Jim Machi
Proactive Care Puts Operators One Step Ahead
By Thomas Fuerst, Senior Director, Multimedia Solutions MarketingAlcatel-Lucent
Monitoring and analyzing network data proactively saves operators time, money, and customers.
When a network service fails, it makes headlines, ticks off customers, and costs that network operator money. When a failure is headed off in advance, on the other hand, there might not be praise-laden headlines, but it's newsworthy nonetheless.
The traditional approach to customer care has typically been: a disgruntled customer calls customer service and complains of a service interruption or problem; the rep, learning of it for the first time, sends out a technician the next day, and eventually finds a resolution. Often, customers are left feeling put out, and the operator has spent significant time and money resolving the problem. Even worse is the customer who doesn’t call and just feels this is ‘typical’ of their network experience. That is a customer at risk of leaving.
Proactive care flips this dynamic on its head by using predictive analytics to identify potential outages or errors in the network and stop them before they occur. It consists of three main parts: one, constantly monitoring and measuring data on the network; two, real-time analysis of the data; and three, the most important, acting on that analysis to fix the problem.
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10 Lessons from Volleyball
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Emerging Threats Combats a Million Plus Pieces of New Malware a Week
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NFV-Based Software Telcos Need OSS/BSS Interoperability
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SysAid's Lifshitz: The Cloud Will Dominate ITSM Market
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Avaya Takes Networking Lead in SPB
At Interop Las Vegas 2013 Avaya was demonstrating their real-world Shortest Path Bridging (SPB) solutions and while interoperating with Spirent, HP and...
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Alianza Wants to Host Your Software Telco
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Blogging and Tweeting and Writing, Oh No!
October 2, 2012Some of you may have noticed that a few weeks ago I entered the realm of tweeting. Some may ask “what took you so long?” Some may have just said to themselves, “You gotta be kidding me.” Well, to the point about what took you so long, it was really about making sure I would be able to follow through. If I do something, I want to make sure I will do it and I was worried about carrying through on the commitment. I already blog once per week like clockwork, and I frequently write articles on top of my “regular” job, so I was reluctant to enter the realm of Shaq, Kim Kardashian and the like.
Who's Going to Deliver Mobile Video Services?
September 25, 2012On October 4th, I will be speaking at the Mobility Tech Conference and Expo in Austin, Texas.
The title of the talk is called “When Visions Collide” and the abstract reads in part “Do service providers have the ability to make the transition to video calls or should we accept that these calls are going to be ‘Over the Top’?”
I’d like to explore that topic a bit in this blog prior to the talk next week.
Solving the Mobile Congestion Crisis, One Network at a Time [Infographic]
September 19, 2012Lately, service providers have been facing an influx of subscribers who’ve been unable to complete phone calls or send text messages, or have experienced extremely slow data speeds, all the while having to deal with relatively small data caps! This poor mobile experience is partly due to the network congestion issues in the service provider’s mobile data networks. I think it’s safe to say we’ve all experienced this one way or another by now. And if you think it’s getting worse, it is!
Video Communications as an OTT App
September 11, 2012
Two week ago, I explored Voice as an OTT App. Looking at the Cisco VNI report, I went a little deeper into the Voice as a type of data than the high level reporting provided. In the course of doing that, I found that video communications, which is basically video calling, is larger than voice communications. Given that an Exabyte is 1024 Petabytes, in 2016 video calling would be over 30x more prevalent on a mobile data network than voice!
The IP Network Interconnect Problem and the GSMA IPX Solution, Part 2
September 4, 2012Two weeks ago, I introduced the concept of the IPX as a standardized interconnect service for IP networks. But what is required to be IPX compliant? One good place to start is by reading the GSMA IPX White Paper.
Voice as an OTT App
August 28, 2012
I’ve been writing a lot in this blog about the wireless industry’s movement to IP and its impact. One obvious impact is the amount of mobile data predicted to be passed along the mobile networks. I’ve cited the Cisco VNI report one source of this data, which you can look at below. One realization from viewing this data is that the on-ramp to the internet is increasingly coming from mobile devices.
The IP Network Interconnect Problem and the GSMA IPX Solution
August 21, 2012As the industry moves towards full-scale IP networks, the problem of interconnecting all these networks with the different service providers (each with their own IP networks) becomes glaringly important to resolve. And with discussions of a PSTN sunset happening in various countries around the world, full-scale seamless core IP network interconnection becomes ever more urgent.
Additional complexity is added because we’re not just only talking about voice now.
Talking About SpeechTEK
August 14, 2012Yesterday, I attended SpeechTek in New York. With all the hype and bling in our industry revolving around video and data, SpeechTek makes no bones about expanding beyond voice to include “multimodal” self service. However, Siri has revitalized speech itself, and I found the show fairly vitalized because of this. This show is definitely different than it used to be.
The SpeechTek website explains this change best: “Smartphone and tablet applications provide convenient and intuitive interactions by allowing customers to use different input methods (talk, touch, and type) and see and listen to results.
The Promose of the African VAS Market
August 7, 2012I was asked a question a few weeks ago about “the future” of value-added services in Africa. This question was deeper than it first appeared because the person asking me the question was really wondering whether VAS will be “required” once 3G services, and thus over the top services (OTT), become bigger over time in Africa. Before we really get down to answering the question, it’s important to remember that a value-added service is a service beyond voice that the consumer is willing to pay for. This does not necessarily mean that it has something to do with mobile broadband and smartphones.
BYOD and HTML5
July 31, 2012Last week I wrote about HTML5 and its impact on apps. One other potential impact of HTML 5 is that it will be less important that your IT department “hands out” specific devices to its employees. I remember just a few short years ago that Dialogic (like many companies) was a Blackberry organization. It just so happened I had the luck of having the first employee in the company who wanted to put his iPhone onto the Dialogic network (yes, you know who you are Vaughn).
