“Instead of asking: do we have enough capacity? telcos should be asking: when (and where) will we run out of capacity? And what are we doing to mitigate?
Instead of simply reacting to outages, telcos should have a real time view of the current risk points, failure scenarios and their impacts – with recovery plans should the worst case failure happen.”
Robert Curran here.
What a wonderful concept from Robert Curran! Rather than our OSS just providing real-time network-health tools, this rolling contingency planning concept could be far more powerful (if done well). To my knowledge this would represent a new class of OSS tool.
Contingency planning is currently is currently done at (relatively) lengthy intervals using a static dataset to make projections on. Robert’s concept would require predictive / precognitive analyses to be performed on a rolling basis using streaming data sets.
I had envisaged the concept of roll-forward and play-back for scenario / contingency planning for a customer a few years ago, but it hadn’t dawned on me to extend the concept to stream it until reading Robert’s post. The user experience would be quite different and would need some very thorough planning. This could be a very powerful tool (or be kept relatively unsophisticated, yet still be valuable).
What do you think? Would you buy one to help maintain your network?