Passive telecom network probes play a vital role in helping service providers understand how networks are performing from a customer’s perspective – enabling them to detect and resolve issues, and gain insight into customers’ behaviour. Maintaining a passive probe infrastructure though comes at a cost. But what if service providers could insulate against future change and extend the life of their passive probes?
The telecom probe market is booming
Most networks have a heterogeneous mix of probes from different vendors and of different ages that need to be supported and managed. As the network expands and densifies, more probes are being added, a trend that’s been accelerated by the growth of cloud services, enterprise mobility, the rise of IoT and QoS-sensitive data traffic such as video, and the deployment of 5G. As a result, telecom service providers are increasing their spending on network probes, which will drive up the global probe market at a CAGR of 11.7% between 2022 and 2032.
Drivers of telecom network probe market
Probes add essential data
Probes are installed in the core network around different network nodes (eg MSCs, GGSN, SGSN etc) depending on the generation of network technology. While some service provider may only have control plane probes, it’s possible to gather three types of data from probes.
Control plane data for both circuit switched and packet switched networks, which provides insight into voice call quality and data quality
User plane data which provides information about uplink and downlink data flows and throughput
Deep packet inspection (DPI) which gives a service-level view of services being consumed.
The main network equipment providers or third-party probe vendors all have northbound data feeds (xDRs) to OSS tools. These tools are often in silos, requiring staff to check multiple systems to get a holistic view of service quality.
Get one holistic view of your probe data
Extracting and combining the data from probes can be challenging and staff frequently have to check multiple systems making their job harder and slowing time to resolve. To make things even harder, probe vendors often cease supporting older probes, which leaves telecom service providers faced with the challenge of having to replace them, which is both costly and disruptive.
This is where Subtonomy can help. Not only can we extract and aggregate data from any type of passive probe or other data source - smoothing the path to CX improvements and AI-enhanced operation - but we can future proof service providers against network probe vendor changes. Whether the vendor goes out of business or ceases to support some of their probes, we can still extract the data, turn it into a usable and actionable format, and integrate it with data collected from other sources.
Subtonomy is not a probe vendor, but instead acts as a data-source-agnostic, smart aggregation layer for probe data, feeding valuable network-level insight to support teams, digital self-care and chatbots, network operations and engineering teams. This data is also an essential input for automation initiatives and AI-empowered operation across the entire service provider.
Whatever your future plans, Subtonomy helps by providing ONE holistic source of data across EVERY type of network for each and every service and customer type.
Have probes reaching the end of life? Why not contact us today to find out how we can help you re-use your legacy probe infrastructure and other data sources to deliver Customer Experience insight faster, and move to AI-enhanced operation simply and easily with minimal cost and disruption.
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