The telecommunications industry has and continues to transform in many ways driven by new technology, evolving needs and desires of consumers, and enterprise digital transformation programs in diverse industries such as automotive, public sector, manufacturing and health care.

At Digital Transformation World 2022 in Copenhagen we can see this transformation in action with some fantastic examples from Ericsson customers touching some of the key drivers for change. Here’s a sneak peek.

More and more communication service providers (CSPs) realize network slicing use cases

Network slicing provides an enormous business potential for CSPs, by opening up many different opportunities and possible go-to-market roles. Network slicing enables CSPs to meet new customer needs.

In a recent study, on network slicing top 10 use cases, from Ericsson and Arthur D Little more than 400 digital use cases and 70 industries were analyzed. It showed that enterprises are expecting CSPs to collaborate with other vendors to develop new complete offerings and services. CSPs are expected to act with speed and innovation, those that can, will find enterprises happy to buy from them, but also to work together as partners.

Capturing the value of network slicing will require new ways of working in addition to new network, OSS and BSS capabilities. Deutsche Telekom and Ericsson successfully demonstrated 5G network slicing with on-demand quality of service control for enterprise use cases.

This proof-of-concept sets a benchmark for ‘network-as-a-service’ innovation, revealing how 5G network slicing can enable a new level of flexibility and control for enterprise customers. It also successfully implemented fully automated configuration, provisioning, and end-to-end orchestration of the slicing service.

Ericsson and Deutsche Telekom worked together on the proof-of-concept in Deutsche Telekom’s lab in Bonn, using a commercial-grade 5G Standalone (SA) network provided by Ericsson to implement end-to-end network slicing infrastructure and 5G integration of slice-specific network exposure – and explore the benefits they can offer for enterprise. If you are interested to hear more on the topic, come listen to the exclusive network slicing panel discussion with Telstra, Deutsche Telekom and Ericsson on 21 September at Digital Transformation World 2022.

New services to meet new customer needs

One of Ericsson’ customers, Australian operator Telstra aimed at providing low latency, on the edge services to meet new customer needs. But these new complex services are built on multiple network domains increasing the complexity. Leveraging TM Forum’s Network as a Service (NaaS) framework and ODA Telstra and Ericsson provided composite orchestrator capability across multiple domains and vendors, with the result of reduced time-to-market and delivery time for multi-domain services.

As a result, Telstra customers are offered products that combine the capabilities of operational domains, in contrast to vertical architectures where products may not work in concert and tend to overlap and compete in offers to customers. The solution also streamlines managing the creation of new products and services, retiring old ones and adjusting current offerings.

The joint effort between Telstra and Ericsson for this solution has been nominated as a finalist in the 2022 Excellence Award at Digital Transformation World.

Transforming operations is the key to agility for the digital telco

Telia are transforming their IT operations to radically simplify operations, to evolve into a simpler, faster, more agile digital telco. Providing for faster product life cycles and new services and business models as Telia evolves their business in a new telco environment.

The target IT Solution embraces TM Forum Open Digital Architecture (ODA) and consolidation across BSS and OSS in the pursuit of supporting a faster time to market process and zero touch automation in the order to activation processes. Ericsson’s platforms have a key role in the architecture; providing catalog driven product life-cycle management, multi-channel configure-price-quote features, commercial and technical ordering network inventory and activation.

The new IT solution is targeted for six countries of operations across Telia. It is built on a concept of common software product platforms and common application configuration/integration. The IT platform is cloud based and will be deployed using a mix of private and public clouds. 

Transforming the capabilities of the network to support and transform enterprises

The telecom market has changed in the last years, new cloud and network players have entered the ecosystem and there is great hope that developer communities, through standard APIs, will be able to the increase the relevance of the 4G & 5G network. This will transform the CSP network to an innovation platform for B2B and B2C customer experience.

There are already many capabilities that can be exposed, both for advanced and simple use cases. Ericsson encourages CSPs to align on early industry APIs, that are easily adopted by developers which caters for their needs and enhances the services the developers are used to consuming.

But what needs to change, what are the new ways of working, new accountabilities, and new relationships to build to make this innovation platform a success?

If this topic is important for you, we encourage you to come and see our presentation at DTW on 20 September where Enrique Blanco, CTIO Telefonica and Jan Karlsson, Head of Global Network Platform, Ericsson, will present exactly this.

Optimized networks enabled reliable communication infrastructure in natural disaster

There are many examples where new technology can make our society better and safer, one example is the collaboration between Ericsson and Verizon who collaborated to quickly deploy and configure an automated self-optimized network solution in the hurricane season. When Hurricane Ida made its way to the Gulf, Verizon teams in the storm-weary markets prepared to provide critical communications before once again, during and after the storm.

The hurricane was speeding across the Atlantic, giving the Verizon team just days to respond, the at the time manual processes were inadequate to address the state-wide outages. The team achieved success against all odds. The success was due to collaboration, innovation, and automation. As the team acted quickly, they could succeed or fail fast to get the solution right. The SON-technology including a vendor agnostic SDK came to be the solution.

Automation is the key for a digital telco

Different customers, different cases but we see a clear trend: combining new and existing capabilities in the network together, increased level of automation, new and exciting monetization opportunities. Whether it is streamlining operations, setting up new offerings or achieving the speed and agility needed to be ready when you least expect it, proactively. The telecommunications industry transformations are many and we will see more coming.

These four examples above will be presented deeper on stage at Digital Transformation World in Copenhagen 2022. We hope to see you there.

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