Exploring Automation in Telecoms – opportunities and challenges -drivers of efficiencies.

Thinking about Telecom Automation for a local round table with CSPs in the country, a few topics surfaced that will be noted here as part of a series on this.

The first discuses the why of automation in the Telecom industry and Telco’s move from CSPs to DSPs.

One aspect of why is drivers for efficiency which includes the usual candidates; reducing costs, improving customer experience, and enhancing network performance.

A second aspect of why is the adoption of standards to leverage AI and ML for network optimisation and service operationalisation. (e.g. ETSI TS 129 520 from 3GPP TS 29.250). This allows for effectiveness and efficiency in managing the network, deploying Devices, Virtual Devices and Containerised Devices representing Network Functions to the network, and fine-tuning product and service offerings to each individual customer.

A third aspect of why is to enable integrations with Suppliers and Partners to allow entry to the Digital Services Markets offered by SaaS providers. Business capabilities are exchanged to provide E2E services. It is almost certain that some data transformation is required for integration.

Assume patterns of Domain Driven Design are used in such integrated bounded contexts and data model translation occurs in such contexts following best practice for effective and efficient designs with microservices. Then depending on how the SaaS service forms the bounded context relationship with the CSP, the definition and use of APIs for effective collaboration and communication changes. Additionaly any such translation can be stateful or stateless. Given such volatility in design the use of standards as provided by TMForums OpenAPI cannot adapt and increase complexity in integration in such contexts.