A telecommunications company in the Maldives worked with NCINGA to introduce a platform that powers data collection, introduction of innovative services, and continued relevance in an increasingly competitive industry.

Industry: Telecommunications
Location: APAC

Dhiraagu is a leading telecommunications company in the Maldives. The company offers a full range of communication and broadband services. Dhiraagu has over half a million customers. Throughout its corporate history spanning three decades, the company has established a reputation as a market leader introducing new products - especially in emerging digital areas. Dhiraagu’s vision is to inspire and empower their customers to “take on tomorrow” and thrive in the digital future.

The biggest hindrance that Dhiraagu faced to its vision of providing superior quality services for customers is a legacy network and policy enrolment platform. These were creating several problems:

• Limited platform scalability to cater to an ever-growing customer base and throughput demand
• No clear roadmap from product vendors
• Lengthy workflow to implement new services
• Inaccurate forecasting due to a lack of utilization visibility
• Visibility challenges on growing encrypted web traffic

Internet traffic is the foundation of obtaining business intelligence and service monetization. Dhiraagu lacked a more informed understanding of customer usage patterns to enhance the quality of their network, provide innovative service plans, comply with regulatory requirements, and defend the network from fraudulent actors. And as with any telecommunications company, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic tested Dhiraagu’s network platform capabilities. An increase in network traffic and a higher dependency on bandwidth required an intelligence-based solution.

Thus began Dhiraagu’s collaboration with NCINGA. Dhiraagu decided to re-architect its network and policy enforcement platform entirely.

Dhiraagu and NCINGA identified a list of goals that the upgraded network platform must achieve:

• The network platform must facilitate Dhiraagu to maintain a seamless quality of service, even during times of high demand to ensure user engagement.
• Support gaming and video streaming customers especially, as there is growing use of these functions.
• Most importantly, the network platform must equip Dhiraagu with the required data to support future growth of services and the company’s vision.

NCINGA with Sandvine used a virtualized application deployment on low cost, highly reliable commercially off-the-self (COTS) hardware. This enables the policy enforcement platform to become hardware agnostic and achieve greater scalability. The Sandvine policy enforcement and deep packet inspection application uses supervised machine learning models that have been pre-trained in-house and validated for accuracy. These proprietary models and techniques are built upon 150 different flow parameters.

Employing these techniques, Sandvine is able to broadly classify encrypted traffic into categories (such as web browsing, video streaming, VoIP, etc.) and accurately classify unique applications within categories (e.g., Facebook vs. Instagram, WhatsApp vs. Lime, Netflix vs. YouTube, etc.) – even when the traffic is encrypted and ESNI is in use.

You can also apply machine learning techniques to distinguish between authentic traffic and traffic masquerading as something else. Crucially, these techniques do not rely on reading or extracting fields from flows. As such, Sandvine’s machine learning is impervious to encryption. Because many services are already encrypted and VPN use is widespread, these techniques will become essential – and will perhaps even account for the majority of traffic recognition – in the future.

With the NCINGA-designed PCEF/DPI and PCRF platform in place, Dhiraagu has been able to overcome their business obstacles. They are now able to:

• Manage network congestion, extend the network infrastructure, and protect the quality of experience for customers.
• Rapidly troubleshoot network issues (especially those adversely impacting customer experiences) and identify their sources.
• Gain visibility of long-term trends for performance monitoring/analysis.
• Monitor usage patterns in real time for proactive capacity planning expansions.
• Manage video bandwidth resolutions and deliver consistent streaming experiences.
• Carrier Grade Network Address Translation (CGNAT) to mitigate IPv4 address exhaustion while maintaining network visibility.
• Block any website or content as per regulatory guidelines.

Dhiraagu now looks forward to staying abreast with the competition in the Maldives’ fast evolving broadband services industry.