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.
Ookla’s platform captures more than 1,000 attributes per test across device, application, and network layers. Accenture is positioning that data as fuel for AI-driven decision-making.
Accenture highlighted several use cases where deeper network intelligence connects directly to experience and cost outcomes.
Stephen Bye, CEO of Ookla said, “Our combined capabilities will enable us to more effectively serve CSPs, AI infrastructure providers, edge data centers and enterprise networks.”
Communication service providers can move toward more autonomous networks, using real-time data and predictive modeling to guide capital planning and reduce operational costs while improving service reliability.
Hyperscalers and cloud providers gain clearer visibility into the resilience of AI infrastructure and edge data centers, where inference workloads are increasingly sensitive to latency and downtime.
Enterprises designing private 5G and Wi-Fi networks can troubleshoot issues before employees or customers feel the impact.
Sharma said:
“With the Ookla portfolio, we will offer end-to-end network intelligence services essential for AI-based transformation. Speedtest and RootMetrics define the experience; Downdetector identifies incidents faster; and Ekahau drives digital workplace transformation through superior Wi-Fi.”
Founded in 2006 and operating as a division of Ziff Davis, Ookla’s data platform is powered by more than 250 million consumer-initiated tests each month, combined with controlled testing methods that deliver quality-of-service and quality-of-experience insights.
“Joining Accenture will allow us to scale our premiere network data business across the world’s largest enterprises and accelerate our goal of creating better connected experiences,” said Stephen Bye, CEO of Ookla. “Our combined capabilities will enable us to more effectively serve CSPs, AI infrastructure providers, edge data centers and enterprise networks.”
The transaction is subject to regulatory approvals, and financial terms were not disclosed.
