Carriers Need to Change Mindsets, Not Just Technology: Panelists
Network automation takes a long time to get right, but it's necessary in order to meet the needs of customers today, said Swisscom’s Francesco Pellegrini during a TelecomTV webinar Tuesday. Providers need to embrace change and not just move to updated technology, he added.
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Competition is getting “tougher and tougher,” and the networks are getting more complex, but customers don’t care about any of that, said Pellegrini, who oversees network optimization for the carrier. Customers “just simply want to have the best network” and “the best customer experience.”
Carriers are moving to a service management and orchestration (SMO) solution and self-organizing networks (SON), Pellegrini said. Changing the technology by itself wasn’t enough, though, and Swisscom had to “change the mindset of the engineer” and develop and improve its "competencies,” he said. “We had to acquire new skills in data management.” As mindsets shift, network engineers have started to see automation as a “resource and not as an issue,” he said, adding that providers' need for openness and flexibility in their networks are the main drivers of change.
Adoption of new concepts, such as cloud-native AI, and network transformation “need to happen in parallel,” said Felipe Romera, Ericsson's strategic product manager. “We are in a time when we have the technology ready and also the willingness” to embrace change. “It’s now time to move to the next step.”
Romera also said carriers want “freedom of choice” to optimize their networks, as well as “AI capabilities.” SON technology was developed to manage earlier wireless generations, but with 5G, “we have more complexity” and “new features that are coming,” he said. Traffic patterns are changing, and “we need to be able to react to that.”