In today’s wireless climate, it is commonplace for operators to react to problems. This causes them to deal with several consequences including outages and revenue loss. It also leads to unhappy customers that are willing to bring their business elsewhere. What this translates into is that wireless network operators that are proactive in resolving problems before they affect services not only increase network uptime, but can cut operational costs, both as much as 20 percent.
A recent Alcatel-Lucent (News 
- Alert) Enriching Communications article, It Pays to be Proactive, highlighted how network uptime is increased by minimizing service affecting conditions through preventive actions. It noted, for example, that OPEX (News - Alert) can be reduced by focusing staff on identified issues more quickly, which in turn improves staff efficiency by freeing up time to work on new network projects.
Gaining critical insight into issues before they escalate to the point of negatively impacting service and revenue can save operators from having to deal with these business problems, and mitigate costs. In fact, Alcatel-Lucent says that in addition to increasing network availability and decreasing costs, proactive services can help operators:
Improve customer satisfaction. While outages can be a major source of customer dissatisfaction, it’s the day-to-day issues like dropped calls and slow transmission speeds that are likely to make customers churn to the competition. Actions that help avoid capacity bottlenecks and improve network performance for voice, data and video applications keep the customer experience high.
Increase internal efficiency. Network operations teams can focus on the issues that are most likely to affect services and revenue. There are fewer field dispatches and more time for planned activities.
Reduce risks. Preventing problems with new technologies, such as LTE, helps operators meet high customer expectations and accelerate return on investment (ROI).
Alcatel-Lucent’s Proactive Services help service providers to offer best-in-class end user experience at a lower operations cost and with improved network availability. These are not another set of reporting tools, but rather a portfolio focused on optimal network availability.
The Proactive Services provide improved operational efficiency and network performance with the following benefits:
- Reduction in network outages
- 15-20 percent lower network operations cost
- The ability to actively address issues before they escalate into major operational concerns
- Leveraging existing resources most effectively
- Better capitalization on new market investments
The bottom line here is that an effective proactive services partner can have significant impact on the bottom line. They can tailor trials and offerings to meet an operator’s experience level, competitive environment and business models. The right partner can help network operators to not just pick out the right pieces of information, but also to interpret what they mean to prevent serious network problems.
There used to be a famous commercial that played frequently on U.S. television by a company called Fram Oil Filter. The tag (News - Alert) line was, “you can pay me now or pay me later.” This was the commercialization of the old axiom, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” The point is the same whether for oil filters for your car or for providing mobile operators and their users a quality experience, no surprises, lower operating costs, and for the network operators a precious commodity, loyal customers. As the ALU article says, it pays to be proactive.
Edited by
Peter Bernstein
