Case Study: ntl:Telewest Calls on InfoVista Quality Monitoring

ntl:Telewest Business, part of the Virgin Media group, is the United Kingdom’s second largest fixed line communications company with revenue of £3.9 billion ($8 billion U.S.). The integrated ntl:Telewest Business network covers 186,000 km of local and metro networks and has the largest Ethernet coverage in the country with 330 Ethernet points of presence. It delivers a complete portfolio of high-bandwidth voice, data, IP and Internet solutions to U.K. businesses, service providers and public sector organizations.

Customers rely on ntl:Telewest Business to deliver critical communications across its network 24 hours per day, seven days per week; which is exactly why ntl:Telewest Business puts a huge amount of investment into ensuring its network is capable of meeting the needs of its customers and exceeding their expectations.

Challenge:

Prior to the merger between the two companies, ntl and Telewest had differing approaches to performance reporting for its business services. Telewest had been using InfoVista’s software to deliver customer reports for its IP VPN, ATM and Frame Relay (FR) based services. InfoVista’s proactive service assurance solutions, designed specifically for service providers, ensure the optimal delivery of mission-critical networked services, applications and infrastructures. ntl deployed Concord e-Health for capacity planning and network modeling. Additionally, ntl had decided to invest in a state-of-the-art carrier Ethernet network to address the growing bandwidth requirements its business customers were demanding. However, as carrier Ethernet is packet-based, it is not as deterministic as ATM/FR, and without the same performance monitoring mechanisms, could be more prone to degradation around quality of services. Both service providers understood the need to provide customers with service level agreements on Ethernet services as well as real-time performance metrics including jitter, latency and packet loss in order to guarantee those customers the same quality of service they were accustomed to experiencing. The newly formed joint company recognized the importance of taking a much more proactive approach to performance management.

Solution:

ntl:Telewest Business began the search for investment into a customer-facing performance management solution. Issuing detailed requirements for a performance management reporting platform to support IP VPN and Ethernet services, the company invited presentations from vendors for a “next generation” performance reporting system.

“We had a lot of requirements for tailoring the product, which some of the solutions evaluated could not meet. In the end, we were particularly impressed by how easily InfoVista could manipulate and present the data on its front end portal and its clear, easy- to-use reporting structure,” says Martin Singer, network OSS architect for Virgin Media. “It wasn’t just the flexibility of the product that impressed us, it was also the quality of the InfoVista team. The presentation they delivered clearly demonstrated their commitment and dedication to work closely with us, and convinced us that they would be the best company for the job.”

ntl:Telewest Business made a strategic decision to roll out InfoVista’s VistaInsight for Networks solution across both its carrier Ethernet and IP VPN networks. VistaInsight for Networks’ out of the box functionality supports rapid, cost-effective delivery of “next generation” network services and enhanced customer reporting.

VistaInsight enabled ntl:Telewest Business to benefit from cost-efficiencies by integrating a number of third-party management tools on the network such as Alcatel-Lucent 5620 SAM and Brix Networks BrixWorx. VistaFoundation, the underlying architecture platform for the solution, collects topology information from ntl:Telewest Business’ provisioning systems as well as performance data, which it then analyzes, stores, and consolidates. This data is then presented in real-time in the form of graphs, charts, and tables through InfoVista’s Web-based portal architecture. Customers can use the portal to drill down on individually tailored metrics on service and access utilization, packet loss, jitter, and latency break down.

“InfoVista’s integration module enables us to collate all the topology, customer, and service inventory from the network, and overlay the accounting data on top of it, thus removing a majority of the manual work required every time we want to add a new service to the network,” explains Singer.

ntl:Telewest Business also has a number of Brix verifiers on its network which are used to derive packet loss, latency and jitter across all the links on the network. ntl:Telewest Business is currently working with the InfoVista Professional Services team to integrate the BrixWorx data into its reports so it can be presented to customers alongside service utilization data. This will show customers how individual links on the network are performing and will help ntl:Telewest Business demonstrate the effectiveness of its high-capacity backbone.

Benefits:

It is not just ntl:Telewest Business’ customers that benefit from InfoVista’s service-centric performance data; its business managers are now equipped with the data required to demonstrate to customers the need to purchase more bandwidth.

“Previously, it was extremely difficult to pinpoint packets dropped on the network and identify the cause of the problem therefore poor service would be blamed on a poor performing network,” says Chris Ducker, product manager, Ethernet services for ntl:Telewest Business. “Now, we can easily identify issues and it provides our sales team an opportunity to up-sell further services and bandwidth.”

Further integration is planned at a later stage as ntl:Telewest Business selects new equipment to extend its Ethernet network with Ethernet access equipment and implement future OSS solutions. This integration will enable ntl:Telewest Business to leverage existing and future technology investments to report from customer site to customer site and provide end-to-end service reporting.

The company reports that an additional advantage of working with InfoVista is its active membership with Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF). ntl:Telewest Business has always been at the forefront of MEF accreditation which independently verifies the high performance capabilities of the next generation network. As members of MEF, both companies will play an active role in shaping Carrier Ethernet standards, helping to drive equipment and service certification.

InfoVista has added greater efficiency to the way ntl:Telewest Business works, enabling it to take a far more proactive and customer-focused approach to the running and management of its network. “By providing enhanced visibility into service delivery and network performance, InfoVista’s solutions enabled us to dramatically improve the service we offer our customers, helping us to retain existing customers and win new business,” says Singer. “Most importantly, it will help us to build on our position as a leading service provider in the UK.”