Fluke Networks has unveiled the Network Time Machine LTE/VoLTE, a portable LTE troubleshooting appliance that helps wireless carriers resolve network performance issues quickly and cost effectively.

This ability is crucial to reducing customer churn, as subscribers who switch wireless carriers increasingly point to poor customer care and inadequate network performance as their reason for leaving. The Network Time Machine provides extensive network and application visibility, as well as the forensic details necessary to solve signaling or data performance problems in 20 Gbps carrier environments. Using Network Time Machine, carriers can measure and prove network performance, resolve subscriber issues and deliver the best possible consumer experience to meet growing voice, video, and data demands.

“The proliferation of affordable smartphones, tablets, and other devices has sparked an ever-increasing popularity of mobile videos, games, and data applications,” Carrier Wireless Core product line general manager Amit Rao says.

“While networks have evolved from 3G to 4G/LTE to meet performance demands, network monitoring technologies have not kept pace. Network Time Machine LTE/VoLTE is the first troubleshooting appliance that can deliver the 20Gbps performance required for high-performance wireless networks and—even more important—for creating loyalty among today’s fickle wireless subscribers.”

According to a recent Ovum survey, 27% of wireless subscribers who had changed carriers in the previous month cited “low network quality/speed of the services” as their reason for switching. More than 30% said poor customer care was a key reason.

While today’s wireless carriers need better and faster ways to resolve the network issues that drive customer complaints, most of their network engineers rely on solutions that lack capture performance or fragile appliances that must be shipped to unmonitored high-traffic LTE port locations.

These tools often break and require complex configurations to make them operational.

Network Time Machine LTE/VoLTE is a rugged appliance that solves both problems. It identifies and resolves issues before subscriber frustration and churn concerns grow. The solution’s unique performance bottleneck analysis (PBA) automatically discovers applications and reports performance trending metrics by server, network, and client site. These metrics show where application time is spent and immediately identifies the root cause of customer complaints about performance. Network Time Machine also provides voice and video traffic analysis and playback, enabling carriers to troubleshoot and monitor the entire triple play from a single appliance.

LTE network deployments have evolved carrier networks to an all-IP environment that encounter a host of new application and data problems, from the backhaul to the core and data centers in the network. Even if current monitoring systems can reach these regions, which most cannot, the end-to-end visibility needed to diagnose issues would suffer due to the exorbitant cost of monitoring every link and the lack of granularity needed to identify and fix the root cause. Network Time Machine LTE/VoLTE provides the application and network visibility LTE carriers need more cost-effectively and with more detailed data than other solutions.

Network Time Machine for LTE is available in both portable and rackmount platforms.