Connectivity isn’t enough – Telcos must deliver seamless experiences

What festival crowds can teach us about the future of telecoms and the transformation CSPs must embrace. Welcome to part one of our “Engineering Smart Networks & Operations” mini-series.

Imagine you’re at a large music festival with 175,000 other people, wristband blinking as you weave through the main-stage crowd: your phone pings with a route that steers you round a bottleneck, past a freshly stocked water point, and straight to the spot where your friends’ tents glow on the app’s augmented reality overlay.

A tap of the same screen settles your bar tab in seconds. No patchy signal, no queue as card machines need to be reset. The set you’re watching is instantly livestreamed from your handset to your followers, thanks to a creator-grade uplink slice of the network, humming in the background.

Minutes later, a safety alert nudges you aside as security teams, guided by real-time drone feeds on their own event emergency slice, ease a crowd surge. Backstage, VIPs glide through a different digital lane altogether, enjoying 8K video streams and concierge chatbots that never buffer.

These may be presented to the customer as separate perks, but cashless payments, immersive navigation, glitch-free streaming, and iron-clad safety are all threads from one fabric: a single, software-defined network, sliced and stitched on demand to cater for a vast array of personalized services, that people consume eagerly with ease.

Rethinking services 

This hybrid of telecoms and digital technology turns the operator’s infrastructure into an array of different services. Each is tuned to a precise need, yet orchestrated from the same intelligent core, proving that the future of connectivity is less about bandwidth bars and more about the seamless experiences this bandwidth weaves together.

This is certainly not what revellers at the world’s most famous performing arts festival experienced last month. Yet, it may not be long until they can. This example might be theoretical, but it is certainly indicative of what customers want, and therefore what Communication Service Providers (CSPs) want to offer.

This is not just about meeting customer demands to retain revenue streams. It’s more about finding new ones. The raft of new services enabled by 3G and 4G connectivity has not been mirrored by 5G’s arrival. So, whilst the telecommunications industry has had to spend big on networks to provide customers with 5G bandwidth, it has struggled to use that as a springboard to bring brand new services to market that help recoup its investment.

CSPs have realized they must generate revenue in unfamiliar ways if they want to maintain relevance and growth.

Rethinking revenue

We are starting to see what that revenue model looks like in practice. There is already a focus on moving from broad services designed for everyone to access, to bespoke ones for smaller groups with specific requirements. There is a broader move from CSPs dictating what services are available to a responsive agile network that bends to the customer’s whims.

Telecommunications would not be the first infrastructure industry to do this. Energy companies have embraced digital transformation to upend traditional approaches to making money from electricity and gas.

Smart metering and real-time data have enabled personalized tariffs and dynamic pricing. Apps and platforms now help customers monitor their own energy use, allowing providers to offer new service tiers, like home automation integration or carbon offset features. These companies are also supporting customer microgrid participation (so they can charge for grid balancing) or offering buyback schemes to monetize excess generation.

Many of these companies are also expanding beyond energy offerings, providing customers with additional consumer services, like electric vehicles or financial products. 

As it has in energy, doing this in telecommunications brings with it technical consequences for the owners of the existing infrastructure. The technology to enable everything from intelligent network slicing to automated personalization is varied and advanced, but it must somehow become seamlessly integrated into legacy networks.

From data management and cloud services to artificial intelligence and advanced cybersecurity – together these additional technologies represent the single biggest digital transformation in this sector since mobile telephony went mainstream in the 1980s.

How to tackle telecoms digital transformation

Digital transformation won’t be easy. Identifying the right technologies is only part of the challenge. While CSPs are experts in the telecommunications equipment that powers their networks, they often lack the cloud, data and AI expertise as well as experience in agile and DevOps methodologies, needed to effectively splice broader digital technologies into their existing infrastructure. As a result, the industry must find a way to bridge these gaps if it is to navigate this transformation successfully.

That is where working with an ecosystem of partners that understands both sides makes a difference. Organizations that bring in experts who can ‘talk their language’ whilst simultaneously translating others they need to learn pays dividends – cutting the time it takes to transform and optimize. To succeed as the boundaries between telecoms and digital technology become thinner requires CSPs to find partners with practical experience in both worlds.

Over the course of the following articles, we will delve into the most important areas where this transformation needs to be swift, smooth and successful. We believe that CSPs approaching this pivotal transformation should seek guidance from partners with deep expertise in telecommunications, digital technologies, and large-scale digital change – partners who can offer proven digital and engineering methodologies and strategic insight.  

With the right partners, CSPs can unlock the full potential of network transformation – leveraging it to deliver seamless client experiences, reduced costs, and the development of secure, AI-enabled operations.  

We hope this series will help CSPs stay focused on what matters most, by clearly defining core versus contextual priorities.

From infrastructure providers to orchestrators of seamless digital experiences

The music festival example may be theoretical, but the expectation it reflects is very real. Customers no longer measure their experience in megabits per second – they measure it in moments: seamless, personalized, secure, and shareable.

Meeting these expectations requires CSPs to evolve from infrastructure providers into orchestrators of digital experiences. That evolution demands not only bold investment, but the right blend of technical insight and strategic vision.

To learn more about how we engineer smart networks and networks operations, contact us at engineering@capgemini.com