Mobile Magazine March 2023 | Page 104

SANDVINE

What ’ s needed is accurate and precise forecasting , and our solutions are designed to provide more visibility , such as :

• What is driving utilisation ? Are you acquiring more subscribers in a certain location ? If there ’ s not much subscriber growth , do you have a lot of movement , like people moving among states or countries ? Are a small percentage of users eating up most of the network resources ? Do you have 1 % of users eating up 10 % of resources , or maybe 10 % of users eating up 50 %? Or is there , perhaps , a device issue , like a new security camera defaulting to 4K and eating up people ’ s plans without them knowing ? Is there intentional fraud like tethering or video in VPNs that needs to be evaluated for disproportionate or heavy usage ?

• What ’ s the “ application popularity ”? Meaning , how many subscribers at peak are using heavy video applications and how much and what type of video is being used ? Is it Netflix or YouTube , is it 4K or 1080p ?

• How much bandwidth does each application session use ? Is the session video , gaming , or social networking , and which apps within each category are consuming the most bandwidth . How is this affecting other customers ’ App QoE ?

• Answering each question helps predict how much growth there will be in a particular node . Then what-if analyses can take place to inform planning for different scenarios : if you have 5 % more subs , or if Netflix changes throughput for a video from 1080p to 4K , or if 20 % more videos will be 4K , what can you do ? Down the road , what happens if 10 % more people are on metaverse , or if cloud gaming takes off and 5 % of my users are at 50 MB each ?

• The answers to these questions lie in the data . The quality of the data , the ability to manage and enrich data with context , and to share the data among systems relevant to App QoE is the critical foundation for decision making .

AMBUJ MITTAL CHIEF DEVELOPMENT OFFICER , SANDVINE

104 March 2023