No one likes a nasty surprise.
An interest rate hike; a sudden rainstorm.
In business, we like to think we’ve got everything covered: that we’re prepared for the unexpected and have mitigation measures in place just in case.
However, the pace of technological advancement can often be too fast, even for the fleetest of foot.
The latest potential banana skin? Unexpected 4/5G connectivity costs – or, more specifically, when your ‘back-up’ somehow becomes your ‘mainstay’.
Like so many other IT issues/challenges of the day, it’s a negative consequence of positive progress.
Put simply, the surge in remote and integrated communication means more people AND processes can be quietly consuming (expensive) 4/5G bandwidth, despite the presence of an apparently reliable (and cheaper) broadband or ethernet connection.
The result at the end of the month? Often big, unexpected bills which, for a Managed Service Provider, can’t be waived and so must be passed on to the end-user customer so they don’t come straight out of an already squeezed margin.
Enter the latest (no brainer) mitigation measure: Highlight’s Cellular Clarity.
An addition to an organisation’s performance monitoring toolkit, it cleverly flips the standard requirement to flag a live connection that is failing, into one which spots an intentionally dormant connection that has suddenly begun to pass traffic.
Applied 24/7 to multiple 4/5G endpoints across a large estate – particularly if those endpoints are in overseas territories where uber-expensive roaming charges apply – it’s the ultimate in connectivity cost management.
“The number of 4/5G connections has grown significantly due to a COVID-related increase in remote working as well as a more general move away from expensive ethernet and towards cheaper broadband,” says Richard Thomas, founder and CEO of UK Service Assurance disruptor, Highlight, which has added plug-in Cellular Clarity functionality to its suite of solutions.
“Having full visibility of those connections is critical in order to ensure business continuity and to control costs.
“4/5G is a technology to be careful with: some connections will be incredibly reliable, but some will be patchy and inconsistent depending on local conditions.
“A variety of factors can lead to devices unexpectedly routing traffic over those 4/5G connections, leading to bill shock.
“Both of these issues become huge problems in large estates. The first time those organisations notice that they have run up those unexpected extra costs is when the provider bill comes in, by which point it’s too late.”
Highlight has been taught to understand cellular networks as much as hardwired ones.
It can look across a large estate and see patterns of 4/5G signal strength, erratic performance, unexpected traffic, and outages.
Crucially for large MSPs managing multiple upstream providers, it is also able to group connections in a way that identifies the source of an outage – an MSO at a specific cellular provider, for example - and enable a targeted more efficient response.
