Telecommunications is an industry entirely embedded in the fabric of our everyday lives. Never before have we been so connected. The means to make that happen to continue to be maintained and developed by the telecom industry at large. But how can they deliver better services? With automation, of course.

The constant ability to communicate in the 21st century is no longer a luxury; it’s a necessity in our personal and work lives. Telecom is a broad descriptor of a huge industry that looks after all the hardware and software that powers our communication. But, like any sector that has developed organically, there are many parts of it that are lagging behind and need automation to drive them into the future.

What Is Telecom Automation?

Automation in telecom is the use of technology to carry out a job or task that traditionally would be done by a human. The type of tasks it covers, most commonly, refers to a digital interaction like clicking a mouse or pressing a key on a keyboard. There are different types of automation, including attended and unattended, requiring a person to be involved and not involved, respectively. The idea of involving a person usually revolves around helping augment their existing skills with more processing power, serving as a digital helping hand.

Challenges And Opportunities In Telecom

One of the biggest challenges facing the telecommunications industry today is a shortage of skilled labor. This is not only for legacy technology and having experts to maintain those services, but it’s also for the rapidly growing fiber and 5G space where the supply of engineers, and back-end workers, is outstripped by the demand to roll out installations. The clear opportunity available to telecom is to make work more efficient and maximize the available workforce’s productivity and keep telecom running.

Use Cases Of Telecom Automation

Service coordination is a big part of any telecommunications operation. That’s the digital side of things, with data flow in virtual environments, tying to the physical connections over cables and through the air via radio waves. Bringing all these things together at once is a deeply complex process and something automation can seriously help with. Because of the complexity of all the connections running in tandem, automated artificial intelligence (AI) must be deployed to monitor the interactions of services.

Service chaining helps automate traffic flow between different services within a virtual network, optimizing the use of network resources to improve application and hardware performance by selecting the most efficient path for any assistance. This means a person doesn’t have to monitor service efficiency; they can leave it in the hands of a bot and just be alerted to any problems that arise.

Service monitoring is a big part of an effective telecom operation. Making sure that customers have maximum uptime is critical to staying competitive. Automated service monitoring can help to show you the location of faults or faults that could get worse and fix them with little to no impact on the end user

Does your telecom business need help with automation? Reach out to PAteam today.