Making network performance transparent for app providers
The ‘Network Insights for Customer Experience (NICE)’ Catalyst aims to enable application developers to create a tight bond between the end user experience and the underlying network.
Making network performance transparent for app providers
Commercial context
Communication service providers (CSPs) are investing heavily in 5G and edge networks in the hope that they will generate billions of dollars in new revenue. To full monetize these new networks, CSPs need to make them easily accessible and configurable for application developers. In particular, enterprises and partners need timely, clear and actionable network data to enable them to harness 5G networks to support a wide range of new and highly customized use cases.
Any company operating an application that uses a CSP’s network will want to know immediately if the required QoE (quality of experience) is not available. This allows the application to take actions to address the situation, and if necessary, notify end users. As a lot of these applications will be hosted in public clouds, integration of public cloud and the CSP’s resources is critical.
Yet, the necessary transparency is missing today. While CSPs have service assurance systems that indicate the performance and service quality of the network and services – these parameters are not exposed in a transparent, real-time, actionable and standardized manner. CSPs need to make the data readily available securely, reliably, and in a form that is easily understood by their customers and their applications, while maintaining appropriate privacy controls.
The solution
The Network Insights for Customer Experience (NICE) Catalyst shows how a CSP can expose the application performance parameters it is collecting. The Catalyst demonstrates this capability supporting a security camera application streaming video in real time to the public cloud. The solution is designed to enable the developer of the cloud-based video security app to retrieve performance data from the network, even if a camera or device has a poor connection.
An enterprise application controller can monitor the application network performance using metrics collected from the telco network via TMF Insights API (628). The collected metrics enable the controller to sense changes in the application experience and to take required actions. “The Catalyst [has] enhanced the TMF 628 API to support a wide range of data sharing needs and demonstrates its usefulness by supporting automated quality of service assurance for wireless security cameras,” explains Oliver Spatscheck, AVP DSI Network Data and Innovation, AT&T.
Based on the real-time insights, and to ensure timely availability of high-quality video, the security company can set a policy to configure an automatic upgrade of service, or upgrade manually at the tap of a button. For example, it could order optimized connectivity, as demonstrated by the related Private Optimized Connectivity (POC) Catalyst.
After the temporary upgrade, the API will also confirm the improved performance, so the business user is aware the situation has been resolved.
Applications
By providing much greater transparency of the network performance, the solution will enable applications providers and/or users to track whether they are getting the connectivity they have paid for.
"In contrast to legacy wireless networks, 5G, in particular, when combined with edge and hyperscaler cloud deployments, provides a large number of options which can all be exposed to the customer or its application,” notes Oliver Spatscheck, AVP DSI Network Data and Innovation, at AT&T. “As this flexibility will revolutionize applications in many areas, such as autonomous vehicles or augmented reality, it requires the application or its user to configure all those options which in turn requires a much better understanding of the current and future network states by the customer and its applications.”
The Catalyst is also designed to support the development of broader ecosystems. As many services will span multiple CSP networks, and often extend into hyperscaler public cloud environments, assuring and maintaining such services across platforms and providers is a huge challenge. By proposing standardization, the NICE Catalyst seeks to facilitate a uniform approach to assuring the service end-to-end across multiple networks and cloud environments. That will help CSPs extend services to new locations, while optimizing resource utilization – in accordance with the insights that will arrive from partner networks.
Wider value
The main benefit of standardized exposure of the network and service performance will be enhanced trust in the network by both enterprises and partners. If they know the performance is transparently exposed to them in real-time, they will be more willing to leverage the network and pay for it in new ways, paving the way for emerging applications and innovative business models, such as B2B2X, NaaS (network-as-a-service), pay-per-use and dynamic pricing.
In explaining the project’s long-term effects Oliver Spatscheck said “this Catalyst is an important first step in a journey of not only providing more network data to the customer and its application, but to also make that data more useful and actionable enabling an entirely new and revolutionary set of applications."