Nokia Real-Time Mobile Network Analytics provides instant correlation of network-wide data and its impact on customer experience

• Turns every mobile device into network test equipment, allowing operators to optimize the network for real customer behavior without time-consuming drive testing
• Ties together network, applications, usage and device data in a multi-dimensional toolkit for operations and engineering
• Simple to implement without extensive data probes and costly integration projects. Also improves customer experience on Voice over LTE and IOT services

30 June, 2016

Nokia is launching Real-Time Mobile Network Analytics, the industry's first solution to give operators an end-to-end view of mobile networks from individual subscribers, applications, devices and operating systems, network elements, cells and calls. The analytics link the performance of applications and devices to network issues in real-time, effectively making every mobile device part of a network test bed. This enables operators to pin point potential causes of service degradation much more rapidly than they can today since they no longer need to consult a myriad of tools and correlate the data from them manually. It also offers engineering teams a proactive way to understand Over The Top (OTT) application impacts on the network and optimize opportunities.

The Real-Time Mobile Network Analytics solution integrates three network analytics tools widely deployed by more than 200 operators:

• Nokia Wireless Network Guardian that provides engineering teams with analytics on applications, network and devices
• Nokia Traffica that supports Network Operations Centers by linking application-level analytics to real-time troubleshooting and root-cause analysis in radio and core networks
• Nokia Network Performance Optimizer that provides deeper, call-level analytics

The combination of tools, sources data directly from radio access and core networks with fewer tapping points than standard solutions. This reduces the need to expand interfaces for legacy network probes. It also offers open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that enable operators to use the collected data for their big data strategies.

Real-Time Mobile Network Analytics use-cases include:

• IoT device and service insight. The solution helps operators proactively identify the signalling impact of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and optimize network resources before problems arise. The solution also provides insight into IoT usage trends, IoT hotspots, IoT services Quality of Experience (QoE) and the readiness of a network to deploy a specific type of IoT device.
• Real time input for automated congestion/traffic management. Despite operator capacity investments, many subscribers still report slow connectivity. Real-Time Mobile Network Analytics' subscriber-level intelligence can monitor all bandwidth consumption and predict potential congestion problems.
• Assuring high quality, interruption-free VoLTE. Typically, 5% of cells cause VoLTE voice interruptions of more than five seconds. Using conventional troubleshooting, one operator took two months to find the cause of VoLTE quality issues. Real-Time Mobile Network Analytics is the only solution that detects these silent periods and ties them to real-time network performance for a much faster resolution.
• Identifying problems with Over The Top applications. Misbehaving OTT applications can cause issues like excessive signalling that are hard to detect. One operator took five months to detect and resolve the issue. Deep analysis of application performance linked to network issues supplies real-time root-cause analysis.
• Providing real-time marketing insight . The collection and analysis of data from devices and subscribers can be used by operators to target marketing campaigns in real-time.
• Precise scaling of virtualized functions. Operators can use Real-Time Analytics in conjunction with Network Function Virtualization (NFV) to predict when a customer will need additional capacity and provide it before it impacts performance.

Bhaskar Gorti, president of Nokia's Applications and Analytics business group:

"Currently, operators are forced to take important operational and engineering decisions based on disconnected sets of data from separate tools for radio, core and transport networks. This makes it very hard to perform network-wide engineering and optimization or identify if a problem originates in the network, device, device OS, radio link, cell core network, transport network or at some other point. Today, we introduce a completely new approach that meets the needs of modern-day operators by providing on-the-fly correlation of network-wide data and its analysis per application, per cell, per subscriber, per device and even per call. In the future we will extend this capability to support fixed networks and Wi-Fi."

Shira Levine, research director, service enablement and subscriber intelligence, IHS Technology:

"As the cost of storing and analyzing extremely large data sets comes down, and the processing-power of various analytics tools ramps up, operators are increasingly incorporating big data and analytics into their larger customer experience management strategies. Nokia's Real Time Analytics solution is positioned to capitalize on that trend by allowing operators to pull together data from multiple sources and thus gain a more holistic and comprehensive view of the subscriber; this enables them to do more proactive management of the experience and promptly address any problems that may arise." *