Wireless networks are demanding new levels of data capture and analysis.
Organize, analyze and prioritize is a mantra being chanted by the wireless industry and its supporting cast of operational support system (OSS) suppliers as their search for a holistic view of today’s advanced networks, and the vast amounts of data they’re producing, intensifies.
Exactly how, where and by whom the crucial data being collected by sophisticated networks is being used – from improving operational efficiencies and quality assurance, to marketing and customer care – is now top of mind for most wireless carriers, and pushing their support community deeper into the world of data collection and usage.
And it’s not only affecting traditional functions such as engineering, but entire organizations.
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| Yoely: Complexity of next-generation networks is demanding improved data-gathering capabilities. |
“We’re seeing the growth of information coming from networks especially in wireless. There’s a great jump in network performance, particularly with 4G networks, but they are also becoming much more complex, so there’s a growing need to collect data, process it and decide what to do with it in a very demanding market,” said Duby Yoely, vice president of marketing and solutions engineering for TTI Telecom.
Traditionally, fault management and improving a network’s performance have been the key recipients of the data generated by the network. Not anymore.
Functions such as marketing, customer care, billing, sales and just about every discipline within an organization are now finding that the highly coveted data derived from a network, particularly customer information, can be analyzed, prioritized and utilized in a number of ways.
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| Rotch: Personalization in wireless is a data game changer. |
“There is new data being collected, and it’s about personalization and new transactions. We’re seeing a move to personalized data and one-to-one marketing. And there are other data points attempting to collect more data to understand consumers to target mobile advertising and more. There’s lots of investment in bringing data closer to the network and flowing it into the network, and pushing the customer data model and intelligence into the network,” said Will Rotch, CTO-Americas for billing at Comverse.
SHOW ME THE MONEY
There’s a financial side to the new data collection model as well, experts maintain. “An important part of a carrier’s financial obligation is reporting assets and value. But often, there’s inaccurate data about their networks, like how many ports are actually being used, and inventory. The network is a living, breathing thing and changes every day with new switches, ports, lines and new services. We’ve found 30%-40% of this data isn’t being tracked or recorded. It can be a nightmare,” said Sanjay Mewada, vice president of strategy for NetCracker, a service and resource management company playing in the OSS/data space.
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| Mewada: One third of network data isn’t being tracked. |
Bad dreams about neglecting this valuable data aren’t helped by the tricky integration processes that can collect and deliver it to the right people.
“There’s lots of technology available in the underlying functions, but not a lot of work being done in orchestrating the technology. A lot of the costs are in the integration of delivery. And a lot of carriers aren’t picking through this data carefully for BSS, billing, analyzing traffic, business analytics and intelligence. But that will change, and probably quickly,” Rotch said.
It probably already has. Competition is heating up and the technology driving today’s advanced networks is adding a layer of sophistication that can generate huge amounts of data. “There is so much more data today, and it’s from real people. We know who they are, what they do and where. That is tremendously helpful for our customers. For example, traffic monitoring and in marketing for modeling their packaging to the data. And it’s all available,” said Jan Lindeberg, product marketing manager of the service assurance division at Anritsu.
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| Devlin: Time is of the essence in gathering data for network changes. |
SHRINKING TIME MODELS
The new data model also represents a sea change from past methodologies of how data was collected, and where it went. “We used to plan our networks by simple trending, like monitoring traffic flow and figuring out when and where to add more switches. But that’s not working anymore. Now, we need to plan in advance of subscriber behavior changes and use sophisticated demographic tools to plan services, and the impact they will have on the overall network. That is a real challenge and requires a network transformation of OSS that will tell us what to add 30 days from now, not two years from now. It’s shrinking the planning horizon,” said Mike Devlin, vice president of business development for VPIsystems, a player in the wireless billing and OSS space.
It’s also prompting some much needed industry standards, said Allen Seidman, vice president of business development and product management for Telcordia. Without them, he said the OSS/data world could get rather chaotic.
“The industry wants to improve the quality of information for the 360-degree view of customers and networks. But if data isn’t translatable or workable, there needs to be a framework, like eTOM (enhanced Telecom Operations Map, created by TeleManagement Forum as a guidebook for telecom industry business practices). We need to develop a model that provides structure and language to describe connections of where data will travel. And in the end, what data gets routed and where. We’ve found that poor information management is the industry’s Achilles heel,” Seidman said.
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| Anritsu’s MasterClaw is a probe-based monitoring system for end-to-end monitoring of converged networks. It’s based on a 3-layer architecture with distributed intelligence: The data acquisition layer with distributed probes for end-to-end coverage, the data processing layer with servers and applications, and the presentation layer with an advanced, Web-based GUI portal. |
The company’s answer, Seidman noted, is its “common language” solution. “It’s a platform that translates the vast amount of data between service providers, regulators and vendors and can flow data between them. It’s like a dictionary and syntax,” he said.
With the growing appetite for customer and network data becoming nearly insatiable, a new challenge is emerging, admitted Yoely. “The mechanisms to collect and use data exist. But the challenge now is in the amount of subscribers in mass-market applications. When you get into the millions, that becomes a big challenge. That’s when performance data of the network becomes a key piece. We have to constantly improve the technology and upgrade the processing and collection of data.”
It doesn’t get any easier on the mobile side, but the vast amount of data being collected, and the new uses for it, is expected to aid the wireless industry. Concluded Mewada: “There is more data being collected on the mobile side, like what’s being downloaded on mobile phones. That is data which hasn’t typically been collected, and today’s carriers are much more sophisticated in what data they collect. So the capabilities to capture and analyze the data will become crucial.”