Customer care, metaverse, and private networks

As one of the 2022 ‘ICT Visionaries’ selected by ISE Magazine, our VP Strategy Johan Ottosson is sharing his thoughts on various topics throughout the year. His second article for ISE Magazine covers customer care, the metaverse, and private networks. The article was originally published in the magazine’s July issue found here. 

Customer Care and WIFM

It starts with strong knowledge and a common language across both organizations. At Arelion, many support representatives have more than one university degree in engineering and networking technologies. In addition, specialized “knowledge leaders” support complex issues and liaise with their counterparts in networks.

Anyone working on a network incident must have access to real-time and accurate data. Because most operations teams work with legacy systems and layers of accumulated complexity, it’s easier to see that a network element is affected, than how a service or customer is impacted. For example, a router or transmission link may be down, but teams can’t reach out proactively to customers about what’s being done to bring their services back. Or, planned changes could face the risk of taking something down inadvertently.

In 2022, we’re transitioning to a new “clean slate” NOC set-up and building our own next-generation inventory system. Structural changes like this are needed to bring about real customer-facing benefits.

Metaverse

Low latency, bandwidth scalability and high-performance connectivity, moving computing closer to the edge, building diversity into the network–this is what the metaverse will need to come to life. We use sophisticated network analysis, failure simulation and forecasting tools to determine the capacity required to deal with unprecedented surges in peak traffic. For example, combining analytics such as Cisco’s WAN Automation Engine (WAE)¹ and forecast tools building on Meta’s Prophet.² This makes our network extremely robust as evidenced in 2020, when we saw a 50+% traffic growth, almost overnight.

We are also constantly enhancing our network diversity, with several new routes added to our US network in recent years. Moreover, our large coverage of tier 2 and 3 markets helps digital service providers bring their services to the edge, which reduces latency. In a sense, the metaverse is precisely what we’ve built our network for.

Private Networks

A private network is an island that needs to connect back to the rest of the world to add value.

Though private networks currently see a lot of hype, greater collaboration is needed. The industry currently sits between “fragmented” and “coming together”, where mobile network operators (MNOs) tend to be very local in their thinking.

International enterprises need something broader. Often, private networks will require a highly secure connection from not just one but from multiple mobile networks to public or private clouds, wherever they may be. Solutions that work locally and scale globally.

For Arelion, private networks are a natural extension to what we do–keeping the world connected. It’s just another access layer for a digital service provider to manage. We have a great toolbox to draw from, starting with IPX and IP connectivity to mobile operators, and a global network with dedicated and distributed connections to clouds and data centers worldwide.

RESOURCES AND NOTES
1.     https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/routers/wan-automation-engine/index.html
2.    https://facebook.github.io/prophet/

Johan Ottosson, VP Strategy