Vantage

As service providers of all tiers begin to deploy and integrate with 5G networks, they face a host of new challenges and opportunities. The promise of increased data speeds, network slicing, and ultra-low latency brings enormous potential for innovation and growth. However, the complexity of 5G networks also presents new challenges for ensuring service quality and reliability. Disaggregation, virtualization, and dynamic changes are difficult enough to manage, but just as challenging is understanding what’s affecting the parts of the network you might not even own. Active assurance with full network visibility is essential for success.

The launch of 5G is a revolutionary point for communications service providers (CSPs) to migrate from legacy networks to new virtualized, cloud-native infrastructure in support of the delivery of new digital services. The new service-based architecture for these 5G networks enables edge clouds and network slicing technologies that will bring high-performance computing closer to the point of service in order to support low-latency applications for enterprise and consumer use cases.

Innovative turnkey solution empowers CSPs with 5G test and assurance expertise from day one

A comprehensive, yet simpler, approach to 5G test and assurance

Techfluencer Evan Kirstel interviews Spirent's Doug Roberts and Charles Thompson on how service assurance strategies need to keep up with the pace of 5G technologies.

Service assurance strategies have typically relied on disparate systems and manual, swivel-chair practices. The operator employing passive monitoring of network traffic was generally able to detect issues— but too often not before the customer experienced degraded service levels. Because networks will become more dynamic as NFV and 5G deployments become more numerous, passive-only approaches to assurance cannot validate the end-to-end performance and are insufficient for meeting the significant challenges presented by these new technologies.