Service demarcation: A foot in the present with an eye on the future

Before a service can be monitored for performance, it first has to be successfully delivered to end customers to enable revenue generation

In this blog, we consider what’s needed from service demarcation solutions to support current services, as well as the new stricter demands of 5G.

Changes in the network usage behaviors of both consumers and businesses, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, are forcing communications service providers (CSPs) to make fast upgrades and changes to their networks. It’s not just more network capacity that is needed, but they also need new flexible tools to monitor their services. These tools have to be more precise and accurate to meet the ever-increasing need for improved performance, as well as flexible enough to cope with the current changes and the roll-out of 5G.

Before a service can be “monitored” for performance, it first has to be delivered successfully to end customers.

In order to deliver satisfactory services to end customers, CSP must invest in solutions that enable these revenue-generating service deliveries, in particular, service demarcation solutions.

A suite of tools exist today, such as very small form factor SFP-like demarcation devices and larger hardware aggregation devices, each with multiple interfaces of varying speeds. The cost benefits of the different solutions will determine which solution is applicable to the use case, for example, fiber exhaust applications, multi-service/multi-customer deliveries, or service aggregation/space-constrained environments. 

Software-only vs. hardware-based network demarcation solutions

Despite the industry leaning towards software-only solutions, in reality, the network infrastructure needed to support software agents is not yet ubiquitous enough (across the different networks) to make software-only solutions the only choice for service delivery today. 

Service providers need a tried and tested solution that is easy-to-use and available now. This is where good hardware-based network demarcation solutions come into play. These devices also offer the added benefit of predictability in terms of performance and costs.

With the push to minimize service deployment costs and provide real-time automated problem resolution to help maintain customer experience, service demarcation solutions are no longer standalone elements. The devices now combine demarcation units, an orchestrator tool to automate service delivery, service activation testing, performance monitoring, reporting, and analytics. The analytics tool collects and analyzes network and service performance in real time which enables machine learning-based problem resolution.

CSP tips for purchasing service demarcation solutions

Not all demarcation solutions are created equal, so it is important to consider the criteria to consider in the buying decision, especially when it will need to support new types of services that require stringent SLAs:

1. Unparalleled performance and scalability: the latency of devices inserted in the data path must be close to zero so that the end-to-end latency of the service is not affected by the introduction of a physical device. CSPs need predictability which means that jitter also needs to be zero. In other words, the latency needs to remain constant regardless of the quantity or type of packets going through the device. It cannot change when more services are added after the device is deployed. Service providers need to guarantee performance so they can’t rely on solutions where performance varies with traffic load. This is particularly important for 5G, where end-to-end latency will be critical to ensure services meet stringent 5G performance requirements.
2. Easy to deploy: the solution should be easy to deploy either in small volumes or at scale through automated provisioning and testing. With the right orchestration tools, everything from device discovery to service provisioning, activation testing and reporting, as well as performance monitoring, can all be automated to reduce the overall deployment costs. It should be as simple as having the end user receive the device and simply connect it to the network. Then, automation does everything else.
3. Adaptable: the solution needs to interoperate with existing devices right off the bat. Not only does it need to comply with all existing networking standards to ensure interoperability, it also needs to have proven interoperable capabilities with most solutions already deployed in the different networks.
4. Robust and dependable: the solution needs to be super reliable. In other words, it needs to be able to “take a beating but keep on ticking” to avoid costly truck rolls.
5. Best-in-class service assurance for SLA reporting and troubleshooting: not all demarcation solutions can provide high quality performance monitoring to support the strict requirements of 5G, for example, as several critical elements are needed to achieve this:
   • You need the right performance data to start with. Without the right metrics, no analytics tool will be able to provide actionable insights. The solution needs to be able to provide extremely precise metrics, time-stamped at the nanosecond to provide microsecond accuracy.
   • These metrics need to be captured in a very granular way, every millisecond.
   • The precision and accuracy of these metrics need to stay constant regardless of the load on the solution.
   • Ideally, the performance metrics would be captured from packets that are following the exact same path as the service that is being monitored.
   • All performance metrics collected need to be transferred in real-time or near real-time basis to an analytics tool. Forget the 15-minute stats collection intervals that most networking devices out there still support today. This slow reporting impedes CSPs from getting an accurate view of the state of their network. This impacts their ability to troubleshoot the right issues which, in the end, impacts customer satisfaction.
   • The analytics tool also needs to be capable of ingesting mountains of data in real-time or near real-time and providing meaningful insights instantaneously. Just imagine the amount of data that a few thousand demarcation units would send over the course of one day if they were reporting performance metrics every millisecond. We are talking about billions of data points every day that would need to be ingested and analyzed to provide real, actionable insights.

In the end, the best demarcation solutions provide the right metrics to help deliver services quickly and cost efficiently to end customers. This helps you to find the root cause of issues, understand networks better, and determine new ways of managing your networks more efficiently.

Find out how Accedian’s service demarcation solutions can help you.