OpNet partners with Sandvine
August 2, 2023
OpNet, Italy’s first 5G standalone network operator, is partnering with Sandvine to maximise its network performance and improve customer satisfaction as a first step toward offering B2B internet services with strict service level agreements (SLAs).
Resulting from the spin-off of Linkem’s Retail branch and its subsequent merger with Tiscali, OpNet is the Italian 5G Wholesale Operator, covering more than 70 per cent of the population with its own structure. With its commercial deployments of 5G radio spectrum over fixed wireless, OpNet moved to a wholesale business model, rolling out private networks and vertical applications across industrial logistics management, industrial security, and smart-city construction.
“By becoming a wholesaler of FWA and optical fibre solutions, as well as radio connections and 5G private networks, we can open our network to ‘everyone,’ namely the several thousand smaller companies, firms, and branch offices that lack the digital services needed to compete,” said OpNet CTO Cosimo Buccella.
The move to a 5G wholesale model, combined with the increase in online video content made popular during the pandemic, strained the limits of OpNet’s fixed wireless network.
“The increasingly dynamic nature of both our network and the applications meant we could no longer rely on manual finetuning to optimise the network,” said Buccella. “We needed to know which applications were having the greatest impact on network resources, and how that translated in terms of the application quality of experience our wholesale customers were delivering to their end users.”
To address the need for traffic analysis and network optimisation, OpNet enlisted Sandvine and its ActiveLogic solution to provide traffic classification and QoE analyses.
“By providing more visibility into complex network traffic, we help provide a better understanding of how customers are benefiting from the increased speed and capacity of 5G,” said Sandvine Chief Solutions Officer Samir Marwaha. “This insight can help drive automation, improve customer satisfaction, and it can eventually help OpNet deliver SLA-driven B2B services built around guarantees for uplink and downlink services.”
“We rapidly relieved on-site congestion and improved customer satisfaction, without any change to KPIs,” said Buccella. “In fact, we’ve seen the amazing result that no more calls have come into the contact centre about buffering of video or other QoE issues. The results prove we made the right choice as we orient ourselves to the wholesale market, where we will be a point of reference for multiple stakeholders that will want easy access to increasingly complex connectivity solutions that will close the digital divide and advance services that will help Italy fuel its economy.”