Advancements in Agility

A newly released Ericsson Consumer & IndustryLab Insight Report—The Zero Touch Customer Experience—explores the future of customer interactions with telecom service providers. Current frustrations with mobile CSPs are highlighted: an average of 2.2 attempts and 4.1 days to successfully complete or resolve an interaction. The report details how zero touch can drastically reduce frustration, improve CX, and enable innovation. 

At Digital Transformation World in Nice, France, AT&T, KDDI, TIM, and Spirent showcased a new TM Forum Catalyst project, the Automated Optimization of Customer QoE (quality of experience). The catalyst focuses on the role of network automation as providers seek to improve QoE for subscribers amidst the improvement of operational efficiencies. 

It’s been a busy month for Telinta. The US- and Europe-based VoIP white label solutions provider announced the launch of a complete solution for VoIP service providers to offer DIDs and toll-free numbers to their customers and resellers. In addition, Telinta has teamed up with Magic Telecom on a convenient API that integrates Magic Telecoms DID with Telinta’s switching and billing solutions. 

Datavision completed a Proof of Concept demonstration showcasing interoperability between ONAP and MEF 3.0—Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO) architecture, alongside BringCom and ADVA. The POC, which was developed to instantiate a firewall VNF onto the ADVA Ensemble Connector platform, was performed at the recent MEF Member Meeting in Athens, Greece. 

During this month’s TM Forum Show, Velankani Communications Technologies announced that a leading Tier-1 US-based service provider has selected its NOCVue UNITY Platform to improve operational efficiencies in addressing the fall-out from provisioning their multi-vendor xDSL/GPON access network. 

The New York State Education and Research Network (NYSERNet), a non-profit organization that provides Internet access to education, research and health care institutions across the state, deployed ADVA’s FSP 3000 CloudConnect to create an agile, open and automated transport network.

Data Center Expansion

Nokia and Nuage Networks—its venture focused on software-defined networking (SDN)—are partnering with Telefonica Spain to modernize its data center network architecture for massive scale, agility and efficiency of its cloud-based services.

In other data center news, EdgeConneX announced a partnership with Pilot to upgrade Edge Data Centers in Atlanta, Denver, Miami, Minneapolis, Portland and Santa Clara. EdgeConneX customers will gain access to Pilot’s flexible and scalable network solutions with quick provisioning and bandwidth options up to 100 Gbps.

Video Analytics

To meet increased demand for flexible deployments and operations amid continued pressure from OTT providers, Agama Technologies announced the launch of a fully containerized solution for monitoring, analytics and customer insights for video services. It will showcase this new functionality at TV Connect, Digital Transformation World, ANGACOM and IBC.

Digital Transformation

Digital transformation for 24 Hour Fitness gets a boost with a new agreement from Microsoft Corp. and Adobe. 24 Hour Fitness will deploy Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Adobe Experience Cloud across its nationwide network of more than 420 clubs.

To build a digital Indonesia, Telkomsel has selected Sigma Systems as its partner. With more than 190 million customers, Telkomsel is the country’s leading mobile operator. The partnership supports Telkomsel’s digital mandate and establishes Sigma Catalog as the central enterprise catalog in its evolving business.