Mobile service providers can boost revenues and benefit from the broad range of potential commercial applications with LBS. Faced with an ever-increasing threat from “over-the-top” (OTT) services, service providers need to continuously explore new ways to generate income from their existing network infrastructure. LBS plays a significant role in this strategy.
In order to do that we recently sat down with Graham Kunz to discuss the next evolution of mobile technology. With Graham’s background in service assurance for wireless customers, it was an interesting conversation that I hope you will find useful.
At Empirix, our continued focus and development of our analytics platform will extend the value to both Wireless and Wireline Service Providers. Our solutions will continue to place emphasis on Customer Experience and Empirix will offer holistic insight into those key entities that reveals unnecessary Opex and Churn.
To date, it appears most of the MSPs that have deployed VoLTE have relied on active testing to effectively “spot check” the end-to-end service improvements and overall performance. Very little appears to have been done to look at overall QoE across the entire customer base.
As Mobile technology moves towards 5G there’s an increased rollout of small cells capable of supporting low latency, low data rate applications like smart energy, building security, infrastructure, retail and healthcare etc. It may still be several years before we see the first, commercially viable applications actually in operation.
Service providers are demanding more from their customer experience and service assurance solutions because they have a keen awareness of the richness and value of the information that flows across their networks. Reliably and accurately extracted, this information can be used to help manage not just the network, but also the services offered and the devices deployed. Insights can be also be gained around the performance of providers’ vendors and—most significantly—the experiences and value of their customers.
Companies migrating to an Agile development methodology have seen the benefits of accelerating deployments with smaller, more focused feature sets per release, but they have also experienced the pain of grouping those feature sets into workable code capable of being released to the public—without sacrificing quality.
The explosion of smartphones (~1.5 billion sold in 2015), the proliferation of applications accessible through 4G mobile networks, and the advent of over-the-top (OTT) services have all put pressure on traditional service providers to differentiate themselves, keep the customer base loyal and, most importantly, recover revenues currently flowing to OTT providers and other MNO competitors.
Designed for use by a service provider to manage the performance of all mobile devices on its network—2G, 3G or 4G—the solution generated interest from not only service providers, but also from network equipment vendors who are in the process of investigating not only the next generation in network technology but, more significantly, user or application devices capable of hosting next-generation services.
If the transition to virtualized environments in the enterprise is any indicator, it appears that the transition to NFV in CSPs is only a question of when, not if. Why is this so? Well, for the same reason the enterprises did it: to be more agile.