Spirent focuses on 5G visibility with Vantage launch

Service providers have to deal with increasing complexity in their networks and services, amid what have been highly manual and ponderous service assurance deployments that almost inevitably result in visibility gaps and too much data that needs highly skilled human interpretation to resolve issues. As Charles Thompson, VP of product management at Spirent Communications with a history of more than two decades in service assurance, put it, "Service assurance for operators has traditionally been very burdensome. It's been a very big deployment, [with] multi-week, multi-month services engagement to do, to get things up and running." There's typically a highly manual process of deploying software or hardware-based test agents: Figuring out where you want them, configuring them, pushing them out and often still being left with "massive visibility gaps" as new data centers and other new network elements come online or, in a software-defined networking world, as virtual machines spin up and down and routing changes in response Spirent Communications aims to simplify and automate with the launch if a new service assurance solution, Vantage. Spirent is "hyperfocused… on the mobile core" with the Vantage release, said Thompson, and invested in the solution with an eye toward how it expects networks to continue evolving over the next three to five years: A continuing push for 5G and the use of open, cloud-native and containerized infrastructure and multi-vendor environments, combined with massive data demand, and the need to assure new use cases, features and services that have not existed before, like Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communication (URLLC).