Next-Gen Customer Network Experience Software System: A Data-Driven Approach

In the past, it could take days, if not weeks, to pinpoint the cause of a poor network connectivity experience (wired or wireless) for customers. The network troubleshooting team had to scourge through data from various network devices in different formats to find the root cause of the issue. Poor connectivity could be due to several reasons – transmission and reception of weak radio signals, issues with a particular type of mobile device, changes in nearby geography of radio towers (e.g., the blocking of radio signals due to a newly raised building, growth of trees, etc.), misconfigured networks, network congestion, etc. Managing customer complaints for poor connectivity conventionally has required the setup of an extensive customer care team to handle incoming customer calls, address incident tickets and perform analysis of reported issues. A significant portion of the OPEX budget is allocated for this activity by Tier-1 operators.

Humans and businesses are increasingly dependent on reliable data and voice connectivity, which has been further accelerated after the onset of Covid. With stress on digital transformation in practically every facet of business transaction or human interaction, there is a need for software tools and solutions that can quickly point to the real cause of network issues affecting the customer network experience. These software tools need to process vast volumes of telemetry data that networks generate and be able to derive insights in near real-time by correlating data from various sources. Functionally, a software system that provides insights into customer connectivity experience is developed with the following principles in mind:

• Provide a snapshot of the network at a particular time instance in terms of network throughput, radio interference, network congestion, state of network devices, and nature of data traffic flow.
• Have real-time access to customers’ experience about data, voice, HD content, and type of mobile device.
• Provide proactive updates to customers for any predictive outage in network service.
• Provide automated remediation to solve network issues using AI/ML techniques.

Network experience software systems are helping operators reduce their operational overheads by reducing the following:

• number of incoming calls to customer care
• average time to handle a customer call
• incident resolution and network troubleshooting time

Tier-1 operators having nationwide deployments deal with a massive customer base, and even a fraction of savings leads to a huge advantage and significantly improved customer satisfaction. In this whitepaper, we provide an overview of a modern customer network experience software solution and its functional aspects when dealing with large volumes of network data.

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