Last Mile

Some Network Operators have claimed 80-90 percent of delivery issues happen in the last mile out to the end consumer. This statistic doesn’t fully take into account the “Silent Sufferer” who is extremely important to know and understand. They are the ones who quietly put up with delivery issues until they are lured away with the next competitor's promotion. Cataloging customer complaints is not always the optimal way to understand what is happening with your customer base. Deploying apps to sit on end consumer devices is too much data to sort through and is a bit intrusive to your customers.

Having visibility out to the last mile delivers a wealth of information for everything from knowing coverage area for terrestrial, to preventing truck roles for cable operators, to fine tuning the overall network for optimal quality without having to overkill on bit rates and overly expensive infrastructure. The probe count goes exponentially as you leave the content origination point. Last mile could be thousands of probes but end user would be in the millions! Up to this point, the barrier has been in how economically systems can be deployed and how well the data can be aggregated to make actionable conclusions.

Qligent Vision has recently added a family of low cost RF, STL and IP micro probes (uProbes) that cover a range of features based on hardware performance. Technology advancements in COTS hardware has made it possible to reach price points not possible in recent years. Qligent has developed software defined probes that can deploy on a wide array of hardware platforms, even those in a “System on a chip” form factor. Wired network, Wi-Fi, or even GSM modem options allow for data backhaul and aggregation. Q’ligent software probes require very light weight backhaul, 64kbs in normal cases.