Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly feature, Analyst Angle. We’ve collected a group of the industry’s leading analysts to give their outlook on the hot topics in the wireless industry.
The surging 4G world promises to deliver many innovative and groundbreaking features to customers around the globe. However, what may be good for the consumer will prove daunting for the operator. The complexities of delivering 4G services, while assuring service delivery and providing a positive customer experience will be far greater than in the 3G environment.
4G technology promises to deliver the features customers are demanding: enriched application experiences, faster file transfers, voice-as-data applications, real time video, two-times the uplink speed, four-times the downlink speed and a five-times decrease in latency. Consumers will have far more choices in service offerings and service providers alike.
But from an operator’s perspective, the complexities of managing customer billing and providing a positive customer experience, while assuring high quality service that meets and/or exceeds SLAs and industry standards will prove very complex and challenging. And with the multi-service, multi-provider converged environment, operators must shift their assurance strategies from reactive to proactive to effectively manage performance. Operators must confront numerous significant challenges along the way:
–Multiple partnerships and providers in the value chain require new sophisticated SLA agreements and KPIs.
–New value added services such as online gaming and social networking require stringent, real-time monitoring techniques across the entire two-sided value chain.
–Subscriber access from multiple sources, including Wi-Fi and other “unlicensed” IP sources make it impossible to guarantee service levels end-to-end.
–A mismatch of supply and demand due to data traffic surges can result serious service delays and outages.
–Existing QoS techniques have not been engineered into mobile data networks.
–New KPI models encompassing not just networks and services, but also devices and applications must bee accommodated.
Our experience has shown that these challenges cannot be addressed in a vacuum or from one vendor’s viewpoint. A best-in-class service assurance program must be holistic, include all vendors in the value chain and be highly automated with real time monitoring and reporting.
Assuring service delivery and keeping your customers satisfied and loyal are critical to your continued revenue growth, profitability and competitive positioning. Every aspect of the value chain, from network, to products and services (care, billing, provisioning, fulfillment, etc.) to devices, must be addressed on a holistic, end-to-end basis with a customer-by-customer focus. In this case, “holistic and end-to-end” must include all technologies and partners/suppliers in the real time and high bandwidth applications value chain. Each partner/supplier will have to deliver against a specific set of metrics and SLAs and must be monitored on a real time basis. Also critical to assuring service is the need to have the necessary data to manage all elements, whether partner/supplier or technology, to enable the rapid identification of the elements that are not performing according to the established standards and which will ultimately prevent a positive customer experience.
In summary, the key to service assurance and customer satisfaction is to first develop your service assurance strategy by looking at all critical business areas that might be impacted by the implementation of the 4G technologies. Then, you should carefully align your business strategy with your management of the service assurance value chain. Finally, you must monitor and manage all key performance indicators in real time and on a partner-by-partner, technology-by-technology basis. This will ensure optimal performance, satisfied and loyal customers and strong competitive positioning in the 4G world.
Dr. Ronald Angner leads the Sales Support & Delivery team at TMNG Global. In this capacity, he serves as general manager of the TMNG OSS/BSS practice and is TMNG’s senior operations executive. Dr. Angner has over 25 years of experience in the telecommunications industry and possesses hands-on operational and management experience in nearly every discipline within the industry including, strategy, marketing, network planning, product/service design and implementation, customer premises equipment servicing strategy, billing and customer care.
