Among other things, a telco cloud architecture makes it easier for operators to collaborate with enterprise customers to develop customized B2B solutions
Because telco operations have more stringent performance and quality of service requirements than IT or public cloud operations — along with vastly more regulatory oversight — operator networks need faster traffic management, more reliability, minimized jitter and lower latency than public clouds can provide. Therefore, clouds for telcos are built with special requirements in mind. Enter the telco cloud.
Whether on a local network or on a telecom network, however, cloud computing is a distributed computing architecture. Software operates on the network as microservices or virtual machines. These apps are managed and orchestrated by hypervisor and app container technology. The software is available at scale, depending on demand and resource availability.
Ok, so that’s what a telco cloud is, but what can it be used for?
Network automation and management
The telco cloud architecture promises to simplify and automate network functions and management, allowing operators to bring new services to market faster, as well as pivot or amend services quickly and seamlessly.
As Red Hat puts it: “Telco cloud is a software-defined, highly resilient cloud infrastructure that allows telcos to add services more quickly, respond faster to changes in demand and centrally manage their resources more efficiently.”
Fault and anomaly detection
Building off of the concept of network automation is the idea that a telco cloud architecture, particularly when used in conjunction with artificial intelligence and machine learning, can improve network fault and anomaly detection.
Detecting and then fixing network issues is costly and time consuming. However, a telco cloud can allow an operator to achieve more accurate, and in many cases predictive, data-driven fault isolation and root-cause analysis, saving valuable time and operating costs, while ensuring better overall network performance and user experience optimization.
Several telecom vendors are reworking their offerings to incorporate more automation into their fault detection solutions. Nokia, for instance, plans to add a SaaS-based anomaly detection offering to its cloud portfolio. The company described this offering as “a machine learning service aimed at finding and fixing network anomalies before they affect customers.”
Targeted consumer experiences and solutions
According to a recent PWC report, one of the biggest opportunities that the telco cloud provides operators is the ability to develop industry-specific solutions. Further, by quickly integrating cloud-based applications and features targeted to specific customer segments, cloud-native architectures allow operators to reduce the time it takes to deploy such solutions, which ultimately improves time-to-revenue.
“[Operators can] work with customers and partners to deliver industry-specific solutions across the value chain (i.e., solutions for highly secure and regulated industries like healthcare and financial services, or solutions for industries with high content streaming, etc.),” stated the PWC report.
Telco cloud makes it easier for operators to collaborate with enterprise customers to develop customized B2B solutions, and further, bring those solutions to market quickly. The targeted nature of such offerings will differentiate the operator, better protecting it from industry competition.
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