If you work in the telecommunications industry, chances are you’ve heard the term “NOC.” What you may not know, however, is the vital role it plays for any service provider, and the impact that its successful operation has on an end-user’s experience.
What Is a Network Operations Center?
NOC (pronounced “knock”) stands for Network Operations Center. Its core function is to serve as the eyes and ears of the network. When something unexpected happens, network operations staff (frequently referred to as “NetOps”) are notified through visual alarms or automated emails. It’s their responsibility to assess the impact of the event, notify the appropriate parties and coordinate restoration.
Additionally, the NOC acts as a centralized point of communication. When a network maintenance is scheduled or an impairment occurs, the NOC is the first to know. If you have ever received an impairment notification, it very likely came from the NOC. By serving as the input/output (I/O) for any potentially service impacting information, NetOps staff have total awareness of what is happening in their environment. It is from this eagles-eye point of view that restorative actions can be taken swiftly, and with confidence.
Constant Vigilance
The importance of the NOC cannot be understated. By having this centralized resource, many problems can be detected, isolated and eliminated before a single customer is affected. An organization offering world class service must be prepared to confront the unexpected in a manner that is both decisive and consistent.
Our NOC meets this need through a posture of constant vigilance, responding proactively long before an issue becomes an outage. To our customers, this translates to services they can trust their business to, day and night.
24/7 Service and Network Monitoring
Unfortunately, impairments cannot be expected to keep bankers’ hours. Maintenance on infrastructure is often performed in the earliest part of the morning in order to minimize disruptions. It is for this reason that it’s so important to have NOC engineers staffed during this critical period of time. If a routine maintenance causes an outage, it has the potential to go undetected until end-users begin filing into the office the next day, only to pick up their phones and hear nothing but air.
With a NOC that operates through the night, service providers like TelNet Worldwide can respond to these events in real-time. Instead of coming into the office to find dead phones, our customers instead find an email indicating there was a brief service disruption the previous evening, which was promptly rectified. The email is discarded, their phones begin ringing and their workday goes uninterrupted.
Where Technology Meets Experience
All world-class NOCs have cutting-edge technology that is used to provide technicians with high-quality, real-time data from every corner of the network. From packet-capturing software that parses and analyzes SIP call-flows, to robust Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) polling that lays bare the health and performance of every device in the datacenter, it’s these technologies that help keep us a step ahead of any trouble that could arise.
A world-class NOC has a team of highly trained technicians and engineers who are experts in their field, ready to read and interpret this data and, most importantly, act when necessary. It is the men and women of the NOC, and their deliberate actions, that empower our customers to focus not on their communications technology, but on what they excel at: their business.
The Network Operations Center is an essential part of any service provider organization, and TelNet Worldwide has one of the best. If you’re ready for our NOC to become your NOC, Contact Us Today!
