Over the past decade the telecommunications landscape has transformed dramatically. The rise of over-the-top (OTT) services has eroded carriers’ traditional voice and messaging revenues. Industry estimates have suggested substantial losses due to the rapid adoption of OTT messaging and VoIP services, prompting operators to rethink their business models.
Competitive mobile operators introduced unlimited data plans, forcing larger providers to follow suit or risk losing customers. As a result, many carriers shifted toward unlimited packages and data-driven offerings to remain competitive.
Unlike cloud-native OTT companies such as WhatsApp and Skype, legacy telecom operators have historically lacked the cloud infrastructure and operational processes required to compete effectively in a digital-first market. To succeed, operators must fundamentally modernize their networks. Migrating functions to the cloud enables greater agility, faster innovation, and the cost reductions necessary to reinvest in network capacity and services.
Consequently, numerous operators are adopting Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) to boost operational efficiency, reduce costs, accelerate service creation, and support a broader range of applications. Virtualized architectures give operators far greater flexibility, allowing them to scale resources up or down more cost-effectively to meet fluctuating demand—an advantage that will become increasingly important as IoT device numbers rise and data consumption soars.
However, virtualization introduces additional complexity and new operational challenges that must be addressed before operators can fully unlock its benefits.
Visibility in a complex environment
As operators deploy virtualized network functions—such as IMS and VoLTE—and implement infrastructures like Cloud RAN (C-RAN) and edge-based virtual machines, they face the challenge of maintaining clear visibility across an increasingly distributed and dynamic network.
Comprehensive visibility is essential to identify and resolve issues quickly, whether they occurred in the past, are happening now, or could arise in the future. Many services depend on uninterrupted connectivity, and even brief outages or degraded performance can lead to revenue loss, regulatory exposure, and customer churn.
To manage these risks, operators need insight into every layer of traffic traversing their multi-tiered networks, with the capability to track experiences for individual subscribers. This level of granularity enables faster troubleshooting, better capacity planning, and improved service assurance.
Smart data for insight and intelligence
Operators derive critical intelligence from the data flowing through their networks to optimize subscriber experience. In the digital era, however, this data must be handled with speed, accuracy, and fidelity.
The explosive growth in data volume makes it increasingly difficult to extract relevant information quickly. Data arrives from diverse sources, in both structured and unstructured formats, and often includes internal and external feeds.
To address these challenges, forward-looking operators are turning to “smart data”—data that is prepared and organized at the source so it’s ready for rapid, high-quality analytics. By extracting the relevant insights from IP traffic in real time, smart data provides actionable intelligence that helps operators detect faults, optimize resource allocation, and align infrastructure with traffic patterns. When combined with pervasive virtualized instrumentation across the network, smart data can be especially cost-efficient.
Smart data solutions are typically network-, vendor-, service-, and device-agnostic, supporting a wide range of technologies and standards. That neutrality is valuable today, as different operators pursue different virtualization strategies and adopt varied low-power wide-area (LPWA) technologies to serve the growing Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem.
Faced with stiff competition, operators recognize that virtualization can transform their networks, deliver cost efficiencies, and enable new services. But virtualization alone is not enough: operators must pair it with smart data to gain the visibility and intelligence required to deploy virtualized functions successfully and manage digital transformation at scale. With the ability to observe, secure, and optimize their networks simultaneously, service providers will be better positioned to reclaim ground from OTT competitors and deliver reliable, differentiated services to their customers.
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