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.
