News: Finally 4G?

IMS was designed in a very a general way. As a service network which is access independent, supports multiple identities and it is very expensive to implement. Sometimes less is more – at least in the beginning. That’s also why we have the VoLTE – a minimum IMS profile which reduces the scope into something manageable and more practical.

As the VoLTE has been around for a couple of years already and works fine, the early adopters are looking for more – HD Voice, EVS, WebRTC and other technologies. Recently T-Mobile USA (DIGITS) and AT&T (NumberSync) announced their solutions for multi-device feature. Not all the features are always successful or truly practical – but this time I’d think more operators will follow. Btw. with IoT to come I wonder when exactly we will see a first virtual entity (agent) seamlessly moving from one devices to another 🙂

News: Telco Monitoring

I always enjoy to visit telcos’ monitoring centres. One feels like to be in NASA. It’s a pity that mostly it is not allowed to take any pictures.

AT&T Monitoring

It is interesting that rarely there is just one vendor of this monitoring. Usually it is a mix of various applications, which inform about the most important KPIs and events. Often we can see open applications to be used. If you are working in support you probably know at least some of them – cacti, zabbix, nagios, observium, MRTG, munin, zenoss, etc. One of them is grafana.

Grafana

I’ve recently seen a T1-operator monitoring based on Grafana. The nice thing about it is that it allows to include various data sources, analytics where we can easily combine charts with related events and it supports multi-tenancy. Just before Christmas we have got a new version 4.1 with a new alerting feature. The alert rules are easy to configure using existing graph panels and threshold levels can be set simply by dragging handles. The rules will continually be evaluated by grafana-server and notifications will be sent out when the rule conditions are met. Besides the altering there are many other improvements and enhancements.

Anyway whatever tool you use, happy NYE monitoring!

News: RCS Reborn?

There are mobile operators who have RCS in their network but practically no one really use it. The number of RCS deployments – in contrast to VoLTE or VoWifi is decreasing and more than once I’ve heard that RCS is a zombie. These days when it comes to texting over 4G we mostly still rely on the old good SMS, using IPSMGW. Of course, we can choose from plenty of OTT technologies as WeChat, WhatsApp, Line, etc. However SMS is still a must to have for all the mobile carriers, even though they are not making much money on it.

RCS standard is everything but simple and straightforward. The operators were that afraid, that they’ll become only connectivity providers that they created an omnipotent service which no one was able to implement. For many years we struggled during the integrations and to find a really working RCS client was close to impossible. One of the better clients was Jibe. Jibe was bought by Google the last year and many were wondering what is the Google up to..

Messanger

Recently Google along with Sprint in US and Rogers in Canada announced that they’re rolling out with their RCS Messaging. More info in RCS Universal Profile post. Hard to predict how successful it will be this time, but chances are, we will see RCS around in 2017.