience

One key result of traffic increase in the backhaul is the migration of most service providers towards an IP/Ethernet-based backhaul environment.  But IP/MPLS and Ethernet, as compared to traditional TDM, is not deterministic in performance and brings more complex concepts like classes of service, VLANs, virtual circuits and MPLS tunnels.  As such, operators need to ensure that the transmission teams that were managing TDM backhaul are equipped with the right tools to assure and engineer all these entities.  Overall, the majority of today's service assurance tools are designed to tackle either per-subscriber service monitoring, mobile infrastructure monitoring or transport monitoring, but not all three at once.  This has resulted in a proliferation of tools and made asuring the end-user experience an increasingly difficult and expensive.