We’ve all experienced wireless call drops and we accept it as part of life. We’d never think of reporting a dropped call to the carrier. EXFO, a company known for its installation and maintenance test equipment, has created Nova SensAI to monitor networks in real time, letting telecom service providers get the feedback that users don’t provide

“Currently, just two percent of anomalies get reported to network operators,” EXFO CEO Philippe Morin explained to 5GTW. “Reported outages reported has increased by 46 percent. The virtualization part of the network accounts for 65 percent of these outages. Virtualization lets network operators reduce costs, but it creates more complexity.”

Nova SensAI is subscription software that integrates into a service provider’s carrier network, collecting data through network probes and analyzing it in real time through a machine-learning algorithm. From the data, Nova SensAI can detect network anomalies that affect service quality.

Using Nova SensAI, carriers get increased visibility into the network and can use reports to find and fix outages. Reports can tell you the location of a network outage and correlate it to network condition through the protocol stack. Reports tell you which type of network traffic experienced a problem, for example HTTP or voice, and the number of subscribers affected.

Nova SensAI provides analysis on voice calls, emergency voice calls, and Voice over IP Multimedia Subsystem (VoIMS) calls. It also analyzes roaming and data for conditions such as transmission control protocol (TCP) and Domain Name System (DNS) failures.