As new technologies continue to emerge, we will move further into the 5G era. By 2025, 5G is expected to account for 1.2 billion connections, covering a third of the world’s population.
While it is easier than ever to build the technology stack and telecom operators will face 5G blue seas, telecom operators are still struggling in a difficult and inefficient environment, and the vast majority of telecom providers today are relying on a stack that cannot build and deploy the next generation of 5G applications.
Make no mistake: 5G’s success will largely depend on the quality and efficiency of the underlying technology stack. The sooner telecom 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 have little chance of winning the competition in the 5G era. This will become increasingly evident over the next few years as more telecom operators overhaul their architecture and latency per millisecond becomes the new industry standard.
01 Stack Simplification and Edge Calculation
A major part of the 5G opportunity for telecom carriers and technology stack simplification is becoming increasingly important for telecom carriers, mainly due to the rise of edge computing.
Ultimately, the only way to speed up processing and take full advantage of 5G is to process data as quickly as possible, from “edge” to ingestion to action as data events occur. Whether the edge is in a public cloud, a private cloud, or a local data center.
Gartner predicts that by 2025, three-quarters of all enterprise generated data will be created and processed at the edges of traditional centralized data centers or outside the cloud.
Although edge data centers often 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 data is reduced. However, if a data platform working in a small footprint cannot meet the requirements of 5G latency per millisecond, then edge computing has little advantage. 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.
Technology Stack Simplification Case for Telecom Companies
Until now, most telecom companies and communication service providers (CSPs) have been able to rely on relatively deep technology stacks. Before 5G and in the IoT era, because the data volume, variety, and speed are much smaller, this is not a problem, and ordinary applications can withstand multiple packet transfers to and from the data warehouse without worrying about data accuracy and consistency.
However, the multi-tier technology stack is simply not realistic for the 5G era, and the possibility of moving data instantaneously, processing it, and applying business rules across the multi-tier is extremely small. But without this urgency or ability, companies will miss out on too many opportunities, and thus lose out on the economic risks of fraud.
Telecoms operators need to simplify their stacks and implement a unified layer to achieve true 5G speeds and reduce the latency in the decision part of the process (that is, when your application needs to determine if an unusual event has occurred) to less than 10 milliseconds. . With a simplified technology stack, companies can quickly extract and analyze information for real-time decision making. This can improve application performance in many ways, including:
1. Customer management
Most telecom companies are actively trying to enhance and improve customer management in order 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, telecom companies can respond to customer problems when they occur, thus resolving problems faster and more efficiently, also reducing customer complaints, speeding response times for telecom applications, and maintaining customer loyalty.
Telecoms 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 reduce their communication costs, not pay more. Most importantly, the opportunities for participation are limited. By simplifying the technology stack and enabling real-time decisions, telecom companies can more effectively identify and leverage sales opportunities in real time.
For example, agents can talk to customers, who can upgrade their bandwidth or add new services to their packages. With a simplified technology stack, telecom companies can instantly analyze customers’ networks, learn about their personal information and history, and make instant decisions about offers, enabling agents to offer data-driven offers and increase profits.
2. Fraud prevention
Fraud has long plagued the telecom industry, and it will only get worse as AI is used more widely. A recent study found that 96 percent of security professionals are now preparing for AI cyber attacks. To proactively prevent fraud, telecoms companies need to be able to ingest and analyse large amounts of data in real time. In short, companies that fail to keep up with cybercriminals will likely suffer significant financial and reputational damage in the years to come.
Simplify your technology stack with VoltDB
VoltDB is a leading data engine specifically designed for the 5G era, and telcos can easily simplify the technology stack by switching to VoltDB.
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 enables VoltDB to span the entire data life cycle and respond to large network traffic extremely quickly, without compromising data accuracy.
At the same time, VoltDB supports AI-driven tools and distributed computing needs. A VoltDB cluster can handle both inbound queues and message processing, as well as filtering data and aggregating both data and outbound queue messages. A tenfold increase in data-processing power was accompanied by an 83% reduction in the risk of credit-card fraud and a 25-fold reduction in lost income.
VoltDB has a world-class development team with a deep understanding of mission-critical systems. As a result, telecom companies can get the support of real industry experts. In addition, this support system relieves the burden on the internal IT team and allows 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 technology stack. By understanding this and adopting a streamlined technology stack, telecom companies can accelerate the development of their 5G capabilities now and gain a competitive edge in the years to come.
VoltDB supports strong ACID and real-time intelligent decision making applications to enable a connected world. There is no other database product like VoltDB, which can fuel applications that require a combination of low latency, large scale, high concurrency, and accuracy. VoltDB was created by 2014 Tering Award winner Dr Mike Stonebraker, who has redesigned the relational database to meet today’s growing challenges of real-time operations and machine learning. Dr. Stonebraker has been studying database technology for more than 40 years and has brought many innovative ideas in the areas of fast data, streaming data and in-memory databases. During the development of VoltDB, he realized the full potential of using in-memory transaction database technology to tap into streaming data, not only to meet the latency and concurrency requirements of processing data, but also to provide real-time analysis and decision making. VoltDB is a reliable name in the industry and has been used in practical scenarios in cooperation with leading organizations such as Nokia, Financial Times, Mitsubishi Electric, HPE, Barclays, Huawei, etc. *
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