Written by: Gerd Holm-Öste and Matz Norling

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This article shows how Ericsson is securing predictable user service performance by introducing innovative methods and reusing proven tools. Among other things, this entails setting requirements at the system service level using input from user studies; defining system service KPIs that reflect the user experience; verifying system service performance values in a test environment with relevant network load; verifying the system service assurance architecture and reports for the defined system service KPIs; and providing system service audits and benchmarks.

Background

Today, users take telecom-grade service performance for granted and judge operators and service providers by price and the quality of their service portfolios. For this reason, the maturing telecom market must act swiftly to create and deploy new services - a fact that market scenarios confirm. Operators are thus shifting their focus touser service performance (quality); best-effort IP services and quality-enabled user services; and user-experience-based targets.

Ericsson has anticipated this shift in focus and is fully positioned to help by providing systems that perform up to user expectations. To this end, Ericsson has created the User Service Performance framework, which by means of a handful of performance indicators (PI), enables operators to predict and monitor essential performance values and gives telecom players a common ground for discussing user performance.

The telecom network, with its many hundreds of services, produces a huge volume of performance data. Determining which indicators one should measure to best gauge user demands is thus no easy task. This is why Ericsson has defined a new system service assurance level (quality of system service, QoSS), which paves the way for estimating user service performance.

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