This article was originally published in The Fast Mode
The telecommunications industry constantly talks about quality and value. While market pressures have understandably led some service providers to compromise on quality, this only erodes customer trust. Quality is challenging because it’s subjective and specific to a customer’s business requirements, market sector and region. There’s no blanket solution in network communications. Some customers value speed and availability. Others value diversity or customer service.
In pursuit of perfection, operators must focus on their service offerings and overall operations as much as their network fundamentals. However, pursuing perfection across various facets is a formidable obstacle. So, will this goal always remain elusive?
Paradoxically, imperfection has driven major advancements in telecommunications over the past few decades. As much as the industry focuses on innovation, it’s vital to “fail fast” and learn from our mistakes. Regardless of these changes, quality and trust remain intertwined. This dynamic boils down to a few goals for internet carriers. High network availability, quick remediation (rapid rerouting or failover mechanisms), fast customer response times and other qualities are still paramount.
By focusing on scalability, reliability, service delivery speed and more when evaluating potential operators, customers can accurately assess the networking facets essential to business success.
Scalable capacity through optical innovation
Optical innovation via coherent optical pluggables is vital in empowering customers with scalable capacities, particularly amid the rise of bandwidth-hungry AI/ML and cloud applications. These capacity demands increase annually, with many operators beginning to test and explore the capabilities of 800G ZR/ZR+ pluggables in metro and long-haul networks. These components provide the scalability required to handle fluctuating demands in real time, helping operators scale massive capacities according to their customers’ immediate needs.
While testing these pluggables in a laboratory environment with “perfect” fiber is one thing, some operators are setting industry benchmarks through live network field trials over existing fiber. This approach heightens risk, requiring courage as the possibility of failure rises when conducting trials in suboptimal, real-world conditions. However, this willingness to experience imperfection catalyzes progress and expedites the eventual implementation of components that future-proof networks for customers’ evolving capacity requirements.
Diversity and availability remain essential
As AI/ML and other emerging applications transform the telecom ecosystem, the underlying connectivity supporting these applications must be diverse, highly available and resilient to enable real-time functionality and high-capacity data transfer between data centers. By enhancing the diversity of their networking footprints, operators can reduce the impact of single points of failure by routing traffic via alternate paths if one route is compromised.
Diversity also improves performance and latency by routing traffic between the shortest available distances while supporting redundancy and disaster recovery for customers’ mission-critical services. This network quality is particularly vital amid higher instances of increasingly volatile weather, geopolitical sabotage and accidental damage to fiber cables.
In an always-on, interconnected world, many companies’ business success depends on high-availability connectivity. AI/ML, IoT and cloud applications raise these stakes even higher, as their utility depends on 24/7 real-time operations. Carriers risk missing service level agreements and damaging customer trust if they neglect availability. Operators can improve this essential quality by establishing an expansive network footprint and placing Points-of-Presence closer to customers and their end-users. Network automation and predictive analytics can also help internet carriers detect and prevent network issues quickly to improve uptime and availability.
Speedy service delivery and distributed customer support teams
In such a cutthroat industry, first impressions matter. As a result, many operators strive for speedy end-to-end service delivery across their networks to establish and maintain positive customer relationships. Fast service delivery enhances business agility for customers, helping them meet their evolving and occasionally unpredictable technology requirements quickly. Operators can improve this network quality by implementing more intelligent provisioning and orchestration tools that automate portions of the service delivery process.
Distributed customer service teams are also essential. Given the globally distributed nature of today’s networking ecosystem, these teams should reflect the diversityof the companies they support. They should understand local languages and cultural nuances and possess deep contextual knowledge of a customer’s technological environment and connectivity requirements. This level of localized, context-specific support helps operators build stronger trust within a highly competitive industry landscape.
Courage and curiosity: telecom’s driving forces
No matter which innovations the telecommunications industry implements amid the rise of AI/ML technologies, perfection will always remain just out of reach. Despite this challenging reality, operators are still hungry to pursue it. Today, they focus on making the right choices according to each customer’s unique needs. While operators can’t predict tomorrow’s challenges, they can prioritize diversity, resiliency and scalability when building infrastructure, keeping them prepared for their customers’ requirements no matter which obstacles they face next. Courage and curiosity are the driving forces in this pursuit, helping operators push the limits of network design and performance, even when imperfection is inevitable.
Mattias Fridström, Chief Evangelist