Given the current industry conditions, achieving operational excellence is critical for Communication Service Providers (CSPs). True excellence balances three key areas: managing capacity demands, improving financial performance through cost optimization and investment management for sustainable growth and ensuring quality of experience (QoE) meets or exceeds end user expectations.
To achieve this balance, transformation must be integrated across network and IT efforts, creating an operational environment that improves competitiveness across converged business operations.
Address capacity demands efficiently
One of the many results of the global data explosion is that revenue has been decoupled from transport, forcing CSPs to reduce the cost of carrying traffic while delivering advanced multimedia services to end-users. Thus, CSPs must find a cost-efficient way to increase network capacity as they move ahead with their convergence strategies.
That is no easy task. Legacy network architectures and operations are not designed to support data-intensive services and applications. Since revenue is no longer based on traffic, performance must be optimized to reduce costs while offering rich, multimedia-capable services.
A viable approach is to divide network evolution into phases, with measurable, quick paybacks to fund future programs or contribute to growth objectives. This strategy makes it possible to:
- Scale network capacity at the lowest cost for both short- and long-term needs
- Simplify service offerings and service infrastructures
- Enable optimization of bandwidth, network performance, and service delivery
- Facilitate and accelerate the replacement of legacy networks
- Optimize reuse of existing assets for next-generation services
But cost is just the beginning. CSPs are under unrelenting pressure to develop new services. Their customers are seeking rich content that combines audio, video, and multimedia into one personalized offering available anywhere, anytime, from any device. In this competitive environment, the demand for improved quality and profitability is driving CSPs to differentiate themselves, and to gain customer loyalty, through improved Quality of Experience (QoE).