Sandvine Report | Page 12

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

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