It will be challenging to ensure QoE for roaming subscribers. Ensuring QoE in 5G roaming scenarios starts with monitoring network performance, reliability and capacity at the edge and in the core, so that you can maintain real-time visibility into network state spanning both domains. Roaming requires tracking subscriber usage and behavior, which involves analyzing data generated within silos in both the subscriber and service domains. When making a decision to select a visited network, a complete picture is needed of the subscriber’s profile, service-specific QoS requirements and the current state of the roaming network.

360-Degree Customer Experience

360-degree customer experience management goes beyond ensuring the performance, reliability and security of 5G services. The term "360-degree” implies that all aspects of a subscriber’s experience with your products and services are monitored and managed to ensure total customer satisfaction. This includes customer interactions with automated systems and personnel in sales and customer care.

Machine intelligence enables information to be correlated cross-domain with insights gained from monitoring subscriber usage of applications, devices, networks and services to ensure the highest quality, 360-degree customer experience. You’ll be able to immediately recognize and rapidly respond to any issues that negatively impact customer experience, helping to reduce churn and steer subscribers into products and services that better serve their needs.

The Bottom Line

The benefits of AI-powered operational intelligence will contribute to significant OPEX savings. Reducing OPEX in 4G networks is already a major focus for all the leading operators. The urgency will be even greater for 5G, given the scale and complexity of the underlying infrastructure and the significant CAPEX investment required. Machine intelligence enables operations teams to streamline and automate operational workflows, leading to better outcomes while reducing the time expended in tedious and error-prone, manually intensive processes. Operations teams can’t afford to consume the precious time of highly skilled contributors that can be better utilized elsewhere.

Machine intelligence can be leveraged to reduce the mean-time-to-detect and mean-time-to-repair faults and anomalies. Real-time performance monitoring combined with closed-loop network monitoring will ensure QoE for subscribers. Predictive analytics will help you head off potential problems by taking timely preventative action. The 5G edge domain will be highly complex and involve the continuous tuning and optimization of radio spectrum, small cell capacity, fronthaul/backhaul bandwidth and virtual RAN resources. AI and ML-based analytics can be applied in this domain to ensure quality of service for meeting SLAs and efficient utilization of the edge domain infrastructure.

Knowing what lies ahead, the challenge is to determine the right path to get there. Start by gaining an understanding of the operational complexities and then lay the groundwork to leverage the power of big data and AI/ML through analytics. This path will by no means be straight up the slope of enlightenment.  No doubt it will be a tough climb, with several false peaks on the way, but eventually applying machine intelligence to master the complexity of 5G will enable you to satisfy your business stakeholders and deliver an improved customer experience.