Accenture has agreed to acquire network intelligence and customer experience analytics firm Ookla, the company behind Speedtest and Downdetector.
The move indicates how central network performance has become to modern customer experience, which is shaped as much by latency, signal strength and uptime as it is by the apps and interfaces customers interact with.
The deal brings Ookla’s network intelligence, benchmarking and experience analytics into Accenture’s data and AI stack to help communications service providers, hyperscalers and enterprises better design, monitor, and optimize the Wi-Fi and 5G networks that sit underneath digital interactions.
For many consumers, Ookla brands are synonymous with checking whether “the internet is broken.” Accenture aims to use those same signals, aggregated and analyzed with AI, to help enterprises prevent issues before customers notice.
Accenture plans to integrate Ookla’s products including Speedtest, Downdetector, Ekahau, and RootMetrics into its broader enterprise offerings. Together, they give organizations visibility across network performance, real-world user experience, and incident detection.
Julie Sweet, chair and CEO of Accenture, said:
“Modern networks have evolved from simple infrastructure into business-critical platforms. Without the ability to measure performance, organizations cannot optimize experience, revenue, or security. By acquiring Ookla, we will help our clients across business and government scale AI safely and build the trusted data foundations they need to deliver the reliable, seamless connectivity that creates value.”
Why Networks Are Becoming a CX Problem
This acquisition comes at a time when CX teams are being pulled deeper into conversations once owned by IT and network engineering. As AI-powered services scale, even small performance hiccups can ripple quickly into customer frustration, abandoned transactions, or reputational damage.
Manish Sharma, Accenture’s Chief Strategy and Services Officer, noted:
“In an era of omni-channel and agentic access, low-latency, zero-friction connectivity is a competitive necessity, and these tools give enterprises the power to build the high-performance environments they need.”
Beyond its use by the telecom industry to monitor and keep services running, network data has become a key strategic asset fueling critical business outcomes across industries.
As AI scales, insights captured at the network, device, and application layers are essential to enhancing fraud prevention, especially in customer-facing operations such as banking. For example, Transaction Network Services (TNS) is applying network-level intelligence and AI to secure inbound voice channels in contact centers. By correlating network attributes with real-time call behavior, the company’s approach can validate whether a call originates from the claimed device and network, helping to filter out imposters before they reach agents to protect customer trust while maintaining a smooth experience.
In retail, connectivity quality affects everything from in-store mobile checkout to real-time inventory systems. Utilities and smart home providers rely on stable networks to deliver proactive service rather than reactive support. When the network fails, the experience fails with it.
