Research Center Reports Rural Call Completion Findings, Devises New Network Metric
The Security and Software Engineering Research Center reported its rural calling findings, announcing a new network performance metric, "Human Retries" (HMR), to address problems. "We are close to real-time HMR validation. It would be valuable to finish that work," said…
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a paper Tuesday filed in FCC docket 13-39 by the Center, which is National Science Foundation-sponsored and industry-supported, and carried out the rural calling project with help from Verizon and others. "Old network performance metrics seem incapable of identifying" emerging problems as new technologies are introduced and wireline systems change, the paper said. "Originating carriers have no idea if calls are truly being mishandled once they leave the carrier's network." The FCC "cites three factors: uncaptured or incorrect signaling, the presence of automated call traffic, and the increase of phone numbers without subscribers, which work together to reduce the capability of older metrics to measure network health," the Center wrote. It created the HMR metric to avoid those issues as much as possible, with the intent to identify and resolve rural call problems quickly. "While we were unable to completely disentangle HMR" from some lingering issues and more work is needed, "we were able to detect anomalies that potentially indicate problems that the other metrics were not able to capture," the group said. "We propose that we instrument the network at the point where we can detect call failure: at the rural carrier’s interfaces with the rest of the public network. We can create tooling for rural carriers to detect deviations between normal call volumes and reduced call volumes." It expected robocalls and declining wireline use would continue to present challenges.