By: Ian Meakin

The word "digital" evokes visions of binary, accurate, precise and fast. The digital world promises all this. In the Internet and computer world, (where the word digital is borrowed from), much is happening. 

The Internet has, once again, taken the world by storm, as it did in the early 90s. But this time, the storm is being kicked up in the telecom world. With the advent of instant communication, resulting from rapid advances made in voice and video quality over Internet resources, the importance and significance of the traditional telecom technologies have waned. There has been an unprecedented, exponential adoption of digital services, fueled by the social media proliferation and the widespread usage of smartphones.

Now, digital business, digital commerce and a digital way of life are all set to invade the existing telecom world. This effectively means a new way of managing CSP (communications service provider) networks out of an increasingly virtualized space, with datacenters and IT methodologies that deliver the expected speed and scale. With NFV as the popular virtualization technology being adopted, new telecom networks will emerge as digital networks and CSPs will evolve into DSPs (Digital Service Providers).

In these digital networks, service rollouts will become faster, using faster modes of communication. This will include fast APIs, elastic storage, Hadoop databases, open RESTful APIs, and all the new technologies that will make telecoms networks agile, cost of infrastructure less and introduce automation. While the network operator will reap benefits from this 21st century transformation of telecom networks, there is much in store for the customer as well. The instant, real-time and reliable connectivity, and the digital service agility that the millennials have been used to will be available to the mass mobile digital customer. The digital transformation will result in tremendous impact on business, customer base, nature of services, and also billing.

For effective management of the digital transformation, we break down the digital experience management into the following seven constituents:

1. Virtualization Experience

Over the next 5-10 years, operators will have to manage hybrid networks (combined virtualized and physical). The real, large scale and commercially meaningful adoption of NFV heavily depends on NFV orchestration and new OSS architecture.

With NFV, operators will dynamically configure and deliver digital services, based on real-time awareness of network QoS and customer QoE. Because QoS and QoE are linked to the performance of different layers like virtual functions (VNF) and NFV infrastructure (NFVi), and the dynamic nature of NFV network topology and configuration, it requires a tighter integration between fulfillment (inventory) and assurance processes/data with frequent, dynamic configurations.

Some areas of OSS that can achieve this are:

• QoS-driven orchestration: This critical functionality requires simultaneous orchestration of QoS violation in the virtualized and physical networks, resulting in triggering of QoS policies in a hybrid OSS system, followed by an immediate automated closed loop corrective response;
• Horizontal scalability of OSS systems to cope with millions of events and data streams pushed through the virtualized network;
• Real-time analytics capability of OSS systems to match the service agility of an NFV environment;
• Dynamic SLAs, on-demand capacity configuration, dynamic topology changes etc., which are associated with virtualized networks;
• Mapping and coordination of OSS layers of OSS in a hybrid environment through consolidated OSS systems that carry out all the functionalities (PM, FM, SQM, CEM, Inventory, Analytics, Automation etc.) for dedicated and virtualized networks; and
• Security enhancements so that spurious/false triggers for automation can be identified/removed in case of MANO orchestration.