COVID-19 network traffic surges accelerate the need for active monitoring and agile service assurance

Changes in internet usage behavior as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic are definitely leading to changes in the way communications service providers are delivering and managing services. Agile, flexible and scalable service assurance is becoming more critical in maintaining network and service performance quality and customer satisfaction.

In a recent blog, we talked about how service providers were investing in their networks to meet the ever-growing bandwidth demands from their end customers. These investments undoubtedly helped networks to meet the unexpected 25 to 30% surge in internet traffic initiated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

In spite of a peak number of outages in March, traffic numbers have now begun to stabilize and even decline. The latest speed tests show a very small decline of 1% on average globally for internet performance, with some wide regional variations.

Regardless, many service providers, including AT&T, Cox, Verizon and Vodafone, have already announced plans to increase spending on their network infrastructure in order to stay ahead of the traffic growth curve. Not to be outdone, cloud providers are also investing to upgrade their infrastructure.

Soaring usage during COVID-19 lockdown

It’s important to understand how the changes in consumer internet usage behavior are impacting these network investments. With stay-at-home policies enforced in most countries, it’s easy to predict that online activity, video and mobile device and PC usage would increase across the board across all age groups.

Mobile device usage has also increased much faster than computer usage, which is partly explained by the fact that broadband access is often better through the mobile network than the fixed network in many areas.

The “busy hour” period in residential areas has also increased substantially. Finally, users have spread out geographically. They are not all concentrated in city center offices or university campus. Now, users of a similar service can be distributed across networks. They can be located anywhere, moving around, and yet they all still expect to receive the same end-user experience, the same service, no matter where they are.

Increases in network usage and changing behaviors highlight the need for active monitoring

Increases in network and application usage at home inevitably push service providers to adapt and make changes to their access networks. Cloud-based content providers like Netflix, for example, are also investing to bring the services closer to the end user because it speeds up content delivery and improves user experience. Zoom is doing the same and trying to set up dedicated connections with service providers to ensure video call experience will be optimal for everyone, regardless of their location.

However, there’s more to customer satisfaction than just increasing capacity. New services need to be monitored actively. Why? Because good network quality and performance help keep customers satisfied, which leads to increased revenue and decreased churn.

The ability to deploy services quickly, and monitor them with accuracy and precision to enforce SLAs in a consistent fashion for all customers has become a lot more complex. It’s no longer just a capacity issue, deeper visibility of the services is needed as well. 

A service provider needs to be able to deliver the right level of network performance at the same time for each service to a geographically distributed and diverse set of customers. This could be hosting a game for an online gamer, a doctor performing a critical diagnosis, or a teenager streaming a Netflix movie. Each is expecting their service to ‘just work well’, and service providers must be able to do this consistently (even during peak hours!) to potentially millions of customers at scale. 

Active monitoring made easy with agile performance assurance

Flexible, scalable and agile performance assurance tools are needed that can cope with sudden changes in usage patterns, spikes of bandwidth demand and user location. Active monitoring solutions should be cost-effective to deploy and manage and easy to install or enable anywhere in the network when needed. They need to seamlessly integrate with existing network and IT operations and systems, particularly analytics platforms. Furthermore, as the variety of end user applications continues to grow, these tools need to capture the specific performance needs of each application.

The network characteristics of a gaming app are much different than for a healthcare app. Service providers also have to troubleshoot and resolve issues quickly for applications such as gaming or healthcare, each with different performance characteristics. Anywhere, from a city business center all the way to a remote farm. As network resources are shifted to the edge, proactive monitoring and real-time visibility of performance become critical for maintaining a great user experience.

With soaring network usage initiated by COVID-19, assuring network performance and quality needs to be a priority for service providers. Maintaining customer satisfaction and winning new customers requires using the right tools that can adapt to ever–changing user behaviors to get an accurate view of the customer experience and end-to-end network performance visibility.