MILPITAS, CA--(Marketwired - May 9, 2016) - Viavi Solutions (NASDAQ: VIAV) today announced the availability of Release 1.1 of its xSIGHT customer experience assurance (CEA) portfolio for telecommunications networks. Viavi will be demonstrating xSIGHT at TM Forum Live, May 9-12, Nice, France.

Communications service providers are striving to deliver optimal quality of experience as network usage escalates and applications diversify. Even within broad application categories such as voice, multimedia messaging, video entertainment and productivity, apps and services utilize the network differently. CSPs are trying to improve the subscriber experience by allocating network resources to subscribers based on application-specific requirements. This approach calls for rapid analysis of application usage and QoE on the network. Existing technologies for this analysis -- such as deep packet inspection -- have been increasingly hindered by data encryption or local regulations aimed at protecting consumer privacy.

xSIGHT is a CEA portfolio including a centralized analytics platform fed by agents distributed throughout the network. The agents passively analyze traffic in real time, build network and application performance metrics and selectively store traffic for troubleshooting purposes. This capability is especially important for Voice over LTE (VoLTE) as a fundamental communication service -- with low user tolerance for quality issues -- that is now a data application. As subscribers increase the share of time they spend on over-the-top (OTT) services with different demands on the network and unpredictable behavior, the need to analyze user plane data in real time becomes vital to optimizing QoE.

xSIGHT Release 1.1 now includes the following functionality:

• Virtualized agents - aligning with network operators' focus on virtualizing network functions, xSIGHT offers traffic analysis and storage agents capable of running on virtual machines to access traffic on virtual network interfaces

• User plane metrics - xSIGHT provides real time analytics on network performance, application usage and comparison between actual performance and application-specific minimum requirements, to flag application QoE issues; xSIGHT's algorithm for application identification is not affected by either data encryption or privacy restrictions

• Selective user plane data capture - for troubleshooting purposes, xSIGHT enables highly targeted user plane packet capture, avoiding the need to exhaust buffer and storage capacities by capturing all packets.

"xSIGHT is designed differently than alternative solutions, addressing not only immediate technological requirements of mobile broadband networks, but broader operational ones as well," commented Sameh Yamany, Chief Technology Officer, Viavi Solutions. "While other systems may provide after-the-fact processing of metrics, xSIGHT's architecture allows users to receive multi-dimensional analytics in real time, so quality issues may be addressed while or perhaps even before the user experiences them."