In our industry, we often talk about quality. The truth is that the definition of quality is an intensely personal judgement. It is a topic that we discuss constantly at Arelion and we’ve explored it many times with our customers: for some it is all about speed and availability and, for others, the customer service experience. It varies by region, role and individual.
The reality is that delivering the best service requires telecom operators and carriers to not only focus on the network fundamentals for their quality measures but to also look across their service offering and operations. In such a disruptive marketplace, even the most formidable Internet backbone and carrier networks have fallen by the wayside over the years.
It is easy to understand the temptation that some have faced to compromise on quality under market pressures. But quality and trust are closely entwined – both are essential when choosing a reliable network partner, and indeed for a network provider’s long-term survival.
Chasing perfection
In many ways (and somewhat paradoxically), imperfection within our industry is what has driven us to build a better network experience. At Arelion, we believe the keys to reliable, scalable networks and the best customer experience are innovation and attention to the finest of details.
At its core, there are four simple goals that drive our team forward and which reflect our belief that quality is not merely about network stats:
- Achieving the shortest possible delivery times
- Pushing for the greatest network availability (every 9 counts)
- Actioning repair in the shortest possible time
- And, responding to customers as fast and clearly as possible (every second counts).
These goals have all helped our AS1299 Fiber Backbone Network achieve its #1 ranking. However, we have also learnt a lot from our mistakes over the years. Indeed, many of our achievements wouldn’t have been possible without pushing boundaries and daring to ‘fail fast’. These include:
- Being the first European carrier to hold a US operator’s license in the late 1990s
- The first to provide 100GE wavelengths on both sides of the Atlantic
- The first to demonstrate 400G coherent connections over third-party open line system with pluggable optics
- Our customer service teams were an early adopter of Cloud CRM and Salesforce
- Arelion was the first Tier-1 transit network in the world to launch RPKI
Getting you closer to perfection
We admire the grit and determination of life’s perfectionists (indeed, we’ve celebrated a few of them in our latest film), and while we relentlessly chase perfection ourselves – closing the gap and trying to get it in our grasp – in a world of rapidly changing technology and customer needs, it will always be just out of reach. But the very pursuit of it has led to innovations and improvements that have ultimately benefited the industry as a whole and, most importantly, our customers.
To push the limits of our network and customer service performance requires curiosity and courage. Without it we could never have built the platform which enabled the keypad office during lockdown – on a solid global backbone with the ability to ramp up critical network capacity in hours rather than weeks.
At the end of the day, there is a fine balance to be struck between the pursuit of the perfect network experience and sustaining a viable business in a cut-throat marketplace. Of course, holding vast stocks of hardware and spares would make it easy to promise speedy deliveries and upgrades, but it wouldn’t necessarily make good business sense. So, perhaps, it isn’t so much a case of the telecom industry losing its hunger for perfection, but more a matter of focus and – ultimately – making the right choices.
We’ve always maintained that ‘you can’t predict the future, but you can be ready’, and with an unrelenting hunger for perfection, we will continue to try new things, expand our network, and work to help our customers enjoy the best possible network experience (through good times and bad).
Mattias Fridström, Chief Evangelist