It is not new for telcos to constantly adopt new technologies to monetise their networks and services. Currently, telcos are reshaping their business considering the smart industry opportunity, and utilising AI to understand their own data, optimise their resources and cut down operational expenses.
Gartner estimates that 5G infra revenue will increase to $23 billion, and that IoT and private mobile networks business will continue to grow.
The shift to more mission-critical enterprise and industry services, based on streaming applications, is triggering a need for flawless connectivity and optimal performance for enterprise use cases, such as remote healthcare, autonomous transportation, robotic manufacturing, and other critical services.
The addition of connected small devices (sensors etc), private 5G networks rolled out by public telcos, and the use of cloud companies to build cloud networks is generating new data in the telco ecosystem, which can be harnessed to drive the enterprise services.
How the enterprise is reshaping the telco
Smart industry requires ubiquitous connectivity with high reliability. The enterprise user expects the network to operate seamlessly for critical services, such as autonomous cars, precision factories and remote surgical procedures. For this, SLA guarantees are becoming increasingly critical to the enterprise’s business model. From healthcare to transportation, smart industries are requiring telcos to keep up their performance standards.
Telcos will need to offer further advanced connectivity services, delivered on demand with the highest availability and quality, and perhaps a rethink of their business model.
Creating an intelligent telco
To deal with the immense complexity, scale, and diversity of use cases of the smart industry, intelligent connectivity is imperative. Whether intelligence is organically built into the networks or extracted from the network data, it is becoming critical to how telcos will deliver services for smart industries and, thereby, rebuild their revenue models.
Telcos are well positioned to offer intelligent insights to issues facing their enterprise customers. The information could be used to predict and resolve problems and made available to the wider telco ecosystem, for a new source of revenue return. Data can be mined from the network and turned into intelligent actionable insights using the predictive capabilities of AI. Using creative methods, the data can be contextualised and personalised for new revenue streams.
Unlocking the potential of data
Mining huge amounts of existing data from diverse sources of the network could help telcos to refine their AI models to analyse and create insights. This could help in restructuring costs, generating savings, and passing on the intelligence to whoever requires it. This is in addition to the use of historical data and its behaviour patterns to detect network problems, resolve them faster, prevent service breakdowns, and limit revenue losses.
Unlocking the potential of data can support the telco in building new revenue and for aligning with their customers’ needs. By cleverly predicting service needs, service behaviour and network response, telcos can delight their customers.
Harnessing the data with AI
Because telco network data is spread across a large network, it requires an effort to collate it. To top it, the data is disjointed and varied because a network is composed of multiple vendor equipment and multiple technologies. The data is generated in ultra-high volumes because of historical archives and billions of data collection points. This can pose difficulties in capturing because of the real-time nature of the data transactions.
Despite these challenges, data needs to be harnessed to make sense of it. A shared responsibility model can be created between a telco and software vendors like MYCOM OSI, who have understood the nature of telco business and telco network and services. This would help in integrating the data silos and creating a common platform that can leverage AI.
Applying AI to a telco network data brings higher levels of benefits, namely predictive reporting on network and services for a better understanding of the enterprise need.
Telecoms is a cash-generative business, and the desire for higher revenue growth is pushing telcos towards newer ways of building revenues. Unless the network and service data are mined using AI for insights and analytics, a lot of relevant intelligence (which could help create new services) could be lost forever. Monetizing new revenue streams rapidly through adoption of intelligent data mining technologies is crucial to development and delivery of new services at a lower cost.
Author: Andrew Coll, CEO, MYCOM OSI
This blog was first posted on Financial Times on 25th Sep 2023: https://www.ft.com/partnercontent/mycom-osi/driving-intelligent-data-mining-in-telcos-for-revenue-growth.html
