If you are one of 13 out of 100 persons in Australia [1] with broadband internet access, then you have probably experienced a problem on your broadband connection that has been difficult to resolve. Internet services are a high volume, low margin business. In a relentless drive to reduce the cost of service delivery, the individual subscriber's experience can suffer to the point where they vote with their feet - churn. This article describes how ISPs can deliver a high quality subscriber experience at lower cost.
Welcome to the real world...
Quite often, the broadband problem scenario plays out as follows: You have to access the internet urgently to send an email or to do your internet banking only to find the internet is running slowly for no apparent reason. What is causing it? Do I have a virus or spyware? Is my DSL modem working OK? Does the ISP have problems? How do I fix it? If rebooting the PC or DSL modem does not fix the problem, the next step (or sometimes the first step...) is to call the ISP helpdesk, sit back and hope you can talk to someone quickly.
And the scenario doesn't normally end here either; one can spend a fair time trying to describe their home system and the problem to the helpdesk person so they can at least make suggestions to fix the problem. Often these recommendations have no effect in resolving the problem and after a few days, as suddenly as the problem appears, it disappears and all is well.
The ideal world?
Let's compare the above scenario with one that is possible for ISPs to implement today using a new solution from Compuware called Vantage Service Check. The scenario starts as follows: You just realise you have to urgently send an email or do your internet banking when all of a sudden your mobile phone beeps to say you have received a SMS message. You look at the message and see it's from your ISP saying they have noticed that your internet connection is having problems. On ringing the helpdesk, they say they can see lots of traffic being generated by spyware activity on your DSL connection and suggest you update your anti-spyware software. While on the phone to the helpdesk, you update your anti-spyware software (albeit slowly) and the internet is now back to normal. But then you notice and inform the helpdesk that your internet banking website is running slower than before. The helpdesk says that they can see that many of their subscribers are finding that this bank's website is slow but since the bank's website is on another ISP's network and their pipe to the bank's ISP is not congested, the problem must be outside of their network. You then ring the bank's helpdesk who say they are aware of the problem and will have it fixed soon.
The difference between the two scenarios is a result of one feature, visibility. In the first scenario, the ISP has limited visibility of what's happening on your broadband connection, in the second scenario, the ISP has full historical and real-time visibility of all problem events and conditions that may affect every individual's broadband connection.
How is this achieved? We will discuss this later on but for the moment let's look at some of the issues facing ISPs in providing an optimal broadband service, issues that present challenges in insuring a problem-free internet experience today.
An ISP's life is not a happy one...
If you look at the early days when the first ISPs in Australia (mid-1990s) started offering services to customers, the main features offered were stateless applications like web browsing, file transfer, e-mail and news group access. Most of the internet content came from the USA and the main access platform was dialup using modems. Experience in setting up some of these ISPs illustrated that quite often the biggest headache for the ISP was maintaining the large banks of modems that were used to allow customer access. Security issues like viruses and worms were almost unheard of, and since the dialup lines provided a natural control on the maximum throughput of the customer's internet connection, poor performance issues happily went unnoticed or were accepted as the norm.
If you compare this with the services demanded by today's subscribers and offered by today's ISPs, the difference is enormous. This creates new network management challenges requiring new approaches and new solutions.
ISPs are expected to provide high speed internet access via broadband for real-time applications like VoIP, gaming and video, streaming and new state-full applications (not to mention in the future IPTV). Minor problems previously tolerated with dialup access are now intolerable as these can significantly affect the performance of real-time applications. In fact, ISPs are expected to provide good service for real-time applications that have been designed with QoS (Quality of Service [2]) in mind when the internet does not currently support QoS!
Security problems related to viruses and worms now present a significant risk to the home users. For the ISP, global studies show that nearly 30% of inbound trouble calls relate to problems with clients' PCs. Not an ISP issue - yet by taking the call and trying to resolve the problem, ISPs incur costs of between $7 and $10 per call [3].
Price drops in networking equipment and PCs mean that many home users now have quite sophisticated network systems (compared to the mid-1990s) that can be difficult to troubleshoot by ISP helpdesks.
If the ISP is involved in providing mobility-based internet solutions, these devices further add to the complex mix of systems that use the ISP's internet service.
Whereas in the past having limited visibility of an individual customer's internet connections did not prevent rapid problem resolution, today such limited visibility can significantly extend the time to resolve problems (if one can resolve them at all). This obviously leads to long call queues, expensive operations costs and frustrated customers who have a poor quality of experience (QoE) with their internet connection which can initiate their move to a new ISP.
The solution is to improve the ISP's visibility into their customer's experience of the services they are consuming - the connections within the ISP of each and every one of their broadband users. This is what Vantage Service Check has been designed to provide.
Some of the benefits of improved visibility by using Vantage Service Check include:
- Fewer helpdesk calls, reduced call queues, shorter calls and better 1st call resolution. This leads to lower churn rates.
- Accurate control of the network because you can see what's going on and how it affects your subscribers so you can deliver a better service. This leads to increased customer loyalty.
- When problems do occur it allows the helpdesk to correlate customer problems to network and underlying public internet network issues.
- Improving the visibility on how viruses and worms on the customers' home network are affecting their broadband connection.
- Enabling "Just in Time" ISP network planning methodologies.
- Allowing accurate planning for future growth with QoE in mind (e.g., capacity planning and oversubscription, etc.).
Finally, a good listener...
So how does Vantage Service Check provide the visibility and QoE reporting for ISP's broadband customers? It all revolves around devices called agentless monitoring devices (AMDs).
The AMDs are deployed into the ISP's network to passively listen to all broadband traffic headers to collate and track problems. The information stored is statistical data relating to broadband throughput, connection errors, login errors and other problems experienced by the broadband user. They can also poll network devices on the ISP core network to gain information on the status of the core network which is correlated to the user problem information at the same time.
It should be noted that from a security and privacy perspective, the AMDs do not store any broadband user's payload information; only statistical data is stored for the ISP's use only.
A single AMD can look at the traffic for up to 100,000 broadband users at the same time, which it then aggregates and sends back to a central report server. This server can then send alerts and provide information to the ISP's helpdesk teams via a web-based interface.
An applications programming interface (API) is also available to interface to any web services systems like the SMS gateway mentioned in our ideal world scenario.
Vantage Service Check allows ISPs to understand their customer's broadband Quality of Experience (QoE). This means that they can increase the quality of the service delivered, reduce its cost and so increase margins, reduce churn and compete more effectively.
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