Telefónica gains unified customer experience visibility across entire network footprint

Business challenges

A big part of Telefónica’s LTE (4G) growth strategy was reliant on improving existing network reliability to meet high customer expectations. Several quality of experience (QoE) factors were in play:

• In some instances, Telefónica leveraged existing infrastructure for broadband data services where 4G coverage was initially limited.
• Speeding up return on investment (ROI) for 4G build-out and beyond depended on optimizing the performance and utilization of Telefónica’s entire infrastructure.
• This effort was seen to be most critical in Central and Latin America, where 75% of subscribers were traditionally prepaid voice users without a data plan.

At the same time, however, accelerating subscriber transition to 4G and ultimately to 5G was a key objective across Telefónica’s global operations.

Solution benefits

To achieve its immediate business goals, Telefónica identified a list of key performance monitoring solution requirements, all of which were realized by the deployment of Accedian’s Skylight solution.

• Unified quality of service (QoS) visibility across their entire multi-vendor metro and backhaul network footprint, leveraging granular, per-class of service (CoS) continuous monitoring.
• Standards-based performance assurance using RFC5357 TWAMP coupled with enhanced KPIs.
• Continuous monitoring and detailed insight to significantly reduce 3G and 4G backhaul connection issues.
• Proactive performance assurance to reduce call drops, boost availability, and optimize bandwidth utilization and call quality across their 3G and 4G infrastructure.
• Ubiquitous coverage to localize issues, plan network upgrades, and optimize performance.
• Real-time metrics covering network QoS and voice and video and QoE for trending, alerts and reporting.
• Ability to monitor multiple classes of service as a means of properly assuring signalling, synchronization, voice, video and broadband flows sharing backhaul and access links.
• One-way metrics without synchronized endpoints, to address their highly asymmetrical network with many radio backhaul and fiber-to-the-X (FTTX) links. This was critical as deploying a dedicated synchronization method for performance management was not feasible.
• Fast and easy instrumentation deployment with a virtualized, centralize control platform that provides comprehensive zero-touch deployment.

Telefónica also recognized that the comprehensive performance management capabilities of Skylight addressed future challenges, such as:

• Replicating its performance-focused strategy across the Movistar mobile brand footprint in Spanish-speaking countries and beyond.
• Increasing 4G coverage and capacity with new towers, as well as upgrading 3G base stations across the Vivo service area.
• Using the same assurance platforms for QoS and QoE across all offerings, including business services, wholesale Ethernet, and triple or quad-play residential services.

Skylight is perfectly aligned with Telefónica’s short to mid-term plans. Its modularity and ubiquity mean that additional capabilities can easily be added through a combination of licensed upgrades and a flexible range of sensors.

Business value and outcome

Having a single ubiquitous solution for performance assurance and management of all of Telefónica’s key services has proven vital to achieving QoE-focused business goals globally. This is becoming increasingly important as network complexity increases and service offerings broaden. Initially, in its Skylight deployment, Telefónica focused on operational benefits being key to its business value. They applied Skylight to their accelerated 4G buildout, to support more diverse and cost-effective services, and to improve infrastructure and service rollout efficiency. Now, with the experience gained from their 3G to 4G transition—supported by Skylight—Telefónica is uniquely positioned to deliver solid business value from the start in the emerging 5G market. Skylight’s capabilities are crucial as Telefónica focuses on end-user QoE as the primary differentiator for 5G:

• Microsecond accuracy to assure outstanding digital experience for 5G users, tied to stringent service level agreements (SLAs).
• Analytics that address the complexity of 5G, including multi-sourced data from all network and service layers.
• Coverage for cover a complex web of new capillaries and capacities associated with the internet of things (IoT), software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV).
• Correlation tools to understand and act on data to realize the 5G value customers demand.