Opensignal has published their biannual September 2022 Mobile Network Experience Report, which measures the 4G and 5G (mobile broadband) services of all four primary network operators – EE, Vodafone, O2 and Three UK – to determine which delivers the best performance. Both EE and Three UK picked up most of the wins. As usual, this […]

Network operator Cityfibre has announced that they’ve started to deploy their gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based broadband ISP network across the Cambridgeshire (England) market town and civil parish of Whittlesey, which is expected to cost the operator around £3m to complete. The overall project in Whittlesey, which is being delivered by civil engineering partner Granemore Group, […]

PRESS RELEASE

Rakuten Symphony today announced the general availability of its Symops Service Assurance suite of products. The Symops products are a result of four years of investment to fully operationalize the end-to-end fault, configuration and performance management in a fully virtualized, dynamic cloud-based telecom operation.

The nature of dynamic deployment of capabilities in 5G, combined with the continuous deployment and re-deployment of cloud native clusters, as well as software micro services that appear in the entire 5G standard, mean that the current tooling of telecoms operations is no longer fit for purpose. Symops Service Assurance is designed to resolve near real-time Root Cause Analysis and Next Best Action functions using cloud native observability frameworks and dense telemetry.

Fully deployed in commercial networks, the solution has delivered modernized monitoring, managing, network change management, and navigation of daily operational tasks with up to a 40% reduction in time. Configuration mistakes and errors can be decreased by 70% and trouble tickets cut in half. All enablers that are traditionally sold as separate products, including fault management, performance management, configuration management, automation engine, data management and analytics, are sold as part of the Symworld™ platform. Consolidation of operational domain data (RAN, Core, Transport, BSS, and security) and end-to-end data management leads to transformational outcomes versus traditional approaches.

Current commercial operations in Rakuten Mobile covers more than 270,000 cells plus all associated domains, managed by a network operations team of only 250 people. The results show how the applications manage failures proactively and cut downtime, in very complex network environments and at scale.

“The operational tools of yesterday were not designed for the scale, complexity or dynamism of 5G and cloud-native networks and operations. To succeed in the new operating environment, telecom must adopt a new approach to diagnosing, isolating, and resolving network issues at scale and in near real-time.” said Narendra Narayana, Managing Director & President of Rakuten Symphony India. “The stakes are higher than ever for operators and subscribers alike, casting a spotlight on an urgent need to adopt end-to-end observability and automation in operations. Part of the Symworld platform, Symops Service Assurance consolidates the fragmented operational landscape of today, leading to faster time to market, reduced costs and near real-time fault analysis.”

The applications contained within Symops Service Assurance include the following:

Cloud Observability: A framework that enables accurate and real-time telemetry data collection from the underlying networks, built from the ground up to correlate the insights from the network functions and cloud infrastructure. It enables improved localization of the resource performance issues compared to the delays and loss of detail associated with proprietary element management systems (EMSs). It further contributes to the effective deduction, improved mean time to repair, proactive monitoring and building of closed-loop scenarios.

Performance Monitoring: Powers end-to-end resource performance visibility of multi-vendor and multi-technology network resources so telecom operators can monitor, manage, analyze and automate predictive actions based on network conditions, all from a centralized location. It provides a comprehensive view of network performance and gives deep insights into telecom data, which eventually eliminates data inaccuracy and data misallocation while improving network efficiency and customer experience.

Fault Monitoring: Simplifies network alert management via advanced alert monitoring capabilities, providing all mechanisms to monitor and manage network-wide faults with machine learning capabilities to improve fault correlation and incident ticket creation.

Configuration Management: Flexible multi-vendor and multi-technology for automated network provisioning, parameter configuration and change management. Orchestrates all network changes, upgrades, golden parameters and configurations for different domains directly to the network elements or through EMS. Leverages the speed and flexibility needed to enable SON and fast network changes while assuring service availability and reliability.

Platform-wide automation capabilities: Leverage on ML/AI to further improve the AutomatedRoot Cause Analysis and Next Best Action to drastically decrease the MTTI and MTTR in operations.

Open source-based, open community standards-driven, cloud-native performance and observability frameworks with targeted use of automation have become integral for fast problem resolution in today’s complex telecom networks. The combination of Rakuten Symphony’s Intelligent Operations suite of products (Symplan™, Symbuild™ and Symops products) with its Symworld automation platform is helping to guide new and existing network operators through an era of unprecedented change.

The Symworld platform helps telecom operators scale faster as cloud sets the pace for speed, innovation, and network expectations. It supports a full range of cloud-native OSS products(Intelligent Operations) that help greenfield and brownfield service providers plan, build, and operate a mobile network at a significantly lower cost than traditional approaches. The platform has been proven to enable zero-touch provisioning at scale, shortening site commissioning times from weeks to minutes for rapid network builds at 40% lower capital cost. Operators can run networks at 30% lower operating costs and accelerate new feature introductions by 10-15x. Protection and transparency are assured via security embedded at every layer.

RELATED STORY: RAKUTEN SYMPHONY OPENS GLOBAL INNOVATION LAB IN INDIA

The post Rakuten Symphony launches ‘proven at scale’ service assurance first appeared on Total Telecom.

NEWS

The latest report by the Global mobile Suppliers Association (GSA), the Private-Mobile-Networks August 2022 report, has identified 66 MNO’s and 70 countries/territories where organisations are involved with private mobile network projects. This equates to 889 organisations deploying LTE or 5G Private Mobile Networks (PMN) in one or more locations – up from 794 reported in June 2022.

Unsurprisingly manufacturing is the major adopter of PMN’s with 165 identified companies, growth of almost 50% from the end of 2021, with other strong interest from education, mining, and power utilities sectors.

LTE is the dominant technology, used in 672 of the private mobile networks for which GSA has data, whilst 5G is being deployed by 354 organisations. 5G Standalone currently accounts for just thirty-seven deployments.

The USA leads the way with the most organisations deploying private networks based on LTE or 5G, followed by Germany, China, the UK, and Japan.

Joe Barrett, President of the Global mobile Suppliers Association called private mobile networks a microcosm of the wider 4G and 5G ecosystem and reported “a strong positive correlation between liberalised spectrum and the adoption of private mobile networks.”

An executive summary of the report is available from the GSA website based on dataset of over 50 equipment vendors, 66 operators and 70 countries and territories.

Private mobile networks are discussed extensively at the Total Telecom Congress on the 1-2 November 2022, where the GSA are an Association Partner. Operators and public sector organisations can apply for a free pass

 

The post Private mobile network deployments now in 70 countries first appeared on Total Telecom.

The growing national scourge of copper telecoms cable theft has raised its ugly head again, this time in Rutland (England), after Openreach (BT) highlighted that their local broadband ISP and phone network had – over the past few months – been struck multiple times by the criminal activity. But arrests are being made. The operator […]

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At the start of this year we reported (here) that Axione UK – a subsidiary of French provider Axione – had started a £300m project to build a new gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network to 4 million premises for ISPs to sell on to homes (open-access). We now have a fuller list of their rollout […]

As expected, Sky (Sky Broadband) has today announced the launch of their new standalone ‘Sky Stream‘ product, which uses your home broadband ISP and WiFi connection to stream Sky’s on-demand video content and live TV channels directly to your existing TV set without any satellite dish or installation being required. Most of Sky’s existing TV […]