Signal to Insight

The Year We Stopped Trusting Green KPIs 5G NSA · LTE · KPI Methodology · 6 min read In earlier generations, a healthy KPI dashboard usually meant a healthy network. By 2021, that assumption quietly stopped being true. As 5G NSA deployments scaled and traffic patterns shifted, networks that were technically compliant became operationally fragile. KPIs stayed green. Users experienced delays, retries, and intermittent failures that were difficult to reproduce in controlled tests. The problem was not missing counters. It was how existing counters were being interpreted. What the old KPI model was designed for Most KPIs in operational use were designed to answer single-layer, binary questions. Did the procedure complete? Was the threshold crossed? These questions made sense when network behavior was relatively sequential and device activity was steady. KPI What it measured What it could not see RRC setup success Procedure completed withou...