Digital Transformation Communications Service Providers

There is no question upgrading or rebuilding a telecommunications network takes years of careful planning and millions of dollars to implement.  The question is, after making such a substantial investment, how can you make sure this new network will deliver on the promises of digital transformation?

In Europe, Vodafone Group extended its partnership with NETSCOUT, planning to use NETSCOUT solutions to help analyze and enhance network performance, and improve customer experience.  These solutions cover all its deployed technology domains, as well as future systems, such as 5G.

New Zealand’s Spark plans to migrate to an all IP-based infrastructure, which is consistent with digital transformation trends that are sweeping the globe. Spark’s recent announcement was nicely summarized in by ZD Net.  The intent to implement technologies such as NFV/SDN, 5G and IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) are all indicative of the need to effectively utilize “pillars-of-innovation” that empower communications service providers (CSPs) to accelerate the delivery of new Cloud-based services and applications to customers, while reducing their OPEX and CAPEX in the process.

To realize this vision, however, it is critical to develop a comprehensive Service Assurance and Security Assurance strategies that are based on end-to-end visibility into all voice, video and data services across the entire new infrastructure, including radio access network (RAN), Wi-Fi, IMS, Evolved Packet Core and NFV/SDN. Since every voice, video and data session is traversing this infrastructure via IP traffic flows (a.k.a wire-data); analysis of these flows is the best source of visibility. To optimize the insight, these IP traffic flows need to be collected across wireless, wired, virtual and physical environments and processed in real-time at the source, for scalability reasons. The analysis of the processed and organized data can then be effectively analyzed to offer insights into network and service assurance, subscriber analytics, Big Data analytics, CEM and cybersecurity, ensuring cost-effective, high-performance digital service delivery.

These insights can be used to continually improve offerings, drive new revenue and reduce cost – essentially the path to your future.  To capture these insights and truly future-proof your investment, planning for the future needs to include planning for service assurance and security assurance.