Orange Egypt turns to automated service assurance to deliver quality mobile experiences

As the leading mobile operator in Egypt, Orange Egypt is focused on accelerating the digital development of the Egyptian society by providing innovative digital solutions and unmatched customer experience.

Customer expectations were put to the test when COVID-19 created a technology tipping point, changing businesses and accelerating digital transformation as Internet connections became as an absolute necessity.

“We always aspire to provide a world-class quality of service to our customers,” says Eng. Ayman Amiri, chief technology officer at Orange Egypt. “As safety of our employees comes first, Paragon Active Assurance came at a critical time to support our vision and overcome COVID-19 challenges while minimizing mobilization of people in the field.”

Service assurance typically takes months to implement, but Orange Egypt didn’t even have weeks to spare. It needed real-time monitoring of its transport network from end to end to precisely locate performance issues in connections toward all of its evolved NodeB (eNodeB) base stations. 

Orange Egypt quickly deployed Juniper Paragon Active Assurance to continuously maintain the quality of its mobile subscriber experience with service activation testing, quality monitoring, and troubleshooting. With a proof-of-concept test already in progress, the operations team took swift action in a matter of days.

“With Paragon Active Assurance’ cloud-native active assurance solution, our operations and engineering teams can locate and fix issues before they impact our subscribers’ quality of experience,” says Eng. Kamal Kamel, director of cybersecurity, cloud, and IP engineering at Orange Egypt. “This has helped us to have major enhancement in incident resolution time and enhance our customers’ experience, which we always put as our first priority.”

With Paragon Active Assurance, Orange Egypt has real-time visibility into service performance of the data plane across different eNodeBs, regions, and equipment vendors. The operations team can locate connectivity issues across the transport network from the core to the radio access network.

Paragon Active Assurance can identify when quality of service is not configured or honored correctly over the end-to-end path. For instance, the differentiated services code point, which is used to classify traffic, can be wiped to the default setting when traversing best-effort paths. Paragon Active Assurance can be used to ensure the service path is maintained or QoS treatments are negotiated with partner networks.

The Orange Egypt operations team can quickly validate the efficiency and impact of implementing updated traffic policy rules. With Paragon Active Assurance, the team can pinpoint issues in partner networks, such as microwave links.

Orange Egypt has eliminated performance issues when putting new services into production, and incident resolution time has been cut in half. As a result, customers continue to have the excellent experience they expect from Orange Egypt.