Smart Visibility: The Key to 5G Innovation

Communications service providers (CSPs) have been hard at work rolling out 5G throughout the world. In fact, a recent report predicted that 5G connections will account for 14 percent of all mobile connections in North America alone by 2021. And this represents only the very beginning of paradigm-shifting change for the industry. Of course, bringing 5G online requires enormous investment on the part of CSPs, who must ensure that new services are reliable and the customer experience is exceptional in order to justify the high cost. 

Holistic visibility is the key to achieving reliability for 5G networks—and ultimately is key to gaining profitability for technological innovations made possible by 5G’s dramatically faster connectivity. Such visibility into wireless networks can give CSPs the insights they need to optimize network performance and effectively monetize emerging technologies such as smart cities and autonomous vehicles.

What do we mean by that? Smart visibility means the ability to look at live, real-time IP packet data across both physical and virtual/cloud infrastructures. From that, companies can construct smart data—analytics-ready meta data collected and optimized from traffic flows in real time—to provide actionable intelligence built from a real-time, end-to-end view of network, services, technologies, and subscribers.

Smart Visibility Delivers a Definitive Source of Truth

Smart visibility delivers a definitive source of truth, making it possible for carriers to see deep into the most complex parts of their networks and reveal the end-to-end experience down to the subscriber level. This is crucial for staying one step ahead of problems, optimizing the user experience, and automating networks for the greatest possible spectrum efficiency.

The insights delivered by smart visibility give CSPs the ability to: 

• Plan network upgrades
• Assess technological innovations and provide better support for new services and applications
• Ensure deployment strategies are based on network assessment and will maximize opportunities for new services and monetization
• Compare different vendor infrastructure performances
• Facilitate automation
• Gain more control of networks
• Monitor network performance and enable troubleshooting to meet critical SLAs

While smart visibility is instrumental to uncovering vital performance metrics such as latency and capacity, it also delivers the awareness needed to track and set targets related to security, virtualization, network topology, and scalability. This visibility can be crucial in setting the stage for adoption of analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML), as well as for the transition to autonomous networks.

CSPs can use smart visibility to make critical decisions, effectively weighting the tradeoffs of various approaches and fine-tuning the direction of infrastructure investments.

Smart Visibility Allows CSPs to Reduce Dependencies

As 5G and virtualization dominate the future direction of CSPs, smart visibility offers an independent approach to reduce dependency on vendors, lower costs, and foster innovation. In today’s multivendor, multitechnology, multicloud ecosystems, complex interoperability depends on reliable open APIs and open source software. Smart visibility makes it possible to coordinate, monitor, and evaluate the interactions among different network functions and various participants in the wireless ecosystem, including vendors, integrators, and enterprises.

Smart visibility enables CSPs to gain better control and make better decisions. The insights gained can allow carriers to innovate with confidence and maximize opportunities to achieve revenue objectives. In the final analysis, smart visibility leads to reliability, which equals increased adoption and retained customers. And that’s the desired outcome.

Learn more about 5G and Smart Visibility