Digital transformation has been one of the most hyped phrases in years, but this does not take away from the fact that it is happening all around us. It’s part of the seismic shift in technological change. Today’s digital transformation projects are touching nearly every industry, and will provide the foundation for innovative new products, services, and digital experiences that haven’t even been invented yet.
This is especially true for the telecom industry, where today’s digital transformation investments will be felt for generations. CSPs are both rolling out their own digital services as well as enabling others to do so. This requires fast changing and adaptive operational support systems (OSS) that leverage machine learning, artificial intelligence, and automation. These solutions can be rapidly adapted for the needs of the various services being delivered and can be accessed through open APIs.
5G is well on its way. The GSMA estimates that it already reaches 1 billion consumers, and by 2025, 5G is expected to cover one-third of the world’s population. Use cases are just getting started, but already include immersive in-store environments, remote healthcare diagnostics, traffic management, smart campuses, ports and factories, industrial robotics, and improved gaming and e-sports.
In 2030 6G will begin its roll out, introducing a whole new realm that Marcus Weldon of Nokia Bell Labs says will be a “sixth sense experience for humans and machines,” where biology meets AI. Early use cases include self-driving (or flying) autonomous vehicles, virtual and augmented reality, digital twins, and even space exploration.
It’s an exciting world. The rate of new services being introduced, the number and diversity of devices and endpoints to manage, and the business agility needed to track network performance and service level agreements at scale and in real time, will all continue to climb exponentially. Meanwhile, operators will be managing multiple existing technology generations while planning for and rolling out future ones.
What Does This Mean for CSPs?
The Need for Massive Scalability, Automation, and Agility.
With data traffic expected to grow four-fold between 2022 and 2028, (GSMA Intelligence, Global Mobile Trends 2023) today’s networks, and the decades-old OSS systems that support them, simply won’t be able to keep up for long. Telecom networks are evolving, becoming more complex and moving closer to the enterprise edge to deliver specialised solutions where and when they’re needed. Today’s operational support systems (OSS) need to be dynamic and agile, providing real-time analytical insights and enabling automation through machine learning and AI. Scalability, automation, and agility are more than buzzwords. They have become the foundation for operators that want to achieve their business goals over the next decade, which brings us to the second point…
The Need to Maximise How Networks are Monetised
Over the last five years, Western European telcos have been spending increasingly more on capital expense, investing heavily in 5G spectrum and networks. Typically, around 90% of these capital expenditures will be invested into the network infrastructure. After years of investment, operators now need to maximise how their networks are monetised, but this can be easier said than done. Most operator networks are massive and highly complex organisations managing billions of network transactions every day. But in today’s market, CSPs often need to behave a bit more like a startup, with the capability to create and experiment with new business models and services on the fly. In this model CSPs both deliver some services and enable others. The ecosystem needs to be dynamic and the systems supporting it need to be dynamic also.
The Future Looks Bright – But Are You Ready?
Private 5G Networks are Poised for Growth
While retail customers will continue to be a prime focus for many mobile operators, 5G opportunities on the business/enterprise side are expected to be the biggest driver of growth. Ninety percent of operators view 5G as crucial for boosting enterprise sales, thanks to its ability to support a variety of private networks and IoT use cases. According to the GSMA Enterprise Opportunity survey, the majority of private network opportunities are expected to be in media and entertainment, hospitals, airports, mining, agriculture, and oil and gas. And they are expanding at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 49.0% from 2022 to 2030. (Grand View Research)
Meanwhile, Fibre Networks are More Important Than Ever.
Innovation is soaring in the wireline sector as well. Engineers in Japan recently set a new speed record, transmitting 1.53 petabytes per second through a standard diameter optical fibre. To put this in perspective, the entire bandwidth of the global internet is estimated at just under 1 petabyte per second, meaning this fibre could handle all of it with room to spare. Highspeed broadband is now viewed by many as a fundamental right, with the U.S. and other countries upping their investments towards improving connectivity gaps that became painfully apparent during Covid-19 when we all transitioned to working, learning, and shopping from home. And of course, despite its name, every ‘wireless’ 5G network requires a whole lot of fibre.
Change Before you Have To.
U.S. businessman Jack Welch famously said, “Change before you have to.” That’s sage advice for any organisation that wants to stay ahead of the game. But when it comes to operators continuing to rely upon OSS systems that were built for telecom networks of thirty or forty years ago, time has run out. You’re playing OSS Russian Roulette with your network. Here’s why.
Legacy OSS systems are simply ‘not enough’:
- Not agile enough – to rapidly support multiple technologies, services, vendors, and network types.
- Not smart enough – to efficiently manage network intricacies, like accurately mapping services to the network.
- Not configurable enough – to rapidly support complex business models and SLAs and run on the cloud.
- Not scalable enough – to efficiently manage the growing speed and number of transactions.
- Not open enough – to rapidly enable new innovative service providers.
There’s a tremendous amount of growth opportunity in the years ahead. Enghouse OSS solution suite is built with the next generation of networking in mind, leveraging advanced AI technologies that deliver greater operational efficiencies and an improved customer experience. We support the way networks really are – with both traditional and disaggregated components. Each Enghouse OSS solution can be deployed standalone, or they work even better together.
- Automatically detect, analyze, and respond to network issues and events.
- Spot critical business trends with quick access to stunning visualisations and interactive displays.
- Offer open APIs for CSP innovation and for enabling ecosystem partners.
Your digital transformation dream come true. An OSS platform that empowers growth and success.
Network Planning and Design – Enable rapid fibre network buildouts with a full geospatial network planning, design, and engineering platform. Improve the decision-making process and achieve productivity gains in network operations.
Inventory Management – Improve time to market for network and service rollouts. Drive accuracy and gain the ability to clearly map network and services by dynamically correlating resource inventory data across all network layers.
Service Assurance: End-to-end solutions for managing critical services in real-time. Includes fault and performance management with automated root cause, service, and customer impact analyses, along with integration to external systems, and topology correlation.
Network Testing: Empower customer service agents and field crews to automatically test access and broadband FTTH, FTTB and FTTP networks. Cut truck rolls by 20% – 30% and reduce repeat dispatches by 10%.
For more information, contact us today.
