Telecom industry participants gathered in Copenhagen for TM Forum’s Digital Transformation World. The content ranged from hyperbolic projections to sober confessions—and the latter is a good sign that the industry is maturing.
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Summary
Thousands of telecom industry participants gathered in Copenhagen in early September for TM Forum’s Digital Transformation World (DTW). As is often the case, the content ranged from hyperbolic projections to sober confessions. The latter is a good sign that the industry is maturing—moving away from hype to reality.
Analytics, AI, and automation could change everything
The three As—analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and automation—were, rightfully, a major focus of numerous sessions and demonstrations at DTW.
For years, communications service providers (CSPs) have known that they are sitting on a treasure trove of data—if only they could get their hands on it and extract insights. At least for the largest ones, their data estate is a mess. Siloes, inconsistent formats, and outdated or incorrect data have been built up over years, if not decades, of new services, mergers, and acquisitions. And no one has had much appetite to venture in to make sense of the madness.
Today, though, data management is a thing—making it easier to work with less structured or unstructured data—so there is some hope of finally doing something with all that data.
Once things are cleaned up, new whizzy data analytics tools can help find interesting patterns. AI takes it to another level by using what has happened in the past and combining it with some human-like intelligence—reasoning, self-correcting, and coming up with insights that a mere human might not immediately capture.
All this can feed into automation—either in a reactive or, more importantly, proactive mode. It is the latter that could be revolutionary and transformational—and, as a result, terrifying for CSPs to contemplate. No one should expect to see any CSPs turn over their networks to the robots. At least no time soon. Rather, they will automate the boring stuff that can be autonomous and let the models show them what should be done, but keep a human being in the chain of events to execute the recommendations.
CSPs share their real-world experiences
At the show, Axiata and Deutsche Telekom (DT) shared actual numbers to quantify the benefits of AI-led transformation. For example, Axiata said it saw 43% faster resolution time for end-user complaints, and 73% of end-user tickets were resolved automatically. DT said 70%+ tickets were automatically resolved or dispatched while reducing truck rolls by 15%.
Importantly, DT also spoke about how CSPs can benefit from automation before becoming fully autonomous: find the signal through the noise. The speaker highlighted these use cases: anomaly detection in LTE performance management, call drop per customer, correlation between network traffic and performance of CRM, automated root cause detection in compute nodes, and chronological sequence of alarm.
Separately, Verizon’s chief data officer, Linda Avery, explained how her group’s AI projects (that were not only for network-related issues) generated $2bn of value to various business units. That number came directly from the business units themselves, lending them more credence. Making a clear connection between AI and measurable business outcomes is extremely powerful, and necessary, at a time when the hype about the technology often drowns out the reason why CSPs will open their wallets and invest in it.
Oracle provided a demonstration of a practical, believable automated network slicing use case involving a fictional racing event. The value of this demonstration was in showing how real money can be generated from numerous participants in the value chain in an engaging and believable way, thereby cutting through the hand-wringing about how CSPs will monetize 5G.
Unclear why network-as-code will work this time
Google Cloud shared that it has had numerous Tier 1 companies asking that their network APIs be embedded in their cloud. All the talk about “network-as-code,” opening up the network and establishing developer ecosystems to take advantage of the network’s capabilities, still seems a bit much. Where is the evidence that the lack of these APIs is what is keeping these ecosystems from forming?
Similarly, “partnerships” and “marketplaces” remain firmly on the telecom buzzword bingo card, with no shortage of proponents at DTW—very notably, Rakuten. Somewhat less notably, Nokia (among others) is trying to reduce the friction needed to unleash innovation in a manner that the CSPs can capture some of the value (for a change). Historically, CSPs have struggled to develop ecosystems or partnerships that leverage the power of their networks. When pushed, proponents say what is different is that the CSPs are fighting for their very lives now, so this time it will happen. Most CSPs are not at risk of shutting down. They are at risk of becoming utilities. That is not the worst thing in the world—just not particularly flashy.
CSPs will get there in due time, so patience please
This year’s DTW had many examples of people being more realistic about the challenges. There is no mistaking it: This stuff is hard. The public cloud providers and digital native companies are completely different businesses than CSPs, and we should not hold CSPs’ metaphorical feet to the fire for not quickly pivoting to the cloud. No one needs to tell CSPs that the world has changed, and most of them are moving as quickly as is prudent. It may take longer than anyone would like, but they will get there.
DTW demonstrated that a lot really has changed since the last gathering in 2019 in terms of being able to support new ways of running a network and creating/delivering services. 5G does bring new opportunities. While CSPs are not guaranteed to capture these opportunities, they certainly can. Perhaps having the hyperscalers nipping at their heels will invigorate them and push them ever so slightly toward accepting a little more risk.
Appendix
Author
Roz Roseboro, Principal Analyst, Service Provider Transformation
