MWC this year was crowded. Judging by the activity in and around the event, those attending had an excellent experience. We certainly did!

It’s always good to reflect on what’s new at MWC and, for the benefit of our readers, we thought we would share some of our own observations.

1. Network monitoring is something that’s fundamental. Full stop. You need to be able to monitor your network in real-time and at wire-speeds. It enables a wide range of applications, but without the basic capability to see what’s happening on your network, you can’t be sure it’s working properly.
2. So much flows from network monitoring that it’s worth expanding on this. One of the major themes of MWC was the delivery of a rich customer experience and the emerging topic of CEM (customer experience management). If you can’t see what’s happening on your network, you can’t deliver CEM. To manage your customers more effectively, you need to be able to perform packet processing at Gb/s rates, which requires specialist hardware.
3. Customers are demanding better and more predictable performance. They are using increasingly demanding applications on their mobile devices. MNOs need to be able to think about delivering Quality of Service to meet these expectations. But QoS demands the ability to process packets and determine if there are any issues or problems  - and that means monitoring your network.
4. MNOs want to exploit an over-arching framework to manage and co-ordinate customer experience. Policy control is the answer to this and it’s big. But network policies need the equipment that can implement them, which takes us back to monitoring and packet processing.
5. Finally, network visualisation and self-discovery is a topic we think is going to develop in the coming months. The ability to create pictures of data routing, data sources and performance will supplement the need to monitor network traffic and help ensure complex MVNO and roaming agreements are consistently and fairly applied. With the dramatic growth in data demand, this is sure to be an interesting area.

So that’s it for another year. Network monitoring is going to be huge, although that might not be apparent when discussing high-level applications. But these applications depend on certain key capabilities and monitoring is fundamental to this process.

We’ll be reporting on new developments and themes in our regular news, but for those who attended MWC, we hope you are able to capitalize on the experience.

If you didn’t attend, or if you want to chat about any of the themes we have identified, why not give us a call? We would be happy to share our expert perspective and show you how you can meet the challenges ahead!

Our product and technical experts are attending Mobile World Congress this year. They will be available to solve your network problems with in-depth, on-the-spot discussions.

• Find out why hardware acceleration is a must for packet processing applications, including DPI.

• Learn why network Policy engines depend on DPI for QoS delivery.

• Discover why true high-performance media processing needs scalable, reliable hardware – and why software is not the only answer.

• See STM1 to 40Gb/s high-speed media and packet processing cards in convenient PCIe form factors

• Discuss high-density media, IVR and signaling solutions for deployment in NGN / IN networks

Why not arrange a meeting with our consultants so we can discuss your needs and apply our expertise to solving your network challenges? Simply pre-book a meeting or call Callum Rasmussen on +44 1258 486518 to arrange a meeting.