An interest rate hike; a sudden rainstorm.

In business, we like to think we’ve got everything covered: that we’re prepared for the unexpected and have mitigation measures in place just in case.

However, the pace of technological advancement can often be too fast, even for the fleetest of foot.

The latest potential banana skin? Unexpected 4/5G connectivity costs – or, more specifically, when your ‘back-up’ somehow becomes your ‘mainstay’.

Like so many other IT issues/challenges of the day, it’s a negative consequence of positive progress.

Put simply, the surge in remote and integrated communication means more people AND processes can be quietly consuming (expensive) 4/5G bandwidth, despite the presence of an apparently reliable (and cheaper) broadband or ethernet connection.

The result at the end of the month? Often big, unexpected bills which, for a Managed Service Provider, can’t be waived and so must be passed on to the end user customer so they don’t come straight out of an already squeezed margin.

Enter the latest (no brainer) mitigation measure: Highlight’s Cellular Clarity.

An addition to an organisation’s performance monitoring toolkit, it cleverly flips the standard requirement to flag a live connection that is failing, into one which spots an intentionally dormant connection that has suddenly begun to pass traffic.

Applied 24/7 to multiple 4/5G end points across a large estate – particularly if those end points are in overseas territories where uber-expensive roaming charges apply – it’s the ultimate in connectivity cost management.

“The number of 4/5G connections has grown significantly due to a COVID-related increase in remote working as well as a more general move away from expensive ethernet and towards cheaper broadband,” says Richard Thomas, founder and CEO of UK Service Assurance disruptor Highlight, which has added plug-in Cellular Clarity functionality to its suite of solutions.

“Having full visibility of those connections is critical in order to ensure business continuity and to control costs.

“4/5G is a technology to be careful with: some connections will be incredibly reliable, but some will be patchy and inconsistent depending on local conditions.

“A variety of factors can lead to devices unexpectedly routing traffic over those 4/5G connections, leading to bill shock.

“Both of these issues become huge problems in large estates. The first time those organisations notice that they have run up those unexpected extra costs is when the provider bill comes in, by which point it’s too late.”

Highlight has been taught to understand cellular networks as much as hardwired ones.

It is able to look across a large estate and see patterns of 4/5G signal strength, erratic performance, unexpected traffic, and outages.

Crucially for large MSPs managing multiple upstream providers, it is also able to group connections in a way which identifies the source of an outage – an MSO at a specific cellular provider, for example – and enable a targeted, more efficient response.

The retail vertical provides the perfect case in point.

Large estates of stores have switched from ethernet to broadband plus 4/5G, creating a more complex network environment while reliance on good connectivity has increased. Point-of-sale, stock management, CCTV, phones, in-store WiFi are now critical.

Many of those stores’ 4/5G routers are located in comms rooms or dynamic environments which impact negatively on robust, reliable mobile connectivity.

Where cellular connections would in the past be deployed here and there to resolve a specific problem, the technology is now mainstream and widespread, giving MSPs large estates to manage and magnifying the cost of problems.

Hospitality, too, is ripe with opportunity.

At one user of Highlight’s tool – a large, multi-site pub chain – staff found that 4G performance was actually better than the standard hard-wired broadband.

As a result, they got into the habit of deliberately unplugging the broadband to give themselves better response times – with the obvious (huge) impact on 4G usage and billing.

“It took the IT team a while to figure out what was going on,” says Thomas. “Of course, the technology was at the heart of the issue but, essentially it was a human factor at play.”

Instantly spotting a 4/5G connectivity issue enables an MSP to provide a swift, effective, real-time response – improving business continuity AND mitigating against unnecessary extra cost.

“A more connected, agile world is a positive consequence of technological advancement such as 5G,” says Thomas.

“But there is a danger that MSPs and end user businesses will assume deploying it on a large scale is really easy. They may not properly consider the potential challenges and, more importantly, they may not mitigate against them. Cellular Clarity covers that”

Looking to the future – even after the much-heralded hybrid working model has returned legions of homeworkers back into their offices – mobile connectivity is sure to continue to evolve and innovate.

And that means demand for Cellular will grow. Pressure on usage levels and performance is set only to intensify.

“Wired connections – Ethernet and Broadband – will never disappear completely because they will always be a cornerstone of the communications infrastructure,” says Thomas.

“But before we know it, we will be pushing into 6G and beyond. Cellular communications will play an ever greater role in allowing businesses to innovate, compete and succeed.

“Having a clear sight of all of that brilliant connectivity is about as important as it gets, because without the network nothing works.”

 

 



from UC Today https://ift.tt/3dU7UZ5