As the mobile industry transforms to an all-IP environment with the deployment of LTE, traditional approaches to network, service and customer assurance are no longer effective. Customer behaviour has changed, says Lyn Cantor, and so must operator strategies for network roll-out and monetization. Co-sponsored feature: Tektronix Communications 
                                                 

                
Lyn Cantor: Simply adding more probes to the network isn't
the answer
            
                     
Transformation in the telecoms industry is not a new concept. It has been talked about, and worked on, for more than a decade and will continue for many years to come. However, with LTE rolling out across the world, bringing with it an all-IP network environment, customers consuming ever increasing volumes of bandwidth and Over-the-top providers (OTTs) competing for the attention of the end-user; the need for the transformation process to accelerate is apparent.
“Transformation today is centered around the customer,” says Lyn Cantor, President of Tektronix Communications. “The challenge for operators now is to build their mobile data networks to address the demand for mobile broadband; and meet the needs of their customers. That’s clearly the case in the U.S., where the tier one carriers Verizon Wireless and AT&T are already at advanced stages of their LTE rollout.”
LTE can provide the cost-effective bandwidth to support the burgeoning usage of smartphones, and tablets, among their customers; but it comes with a series of new challenges for operators to address. “LTE gives operators the economies of scale they need to drive down the rising costs associated with delivering data over existing neworks; but LTE is completely different from the circuit switched, or hybrid architecture, operators currently run,” adds Cantor. “Operators will have to address interoperability challenges when LTE is integrated with new network elements that have combined functionality. The complexity that this will bring to the network environment has the potential to negatively impact the quality of experience a customer ultimately receives.”
In competitive mobile markets that cannot be allowed to happen because customers are more than ready to switch from a provider at the slightest degradation in service. “Knowing that the network is working as expected isn’t enough any more,” says Cantor. “Operators need to know the experience that their users are getting. The network still underpins that experience, but what is carried over it and how effectively that is delivered is now critical. Ten years ago users might have accepted a dropped call once in a while, but today that is unacceptable. Users’ expectations have changed dramatically as the convenience and necessity of mobile communications has permeated nearly all aspects of society today.”
Cantor provdes the example of a new service, such as video calling, failing to perform as expected. A poor experience of this type of service could lead to a subscriber changing provider, or even worse, kill the service altogether following bad publicity generated by customer complaints. Ensuring an individual customer’s experience is not an easy task for operators to address and, while monitoring every users’ experience all the time is technically possible, in reality it is cost prohibitive. “Simply adding more probes to the network isn’t the answer, because the cost will escalate out of control relative to the value of the service delivered,” adds Cantor. “Those costs come in terms of the cost of the probes themselves but also in the storage and analysis of the data they collect. Extracting business intelligence that can be acted on in real-time is critical, but to do that, the data has to be manageable.”
With these new dynamics in mind, Cantor, who re-joined Tektronix Communications in April 2011, has been restructuring the company over the last 18-24 months to prepare it to help operator customers leverage data more effectively. “We’re expanding our propositions from the approach of just being about saving money, to helping our customers make more money. They can achieve this by better leveraging the data in their network for making better business decisions,” he adds. “The high-value, cross-domain data our systems collect, and correlate, gives us the ability to see real-time quality, and usage, at the end-user level, right down to the performance of the handset. This level of granular insight can be fed into the marketing teams and other customer-facing organizations to leverage. It is this level of customer intimacy that allows the operators to deliver on their promises to their subscribers, which ultimately translates to increased profitability.”
Having access to the right data at the right time is not an easy task given the myriad of technologies that make up today’s modern networks. “We artfully mine the data collected from all over the network to provide operators with the end-to-end view of their business,” explains Cantor. “Network technologies have become more complex as carrier networks continue to flatten, but they are required to deliver mobile broadband and data services with high quality. Network environments are now made up of countless elements, interfaces and protocols, it is important that the operator can harness all of that fragmented data and turn it into meaningful, actionable information. We provide operators with the tools that are required to access, collect and analyse all of the data held within the network.”
Those tools will help them understand the impact of the OTT providers on their business as well as their networks. Critically such tools also provide the potential for operators to monetise the data they hold and charge OTTs for access to it. “The volume and types of data being transported by networks is growing exponentially,” says Cantor. “Some operators are struggling to both optimise and monetise this surge in data traffic. We can help by ensuring that those new network deployments, and ongoing operations, are as cost efficient as they can be and that network resources are set up properly, and utilized, as designed.”
“Operators are constantly looking for more upsell and cross-sell opportunities, which requires a greater understanding of an individual user’s quality and usage patterns,” he explains. “Operators have only had limited ability to do that in the past. However, the detailed information we can provide about individual subscribers can empower operators to directly align their customer resources with their customer needs.”
The industry’s evolution to LTE will enable operators to exploit the insight they have into their customers in ways that they have never done so before. “The intelligence about the network, the services and the user experience that they can now access, make use of and monetise using our portfolio is quite compelling,” concludes Cantor. “It’s now up to the operators to seize the opportunity and turn data from their network into bottom-line profitability.” GTB
                   
Lyn Cantor is president of Tektronix Communications