When 5G was first introduced, communications service providers (CSPs) promised reduced latency, increased reliability, and improved network speeds to enable them to offer new services to businesses. Though 5G adoption is growing, CSPs are finding killer use cases are missing, and there’s a perception that 5G isn’t living up to its full potential. Additionally, international regulators are increasingly focusing on network speed claims that are yet to be delivered. If 5G performance continues to disappoint, adoption across businesses may never reach past projections.
At the same time, as CSPs move their 5G networks to the cloud, operations and engineering teams are facing visibility challenges that are hindering their ability to operate the network and reliably deliver high-quality services. Challenges include reduced visibility into applications, services, and devices running on 5G Standalone (SA) networks. Additionally, interconnected 4G networks make it difficult for engineers to monitor, manage, and secure the network.
To overcome enterprise doubts and improve services, it is clear that CSPs need greater end-to-end visibility, spanning from the 5G Radio Access Network (RAN) to the edge of the access layer and into the core network infrastructure, enabling CSPs to achieve real-time, pervasive monitoring with actionable insights from any location, any cloud, any application, and any infrastructure at every stage of 5G lifecycle management. This will result in improved network performance capabilities and ultimately a better enterprise customer experience that delivers on the promise of 5G.
Predict service issues and security concerns with real-time insights
The 5G journey to the cloud is taking longer and being more complicated than CSPs expected. As CSPs adopt new network capabilities from different vendors and launch new features as needed, the resulting multi-cloud architecture becomes increasingly difficult to manage.
The introduction of 5G will further accelerate innovation. But the increased complexity will make it harder for network operations and engineering teams to manage and ensure the various pieces interoperate efficiently, leading to reduced visibility. Furthermore, gaining visibility into “east-west” traffic requires more than just installing physical taps and packet brokers to share and monitor control plane and user plane traffic with service assurance solutions.
Traditional approaches using physical devices are not cloud-native and lack the dynamic flexibility required for future 5G SA networks. To gain critical insights into service issues such as dropped calls, handoffs between 4G and 5G networks, wireless interference, and congestion issues, CSPs need to adopt methods that provide detailed visibility across the RAN and core network infrastructure.
Overcoming these visibility challenges is critical to provide continuous latency measurement from the core to the multi-access edge computing (MEC) layer, provide KPI measurements for each element of the 5G non-standalone (NSA) and SA networks, and ensure service level agreements (SLAs) for network slices are being met.
In addition to service issues, another concern with the rollout of 5G SA is security, as the cyber attack surface expands. To ensure a secure network, CSPs need early warning of anomalous behavior that can distinguish between human error and malicious intent, and threat mitigation measures that constantly defend against persistent threats.
Close the visibility gap across your 5G SA infrastructure
Today’s multi-domain networks have many different connection points: where 4G connects to the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), how 4G connects to 5G, where radio access links to the core network, and where the core network connects to the cloud. Additionally, proprietary software and tools offered by various vendors create further fragmentation. Even open source orchestration environments give CSPs competing options to choose from, adding to the complexity they must manage. Unfortunately, many CSPs are operating essentially blind, without a full view of these boundaries.
In fact, the transition to cloudified 5G SA networks is proceeding at a slower pace than initially expected. Only a few operators worldwide operate true 5G SA networks, and the switch from 4G to 5G and from 5G NSA to 5G SA is more complex and difficult to manage than past network evolutions. Traditional monitoring solutions do not provide visibility into cloudified networks, and without them, operators find it difficult or impossible to realize the stated goals and vision of 5G. Fortunately, thanks to collaboration between equipment manufacturers and service assurance companies, it is now possible to predict service issues with next-generation applications and services, allowing enterprises and developers to deploy 5G with confidence. To do so, however, the billions of dollars operators have spent on bandwidth and infrastructure must be combined with solutions that enable true end-to-end observability across cloudified networks.
