Viewpoint
Even today, in our technology-saturated society where owning a smartphone is more necessity than luxury, there is still a long way to go before we reach the ultimate digital world with ubiquitous connectivity and perfect user experience. While Mobile World Congress provides a chance for companies to showcase their latest gadgets following this year’s top trends analysis, many are still a long way off coming to the market due to current network limitations.
Transforming Telco Operations for Agility
It was with this in mind that Huawei, a leader in ICT transformation, started its MWC early to host its Digital Operations Transformation Summit, bringing together global industry leaders, thought leaders, and innovators. The event not only explored the latest trends but also the different strategies needed to transform the entire ecosystem if we are to take full advantage of the potential promised by many of the technologies being showcased in Barcelona this week. It has been the first time that Huawei brings together over 70 senior executives and experts from carriers, analyst firms and industry organizations during a round table discussion session.
Following an introduction from Ken Wang, President, Global Marketing and Solution Sales, at Huawei, the summit – which took place yesterday at the Crowne Plaza Barcelona, Fira Center – saw delegates look at transforming telco’s operations to realise agility and faster time to market. The summit was a small part of the bigger picture, which also requires transformation of network architecture and business models.
“Today’s telco business, unfortunately, is largely centred on voice and bandwidth consumption, which has a fundamental limit: it is closed, siloed, and not sustainable,” he said. “With recently much-enriched user experiences, you can certainly characterise abundant new business opportunities for the carrier but the question is how do we get there, and how can we transform the telco business.”
Wang went on to highlight user experience as a key factor in achieving this vision. While a number of technologies, such as LTE, have already been introduced to achieve this, Wang said that to truly succeed the industry needs to change the way it thinks about network planning and operation. In other words, operators need to move their focus from the networks to the users by developing a set of user experience indicators in addition to standard Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
“All these indicators should be definable, measurable, manageable and, eventually, monetised,” added Wang. “At Huawei this is user-based mobile optimisation and we are very excited that many customers have already started working with us to make it a reality.”
Beyond connecting people, providing Internet access to objects is also creating huge opportunities for the mobile industry. The IoT trend is progressively bringing about larger-scale requirements for the mobile network and this is only set to continue, with initiatives like Smart Cities growing in popularity. The impact IoT is expected to have was also referred to by Wang, who said IoT is driving another revolution for the whole society.
“When we are fully connected the whole world will open up before us,” concluded Wang. “We will be able to collaborate with industry partners to connect all things and witness the growing momentum of faster and better quality connectivity, launching us forward into an exciting new era. In order to facilitate this better user experience and realise a ubiquitous IoT
network, we as an industry need to put our efforts into technology innovation, business model innovation and cross-industry collaboration.”
The line-up of speakers following Wang included James McQuivey, VP, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, John Donovan, Senior Executive Vice President at AT&T Technology and Operations, AT&T Inc, Stephen Saunders, CEO and Founder of Light Reading, and Dong Sun, Chief Architect of Digital Transformation at Huawei. Panel and roundtable discussions followed, before Peter Sany, President and Chief Executive Officer at TM Forum made the closing speech.
Video Everywhere
A second summit hosted by Huawei focused on video. The Video Everywhere Summit addressed topics such as: What are the OTT and content providers’ major concerns to operators? What is the impact on the user experience? What are standard organizations’ views on video? What are the network requirements for delivering high quality video service and how can it be realized? What is the next big thing in the video market?
Zou Zhilei, President of Huawei’s Carrier BG said: “With the emergence of experience economy, operators are performing a revaluation of priority criteria changing from a network-centric to an experience-centric operation. Providing diversified services based on the basic network capability has become one of the primary requirements of operators.”
Zou Zhilei gave further examples of how operators are already beginning to use video as a way to differentiate their service offerings from their competitors. The South Korean LG U+, he said, binds the main package with self-managing video content, which implements fast go-to-market and profit of video services. Meanwhile, Vodafone cooperates with OTT providers and implements channel service values by binding the large traffic package with OTT content. Verizon acquired AOL to build global digital media platform and ecology and AT&T have become the leader of PayTV after its acquisition of DirectTV.
“After several years of exploration, we are now seeing mature video business models being formed,” added Zou Zhilei.” The leading operators are beginning to implement ubiquitous high-quality networks and video-based services, embracing the Internet and ecology.”
To help operators create the strategies required for this phenomenon, speakers from YouTube, Ovum and Warner Brothers followed Zou Zhilei on stage. While each had a slightly different story to tell, one common theme emerged: the importance of collaboration. While in the past OTT content providers had been viewed as a threat to operators, telcos should now see them as the key to unlocking new opportunities and potential business partners, according to each and every speaker. In addition, the speakers highlighted optimum viewer experience as the best way to win customers.
Zou Zhilei concluded: “As a basic service provided by operators, video service is hot. Providing good video service experience is the key to differentiated competitiveness for mobile broadband operators.”
The importance of standards was also explored by Chaesub Lee, Director of the ITU Telecommunication Standardization Bureau, with Huawei’s U-vMOS – which measures indicators from sample analysis of subjective video experiences, coupled with analysis from related technologies, to provide objective assessments on the overall video service experience – reference as an example. This provides a unified standard to measure the user experience which guides operators and the video industry chain in enhancing user satisfaction.
Conclusion
While transformation of operations and providing video services is just a small part of challenge that lies ahead for operators, they are good places to start. By transforming their operations, telcos will ensure their networks are future-proof, while launching video-based services will provide an additional source of income to fund the upgrades digital transformation requires.
Whether a first-time visitor to MWC or a show-veteran, it is easy to get lost in the blur and noise of thousands of companies trying to prove their latest gadgets outdo all the other at the show. But for those attending Huawei’s Digital Transformation Summit, a certain clarity was provided – while the estimated time of arrival is yet to be confirmed, there is no doubt that we are well on the way to realising the ultimate digital world.
