How Chorus New Zealand Cut Fibre Provisioning Time by 40% with Comptel

Posted: May 16th, 2014 | Author: Steve Hateley | Filed under: Compelling Cases | Tags: , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

If the telco industry will remember anything from 2014, it will be the decisive move toward disruptive technologies. With Over-the-Top (OTT) services and IPTV eating away at traditional sources of revenue, communications service providers (CSPs) are working hard to differentiate in an increasingly competitive and commoditised landscape.

A growing number of fixed broadband providers are turning to automated fibre fulfillment systems to stay ahead. Fibre deployments have been largely impractical for many CSPs, because of cost considerations and logistical reasons, but the need for disruptive tactics may change that trend. After all, ultra-fast broadband connections will be a unique offering in many countries. Pyramid Research estimates that only 35 percent of households worldwide will have a broadband connection this year.

Fibre fulfillment systems will be key differentiators for CSPs, as they will enable more efficient, seamless service delivery to see through customer demand. Comptel customer Chorus New Zealand was one such company that saw the benefits that could be realised – and this week, we were recognised with a Global Telecoms Business Innovation Award for our work together!

The Fibre Future

Chorus is New Zealand’s largest telecommunications infrastructure company. In late 2012, the business was looking for a modern fibre service fulfillment system that offered order management, large-scale logical inventory and activation capabilities that would help establish the company as a standalone entity from Telecom New Zealand. Chorus had recently been awarded a number of ultra-fast broadband contracts and set the goal of delivering a “best-in-class” fibre broadband experience to more than 830,000 New Zealand homes. That’s where we came in.

“Instead of undertaking a major OSS transformation that promised to be cumbersome and costly, Chorus New Zealand elected to pursue an ‘intelligent evolution’ project,” stated Dr. Mark H. Mortensen, author of the Analysys Mason case study. “The major benefit to doing so was it allowed them to provide a fully automated stack based on Comptel’s industry standards-based framework. As a result, Chorus experienced a 40 percent reduction in the time required to electronically provision a fibre connection to a customer’s premises.”

Through such an intelligent OSS evolution, the traditional barriers to fibre deployment fall away. By almost reducing the time of fibre provisioning by half, Chorus guaranteed that the ROI from fibre would be apparent much earlier in the deployment lifecycle. In turn, both the business and customers started to see the benefits of ultra-fast broadband sooner.

The service agility, operational flexibility and rapid time-to-market made possible can become serious differentiators for CSPs in the coming years. The companies that successfully deploy and deliver fibre, supported by automated, catalog-driven fulfillment and by undertaking an end-to-end approach, will pull out ahead of the competition. It also opens up the opportunity for more innovation and better customer service that will generate new streams of revenue to counter the risks of commoditisation.


Want to learn more about the award-winning Chorus & Comptel fibre fulfillment project? Download the full case study!

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Let the 15th Annual Comptel User Group Begin!

Posted: June 11th, 2012 | Author: Ulla Koivukoski | Filed under: Events | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | No Comments »

After some very good conversations at Management World 2012 in Dublin just a few weeks ago, we’re eager to continue the momentum and kick off the 15th annual Comptel User Group in Copenhagen, Denmark this week. Attendees can look forward to networking with Comptel’s executive management and our resident solution experts and learning from other customers and partners, in addition to partaking in some fun extracurricular activities like dinner at one of Copenhagen’s oldest theme parks and most popular attractions, Tivoli.

During the event, we’ll be exploring what seems like one of the hottest topics in the telecoms industry at the moment—analytics. In particular, we’ll be focusing on how it applies to Contextual Intelligence for Telecommunications (CIQ4T) and how it can help communications service providers (CSPs) address the challenges of customer experience management. Stay tuned for the results of an interactive voting session on this topic!

This year’s Comptel User Group will also feature a corporate strategy overview from CEO Juhani Hintikka, followed by presentations from TRUE Corporation in Thailand on provisioning, tefficient on improving efficiency in the telecoms sector, and Heavy Reading analysts Sarah Wallace and Ari Banerjee on compelling use cases for analytics, among others. Product demos and sessions on how they can help CSPs make data beautiful and better engage with their customers will also be available throughout the week.

While we wait for things to officially begin, here are some fun facts about the beautiful city of Copenhagen:

Did you know…

  • In 2007, Copenhagen was voted the world’s happiest city.
  • Around 30 percent of the Danish population – 1.8 million out of 5.4 million – live in the Copenhagen Metropolitan area.
  • Copenhagen’s harbor has been thoroughly cleaned in the past decade:  the inner harbor is now clean enough to swim in.
  • The dragon spire of Copenhagen’s old Stock Exchange, Børsen – now home to the Danish Chamber of Commerce – was created by a designer of fireworks.

Stay tuned for more insights from various Comptelians on-site at the Comptel User Group!


Customer Experience Automation: Beyond the Order, Beyond the Trouble Ticket

Posted: November 22nd, 2011 | Author: Special Contributor | Filed under: Industry Insights | Tags: , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

By: Andy Hicks, Research Manager, EMEA, Telecoms, IDC

If your job involves talking to a lot of different people, you probably find that you end up saying a few things over and over just to lay the groundwork for whatever conversation you’re having. Since I’m a telecoms analyst, for example, I often find myself saying something like this:

“As an industry, we’re entering a whole new level of complexity on the IT side. We’re seeing an explosion of services, user types, devices, quality of service (QoS) levels and service level agreement (SLA) obligations. The permutations of all those factors make for more than any service provider can manage manually, so we’ll have to make sure that all that service and network management is automated to the maximum extent possible.”

So far, this is pretty unobjectionable stuff, and that’s the point. It’s something that most people in the industry can agree on before getting into specific cases. But as with its implementation, plans for automation vary both between carriers and within each one’s IT infrastructure. There is some common ground though. In the fulfillment part of the chain, one-touch provisioning and the like are generally accepted goals.

Where the promise of automation is still not as well understood, I believe, is in the service inventory, especially as it affects customer experience. Discussions of customer experience are often limited to either the fulfillment process (Is the order filled quickly and correctly?) and customer service (Is the problem resolved satisfactorily and cheaply?). Both the order and the trouble ticket are events, which are easier to measure and address. Extending the purview of customer experience to ongoing operations requires diagnosing and averting service problems before they affect customers. This requires systems to predict network and service outages in real time, and provision new resources to proactively fix the problem. The same components can also help engineers model the consequences of any changes to the system before they affect users.

The difference between “good enough” capabilities in this area and true differentiation in customer experience will increasingly inhere in the ability to model the effects of outages and planned changes alike on individual services and the individual customers that use them. Since each of those services is aggregate of smaller elements, and since the most valuable customers are likely to use the most services, a successful extension of the service inventory must be able to analyze the effects of system changes and failures not only on the network, but also on the services provided across it, especially as they affect the “gold” customer base. The criteria for that analysis will come from SLAs as well as service providers’ service assurance goals for each category of its users.

To date, Internet service providers and enterprise network providers seem to have more advanced offerings in these areas than mobile providers and fixed-line incumbents. As markets mature and competition in services increases from over-the-top (OTT) players, every service provider will have to improve its predictive and proactive capabilities to remain competitive in customer experience.

Andy Hicks covers telecom software, services, and business strategies in EMEA, with special focus on emerging markets, at IDC. Currently, he is focussing on the IT-ification of telecoms, the increasingly complex services market they compete in, and the work of multinational groups to rationalize their operations across borders.


A Simple Question: What Is a “Service”?

Posted: September 23rd, 2010 | Author: Special Contributor | Filed under: Telecom Trends | Tags: , , , | 2 Comments »

By: Dan Baker, Research Director, Technology Research Institute

Language—no matter which one—is imprecise in the way that it’s used to explain complex telecom subjects.

A perfect example in English is the term “service”.  What exactly does the word mean in a telecom context?  I’d guess there are probably 50 unique uses for the word “services” in telecom.  Unfortunately, “service” is about as descriptive a word as “thing”.

And as new, over-the-top services emerge, the vocabulary used to describe the “service provisioning” area has also become quite muddy.

Well, here’s my attempt to decipher the terms “service” and “service provisioning” more precisely:

One of the more confusing aspects of service provisioning is the policy area that Comptel is championing.  What’s interesting about policy is that while it’s enabled on the telecom side, the policy may actually be implemented and controlled in real time by the over-the-top provider.

You can be sure that in the years ahead our current definitions of what a telecom service is will be stretched dramatically as they were during the last decade.

While I’m sure my table of service terms has some flaws, perhaps you can use these definitions to spark some fruitful discussions with your peers and vendors, or here on “The Dynamics of OSS”.

In the end, I hope my definitions of telecom “service” will be of service to you :- )

Dan Baker is the research director of Technology Research Institute (TRI).   Since 1994, Baker has authored dozens of research studies in the BSS/OSS market.  He contributes articles to Vanilla Plus and writes a regular column for Billing & OSS World called Dan Baker Blog.