Gigamon partners with Nokia to deliver ‘unparalleled’ 5G experience

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Customers expect a seamless experience with 5G, and service providers are now turning to AI to help identify and manage issues that impact on a consistent quality of experience (QoE).

Nokia AVA.
(Image credit: Nokia.)

For the last 12 months, mobile network operators have been marketing 5G as the most transformative networking technology we’ve ever seen, and user expectations are higher than ever. And with the number of 5G connections expected to grow from 10 million in 2019, to over one billion in 2023, the need to optimize performance is vital.

To manage the huge increase in 5G use over the next three years, Nokia has announced a partnership with real-time analytics company Gigamon, and the launch of a purpose-built 5G solution to ensure a consistent quality of experience (QoE) when it comes to 5G.

"Gigamon’s subscriber-aware processing of 5G user plane traffic helps enhance our Nokia AVA AI as a Service."

Dennis Lorenzin, Nokia.

“Gigamon’s subscriber-aware processing of 5G user plane traffic helps enhance our Nokia AVA AI as a Service,” said Dennis Lorenzin, head of the network cognitive service unit at Nokia. “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.” 

Nokia AVA

The partnership will see improvements being made to Nokia AVA, the company’s AI-as-a-Service offering for network operators. This will be an industry-first, as Gigamon will deliver real-time analytics for customers, providing an unparalleled level of network traffic visibility required by 5G providers.

"Our purpose-built product set delivers the cost-effective, scalable and pervasive network traffic visibility."

Shane Buckley, Gigamon.

“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,” said Shane Buckley, president and COO at Gigamon. “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 (OTT) video traffic needed to maintain a world-class user experience.” 

According to the two companies, 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”. 

Both gaming and video consumption on mobile will require an excellent user experience, with buffering being one of the main issues affecting users today. And by 2021, Cisco has predicted that 78 percent of mobile traffic will be made up of video content, and research from Nokia Bell Labs Consulting has valued the cloud gaming market at $3bn by 2024. 

5G users will have a limited tolerance for delays and interruptions, and real-time analytics from Gigamon will, the companies say, provide an end-to-end view on quality, with AI generating automated recommendations that help mobile service providers maintain the expected QoE. 

Services that will now be available to network providers include: traffic optimization intelligence, to significantly reduce traffic volume with packet deduplication; subscriber-aware sampling; subscriber-aware whitelisting; application-aware filtering; advanced flow slicing; and TLS 1.3 decryption. 


Dan Oliver
Dan Oliver

Dan is a British journalist with 20 years of experience in the design and tech sectors, producing content for the likes of Microsoft, Adobe, Dell and The Sunday Times. In 2012 he helped launch the world's number one design blog, Creative Bloq. Dan is now editor-in-chief at 5Gradar, where he oversees news, insight and reviews, providing an invaluable resource for anyone looking to stay up-to-date with the key issues facing 5G.