This week Ericsson has announce not one, not two, not three… it’s Seven… Seven new things to get us all warmed up and excited ahead of the big MWC trade show in March. Some of it operational, some of it hardware, but all summarized here to save you digging through the press releases.
Digital Telco Transformation Accelerates Digitalization
In order to introduce and monetize the digital information, entertainment, finance and health services that customers want, telecom operators need to adopt a new operating model, says Ericsson. To ease the transition, Ericsson is introducing Digital Telco Transformation – consulting and systems integration services combined with their OSS/BSS portfolio.
Ericsson goes on to suggest that to be considered a digital telco, an operator must provide a consistent experience across all customer interaction channels. Digital telcos should also be capable of seamless sales, upselling and customer retention – and provide subscribers with the highest possible levels of self-care and near real-time service delivery.
Digitalization, by the way, appears to be a word Gartner has been trying to generate buzz around since last year – The need for companies to adapt their business and processes to a world that increasingly wants to do business online.
Ericsson’s New Media Delivery Solution
With the unprecedented growth in demand for mobile broadband, driven by video consumption, Ericsson believes that the viability of the entire media delivery value chain is dependent on the ability of network operators to transform into a media-centric business.
Ericsson’s Media Delivery Network – the single, all-software solution for the delivery of both managed and unmanaged content across fixed and mobile networks – has now evolved into a complete business enabler framework. Ericsson MDN combines a unique set of elements (Cache, Optimize, and Connect) to tackle all of the main challenges of media delivery: greater network efficiency, enhanced quality of experience and value-added services.
Ericsson Debuts Industry-First Analytics Suite
Ericsson has announced the launch of Ericsson Expert Analytics 15.0, a software suite allowing operators to predict customer satisfaction and automatically take closed-loop actions to improve it.
Expert Analytics 15.0 features Ericsson’s patent-pending service level index (SLI), a customer satisfaction score that continuously captures and measures the experience for each individual user. Validated by user trials, the SLI is valuable as an indicator of loyalty, as a measure of willingness to spend, and as a predictor of net promoter score (NPS).
Elisabetta Romano, Vice President and Head of OSS and Service Enablement, Ericsson says: “By pre-integrating analytics with our broad OSS and BSS portfolio, we are enabling operators to automate a wide variety of use cases, driven by analytics insights.”
New Ericsson Router 6000 Series
Ericsson is announcing the launch of the Router 6000 series to enable the evolution to LTE Advanced, 5G and M2M. The Router 6000 series addresses the end-to-end network security concerns and demand for higher operational efficiency. The advanced radio integrated transport, along with Service Provider SDN (Software Defined Network) functionality and Ericsson Network Manager, enables application aware traffic engineering with plug-and-play installation.
The new router series is a key element in Ericsson’s next-generation portfolio, a comprehensive suite of platforms running one network operating system (IPOS), spanning from cell-site routers to edge, mobile core and data centers.
Ericsson Software Drives Evolution Across Radio, Cloud and Virtualization
Networks Software 15B and the Ericsson Software model, Ericsson enthuses, are leading the way the ICT industry is transforming itself, offering increased performance and commercial simplicity for software delivery. Networks Software 15B delivers many new capabilities in the areas of radio access, cloud & virtualization, as well as in the network management & control domain, promising to boost networks for maximum performance.
App Experience Optimization
Operators are well aware that the single most important driver of customer loyalty is network performance, which is why they put a lot of effort into optimizing their networks. Conventional network-related key performance indicators (KPIs) alone may no longer paint an accurate picture of the true user experience.
App Experience Optimization is a new service that transforms how operators optimize their networks to meet the new demands created by a fast-evolving app ecosystem. The service addresses this challenge by providing a true picture of the local app experience and correlating this with network-related KPIs, which can then be acted upon.
In a recent project, Ericsson optimized XL Axiata’s network for performance of the Facebook app. As a result, app experience – defined by the ability to complete transactions within a maximum time of three seconds – improved by between 20 and 70 percent. Time to content improved by up to 70 percent, while upload time improved by up to 50 percent. These results show that it is possible to optimize app experience using existing network resources.
Ericsson Unveils Generational Shift in How Mobile Networks Are Built
In big cities like New York, the air space above buildings is valuable real estate – think the Manhattan skyline. Where there is no room to build out, urban planners build upward. Ericsson’s new modular Radio System is opening up the same opportunity to operators struggling with site acquisition challenges in densely populated areas, allowing them to utilize wall space in existing sites and safely add 5-times the capacity to towers.
Ericsson Radio System’s modular architecture flexibly expands to changing demands on the road to 5G with multi-standard, multi-band and multi-layer technology. It all but eliminates site acquisition issues, delivering three times the capacity density with 50 percent improvement in energy efficiency.