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How often do you hear someone say, “My network is good enough!” It doesn’t happen, right? In the world of networking, every second counts, and every minute of uptime matters. Organizations today depend on strong, reliable networks to keep their operations running. While they expect high-performance connectivity, many have come to accept that issues are inevitable.
At Nile, we believe it’s our responsibility not just to monitor and react, but to prevent problems before they impact users—delivering the consistency others only promise. At Nile, we’re committed to delivering nothing short of excellence when it comes to a network performance guarantee—because in the world of networking, good enough and legacy promises just don’t cut it.
Our approach is built on a philosophy we like to call the Outside-In Approach, which means we focus on understanding end-user needs, diagnosing problems proactively, and using data-driven insights to optimize performance across every single customer deployment.
Let’s take a deep dive into how this approach, combined with our relentless pursuit of perfection, is helping our customers, improve the end user experience, and reach “Always-On Availability”, ”Complete Coverage”, and “Consistent Capacity” Performance Guarantee – something only offered by Nile.
1. The Outside-In Approach: Proactive Availability and Coverage
At Nile, we don’t wait for problems to escalate. Instead, we measure, monitor, and adapt from the outside-in. What this means is that we monitor network performance at the endpoint level (where the user interacts with the network) and work our way inwards towards the Nile core, famously known as, Nile Service Block (NSB). By focusing on the actual experience of the user, we’re able to deliver a more granular, real-time view of network health and availability.
This approach helps us not only meet but often exceed our performance guarantee for availability and coverage, allowing us to catch and resolve issues before they become disruptions. Through proactive monitoring and real-time intervention, we ensure delivering uninterrupted uptime and consistently high performance across your entire wired and wireless network—not just a single link, but every point in your building, with guaranteed coverage, capacity, and reliability.
2. Zero Noise, Total Focus
Traditional networks drown you in alerts—most of them irrelevant. At Nile, we’ve eliminated 100% of unnecessary networking alerts by handling everything that doesn’t require on-site intervention. Unless someone needs to be there in person for support—like fixing a broken cable—you won’t hear about it. Everything else? We’ve got it covered.
Powered by Nile Autopilot’s AI-driven monitoring and self-tuning algorithms, our system continuously analyzes network behavior to distinguish real issues from routine fluctuations. The result? You only get notified when it truly matters—issues impacting users, devices, applications, or critical services, like DHCP, DNS, RADIUS, or ISP fluctuations.
By eliminating alert fatigue and zeroing in on what matters most, Nile helps you maintain a smooth, high-performance experience— guaranteed performance across availability, coverage, and capacity, throughout your entire wired and wireless network.
3. Measuring and Achieving our Availability Metric: The Core of Reliability
Service availability is the heartbeat of any network—and at Nile, we take that seriously. But measuring it correctly is just as important. Traditional networks often rely on outdated metrics like CPU, memory, or link utilization, and they assume that if an access point or switch is powered on, the network is “up.” But anyone who’s worked in IT knows that’s far from the full picture.
A powered-on device doesn’t mean services are actually running, users are connecting, or applications are working. Underlying software bugs, misconfigurations, or compatibility issues can silently break the user experience even when the hardware appears healthy.
At Nile, we redefine availability by focusing on end-to-end service responsiveness. Our platform continuously monitors the health of critical services like DHCP, DNS, RADIUS, and Internet access—across both wired and wireless infrastructure. If users can’t connect, authenticate, or reach the apps they need, we don’t consider the network ‘available.’
And you won’t have to sift through dozens of irrelevant alerts to find that out. Unless there’s a physical issue—like a broken cable—we handle the rest automatically, eliminating 100% of unnecessary alerts.
Because real uptime isn’t just about devices being on—it’s about your network actually working, truly available, and responsive.
The Probing Process:
Our system uses wireless sensors that transmit probes to the Nile Service Block (NSB) Gateway every minute. These probes measure the response time, which gives us insight into the overall health and availability of the network. Here’s a step-by-step breakdown:
- Probes sent across infrastructure: Sensors send probes to various Nile Elements of the network, including access points (APs), and Access and Distribution Service Edge devices, if applicable.
- Good vs. Bad Minutes: If a probe responds within a minute, it’s marked as a “good” minute; if not, it’s “bad”.
- Calculating Availability: We calculate availability as a percentage of good minutes over the total minutes, across all sensors. So, if you had six sensors running 24/7 for a month (31 days), we’d aggregate their results to calculate the overall availability.
Example Calculation:
- Total minutes: (for 6 sensors over 31 days): 267,840 minutes
- Bad minutes: (2 sensors with 9 bad minutes each): 18 minutes
- Good minutes: Total minutes – Bad minutes = 267,822 minutes
- Availability: Good minutes/Total minutes × 100 = (267,822/267,840)×100 = 99.99% uptime.
4. When Physical Sensors Aren’t an Option: Virtual Probes to the Rescue
What happens when installing physical sensors isn’t possible? For instance, in environments where physical sensors can’t be plugged into the wall outlet, Nile’s Access Points (APs) contain dedicated radios that step in to act as virtual sensors. These APs send the same probes as physical sensors, measuring the availability in the same manner, ensuring that even in challenging environments, the service level is accurately monitored and maintained.
5. Coverage Metric: Voice Quality and Signal Strength Matter
When it comes to providing connectivity, coverage isn’t just about “being in range”; it’s about delivering voice-quality connectivity and strong signal strength throughout the entire customer environment, reaching every corner. For Nile, voice quality signal strength is paramount, and we define acceptable coverage as any signal strength of -67dBm or higher.
How We Measure Coverage Metric:
If used, our physical wireless sensors measure the Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) from the Nile Access Points (APs). If RSSI is above -67dBm, the minute is marked as “good,” otherwise it’s “bad”. By calculating the total number of good minutes over the total minutes, we get the Coverage Metric .
Example Calculation:
- Total minutes: (for 6 sensors over 31 days): 267,840 minutes
- Bad minutes: (2 sensors with 20 bad minutes each): 40 minutes
- Good minutes: Total minutes – Bad minutes = 267,800 minutes
- Coverage: Good minutes/Total minutes × 100 = (267,800/267,840)×100= 99.98% coverage.
Even when installing physical sensors isn’t feasible, Nile AP’s via virtual sensors ensure the same high level of monitoring and performance.
6. Capacity Metric: Ensuring Enough APs Are Available
Capacity refers to the availability of wireless access points (APs)—how many are available to meet user demand. To maintain seamless wireless connectivity across the environment by ensuring the right number of APs are always available, Nile’s sensors constantly scan for APs to ensure their availability. When the defined number of APs are available, the minute is marked as “good”; otherwise, it’s a “bad” minute —indicating a potential impact on wireless capacity.
How We Measure Capacity SLA:
- Availability of APs: We measure how many APs are actively broadcasting and how many are visible to the sensors.
- Calculation: We track good minutes and bad minutes across the network and calculate capacity as the percentage of good minutes.
Example Calculation:
- Total minutes: (for a month): 44,640 minutes
- Bad minutes: (1 minute where fewer APs were available): 1 minute
- Good minutes: Total minutes – Bad minutes = 44,639 minutes
- Capacity: Good minutes/Total minutes × 100 = (44,639/44,640)×100 = 99.99% capacity.
7. When Does Our Commitment Start?
At Nile, our commitment to delivering excellence begins as soon as an installation is complete. The moment a customer signs off on the installation, we start measuring and calculating metrics. This ensures that our commitment to guaranteed performance is immediately tied to actual, operational performance—no delays, no excuses!
Conclusion: Why We Never Settle for “Good Enough”
To summarize, Nile’s Guaranteed Performance is designed to deliver consistent, high-quality network experience—ensuring performance, availability, coverage, and capacity without compromise. By taking an outside-in approach, continuously measuring real user experience, and proactively addressing issues before they impact users, we’ve eliminated noisy alerts and are already delivering on our promise of Guaranteed Performance.
With that said, we don’t just want to meet expectations; we aim to exceed them. After all, when you’re delivering something as critical as network connectivity, being “good enough” simply isn’t good enough. It’s all about reliability, and at Nile, we’re committed to providing the best user and network experience possible.
So, the next time someone asks “Is the network up?”, you’ll know that at Nile, we’re ensuring it’s up, reliable, and performing at its best—every minute of every day!
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