I was reflecting on two conversations I have had over recent weeks about how latest network technology is impacting the communications service providers businesses, and also the experience of the end customer.
The first of these conversations was a panel session at TM Forum’s Digital Transformation Live event back in May, I was privileged to chair a discussion that included 3 CTIOs. I asked them if Virtualisation technology (NFV) was starting to deliver on its original promise. The answer was mixed. It is very clear that virtualisation has started to make changes to the relationship between the network operators and their equipment suppliers, but there is clearly much further to go.
It also seems as if some of the business agility we were expecting has arrived and the easiest place to find this is still in the enterprise sector. Broadly as the infrastructure becomes more flexible, this flexibility is being passed onto enterprise customers in the products they buy.
But what difference is all this making to the consumer? We’ve seen a lot of progress with self service flexibility, mainly in the realm of youth focussed sub brands targeted at the younger consumers. These brands respond to that generation’s dislike of talking to call centre agents and desire for almost infinite flexibility (something my generation would call complexity). By placing a modern agile front end onto a somewhat less agile backend infrastructure CSPs are using what is often termed “multi speed IT” to create offers that, to their customers, are unrecognisable to their traditional products in terms of buying experience but actually deliver a near identical mobile broadband service. So what is holding us back from doing more? Well the answer is complex but the recurring theme is “not all the parts are there yet”.
The second conversation was with a group of former colleagues whilst I was visiting the TechXLR8 event in London. Some of us who have been in the telecoms business over 20 years and have already seen the migrations to 3G and 4G were discussing what 5G holds. You can read some of my thoughts on this in my TM Forum blog post. Another way to look at 5G is that the technology is coming along in pieces, and not all of the pieces are actually anything to do with 5G. One presenter at the event pointed out there is not even agreement on exactly which combination of technologies will cause a handset to show whether it is in 5G coverage or not.
So my reflection was this. The network technology that has been deployed over the last 2 years and will be deployed over the next 3 is not about large wholesale changes of many related elements, despite us tending to name it that way. This is much more about many loosely coupled changes over time. There will actually be very few services that are possible on the “new network” that we could not do on the “old network”. What we’ll see is a constant stream of new and upgraded functionality leading to a constant refinement and improvement in the services customer consume and the experience they get.
This has to change the way we look at supporting IT systems. This is not a step change we can go away and plan for, this is a constant stream of small changes and as each one comes along we must be able to configure and provision the new capabilities, assure them, monetise them, secure them, ideally without having to write any code or stop and upgrade any systems. What has been seen as a stack really does need to be seen as a system of decoupled layers running at different speeds. One layer needs to be good at integrating new capabilities as they come along, and another needs to constantly innovate services that use both existing capabilities in different ways, and automatically discovered new capabilities.
On the way home from TechXLR8 a Taxi driver asked me where I had been and I told him I had been to an event called 5G world. “What’s 5G going to do for me?” he asked. I realise this is now an impossible question to answer, the consumer will no longer be able to connect the experience they get to the new technology they hear about but, with the notable exception of my taxi driver making conversation, I think they probably stopped caring about that linkage a long time ago.