Webinar Recap: Lessons learned from T-mobile Netherlands’ road to zero touch

How close can CSPs come to realizing the zero touch network vision, and what are the best next steps for getting there? To discuss this question Anodot brought together a panel of experts, including Kim Larsen, CTIO of T-Mobile Netherlands; Ira Cohen, co-founder of Anodot and the company’s chief data scientist; Fernando Elizalde, analyst at GSMA Intelligence; and moderator Justin Springham. Larsen spearheaded the network automation project on behalf of T-Mobile Netherlands, and was responsible for the implementation of Anodot’s autonomous monitoring solution on top of the operator’s networks. 

On the webinar, Elizalde painted a data driven picture of where CSPs stand today. Larsen described T-Mobile Netherlands’ monitoring needs that led to the implementation of Anodot, and how Anodot transforms the ways it now handles network anomalies and glitches. Cohen described the technology behind zero touch monitoring, and why CSPs need to implement it sooner rather than later if they want to continue delivering a competitive edge.

Here are the key takeaways:

1. The pandemic has brought a tremendous growth in the consumption of digital services, increasing demand on carriers and requiring operators to adopt new ways for assessing networks and addressing faults.
2. Automation has become a more pressing priority. According to a GSMA Network Transformation Survey, 65% of network executives reported that automation of business functions and network operations was extremely or very important, since it is tightly linked to service quality — a key driver of performance.
3. Operators can no longer rely on manual operations. Automation and zero touch processes are required to manage the business and its technology complexities, to create new digital services, and most importantly, to maintain performance levels that provide high customer satisfaction and reduce churn.
4. Considering the state of CSP’s network monitoring and remediation technology today, most are somewhere between level one and level two autonomous in terms of network management: substantial expert manual work is still required to set up alerts, dashboards, and the sensory information required to configure the network components and how they are connected.
5. However, most of the mechanisms required for Telco Zero Touch are already available today, and have been successfully implemented by forward thinking carriers, like T-Mobile Netherlands which implemented Anodot’s zero touch monitoring solution.
6. T-Mobile Netherlands has found that advanced ML-based solutions — in this case, Anodot — offers a much faster root cause analysis resolution, with about 50% improvement in actually identifying the root cause of a particular incident. It also enables proactive incident handling, where CSPs are able to catch incidents before they become real outages — as well as proactive customer experience management.
7. “A super strong point with Anodot is that it allows you to implement a solution very quickly and start getting data out and actually improve your customers’ experience — and understand what is actually happening, what are the causal effects for a certain outage”, said Larsen.
8. Larsen added: “We had very fast return on investment with Anodot, because the system was up and running in three months, and enabled proactive incident handling: we can now catch the incidents before they actually become real outages.”
9. According to Larsen, these are the main Anodot benefits vis-a-vis T-mobile Netherlands:
   
   • Very fast ROI. Proof of value with very short implementation time.
   • Very versatile and flexible. Can be applied to many areas other than infrastructure.
   • Proactive incident handling. Catch issues early before they become incidents.
   • Proactive customer experience management. Know about incidents before your customers. 
   • Much faster root cause analysis. +50% improvement in root cause analysis identification. 
   • Also works with legacy. This is critical since for most companies a big share of infra platforms are legacy.

To learn more about Anodot’s state of the art autonomous monitoring solution for CSPs, and how it has transformed T-Mobile Netherlands’ ability to proactively manage the network and the customers’ experience, you are welcome to watch the complete webinar.