Telco AI strategists should focus on enabling Network as a Service (NaaS) functionality and identifying network traffic patterns, according to the results of a poll conducted during the recent TelecomTV show Network Automation Summit – a mix of interviews, live panel discussions and interactive Q&A panels.
We asked those who attended the online summit to vote in our poll: What are the most important areas of focus for telecommunications AI strategists over the next few years? We offered seven options, and respondents could vote for as many as they deemed relevant.
The “Enable NaaS functionality” option drew the most votes, selected by 65% of the 100+ respondents. This outcome mirrors what we heard from our guest speakers on day two of the summit, when the evolution of orchestration and NaaS were the focus of the live panel discussion and audience Q&A session. . In particular, Johanne Mayer, founder and director of NaaS consultancy Compass, who also leads NaaS specification development work at the TM Forum, noted that exposing network and application capabilities to enable NaaS offerings was on the roadmap for many operators, but it’s still early days for commercial availability and there’s still work to be done on the processes that enable NaaS.
Identifying network traffic patterns is also considered an area of high importance by 52% of respondents, a vital task if telcos are to introduce automated network resource management.
And with energy efficiency so high on everyone’s agenda these days, and rapidly rising energy bills putting pressure on operating costs, the only surprise about the “Enable automated cell site power management” is that it was not selected by more than 49% of respondents.
You can see the other results in the graph above, but perhaps it’s worth noting that the ‘Automate customer service functions/develop bots’ option probably only received support from 27% of respondents. , as much of the development work has already begun and is quite mature and therefore may not be seen as an area that needs to be as much of a strategic priority in the next few years, especially compared to the other options.
To follow all the Network Automation Summit sessions, including interviews with executives from Google Cloud and Telefónica, click on this link.
– Ray Le Maistre, Editorial Director, TelecomTV