Low data downtime is crucial as the number of connected devices continues to rise, increasing our dependence on connectivity in both personal and professional contexts. Depending on the situation, any downtime can have diverse consequences. While some instances may cause minor inconveniences, like a malfunctioning garage door, for businesses, network downtime can have more significant repercussions.
It can damage brand reputation, impact customer reviews, and ultimately affect sales. Financial losses may occur if transactions rely on uninterrupted connectivity or if downtime breaches Service Level Agreements, resulting in compensation fees. In critical scenarios, such as with safety or medical devices, downtime can have potentially tragic outcomes.
At Transatel, delivering high uptime to customers is a priority. There are robust systems implemented and continuous enhancements in its infrastructure to minimize Single Points of Failure ensuring uninterrupted connectivity.
Existing Industry leading practices to eliminate any data downtime
• Multi-operator coverage
Transatel provides multi-operator coverage across various key countries, ensuring broad geographical reach and enhanced connectivity for devices. This approach not only facilitates continuous connectivity for devices regardless of their location but also offers increased reliability in scenarios where a network may experience disruptions or become overloaded.
Furthermore, there is no network steering performed, ensuring that the device can connect autonomously to the best available network.
• Regional points of presence
There has been deployment of regional points of presence to route traffic. This helps avoid time-outs, and reduces latency,
• Redundant infrastructure
In network infrastructure, redundancy is a fundamental aspect to ensure reliability and continuity of service. Additionally, when clients necessitate routing their traffic to their dedicated servers, such as leased lines, VPNs, or Cloud environments, redundant interconnections are established to safeguard against disruptions and enhance overall system resilience.
The Immediate Priorities
There are currently 2 mechanisms being implemented that will greatly improve the service and make it more resilient when incidents occur:
1: A real “constellation” of Packet Gateways
To enhance regional resilience and minimize the need for rerouting traffic during maintenance, Transatel plans to triple the number of regional points of presence. This expansion of the network aims to optimize bandwidth and reduce latency on a global scale.
The strategy: Deploying a minimum of 8 new Packet Gateway (PGW) nodes over the next 5 years.
2: Preserving data service during incidents for Critical Businesses
In addition to already redundant infrastructure, we are implementing a new chain for critical businesses aiming at keeping data connectivity running if an incident occurs with our Online Charging System. While the OCS offers many advanced features, we do not want it to become a weak link in our architecture. We’re therefore working on changes to take our Online Charging System…offline – when an incident occurs.
How:
- First, in case of an incident at the Service Control Point level, we will allow the OCS Guider to take over and generate CDRs asynchronously.
- Then in case of complete unavailability of the Online Charging System, a “fail open” mechanism will be implemented on our PGWs. Data sessions & traffic will remain possible, and charging will resume asynchronously once the incident is resolved.
This will remove the OCS as a Single Point of Failure in our rating chain and increase our uptime.
If you wish to benefit from this Critical Business architecture, we’re happy to arrange a call with our experts!
Going further together
The additional possibilities to “silo” the traffic or critical businesses are also being studied. Deploying a dedicated class of service would reduce the impacts upgrades, maintenance, or changes made for other customers can have on critical businesses.
A few of the options currently studied are:
- The deployment of dedicated logical instances on our PGW Packet Gateway
- Creating dedicated Gy Gateways for critical business customers
Can Data Downtime critically affect your business?
If so, let’s discuss how we can best serve your connectivity needs. Our experts can analyze your needs and current infrastructure and make recommendations to get the best QoS (Quality of Service).
At Transatel, the operator-agnostic approach helps in devising innovative solutions using a variety of networks, including fixed, cellular, private networks, and LoraWan. There is no stone left unturned in finding the best-suited solution for your needs.
Click here to learn more about how Transatel offers high data availability to global industry leaders.