Every day, we move deeper into the 5G era, as the new technology rapidly becomes the standard for telco providers. In fact, it’s expected that 5G will account for 1.2 billion connections by 2025, covering one-third of the global population.
There is now a remarkable 5G opportunity for telcos at hand. But while it’s easier than ever to build stacks today, telcos across the board are struggling with environments that are clunky and inefficient. Unfortunately, a vast majority of telco providers today rely on stacks that are simply not capable of building and deploying next-generation 5G applications.
Make no mistake about it: 5G success depends heavily on the quality and efficiency of the underlying tech stack. The sooner telcos realize this and take action to simplify and improve their architectures, the better off they’ll be.
On the flipside, telcos that resist stack simplification stand no chance of competing in the 5G era. This will become increasingly apparent in the coming years, as more and more telcos overhaul their architectures and single-digit millisecond latency becomes the new gold standard.
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Stack Simplification and Edge Computing
A major part of the 5G opportunity for telcos and the reason stack simplification is becoming so important for telcos is edge computing.
Ultimately, the only way to do things faster and take full advantage of 5G is to accomplish as much as possible with the data as quickly as possible by going from ingestion to action right as the data event happen—ie, at the “edge”—whether that edge is in a public cloud, private cloud, or on-premises data center.
Gartner predicts that by 2025, three-quarters of enterprise-generated data will be created and processed at the edge, outside of a traditional centralized data center or cloud.
Although edge data centers typically have the same components as traditional data centers, they have a much smaller footprint. By being able to move processing requests like JavaScript or HTML files closer to the machine requesting it, the amount of time required to return that data decreases.
But there’s little to no advantage to edge computing if the data platform working within this smaller footprint can’t meet the single digit-millisecond latency demands of 5G. If the whole purpose of using edge networks is speed, you need to make sure your data platform can provide that speed.
Stack Simplification Use Cases for Telcos
Until now, most telcos and communications service providers (CSPs) have been able to get away with having multiple layers in their tech stacks. This was fine in the pre-5G and IoT era, where the data volume, variety, and velocity were far less and the average application could afford to incorporate multiple data packet trips to and from a data warehouse without worrying about data accuracy and consistency.
However, multi-layered stacks simply aren’t realistic for the 5G era. It’s just not possible to instantly move data, process it, and apply business rules across multiple layers with any sense of immediacy or urgency, but without this urgency or capability, enterprises miss too many opportunities and risk losing too much money to fraud.
Telcos need to simplify their stacks and implement a single, unified layer to achieve true 5G speeds with less than 10 milliseconds of latency when it comes to the decision-making part of the process (ie, when your applications need to decide if an anomalous event is worth acting on). With a simplified tech stack, companies can rapidly ingest and analyze information for real-time decisioning.
This can improve application performance in a number of areas, including:
1. Customer management
Most telcos are actively trying to enhance and improve customer management to keep customers satisfied and prevent churn. In the digital age, overall customer experience has rapidly become one of the most critical metrics in the industry.
By simplifying their stack using a modern data platform, telcos can respond to customer issues as they occur, leading to faster and more efficient issue resolution — which, in turn, reduces customer complaints, speeds up telco application response time, and keeps customer loyal.
Telcos are also looking for ways to drive profits to offset declining revenue streams. Yet, this is difficult for a few reasons. For starters, most customers are looking to reduce communications expenses — not pay more. And on top of that, there are limited opportunities for engagement.
By simplifying the stack and achieving real-time decisioning, telcos can more effectively discover and capitalize on sales opportunities as they occur in real time.
For example, an agent may be on the phone with a customer who could upgrade their bandwidth or add new services to their package. With a simplified stack, the telco could instantly analyze the customer’s network, understand their profile and history, and make a split-second decision about quoting—empowering the agent to make a data-driven offer and drive more profits.
2. Fraud prevention
Fraud continues to ravage the telco industry, and it’s about to get worse with the increasing use of artificial intelligence. One recent study found that 96% of security professionals are now preparing for AI cyberattacks.
In order to proactively protect against and prevent fraud, telcos need to be able to ingest and analyze vast amounts of data in real time. Quite simply, companies that can’t keep up with cybercriminals will suffer major financial losses and reputational harm in the coming years.
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Simplify Your Tech Stack With Volt Active Data
Telcos can easily and cost-effectively simplify their stacks by switching to Volt Active Data, a leading data platform specifically designed for the 5G era.
Volt Active Data is a lean data processing platform that contains a single unified layer instead of multiple layers typically found in legacy telco deployments. This unique architecture enables Volt Active Data to address the complete data lifecycle and manage network traffic at scale, at lightning speeds, without compromising on data accuracy.
At the same time, Volt Active Data can support AI-powered tools and distributed computing, both of which are in high demand. A single Volt Active Data cluster can process inbound queues and message processing logic while enriching and filtering data and aggregating data and outbound queue messages. This increases processing capacity by 10x while reducing credit card fraud by 83% and revenue leakage by 25x.
What’s more, Volt Active Data has a world-class dev team with a deep understanding of mission-critical systems. As such, telcos can rest comfortably knowing that their data platforms are backed by the support of true industry experts. As a bonus, this support system also removes the burden from in-house IT teams, enabling them to focus on other priority tasks.
Volt Active Data — The Data Platform Built for 5G
The pathway to 5G profits and efficiency runs through your tech stack. Telcos that understand this and take active measures to streamline their stacks now can accelerate their 5G capabilities and gain a leg up on the competition for years to come.
