Background A Tier One Asian operator offers fixed and mobile communications services to businesses and consumers. Its mobile business provides leading edge wireless services and devices to over forty million subscribers. The operator supports a country with a large and diverse economy across a broad and varied geography. Challenge Customers come first. For this network operator, this statement is much more than just a slogan. Its a philosophy that compels the company to see things from the customers point of view. Its a way of doing business that drives the network operator to continually improve the quality of its services. And its a guiding principal in the companys efforts to improve its business when adding subscribers, providing new services, reducing customer churn, managing network resources and finding fresh revenue sources. But in order to understand the customers point of view, this network operator knew it needed to get a complete picture of the quality of its mobile services. Befitting its position as a leader in the communications market, the network operator sought detailed information on its network performance that could be leveraged by its big-data analytic system. The companys executive team and IT management wanted to use such analytics to track and ensure that a high quality of experience would be maintained while making critical business decisions such as selecting new services, determining rate strategies and prioritizing network investments. The network operator had been employing software-based analytics probes from another vendor running on commercial off-the-shelf hardware to track network traffic performance. The IT team knew that the network operations team used Sandvine Networks family of DPI-powered intelligence engines to deliver policy and charging services across their mobile network, and after getting a demonstration of the analytics in Sandvines Engineering Insights, determined that the data provided by PacketLogicTM software was superior to that of their existing vendor. The operator wanted to change to PacketLogic, but required that this performance tracking be provided from within a virtualized environment that could deliver high data throughputs directly from the network to IT systems used by its data analytics team. Solution With this knowledge, the network operator chose to adopt Sandvines eVolution, a purpose-built virtual subscriber experience probe. With eVolution, the network operators organization, from network engineers to senior executive management, can now track the quality of the subscriber experience. The eVolution deployment provides the operator with the subscriber, application, network, device, and location data that is so important for its QoE efforts. eVolution, based on Sandvines industry-proven PacketLogic technology, can run as a Virtual Network Function Components (VNFC) as part of an ESTIdefined virtual network function (VNF) environment. The solution is able to run on the operators standard hardware system, making it extremely cost effective. Critically, eVolution feeds high-quality subscriber experience data from the network directly into the operators IT analytics systems using Internet Protocol Flow Information Export (IPFIX).

a) After analysing the case study, identify and discuss the benefits that the Tier One network operator will get by choosing Sandvines eVolution virtualized solution.

b) For network operators, why is it important to consider QoE in addition to QoS? How can it be measured?