If Brazil had used NetVision, World Cup catastrophe could have been avoided

SAO PAULO, BRAZIL & LONDON, UK: After a calamitous end to the World Cup campaign, questions have been asked about Brazilian football. Agonising though it was, there are some clear lessons for the future.

The outcome of Tuesday's game was not foreseen. Worse, the emerging problems were not identified quickly enough to avoid the coming catastrophe. The only action that can be taken now is to avoid future catastrophes and to return to normal service (which, in our opinion, means winning in 2018).

Imagine if such a catastrophe had taken place in an operator's network. Conceding the first goal can happen to any side, so it's not a disaster in and of itself: there's always time to come back. Similarly, network problems can occur from time to time - but they can be predicted and avoided, or identified and rectified. Conceding two goals makes it a little more difficult. Three, a steep hill, to be sure, but not insurmountable, as any Liverpool fan will tell you.

But concede four goals and we are in the realm of fantasy. A recovery can happen - it did for Arsenal against Reading back in 2012 - but concede five and, really it's game over - the network may suffer catastrophic, costly service outages.

The thing is, such scores at this level of football are rare - but a normal event can rapidly escalate to catastrophic levels as, sadly, we saw this week. A normal situation became a serious one, which spiralled out of control. If this happened in a network, the implications would be huge, both in terms of direct financial costs and in terms of customer satisfaction and retention.

What Brazil needed was the ability to proactively recognise that an event had occurred and to ensure it was given the appropriate priority to ensure that it was contained, managed and rectified. While we can't account for the performance of footballers, we can account for the performance of your network, particularly during periods of unexpected activity - such as the 20x peak data volumes experienced by at least one content provider during the match.

"With proactive service assurance enabled by NetVision, problems can be identified before they have a serious impact," said Bruno Musa, chief product officer at ISPM. "Better still, trends from the network can be analysed and potential incidents can be spotted before they have any impact, enabling the right resources to be deployed at the right time to ensure consistent network performance," he added.

While we can't say that Brazil would have triumphed, we can suggest that information from NetVision would prevent the catastrophe that eventually resulted occurring in any network in which NetVision is deployed.

If you are a network operator, you want to be sure that you avoid any similar issues. You want to proactively avoid issues and contain any that are encountered. NetVision provides outstanding performance that ensures smooth operation of your network, reducing costs and avoiding penalties.