One company has built a system that takes advantage of information from every network element to tell support—and the managers—what's happening on your network.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [April 24, 2008]

There is a serious disconnect at the heart of the relationship between the ISP customer and the ISP itself. When the user calls the ISP with a problem, the user may not be able to explain the problem to customer support, and customer support may not be able to solve it. We've talked to companies trying to solve this problem before (of them, Enure stands out with a promising but proprietary solution).

Cupertino, Calif.-based Xangati is taking the in depth knowledge view, using net flow data from network elements (and yes, the company supports all the proprietary protocolls from Cisco, Juniper, etc.) to allow an ISP to see whether or not there is congestion in the network when the user calls—or whether there was a network issue when the user had a problem but was too busy to call.

It's a realtively new company, even for the internet. Xangati was founded in 2006 and came out of stealth mode with a press release just last year, in June of 2007. Xangati calls its technology RPI, for Rapid Problem Identification. The name explains the problem that Xangati sees profit in solving: the amount of wasted time that end users and ISP customer service representatives (CSRs) spend on the phone trying to communicate.

David Messina, vice president of marketing for Xangati, says the system helps senior management as much as front line CSRs, in part because the time of senior management is often taken up with escalated issues. "They call it 'firefighting' and 'troubleshooting' but they're spending a large part of their day dealing with problems that were knee jerk escalated by the front line. The cost of that is that even people who have strategy roles often spend 50 percent of their day on trouble tickets."

CSRs are all too often given a script to follow and give customers the same advice: check the PC for a virus, reboot the PC, etc. If that doesn't solve the problem, they have to escalate it.

The technology
Xangati's RPI technology, Messina says, gives CSRs a tool that does for the network what Windows Task Manager does for the Windows PC, showing all the applications that are sending and receiving bandwidth (this element of the system is similar to what Propel gives end users with its Personal Bandwidth Manager).

When we reached Messina, he was in Chicago for the IP Possibilities show, meeting with telcos large and small who are deploying advanced services. "If the IPTV goes down during NASCAR," he says, "that's an emergency."

You may not need to install monitoring on a user's system to find the cause of the problem. For example, if RPI shows that a user has been sending a high volume of e-mail to dozens or hundreds of peers, the CSR can diagnose a spam problem. Large telcos with millions of infected customers won't be able to call every one to remediate the problem, but independent ISPs, and tier 2 and 3 telcos, may have just a few infected customers and may be able to call each one.

One ISP customer, Plattsburgh, N.Y.-based PrimeLink, Messina says, had a customer whose connection dropped out every night at 9 PM. PrimeLink used Xangati's RPI and found that the connection was overloaded with XBOX traffic at that time: the father did not know that his son was hosting games.

Pricing and availability
Xangati's RPI is priced based on number of subscribers supported, starting at $35,000 for up to 3,000 subscribers.

A demo is available on Xangati's Task Manager page.

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