Spirent brings its Vantage to simplify and automate 5G service assurance

Spirent Communications has announced the introduction of Spirent Vantage, an innovative solution designed to simplify and automate 5G service assurance. Built upon Spirent’s industry-leading technology, Vantage breaks down the complexity of 5G assurance for communications service providers (CSPs), with a comprehensive turnkey approach that allows operations teams of any size and skill to understand their network and service performance.

Providing end-to-end network visibility, actionable insights, and automated troubleshooting, Vantage is designed to be easy to deploy and scale, and with a pre-built library of test suites it enables on-demand and continuous testing straight out of the box from day one.

Doug Roberts, General Manager of Spirent’s Lifecycle Service Assurance business, says, “5G networks are much more complex than previous mobile technologies with the introduction of disaggregation, edge computing, cloud-native architecture, and multi-vendor environments. It’s taking predictable network and data constructs and evolving them into dynamic and flexible systems. Vantage tackles this complexity so operations teams can easily understand their network and service performance at a glance, proactively identify issues, and rapidly isolate the cause of problems.”

By facilitating visibility of the entire network with actionable data insights powered by machine learning and AI, Vantage can automate troubleshooting in three easy steps. First, it provides at-a-glance network-wide service performance views, then it can visualize potential impacts via filtering dashboards with customizable overlays. Finally, Vantage provides root cause analysis (RCA) that can pinpoint the source of performance issues and impact in the workflow.

James Crawshaw, Practice Leader for Service Provider transformation at Omdia, says, “5G offers great potential for the telecom industry, but it comes with a steep increase in operational complexity. Mobile operators are already stretched by identifying, isolating, and remediating issues in their 4G networks. As they migrate to 5G they need to streamline and simplify their network and service assurance processes. Spirent Vantage seeks to address this problem by democratizing network visibility and troubleshooting with pre-built tools that leverage machine learning and work out of the box.”

Vantage provides greater ease-of-use and full-featured functionality with intuitive dashboards and automated, streamlined workflows, guiding users from high-level, end-to-end visualizations to deep data insights for RCA in a matter of a few clicks. Additional capabilities include:

· Deploy and Scale - Consistent deployment paradigm for cloud-native agents supporting private, public, and hybrid cloud environments

· Expansive Coverage - A portfolio of active test agents can be deployed in virtualized/containerized mobile core and OTA RAN, supporting 5G SA, 5G NSA, and 4G

· Layered Visibility – Select custom visibility filters with overlays such as technology, region/market, interfaces, and more