CSPs have long since accepted that they must continually optimise their networks for maximised utilisation and ultimately profitability, but ‘next gen’ services, such as the combination of video voicemail and instant messaging alongside voice, come with their own unique set of challenges.
The flexibility to deliver new services, adapt to trends and add functionality to services is key to retaining customers and attracting new ones.
As the costs of voice and data services are being constantly squeezed through competition, operators have been discussing developing new sources of revenue. This driver, combined with technological advances, has led to new products, services and markets, as well as innovative approaches to operational efficiency.
Best practice
When it comes to network optimisation, there are a whole host of best practices to get cost-effective and scalable strategies that can manage the constantly evolving optimisation challenges. Operators are looking more and more at intelligence automation and self-analysing decision support capabilities to ensure best performance and capacity on the network, day after day.
This will help to ensure the very best customer experience across a backdrop of multi-vendor and multi-technology network complexity, as well as declining ARPU, increased customer expectations and rising costs.
For example, we’re currently feeding key network data to a self-optimising network solution to drive automated optimisations and provide feedback on configuration changes. This dynamic will further improve the quality of service.
Which technologies are being deployed?
With opex budgets and headcount at an all-time low, CSPs are becoming more dependent on advanced technology to maximise the network investment.
Next generation assurance solutions allow operators to combine historical, siloed system information into one umbrella system which can be used by multiple departments. This provides optimisation teams with new visibility and end-to-end insight to aid in the root cause analysis process. More recently, they have begun to offer user controlled automation, putting network insights into the hands of hundreds of users.
The amount of data that is now available to network optimisation teams is so vast and varied, it is proving difficult to identify real network performance issues against the background noise. With intelligent analysis and automation, operators can easily identify high priority performance issues across the network and affected services and customers, leading to rapid resolution and maximised utilisation of resources.
There are still large areas of optimisation for CSPs to exploit. Intelligent automation is still in its early stages, and has huge potential across network operations, network optimisation and customer care.
