A central theme of Telecoms Europe Summit 2024 was addressing the necessity to monetise next-gen networks. This article lists the key points of discussion.
In recent years telcos have invested significantly in developing network capabilities that can support a new generation of services. This evolution entails a move to open and disaggregated networks, built upon cloud-native network architectures and with capabilities exposed via network APIs. However, a central question remains within the industry of how best to monetise these substantial investments. At Telecoms Europe Summit 2024 much of the focus was directed at answering this critical question, with the following key themes covered.
1. AI can drive innovation in core connectivity services
The deep integration of AI within telecoms networks opens the door for telcos to optimise operations and integrate AI in their end-user offerings. The latter was a point emphasised by Usman Javaid, Chief Products & Marketing Officer at Orange Business, who detailed how wedding AI with SMS has enabled Orange to develop an innovative service for the 12 million citizens living in the Île-de-France region (the metropolitan region of Paris). In this case Orange has partnered with local councils in Paris to create a gen AI SMS bot, which users can message to ask any questions they have about the area, including current data or information on government policies.
Likewise, AI is facilitating innovation with voice services. An example is BT’s ongoing trial of Azure Operator Call Protection, where real-time voice traffic interacts with an AI engine that can alert users if their phone conversation is likely to be a scam call.
Such is this potential of AI in networks that Bank of America has estimated that it could increase return on capital employed for telcos in Europe from 6% to 8%.
2. Telcos need to speak in an enterprise-friendly language
Much of the value of next-gen networks will be driven by B2B2X solutions; therefore, telcos must be fluent in translating the value of their enhanced offering in a language which enterprises recognise. For example, many enterprise CTOs will not know the difference between 5G non-standalone and 5G standalone or the technological capabilities of 4G private networks vs. 5G private networks – and they should not need to. Enterprises care about the applications that support their business functions, therefore telcos should not sell B2B services speaking in a strictly networking language; instead, they need to clearly demonstrate the ROI of the services.
3. Telcos need to more deeply integrate within developer ecosystems
With network APIs, telcos need to avoid the classic pitfall of designing a solution in search of a problem.
Many developers are not necessarily well aware of the new capabilities which standardised network APIs can deliver to them; telcos need to make an effort to reach out to this community and articulate the benefits of their network APIs. On a practical level, better collaboration can take several forms:
- Creating tools to simplify the development process of new applications; for instance, Deutsche Telekom has partnered with Vonage to create a network API portal that simplifies the development of applications leveraging network APIs.
- Co-organising hackathons; for example Orange and Nokia recently co-hosted a “Network as Code Hackathon” where participants were tasked with leveraging network APIs to create innovative use cases.
Engaging developers in the genesis of network APIs will also help telcos discover the killer use cases that are enabled by these APIs. It is important to not overlook the fact that it is these use cases which enterprise customers will buy, rather than the technical capability of an API – a network API without any use cases is like a smartphone without any apps. This was a point emphasised by Viraj Abhayawardhana, Director of Network Strategy at Liberty Global, who explained Telenet’s collaboration with ship management company Seafar to enable greater remote management of vessels at Antwerp port via the usage of network APIs. In this case it was the application developer who drove the development of the remote management solution and Telenet provided them with the right tools. More details on the use case can be found here.
An important note is that telcos don’t need to search far and wide for these developers, as hyperscalers have already established developer ecosystems. For example, Microsoft has created its Azure Programmable Connectivity platform to enable its developer ecosystem to leverage network APIs.
4. Offering next-gen services requires a deep organisational change from telcos
As our research extensively explains in the Transformation stream of our Executive Briefing Service and in reports such as Inside the cloud-native telco, the move towards software-based and cloudified networks requires significant changes to internal processes and operating models.
Key to this is the adoption of software engineering practices, such as GitOps, that allow for the agility required for next-gen service development. Operators must go through a change of mindset to fully embrace these software development practices – even if this requires substantial internal changes. For example, Deutsche Telekom invested significantly into adopting CI/CD practices, which helped enable it to become the first global telco running Kubernetes across core and edge sites.
This change in mindset requires telcos to break down departmental silos in favour of cross-functional teams. For example, in deploying open RAN you need not only engineering and network teams but also cloud teams.
Only when telcos enact these deep organisational changes can they harbour the correct internal environment to deploy and monetise next-gen networks. Such transformation takes time.
5. Focus on the customer journey
In order to fully monetise digital services built upon next-gen networks, telcos also need to pay attention to the customer journey. This requires an understanding of their specific needs and pain points, tailoring services to meet these requirements, and providing seamless, end-to-end support.
To gauge how well they are doing on this front, telcos must develop appropriate metrics to gain insights into customer experience. Developing robust analytics on the customer journey enables telcos to identify where it is failing and see where features such as conversational AI can help.
For example in the case of Vodafone, it finds that Net Promoter Score (NPS) does not allow for competitor comparisons as it is affected by numerous factors, such as price. It is for this reason that Vodafone developed a new model that benchmarks its customer experience against the three largest competitors in each market it operates within. This benchmark analyses the full lifecycle across each company’s product portfolio and ultimately scores them from 1 to 1,000; similar to how Umlaut benchmarks network performance. The scoring here enables Vodafone to identify which parts of the customer journey it is leading in (Vodafone defines a lead over competitors of 150 points as a clear competitive advantage) and which parts it needs to improve in.
Keeping with Vodafone, it finds the biggest drag on customer experience for its digital services, such as its MyVodafone app, e-commerce sites, public-facing websites and chatbots, to be network performance. Therefore, it has moved its digital services to the cloud to improve their resilience and scalability – this is critical during events such as iPhone launch day (which is the biggest consumer event of the year for Vodafone UK) where the performance of your digital services has a clear impact on revenue.
6. Cloudifying workloads requires complete refactoring
To fully reap the benefits of the cloud, telcos must rearchitect workloads – including IT, BSS and network workloads – from the ground up, taking advantage of cloud-native principles. The potential benefits include greater operational efficiency, the ability to scale workloads more effectively, quicker time to market and decreased costs. However, these major benefits cannot be realised through a simple “lift and shift” of existing solutions. Telcos need to refactor these workloads in order to take full advantage of the tools available in cloud environments. Indeed, this is the reason why project Nephio was founded. For example, TELUS found, when it started migrating network functions to Google Cloud, that legacy automation techniques limited its ability to take advantage of the cloud, and as such it needed to build cloud-native network functions.
As Scott Petty, CTO of Vodafone Group, concedes, however, this is not always a straightforward process and can prove slow and costly; particularly when concerning BSS and network workloads. Telcos must clearly communicate their vision to vendors and seek their support in the migration to the public cloud, or where possible rearchitect workloads themselves to develop internal software engineering skills.
7. Collaboration, collaboration, collaboration
Approaching enterprises in verticals where telcos typically lack expertise, such as manufacturing or healthcare, requires telcos to onboard knowledge by way of partnership. For example, it is naïve to think that an operator can alone provide an end-to-end solution in a port or hospital. Therefore, telcos must look across to partners with vertical-specific expertise. This is the approach taken by Virgin Media O2, which partnered with Accenture in May 2024 to enhance its private networks proposition, taking advantage of Accenture’s industry-specific knowledge.
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