Modern telcos have a bandwidth issue—not the same bandwidth-limitation issue they’ve had for the last three decades or so but the fact that an entirely new and far more powerful bandwidth age is upon us, unleashing new threats and new opportunities that most communication service providers (CSPs) simply can’t manage with their legacy technologies.
With 5G has come a vast new world of potential—and risk—for any company involved in the telco space. It’s not just about the communication piece itself but all of the pieces around it: from gaming to virtual reality to industrial IoT, there’s almost no limit to what 5G can, and likely will, enable, and this holds especially true for the complex world policy and charging.
Traditional telco billing and charging systems were designed for a much simpler world where most services could be measured in minutes and bytes. Today, there are millions of users making transactions simultaneously across a far more diverse multimedia world, one in which even the idea of what constitutes a “transaction” has changed.
As discussed in Volt Active Data’s new enterprise 5G report, and as we will discuss in our upcoming webinar, too, these are the key elements driving change across telco policy and charging:
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5G Monetization
It’s no longer enough to offer reliable connections and quick speeds. Now, telcos are also in the business of monetizing their various network functions to create an entire ecosystem of personalized services and monetization options. This means having database technology that allows your applications to be nimble, scalable, and resilient. The more complex and varied the data that is coming in, the more sophisticated your data platform will need to be to effectively handle it.
Digital twins
Extremely important for things like remote monitoring, predictive maintenance, and automated processing, digital twins, or the digital representation of physical objects, have become a key digital transformation tool for modern telcos.
IoT’s massive new connectivity between devices and people has led to new business process automation techniques for enterprises, techniques that require real-time control loops where physical assets feed current events’ data while the digital twins use this data and the intelligence created in the machine-learning iterations to drive actions.
Edge computing
Finally, there’s edge computing.
Making continuously integrated automation a reality requires ultra-low-latency communications and fast data processing to drive intelligent, spur-of-the-moment actions.
While 5G is making this all a reality, it’s also asking too much of your legacy databases and requiring things to be done so quickly that it’s not just the process that needs to change but the actual location.
Now, to get things done as quickly as they need to get done, your data platform needs to be to ingest and act on data right as it’s coming in—that is, at the point of entry, or the edge, wherever that particular edge may be for your enterprise. There’s no longer time for data to travel to a data lake for processing. By the time it’s done that, it’s already lost its value. That’s why you need edge computing to take full advantage of 5G monetization and fraud prevention opportunities.
Find the full enterprise 5G report here and register for the webinar here.
