SK Telecom has chosen Accedian Networks to provide performance monitoring in its mobile network, spanning 12,000 locations and 28 million subscribers across six of South Korea's largest cities.

"We started this journey with SK Telecom a while ago," says David Dial, vice president of sales at Accedian. "Operators like SK Telecom are introducing new services into the market, and radio performance is becoming tighter and more sensitive as we keep moving forward. The problems are getting worse because of the performance parameters around these advanced radios."

With Accedian, Dial says SK Telecom can deploy a service that works on a more granular level. The Accedian performance monitoring tool provides information that helps SK Telecom align its network for better radio performance parameter support, resulting in better quality-of-experience (QoE) for customers.

"That information that we're providing is an important missing element in the complete structure in order to field an SDN architecture that SK Telecom also happens to be implementing," says Dial.

Bringing Accedian into the fold is important to the operator's goal of performance optimization with standards-based monitoring indicators as it moves toward software-defined networking (SDN) and eventually brings 5G mobile technology to users.

Accedian says SK Telecom will now get access to better network visibility and control, as well as an opportunity to set itself apart from other operators. As early SDN adopters, Accedian says they believe they were a good choice for SK Telecom. Accedian's ability to gather one-way performance information on the uplink and downlink separately in real time means SK Telecom can solve customer issues more quickly and head off conditions that lead to customer-facing problems.

"This is extremely important for Accedian," says Patrick Ostiguy, the vendors's founder, president, and CEO. "We've been working with a number of Tier 1s over the years. In the case of SK Telecom, they are on the forefront and they are innovators. For them to choose us and deploy us in large-volume locations is a huge [indication] of the performance of our solutions."

Accedian's platform is live in an initial deployment in SK Telecom's network. Subsequent phases will include adding automation and big data analytics to other parts of the network.