Digitalization is all about traffic generation

Image credit: By ImageFlow | shutterstock.com

Digitalization is, without question, the most important challenge faced by operators today, and they should not be averse to seeking assistance from industry leaders and strategic partners who can help to improve their competitiveness and business operation.

With the development of technologies such as big data, operators’ marketing activities (user acquisition and service development) are usually digitally enabled and supported. However, where the production systems of operators are digitalized, quite often the planning, deployment and operation of the entire production system has not reached end-to-end digitalization.

Jeffery Liu, president of Southern Pacific Region at Huawei Technologies, has been working in the carrier business for more than 20 years. In the video interview below, he outlines what digitalization of operators means, production systems (3G/4G network communication system) or video data services provided for end users, and whether everyone even has the same understanding of digitalization.

He has carefully studied the eTOM model in the Business Process Frameworx, launched by TM Forum (TMF) over the past 30 years. Based on this he feels that an operators’ digital transformation involves three parts: (1) digitalization surrounding the production system of SIP (Strategy, Infrastructure & Product)’s service flow; (2) digitalization surrounding marketing and user operations business flow; (3) digitalization of enterprise management support systems.

The production system of operators refers to a basic network, and this is all about traffic generation, regardless of whether its 3G/4G or 5G eMBB. The usage of this data traffic could be linked to anything from messaging and emails to high-quality voice packet VoLTE or 4K video streaming.

Traffic is the source that determines the point where capacity expansion and adjustment need to be performed on a production system. The nature of traffic reflects the result of overall service development of operators, and it is also the starting point of network planning. The entire network needs to ensure that user requirements can be supported by traffic that flows smoothly. The essence of network planning is traffic prediction, which requires high accuracy of community level traffic forecasts six to 12 months in advance. Existing planning used to obtain a site to build a tower is only about 50% accurate and this is simply not good enough. But with high-precision maps and mathematical modeling, the results can be calculated within a week with 90% matching operators’ data.

In future digital development, Liu says, carriers will need suppliers that are not only leading in technologies and standards, but also able to help them achieve digital strategic partnerships – not just between operators and Huawei, but also major players in the industry ecosystem, such as subcontractors and business sales channels, all of whom must be digitalized together.

These six modules – customer’s business insight, network planning targets (including three-year targets and annual targets), most important traffic forecast, monthly rolling insight into customers, LLD planning and BOQ cross-domain – constitute the main line of Huawei’s Southern Pacific Carrier Business Group’s interaction with customers around the customer’s production system.

In this interview, Liu explains that when operators develop users and operate services, various types of data (including network data) are closely related to their support and connection, and have a qualitative change compared with those in the past. In this way, Huawei can play an important role in supporting and enabling customers’ marketing based on various data and technologies from the front end.

Huawei will work with operators to promote digitalization based on the two main business processes of customers, help customers achieve E2E service agility, shorten 50% of TTM by three to six months, and help customers achieve business success.

This article is sponsored by Huawei

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