When logging into the Motive Network Analyzer, the home page shows the current stability analysis pie chart (click to enlarge).

By Eric Vos, Director Access Management Solutions, Alcatel-Lucent

Achieving the 100^th customer milestone for the Motive Network Analyzer last year provided an opportunity for those of us who work on (and with) the product on a daily basis to step back, appreciate our accomplishment and look ahead to future achievements.

The Network Analyzer is an important tool for service providers who want to get the most out of their copper and fiber networks.

Especially in the copper world, service providers have been facing increasing pressure to get ever-greater capacity out of their physical access networks. This means in many cases relying on lines that were originally “only” designed for plain telephony services. The problem is: when quality-of-experience (QoE) demands are not met, subscribers notice; especially when they are using bandwidth-sensitive video applications. And unhappy customers call their service provider, which is where operational costs start mounting.

The Motive Network Analyzer tackles this issue at different levels – reactively and proactively. It monitors lines to detect any problems in handling the data load, it allows efficient troubleshooting in case things should go wrong at some point, and it continuously optimizes every line in the network within its agreed service-level agreement. This optimizing feature, called Dynamic Line Management (DLM), is a key asset to providing a better customer experience while reducing operational and capital expenses.

I can’t give you the name, but a Tier-1 operator in Europe actually estimated that our Network Analyzer’s DLM feature enabled them to prevent no less than 170,000 helpdesk calls and 150,000 field visits in just one year. Using average network operation cost estimates, this equals approximately 20 million Euro of savings!

Considering that our potential customer base consists of the relatively small number of network service providers around the world, having 100 customers for a single product is a big deal. It is equally impressive to realize that – worldwide – one DSL subscriber out of six gets a better service thanks to Alcatel-Lucent: the Network Analyzer product currently has more than 60 million copper lines under management out of a total number of 373 million active DSL subscribers (source: Infonetics Research). Nice numbers, which we are obviously very proud of! They also imply, however, that there are still a lot of future milestones to be achieved. To be continued…