Gigamon partners with Nokia to accelerate 5G adoption

Network visibility and analytics solutions provider Gigamon and communications tech giant Nokia have entered into a partnership designed to optimise 5G network performance and deliver what they say will be compelling, scalable customer experiences.

The partners say the mobile service provider investments in the infrastructure needed to support this growth and ensure the 5G experience lives up to expectations are “staggering”, perhaps about $1tn worldwide between 2018 and 2025.

They also note that consistent quality of experience (QoE) scores in high-profile 5G use cases, such as video streaming and cloud gaming, are critical to ensuring the strong customer satisfaction needed to accelerate widespread adoption. These use cases typically have limited tolerance for network delays and interruptions that degrade QoE, so maintaining continuous video quality is crucial.

It is the business need at the intersection of market demands and performance requirements that lies at the heart of Gigamon and Nokia’s 5G solution. It is claimed to be an industry first, with Gigamon delivering real-time analytics for its global customers, providing 5G providers with network traffic visibility that it says is required for “seamless” performance. 

The offering’s real-time analytics provide an end-to-end view on quality, with artificial intelligence (AI) generating automated recommendations that help mobile service providers maintain the expected QoE.

Gigamon expressed confidence that with its latest “breakthrough” capabilities, mobile service providers will be able to lower costs dramatically by using traffic optimisation intelligence to reduce traffic volume significantly with packet deduplication, subscriber-aware sampling, subscriber-aware whitelisting, application-aware filtering, advanced flow slicing and TLS 1.3 decryption.

This combination of capabilities is also designed to allow mobile service providers to manage prohibitive tool and probe costs by maximising existing investments and increasing resource agility, it said. Gigamon’s visibility and analytics fabric tools are already in use in enhancing Nokia’s predictive video analytics service, which is said to lead to a reduction of up to 60% in buffering in video streaming services.

“Gigamon’s subscriber-aware processing of 5G user plane traffic helps enhance our Nokia AVA AI as a service,” said Dennis Lorenzin, head of Nokia’s network cognitive service unit. “The ability to coherently filter, sample, balance and deliver the user sessions, coupled with video data records generation, when combined with Nokia machine-learning algorithms and domain expertise, enables mobile subscribers to enjoy the full benefits of the 5G experience.”

Gigamon president and chief operating officer Shane Buckley added: “Next-generation communications must deliver an unparalleled user experience and we are excited to partner with Nokia to deliver flawless 5G streaming and gaming quality. Our purpose-built product set delivers the cost-effective, scalable and pervasive network traffic visibility required to access the real-time, actionable insights into mobile over-the-top video traffic needed to maintain a world-class user experience.”