Why measuring your customer’s QoE is critical for a virtual network?

Both SDN and NFV hold a great deal of promise for Communications Service Providers (CSP) and their customers. Among them are new services, self-service portals for greater customer control, more responsive service management as well as efficient use of networking resources for the CSP. These benefits, and more, all point to a revolution in the way enterprise customers will use CSP services.

But all these changes raise a question: will the customer’s Quality of Experience (QoE) suffer? After all, if customers can add new services or modify their existing ones, how will the CSP guarantee the overall QoE, for each customer across the network?

In both hybrid and virtual networks, service paths can be optimized to address both service and network issues, such as congestion or equipment failure. As a result, the path through the network is not fixed, but rather resulting from the current network conditions. This means service quality metrics can no longer be implied from network quality metrics, as was the case in traditional networks, since the relationship between network architecture and service has been broken. This has helped drive the rise of active assurance, embedded as part of the service rather than the network itself, as the solution of choice for QoE visibility in the virtual network. Embedded active assurance provides an end-to-end, real-time view of service quality metrics and since it is part of the service definition, it is always available and automatically follows the service during SDN optimization.

To find out more about how EXFO active assurance solutions can help you better manage your customer's Quality of Experience, download the following white paper: The critical role of Active Assurance in the context of SDN and NFV.