DirectQuality - Service Level Test Automation

Complete service-level active test automation from test call generation to IP Quality of Experience network troubleshooting helps diagnose and resolve subscriber issues

Your Challenges

Delivering a high Quality of Experience (QoE) is critical to minimizing churn and to ensure customers are satisfied with your services. Network operations and engineering needs visibility into the subscriber’s QoE in order to understand and correct issues that are having a negative impact. Customer complaints must be diagnosed and quantified in order to help determine if an issue is isolated or systemic. The ability to parse and analyze issues by location, service, subscriber, etc. is critical to rapid and successful network troubleshooting. Furthermore, network operations and engineering should not be limited to reacting to problems but should also have the ability to predict traffic routing issues proactively in order to identify and correct issues before network outages or subscriber complaints occur.

How We Can Help

DirectQuality is a test automation suite that enables network operations and engineering teams to fully understand the subscriber’s QoE by injecting live subscriber-emulated traffic into the network and quantifying network performance. This flexible active test automation system reproduces and diagnoses reported problems by uncovering faults in the network or subscriber service. End-to-end visibility is delivered through cost effective probe placement all the way to the subscriber premises. DirectQuality accelerates new service rollouts or deployments cost-effectively and enables operators to become more proactive by uncovering issues or trends before customers call to complain.

Features and Benefits

  • Configurable threshold crossing and QoS reports help to quickly pinpoint issues and identify where to focus resources. These reports also provide visual comparisons to quickly assess deltas between competitors, routes, before and after, baselines, etc. Users can drill-down to specific problem areas to help uncover root causes.
  • DirectQuality’s ability to generate a variety of subscriber based traffic and services from a single probe platform reduces capital expenditures, reduces network troubleshooting time and provides a true understanding of subscriber QoE over hybrid networks and technologies.
  • Advanced active test automation generates on-demand test call scenarios for timely network troubleshooting and offers the ability to schedule multiple test scenarios in a single test plan.

Applications

  • End-to-end subscriber troubleshooting
  • Competitive benchmarking
  • Carrier interconnect
  • New service rollout and validation

End-To-End Subscriber Troubleshooting

Subscribers experience with the public switched telephone network (PSTN) leads them to expect the same five nines reliability associated with the fault tolerance design of the PSTN. So they are more likely to call in with complaints about their voice service than with data service issues. These voice-related issues are typically escalated to Tier 2 and Tier 3 network engineering support teams. In order to quickly resolve these problems to the customer’s satisfaction, these teams need specific information about what is causing the problem.

DirectQuality makes it easy for network engineering and Tier II support teams to recreate the problem by evaluating the service level of any trunk, route, VoIP peering partner, access link or carrier. The user simply selects the service to test and the test destinations, which can consist of other probes, public numbers, responders, network elements, xDSL or cable modems or multimedia terminal adapters (MTAs). DirectQuality generates a test plan based on the selected test objectives and determines the set of measurements to perform from the valid terminations available. DirectQuality then generates test numbers and associates available testing resources to each test call. The test can be performed immediately, scheduled for a specific time or performed on a periodic basis. The results provide a deeper understand of the problem and identify where the issues are originating. This approach helps increase customer satisfaction by resolving problems quickly and also helps increase the efficiency of the problem resolution process.

Related Solutions

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  • Validating new IMS and VoIP services - Validating new IMS and VoIP services in the lab makes it possible to deploy new features into live production with confidence. Tektronix’s Active Assurance Suite automates and standardizes the execution of active test plans, substantially reducing the amount of time needed for validating new IMS and VoIP services...Read More