As new technologies continue to emerge, we will go deeper into the 5G era. 5G is expected to account for 1.2 billion connections by 2025, covering a third of the world’s population.
Although it is now easier than ever to build technology stacks and telecom operators will face 5G blue sea, telecom operators are still struggling in a difficult and inefficient environment, and the vast majority of telecom providers today rely on stacks that cannot build and deploy next-generation 5G applications.
Make no mistake: THE success of 5G depends largely on the quality and efficiency of the underlying technology stack. The sooner telecoms operators realise this and simplify and improve their architecture, the better off they will be.
On the other hand, telecom operators who refuse to simplify the technology stack stand little chance of winning the competition in the 5G era. Over the next few years, as more telecom operators overhaul their architectures, it will become increasingly clear that delay in milliseconds will also become the new industry standard.
01 Stack simplification and edge calculation
A major part of telecom operators’ 5G opportunity and technology stack simplification is becoming increasingly important for telecom operators, mainly due to the rise of edge computing.
Ultimately, the only way to speed up processing and make the most of 5G is to process data as quickly as possible, starting at the “edge” — from ingestion to action — when it happens. Whether the edge is in a public cloud, private cloud, or local data center.
Gartner predicts that by 2025, three-quarters of enterprise-generated data will be created and processed at the edges of traditional centralized data centers or outside the cloud.
Although edge data centers typically have the same components as traditional data centers, they have a much smaller footprint. By being able to move the processing request (such as a JavaScript or HTML file) closer to the machine that requested it, the time required to return the data is reduced. However, edge computing has little advantage if a data platform operating in a small footprint cannot meet the per-millisecond latency requirement of 5G. If the whole purpose of using an edge network is to increase speed, you need to make sure that your data platform can provide that speed.
Simplified case of technology stack for telecom companies
Until now, most telcos and communication service providers (CSPS) have been able to rely on a deeper technology stack. Before 5G and in the IoT era, data volumes, types and speeds are much smaller, and ordinary applications can withstand multiple packet transfers to and from a data warehouse without worrying about data accuracy and consistency.
However, the multi-layer technology stack is simply not realistic in the 5G era, and the possibility of moving data in real time, processing it and applying business rules across multiple layers is minimal. But without this urgency or capacity, companies will miss out on too many opportunities and therefore the economic risk of fraud.
Telecom carriers need to simplify their stacks and implement a unified layer to achieve true 5G speeds and reduce the latency for the decision part of the process (that is, when your application needs to determine if an abnormal event has occurred) to less than 10 milliseconds. . With a simplified technology stack, companies can quickly extract and analyze information to make real-time decisions. This can improve application performance in many ways, including:
1. Customer management
Most telecom companies are actively trying to enhance and improve customer management to maintain customer satisfaction and prevent customer loss. In the digital age, the overall customer experience has quickly become one of the most critical metrics in the industry.
By simplifying the stack using modern data platforms, telco can respond to customer problems as they occur, resolving problems faster and more efficiently, also reducing customer complaints, speeding up response times for telco applications, and maintaining customer loyalty.
Telecom companies are also looking for ways to boost profits to offset declining revenue streams. However, this is difficult for a number of reasons. For starters, most customers want to pay less for communications, not more. Most importantly, opportunities for participation are limited. By simplifying the technology stack and enabling real-time decisions, telcos can more effectively identify and exploit sales opportunities in real time.
For example, agents can talk to customers, who can upgrade their bandwidth or add new services to their plans. With a simplified technology stack, telcos can instantly analyse customers’ networks, understand their profiles and histories, and make decisions about offers in a split second, enabling agents to deliver data-driven offers and improve margins.
2. Prevent fraud
Fraud has long plagued the telecom industry, and it will get worse as ARTIFICIAL intelligence becomes more widely used. A recent study found that 96% of security professionals are now preparing for AI cyber attacks. To proactively prevent fraud, telecom companies need to be able to ingest and analyze large amounts of data in real time. In short, companies that fail to keep up with cybercriminals will likely suffer significant financial and reputational losses in the coming years.
Simplify your tech stack with VoltDB
Telecom companies can easily simplify their tech stack by switching to VoltDB, a leading data engine designed specifically for 5G.
VoltDB is a lean data processing platform that includes a single unified layer, rather than the multiple software layers typically found in traditional telecom deployments. This unique architecture allows VoltDB to run the entire data life cycle and cope with massive online traffic at breakneck speed without compromising data accuracy.
Meanwhile, VoltDB supports AI-driven tools and distributed computing needs. A VoltDB cluster can handle both inbound queue and message processing, but can also filter data and aggregate both data and outbound queue messages. A 10-fold increase in data-processing power was accompanied by an 83% reduction in the risk of credit card fraud and a 25-fold reduction in revenue loss.
VoltDB has a world-class development team with a deep understanding of mission-critical systems. Therefore, telecom companies can get the support of real industry experts. In addition, this support system reduces the burden on the internal IT team, enabling them to focus on other priorities.
04 VoltDB: A data platform built specifically for 5G
The benefits and efficiencies of 5G technology run through your tech stack. Telecom companies that understand this and adopt a streamlined technology stack can accelerate the development of their 5G capabilities now and gain a competitive advantage in the years to come.
VoltDB China: www.voltdb-china.cn/