By: Matt Torchinsky

Over the past few years, telecom operators have responded to the exponential growing demand for traffic and connectivity services, and their accomplishments in this area have been incredible. The downside has been that in the face of this demand, revenues have been flat or growing linearly versus exponentially. The traffic growth curve doubles every two years, but revenue growth remains below three percent per year. Something doesn’t add up. 

On the positive side, networks are evolving and the cost per gigabit of traffic is decreasing year after year. These reductions, however, are still not enough to offset the expenditures incurred by operators to maintain the level of traffic growth.

There’s also added pressure to deliver new, innovative and customized services that anticipate and fulfill customers’ needs immediately. This market demand exerts extra pressure on the business and the operation, which must constantly invest in the design and introduction of new products while bringing them to market quickly, placing additional pressures on communication service providers (CSPs) to be flexible and agile.

Furthermore, there has been a massive explosion in the introduction and rollout of OTT apps. Bandwidth has become a commodity, and CSPs must rethink their strategy to expand their offerings and generate new sources of revenue. For CSPs, the competition for the customer's wallet has widened. They no longer compete against other telcos, but also against other software-as-a-service platforms.

Surmounting the obstacles to increased profitability can be daunting, but there are a few methods CSPs can use to accelerate their path to becoming digital service providers (DSPs). For example, speed to market, ability to change existing services quickly, and reducing overall operational expenditures—all through automation—are actions CSPs can take to improve operations and the customer experience. The adoption of a no-code orchestrator is a key step toward becoming a DSP with a path to achieve agility and operational excellence, reduce time to market and speed up product development.

The next-gen network 

Major capabilities are part of this path to DSP: automation, orchestration and serviceability. The advantages of orchestration are well known in the industry. The trend is clearly toward an open, interoperable, standards-based ecosystem that allows "any-to-any" communication, along with end-end services orchestration. This is the