Why are the world’s mobile network operators investing nearly US$1 trillion on 5G CAPEX in the five years to 2025? There are a huge number of reasons. But they all come back to the same thing: return on investment, says Suresh Chintada, CTO at Subex. They believe 5G will place mobile networks at the centre of innovative new industrial markets and that this has the potential to generate huge revenues. Indeed, according to the GSMA, that $1 trillion (€1.00 trillion) outlay could pay back $5 trillion (€5.02 trillion) in economic value.
Of course, change is nothing new in mobile. Over the last 30 years, mobile network operators (MNOs) and other communications service providers (CSPs) have seen their businesses evolve from voice to messaging to data. At every stage, there has been a rise in complexity.
Standalone 5G, however, takes this to another level. In a 5G world, CSPs will work with thousands of partners from multiple verticals to deliver an array of nascent products and services: augmented reality and virtual reality-based entertainment, telehealth, smart factories, sports broadcasting, smart cities, connected car, drone surveillance, and delivery and more.
To repeat: the financial upside of this new activity is immensely exciting. But it does raise one fundamental operational question: what does 5G mean for a CSP’s business assurance activity?
Before we dive into that, let’s rewind to understand the nature of today’s assurance systems.
How we got here: From revenue assurance to business assurance
Traditionally CSPs used revenue assurance to look for leakage and to track new revenue streams across the organisation. Over time, that changed. CSPs moved into new digital areas, teaming up with OTT (over the top) service providers such as Netflix. As a result of these new alliances, CSPs mitigated falling margins and increased customer ARPUs. But as they accumulated more partners offering multi-disciplinary services, many service providers realised their current revenue assurance capabilities needed to evolve. This expansion will further help to address new, dynamic, and constantly evolving risks and challenges with 5G and digital transformation.
What CSPs needed instead was a detailed understanding of their business operations. They needed insight on how each component from billing to regulatory compliance could be efficiently managed to protect and develop new revenue streams.
For these reasons, they switched to business assurance (BA). Unlike revenue assurance, BA offers a business-wide and more comprehensive view of customer expectations. It reflects a marketplace that has significantly changed, one in which CSPs have become DSPs (digital service providers).
So, to come back to the main topic, how can these business assurance systems adapt to the unprecedented complexity of a 5G environment?
Adapting to the new possibilities
Well, first let’s consider the pieces they can re-use. Without a doubt, CSPs will be able to retain traditional revenue assurance controls around subscriptions, product catalogue validation, and quality of service (QoS). Meanwhile, there will be many existing use cases of business assurance they can maintain too. These include customer 360-degree, revenue analytics, product profitability, and margin assurance.
But as we move into the 5G era, we will see business assurance play a pivotal role in the following newer areas:
- Maintaining the quality of service (QoS) with an increasing quantity of data, network slicing and API integration services.
- Ensuring data correlation across multiple data points related to customers, services and usage.
- Managing user identities with distributed applications, multiple partners and different data sources.
- Ensuring network and SLA adherence associated with network capabilities in speed, responsiveness and scale.
- Enabling effective charging based on network capability exposure, assuring the level of quality, slice etc.
The above use cases increase the need to establish new BA frameworks and additional controls. Consider the impact of the explosion of third-party contracts, for example. As suppliers proliferate, CSPs will require BA frameworks that can handle charging and billing, quality of experience, new revenue models, massively connected devices and so on. These new controls will help all parties to work in unison to deliver exceptional customer experiences.
A clear view of partners and suppliers
Ultimately, this all comes back to a basic understanding of how CSPs and their partners interact. The importance of this can’t be underestimated. In a 5G world, CSPs must have deep insight into the activities of their network of third parties. BA systems can help them to achieve this in seven key areas:
- Service assurance: Includes everything from partner contracts to configuration validation, as well as monitoring the QoS provided to customers.
- Partner profitability: This extension of margin assurance involves scoring and analysing individual supplier performance.
- Supplier analytics: Comparing supplier performance against supplier risk and sustainability
- Spend analytics: Measuring product and vendor spend. This also extends to forecasting the spending for products launched against expected margins.
- Contract risk management: Mapping expiry alerts, as well as identifying clauses, obligations, and risks.
- Dispute analytics: Using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to predict billing disputes, write-offs, bad debts, and usage charges data sets.
- Just in time (JIT) and just in case (JIC) analytics: Managing inventory based on analysing historical data and current datasets, as well as forecasting capacity.
In their preparations for the 5G era, CSPs have built emerging technologies, partnerships and consumer services into their roadmaps. As their plans become a reality, they will need time to create business assurance systems that can accurately track new revenue streams and plug leakages across this complex new reality.
The CSPs that succeed will unlock many short and long-term benefits. They will enhance consumer journeys, speed up digital transformation, improve trust levels with partners, and achieve measurable profitability.
The author is Suresh Chintada, CTO at Subex.
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