Global Telecom Giant Strengthens
Competitive Position with Ability to Offer New Mobile Services
Challenge
• remaining agile and competitive in
a saturated, commoditised telecom
and mobile services market through
aggressive global expansion
• launching new and innovative
services to customers through a
next-generation mobile network
• high opex and capex owing to complex, fragmented existing network
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Solution
• prepared existing network
infrastructure
• support in the design and
implementation of a next-generation
IP network using the best skills and
expertise in the market, leveraged
through out-tasking
• Uptime multi-vendor support and
maintenance services
• customised support services for
specific technologies
• consulting services to identify the
best technologies for the core and
voice networks
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Result
• The IP network is the foundation
for new services which can be
launched to market more rapidly
thanks to the carrier-class design
and implementation of a futureready mobile network.
• Right-sized support and
maintenance services, as well as
carrier-class design of the network,
ensure lower capex and opex on an
ongoing basis.
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Innovative
technologies
implemented in the new smart mobile network will help to prepare
the carrier’s
infrastructure for the future, not only
in terms of growth
and further
expansion, but also
in terms of flexibility.
case study | global telecom giant
Challenge
Growth in a saturated world
For any large, multinational telecom carrier and mobile services provider today, the international
market is exceedingly competitive and commoditised. This is owing to determined competitors
constantly launching new services at ever-lower margins and entering new, developing territories.
As one of the world’s largest organisations of its kind today, one such telecom carrier is already
present in 24 countries around the world and employs an average of 130,000 professionals to
serve more than 315 million customers. Continued expansion and growth are, however, necessary
in order to remain competitive in a saturated global telecom landscape.
An important target territory for the carrier is Latin America which, as a developing region, shows
the most potential for growth. But, strategically, Spain, Germany, the UK and the Czech Republic
are equally important European countries. This organisation is the dominant telecom carrier in the
one country and the main challenger in the others, and therefore needed to bolster its position in
both to maintain its competitive edge.
Continued success through top technology
Unlike many other large enterprises, telecom carriers generate income directly through their
networks. It’s therefore of primary importance that the network itself remains up to date with
the best technology the world has to offer. Without it, the organisation won’t be able to bring
innovative new services to market rapidly and regularly enough to remain relevant to its customers.
Additionally, telecom carriers aren’t competing only among themselves anymore, but are also
facing serious challenges from innovative organisations such as Google and Facebook – businesses
that are agile enough to launch new and exciting offerings to market very rapidly. One example
is Google’s WebRTC, a fully open-API technology that provides integrated communication,
collaboration and videoconferencing free of charge. Such disruptive technologies will also change
the playing field for big, competing players such as Microsoft (with its Microsoft® Lync product),
as well as more traditional carriers. Google uses carriers simply as a ‘transport pipe’ for this new
service, which means the carrier itself has no control or visibility of customers who use the product
for their communication needs, and so loses out on potential revenue.
Having developed its existing network extensively over the last 20-25 years, the carrier’s
infrastructure had become complex and fragmented, and not agile enough to bring new services
to market fast enough. Yet, the carrier wants to match the speed at which its competitors like
Google did so. It therefore required a modernised infrastructure. As a strategic move in this
direction, it wanted to deploy a fourth-generation smart mobile network. But this implied that the
existing network needed to be consolidated and upgraded to handle – among other things – the
hundred-fold increase in data traffic this would create. Radio interfaces, for example, are anything
from 10-100 times faster than traditional ports. So the underlying infrastructure needed to be
modernised to accommodate the increased bandwidth requirement.
Cost-cutting and revenue targets
Coupled with the adoption of the new smart network solutions came the need for better, more
cost-effective maintenance and support services. The group was spending billions of Euros in
capex and opex each year on maintaining its network. It set itself ambitious goals of reducing
capex and opex drastically within the next three to five years. The existing network was expensive
to run, support and maintain, owing to its complexity and size – better procurement and replacing
equipment like-for-like weren’t the solutions to achieving these targets. The carrier required
a fundamental change in the way it designed and built its network: from the purpose-built,
hardware-focused approach of the past to a software-defined virtualised architecture of the
future. The latter approach would be more flexible and not so dependent on having only one
purpose.
At the same time, the organisation wants to boost its top-line earnings, as revenue was declining
in Europe. Latin America showed growth, but not enough to sustain the entire organisation. With
flat-rate contracts for mobile services, voice services and short messages, revenue per user was
declining, so it was of the utmost importance for the organisation to start introducing new and
attractive offerings to its customers rapidly.
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case study | global telecom giant
Solution
Results
Symbiotic evolution
New network, new horizons
Dimension Data’s history with the carrier reaches back to the late 1990s, and also traces its own
evolution and growth as a global technology solutions and services provider. The engagement
began with the delivery, installation and integration of networking hardware solutions for a
smaller business in Germany before it was purchased by the large multinational carrier to expand
its telecom division in Germany. Dimension Data’s offering to the organisation also evolved over 15
years to eventually include more mature services and solutions.
In helping to design and build important parts of the IP network for this carrier, Dimension Data
assisted in optimising the organisation’s cash flow through smart financial models (pay as you
grow) and out-tasking arrangements. This means the carrier gained flexible and on- demand
access to the best next-generation networking skills and expertise available in the market. These
resources typically consist of engineers with as much as 10-15 years’ experience in the telecom
industry and expertise that would be rare and difficult to find in the market.
Top services and leading expertise in IP networking
The carrier also achieved greater levels of consistency, simplicity and efficiency across all IT
processes thanks to its simpler, more consolidated infrastructure, including procurement processes,
deployment, maintenance and operational management.
Germany is a mobile competency hub for the carrier, so various new mobile technologies are
first deployed in this country. Dimension Data took an active role in helping the client with this
deployment and provided turnkey solutions in key areas of the network.
Innovative technologies implemented in the new smart mobile network will help to prepare the
carrier’s infrastructure for the future, not only in terms of growth and further expansion, but also
in terms of the flexibility needed to launch new services and remain competitive.
This included specialised engineering services for selected platforms, and helping the organisation
to architect and build a smarter network with all of the organisation’s strategic objectives in
mind. Dimension Data helped to transform the IP-transport layer of its existing infrastructure into
a future-proof architecture ready to form a robust foundation for the next-gerneration mobile
network.
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Part of that transformation was the evolution of the signalling plane (based on Session Initiation
Protocol and Diameter) – the ‘brain’ of a next-generation network. Competency in this area is
crucial in designing and building a fourth-generation network.
• prepared existing network infrastructure
In addition, Dimension Data helps to constantly improve network quality via network audits and
infrastructure optimisation services to identify the solutions that would satisfy the carrier’s specific
needs, and to ensure its maintenance and support could be ‘right-sized’ in order to achieve its
saving goals.
Services overview
• support in the design and implementation of a next-generation IP network
• Uptime multi-vendor support and maintenance services
• customised support services for specific technologies
• consulting services to identify the best technologies for the core and voice networks
The solution also included providing the carrier with Dimension Data’s newly enhanced Uptime
multi-vendor network support services covering the largest parts of the IP core and transport
network. Dimension Data also offered customised support services for certain vendor technologies
that were unique to the organisation’s environment.
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CS / AAA-000 / 03/13 © Copyright Dimension Data 2013
For further information visit: http://www.dimensiondata.com/Global/Solutions/Networking