Gigamon, the leading deep observability company, today announced significant advances in equipping global Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) around the world with the deep observability they require to fast-track 5G deployments alongside existing 4G production networks. Over the last year, Gigamon increased the number of customers utilizing the Gigamon Deep Observability Pipeline for 5G core services with 43 MNOs in production, deployment or trials alongside widespread 4G core services, all driven by a series of innovations for converged 4G/5G cores, including bringing deep observability to encrypted 5G core traffic.
MNO network traffic has doubled in the last two years, estimated to grow 24 percent annually over the next five years according to the 2022 Ericsson Mobility Report. While hundreds of billions of dollars have been invested on the new 5G spectrum and underlying infrastructure, most subscriber traffic still traverses 4G core networks – even when 5G radio capacity is utilized. Increasingly, the focus of MNOs is to adopt converged cores to serve both 4G and 5G subscribers as they advance transition efforts. Gigamon serves as foundational technology to a growing number of 5G core deployments, delivering a broad range of advanced product features and capabilities.
Delivering Converged 4G/5G Core EfficiencyGigamon has developed, delivered, and hardened MNO core feature sets for sampling, load-balancing, and forward-listing at a subscriber level, as well as network-aware filtering based on business context like phone model, cell tower, voice vs. data, over-the-top applications, QoS priority, and more. The Gigamon Deep Observability Pipeline efficiently and effectively correlates control plane traffic with user plane traffic across 4G and 5G networks utilizing the same underlying monitoring infrastructure. This optimization reduces unified correlation across a converged core, reducing load on downstream tools while maintaining depth of insight and consistent quality of telemetry in accordance with required service levels.
“Mobile operators of all sizes are under increasing pressure to innovate with 5G while continuing to support the vast volumes of 4G traffic running across their networks,” said Shane Buckley, president, and CEO of Gigamon. “We’re fully committed to developing critical capabilities in close partnership with our MNO customers to provide deep observability into all mobile traffic, with operational and economic efficiency, whether 4G or 5G, even when encrypted.”