The telecommunications industry has seen vast growth in recent years. As we enter 2024, operator numbers are reaching the hundreds around the world. This is creating an extremely competitive environment, putting service providers under immense pressure to retain customers amidst a rising churn rate.
According to a recent report from Wipro, the primary culprit behind this rising churn rate is the persistence of poor network quality. To address this issue, service providers must take a strong focus on improving the Quality of Experience for their users in 2024. Unfortunately, new technologies such as AI, 5G, and solutions aimed at securing traffic are making achieving a better user experience a real challenge.
This is at the same time that service providers are having to consider radical changes to business models resulting from the virtualisation of the network architecture in both mobile and fixed-line. While infrastructure-sharing has proved a successful model for macro-level mobile deployment (generally referred to as tower sharing) fibre and small-cell sharing is nowhere near as clear-cut. Service providers are also faced with the significant decision around the platform for both core and edge, whether to go private cloud, public, or some hybrid model. The more stringent performance requirements in terms of bandwidth, latency, and jitter make this a more nuanced decision than it may appear at first sight. The wrong choice could recreate the vendor lock-in that was thought a thing of the past in the new “open” world.
Whichever path individual service providers decide to take does nothing to diminish the fundamental requirement to improve user experience in 5G, and the architectural shift of the control plane towards the edge of the network will create a complex network design that demands intricate but pervasive monitoring capabilities. As users and subscribers consume more high-definition video and even facilitate virtual or augmented realities, this multiplies the volume of encrypted traffic for monitoring solutions to capture and inspect. For example, an FWA (Fixed Wireless Access) subscriber typically generates three times the volume of traffic compared to a “conventional” mobile subscriber, and FTTH (Fibre To The Home) is an enabler for 8K video streaming. All in all, network analysis is an ongoing and growing challenge for the year ahead.
The best way to stay at the forefront of new network challenges is to stay informed on up-and-coming innovations and methods. Here are some trends that service providers can capitalise on to stay ahead of the curve in the coming year.
#1: Quality of Experience in the spotlight
In the current environment, service providers are facing a crucial challenge: maintaining exceptional, consistent Quality of Experience amidst an ever-evolving landscape of user needs and technologies. Providers are struggling to keep up with the increasing amounts of encrypted traffic and the rapid adoption of 5G, all while experience-damaging cyberattacks such as DDoS incidents increase in frequency. Faced with a swathe of encrypted traffic in a new control plane, efficient and precise network monitoring has become extremely challenging.
Delivering a high Quality of Experience requires as much empirical data as possible, and this is as true for 5G networks as it is for fixed line. With exponentially growing traffic, service providers must recognise that conventional network monitoring and analysis is no longer a sustainable model . Existing decryption and analysis methods are resource and time intensive, leading to data analysis being outdated and ineffective for optimisation efforts. The alternative of not analysing this traffic is also not an option as it would expose networks to immeasurable security risk from both a business and regulatory perspective. Communications is so woven into our daily lives that it is now, rightly, considered Critical National Infrastructure in most jurisdictions, bringing security of service obligations.
Thus, service providers must seek a more streamlined and scalable mechanism to monitor their ever-expanding, ever-complicating networks both effectively and efficiently. One promising solution is pre-encryption interception, which allows providers to intercept traffic before it is encrypted, analysing it before compute-heavy decryption needs to occur. This is a more scalable and efficient way to monitor encrypted traffic, even at the edge of the network.
#2: Scalable networks will drive competitive success
The initial excitement surrounding 5G's ground-breaking release has since been replaced by the realisation that the technology's full potential could remain untapped. Applications like augmented reality (AR), Internet of Things (IoT), and wireless broadband (FWA) have faced significant challenges in their implementation, constrained by the complexities of monitoring performance at the far edge of the network. Regular or extended downtime is the fastest way to lose customer loyalty. With 5G promising lower latency, end users have an even lower tolerance for lags and glitches in their streaming or augmented experiences.
Service providers need to ensure that they make the most of the peer-to-peer traffic offered by 5G – turning around traffic closer to the participants. For large scale events, and those leveraging AR and VR in particular are a great example of this, hauling traffic back to a central site is not effective either from a capacity and performance point of view, nor for monitoring purposes. Visibility into peer-to-peer traffic allows more dynamism as service providers can gain real-time insights at the edge of a network and react faster. The result is a level of network agility that can easily scale to accommodate high-traffic events and locations.
#3: Unlocking 5G success relies on visibility
As 5G deployment nears completion, service providers must pivot their focus from infrastructure rollout to network optimisation. The ability to achieve widespread, granular visibility is now paramount to delivering a quality experience for end users and continually powering network analysis with the right data. By prioritising real-time network visibility, including into the masses of encrypted packets that makes up over 90% of internet traffic, service providers will unlock deep insights into application performance. With the control plane shifting from a central site to the edge of the network, only real-time empirical data on application performance can allow network managers to optimise network resources, reduce latency, enhance security, and deliver exceptional user experiences. Service providers will realise the value of this in 2024 as their competitors leverage better insights and begin to deliver better, more flexible 5G coverage, and the arms race will drive innovation in the industry.
Although talk is already of 6G on the way, 2024 presents a bright future for optimisation that will help service providers see a stronger ROI from their 5G networks. With clearer network monitoring capability and a feedback loop of analytics, service providers can not only keep the lights on, they can revolutionise the way they operate to maintain the competitive edge and regain customer loyalty.
