07 October 2025
As one of Africa’s largest telecommunications providers, serving over 60 million customers with voice, messaging, and data services, this company also extends its reach to business clients across more than 50 countries. Its offerings include high-grade internet connectivity, Internet of Things (IoT) solutions, cloud hosting, and security services.
Managing such a vast and complex network infrastructure requires sophisticated tools for visibility, troubleshooting, and ensuring optimal service delivery. Eli, a network broker planner overseeing the company’s tapping and aggregating platform at nine major sites and six smaller locations, plays a vital role in planning, forecasting, troubleshooting, and maintaining network performance. His goal is to build an efficient, resilient, and profitable network that delivers the best possible experience to customers.
Achieving deep network visibility and efficiency
The company’s deployment of Gigamon solutions predates Eli’s tenure by four years, and over the years, Gigamon has become integral to his operations.
As fraud incidents and network complexities increased, the company invested heavily in Gigamon’s sophisticated tools to gain insight into traffic patterns and network behaviour. Starting with GigaVUE-HD4 appliances, the network evolved to include GigaVUE-TA10 aggregators, GigaVUE-HC3, and GigaVUE-TA200 units.
According to Eli, Gigamon is essential for deep observability, asserting that, “without Gigamon, we would lack the visibility needed to understand our network and traffic flows.”
One of the pressing issues Eli faced was the overwhelming number of duplicate packets in the Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) fabric, which hampered traffic analysis and network efficiency. After conducting a thorough business case analysis comparing various vendors, he identified Gigamon’s GigaSMART technology as the optimal solution. During a proof-of-concept, the de-duplication feature of GigaSMART achieved an impressive 88% reduction in duplicate packets for user-plane traffic, significantly improving network clarity and probe efficiency.
“Not even the probing vendors are able to provide a feature like Gigamon provides. If you look at increasing probe capacity, that will cost you around five times the amount as a Gigamon smart module,” advises Eli.
Advanced visibility and intelligent traffic management
Gigamon’s suite of solutions, including the GigaVUE® TA and HC series appliances, GigaSMART applications, and the innovative GigaVUE Enriched Metadata, forms the backbone of the company’s network monitoring and analysis capabilities.
GigaVUE Enriched Metadata, in particular, offers a groundbreaking perspective on subscriber behaviour, providing deep insights into network usage and helping identify critical service issues. This advanced metadata enables Eli and his team to gain a clearer understanding of traffic patterns and application performance, which is crucial for maintaining high-quality service levels.
Gigamon’s tools empower Eli to monitor network usage across different regions of Africa, pinpoint performance bottlenecks, and address issues such as latency spikes. This insight allows his team to optimize network investments and improve overall quality of service. The solutions seamlessly feed traffic data to probes for various projects — ranging from compliance and analytics to performance troubleshooting — while maintaining a resilient infrastructure with zero downtime, which significantly enhances return on investment. Additionally, Gigamon’s compatibility with other vendor solutions simplifies the process of integrating feeds for diverse projects, making it easier for Eli to manage complex network environments.
Transforming network operations and customer experience
The deep observability provided by Gigamon has transformed how Eli and his team troubleshoot and optimize the telecommunications network.
The availability of comprehensive traffic data has dramatically reduced the time required to identify and resolve issues, directly contributing to improved service quality and operational efficiency.
“Over the past nine years, I’ve had the opportunity to work closely with Gigamon, navigating the evolving landscape of mobile networks. Throughout this journey, I’ve encountered challenges, and time and again, Gigamon Support has risen to the occasion — delivering exceptional service and effective resolutions,” says Eli. “Their success is clearly driven by a top-down approach, where leadership, engineers, and support teams collaborate with agility, fostering trust and innovation. One standout development is GigaVUE Enriched Metadata, which offers a cutting-edge perspective on subscriber behaviour and delivers deep network insights — crucial for addressing critical service issues. I’m a proud customer partner with Gigamon and excited about the promising future ahead.”
Ease of use is another significant advantage. Eli praises the Gigamon Fabric Manager for its intuitive interface, which allows even new team members to quickly understand and navigate the network environment.
“If you look at the Gigamon product line, it’s helped our company become closer to the customer. We want to be on the same journey with them and connect them,” explains Eli. “Our whole motto is about connecting our people and our customers, and the Gigamon infrastructure has met our demands. It’s a world-class service.”
