As we delve into the transformative power of artificial intelligence in telecommunications, it’s insightful to consider the perspectives of experts in the field. Matteo Marchini, a seasoned Principal Consultant and OSS expert with over twenty years of experience working for major network vendors in the Telecommunications sector sheds light on the critical role AI plays in the industry.
The constant growth of traffic and the need for more sophisticated and numerous devices make the management of telecommunications networks increasingly complex and costly. The rapid adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) has become crucial in telecommunications to support networks and customers on a large scale.
What: AI to Learn, Reason, and Create
Firstly, it’s essential to distinguish between “artificial intelligence” and “Automation,” as these two concepts are often confused. AI, most of the time, is integrated into an automation process to introduce that human-like characteristic of learning, reasoning, and creating artificially. When applied to a process, AI should add capabilities of resilience, adaptation, and process improvement, yielding increasing benefits with reduced management costs over changing conditions, something not achievable by automation alone.
Nowadays, AI has become a prerequisite regardless, integrated into an end-to-end process to enhance or resolve various situations.
Why: Optimize, Identify Behavioral Insights, Monetize Data through Commercial Partnerships
The Telecommunications sector is undergoing a significant technological transformation that requires substantial financial investments. With the advent of 5G and Edge computing as enabling technologies for new applications, there’s a need to support investments to provide dedicated offerings to businesses and consumers for the use of innovative applications with specific connectivity needs.
In the current scenario, where making new investments is challenging, telecommunications operators must manage legacy networks, such as 4G, alongside new technologies, adding costs and complexity. Introducing artificial intelligence can bring substantial benefits to manageing the increasing complexity of the network and meet reliability expectations for new applications.
In a consolidating telecommunications market, where operators must increase sales, AI comes to the rescue. It identifies behavioral insights for targeted new service offerings and leverages the vast amount of data operators collect daily, monetizing them through commercial partnerships in other sectors.
How: Analysis, Planning, Prediction, Energy Efficiency. And a Better Customer Experience.
Given the fundamental reasons to apply AI in the telecommunications sector, let’s contextualize the concept by explaining how to apply it, and describing specific use cases in typical telecommunications network management processes. The following list is illustrative due to the nature of the topic.
- Analyzing alarms, counters, and network traffic, AI algorithms can improve network monitoring, identifying faults immediately or even acting predictively to prevent issues, reducing Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR).
- AI is applied to optimize the network by suggesting real-time configuration changes that a dedicated team would be unable to identify, design, and plan in such a short time, especially without errors. These AI-based algorithms consider multiple optimization scenarios simultaneously, simulating the impacts of each, making the best decision in short periods to avoid network congestion and improve the overall customer experience.
- Using AI in planning can reduce investment costs by predicting a dynamic allocation of resources based on traffic needs or optimizing data routing based on traffic changes, intelligently utilizing network resources without necessarily increasing them to handle traffic peaks.
- Real-time traffic and resource utilization analysis also supports sustainability by intelligently turning off some resources when not in use, and implementing energy-efficient features based on AI.
- Last but not least, AI aids Communications Service Providers (CSPs) in protecting networks and customer data by detecting or preventing real-time security threats such as cyber-attacks and fraud.
While ethical considerations about artificial intelligence continue, we are progressively discovering its benefits in our daily lives. We are learning to coexist with AI, not only trusting but relying entirely on it, as we have with other technologies that have profoundly transformed our habits in recent decades.
If you’re eager to unlock the potential of AI in your telecommunications strategy, Neodata Group is here to guide you. Connect with us at info@neodatagroup.ai for tailored insights and expert consultation!
Matteo Marchini
Matteo Marchini, born in 1972, holds a Master's degree in Telecommunication Engineering (1999) and boasts over two decades of experience in the field. Beginning his career with Nokia in 2000, in delivery services organization. Since 2005, Matteo has excelled in sales, specializing in OSS and CEM solutions. Renowned as a seasoned Principal Consultant and OSS expert, Matteo Marchini's insights into the pivotal role of AI in telecommunications are highly regarded. With a focus on innovation and strategic leadership, he continues to drive industry progress.
