Telecom NOC Best practices for future-proof operations (2023)

Large scale5G deployments,V2X connection,and multiplicationIoT use casesin various industries have already initiated a significant transformation of NOC solutions. Future plans to deploy 6G, connected road infrastructure and quantum computing among other new technologies will further transform the NOC's role in telecommunications from supporting to enabling.

At the same time,"improving the quality of customer service"I"revenue generation"rank astwo main goalsbehind the planned network upgrades that global telecommunications companies plan to implement in the short term. To achieve these goals, managers want to add new network providers to their ecosystem.

Products that are highly likely to be purchased if new network providers are involved

A larger supplier portfolio and more complex network architectures can undeniably improve CX and generate new revenue streams. But from the technological side, such decisions make NOCmonitoring more complex.

To balance benefits and risks, telcos must adapt current best practices for NOC management.

Telecom NOC as a strategic business function

To meet consumer demands, telecommunications needed to align its network capabilities to unmatched benchmarks: rapid delivery of additional bandwidth, minimal latency, and 24/7 global consistency across applications, locations, and architectures.

The above options help improve the customer experience (directly and indirectly). But they significantly change the NOC monitoring process. After all, you can't improve service delivery and governance if you can't see the problems. However, low visibility remains a nuance.

Currently, there are many NOC monitoring tools

• Older rule-based systemswithout dynamic automation or self-healing capabilities. Exceptions (multiplied by frequency) must be handled manually - as do the increasing number of basic customer inquiries and support requests.
• No real-time analytics- This delays the response to network performance issues and makes it more difficult for the NOC to proactively resolve issues before they impact service levels.
• Fragmented, meaning they don't integrate well with other business systems, further limiting network visibility. In addition, most of them focus only on network-related metrics and fail to reconcile them with broader business goals such as customer experience and revenue.

In addition, the architecture of telecommunications networks has become more complex due to:

• Larger data processing volumes and variable data types
• Mediation of applications in the form of data exchange and/or data consuming applications/devices
• Intensive use of cloud services by telecommunications customers
• Progressive virtualization activities such as NFV and SDN

To effectively monitor and improve this asset conundrum, you need more than just better NOC tools – you need better processes and organizational structures.

Telecom NOC Best Practices for Better Service Monitoring and Management

Typical network manager seems70 %of your working day for problem solving - preventing, responding to and extinguishing fires in the event of ongoing disruptions. Only 30% of their time is spent on business-related activities, such as increasing revenue or helping to implement new service offerings.

This is in stark contrast to its own telecom priorities - CX improvements and profit generation. The discrepancies are due to the NOC's existing operational structure not fully meeting the new business objectives.

To solve this problem, the telcos will have to make changes at the operational, technological and human level. We formalized them as Telecom NOC's five best practices:

• Make your network more visible
• Apply NetOps processes for better performance
• Implement intelligent automation to monitor your network
• Integrate the NOC more deeply into your business landscape
• Cultivate versatile NOC experts instead of narrowly focused domain specialists.

1. Provide better network visibility

The Telecom NOC is now responsible for the complex network architecture, including:

• Traditional networks (telecommunications, broadcasting, etc.)
• Software Defined Networking (SDN)
• Network Functions Virtualization (NFV)

Legacy and off-the-shelf NOC monitoring software often provides limited visibility into such hybrid environments. This leaves telecommunications vulnerable to sudden outages at any of the "under-monitored" nodes, which in turn may have a limited impact on customer experience or overall network availability.

To improve network monitoring in complex environments, Broadcom, a leading supplier of network equipment, recommendsFITPAL frames(skrót od Fault, Inventory, Topology, Performance, Application i Logs).

This configuration requires the establishment of a continuous NOC monitoring process where network tools continuously discover, map and consolidate data from all elements of the network. Then deliver all the information in a converged stream of monitoring, topology and log data.

The best NOC solutions also come with robust automation and predictive capabilities. They enable telcos to implement touch-free management of core issues, network self-healing scenarios and digital self-service tools for customers.Predictive analytics, in turn, can be configured to predict customer impact and service disruption levels for any network and enable the NOC team to take preventative action.

2. Apply NetOps processes for better performance

NetOps is an operational and technological framework that adaptscore DevOps principlescontinuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) and progressive automation of network management.

The introduction of NetOps presupposes a broad spectrum of transformation of processes, people and technology. Ultimate goal: Gradually eliminate redundant, low-value manual processes and establish proactive, data-driven and predictive network management and monitoring processes.

NOC transformationsinitiativer

From the technology side, NetOps includes the following tools:

• Touchless Provisioning (ZTP) orchestration platforms for automatic network and device configuration.
• Infrastructure-as-code (IaaS) tools for storing network configurations in source control and deploying them using developer APIs.
• Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) to implement some network node functions in virtual machines instead of local hardware.
• Automated network configuration management tools to reduce costs, complexity and errors.

Combined with lean processes, these technologies create a better NOC setup, where many manual tasks are automated, simple problems are solved automatically, and new implementations happen at high speed with minimal error rates.

In addition, NetOps enables telecommunications to provide more profitable services such as "private networks" and "network sharing".

3. Implement smart automation for network monitoring

Full transparency combined with better data collection practices is the basis for proactive and predictive network monitoring – and then intelligent automation. In fact, it is a technology vector that leading telecommunications companies are actively pursuing. According to2021 Anode survey:

• 67% of respondents have already implemented AI for network monitoring (at least to some extent)
• 53% said the main reason for implementing AI-based network monitoring and problem detection was to improve service quality
• 49% expect the "predictive impairment detection" feature to provide the greatest cost savings to their organizations.

Other commonintelligent automationtelecommunications use cases include automatic fault isolation, anomaly detection and correlation of events with the prediction of future faults. In addition to improving network availability, these use cases can also significantly increase the productivity of NOC telecom workers.

But the wrinkle is like thisAutomation systems based on ML/AIare difficult to establish. Integration with existing NOC management tools and other systems was cited as the biggest barrier to adopting AI-based network monitoring by 42% of respondents to the same survey.

In fact, intelligent network monitoring systems presuppose the development of a three-layer architecture with layers of data operationalization, analysis and visualization. Each of them also contains separate subsystems.

Example of architecture of a network monitoring system based on artificial intelligence

However, the initial set-up complexity is largely offset by the later operational benefits. Smart network monitoring can improve the speed of detecting network problemsby 80% and reduce incident costs by up to 70%.

4. Integrate the NOC more deeply into the business environment

NOC in telecommunications has become a function that "enables" new service models and operational transformations. As such, it can no longer exist in isolation from the wider business context and other operating entities.

NOC teams can provide other business units with comprehensive data that goes beyond basic network metrics such as "traffic statistics", "average downtime" or "delay between selected endpoints".

Converged network data can also inform your business

• New security threats
• Overlooked vulnerabilities
• Customer satisfaction indicators
• Response time to common problems

All of this data can be used to improve service offerings, customer service practices, and company security.

The integration of NOC and SOC operations may be particularly promising for telecommunications. At the lowest level, SOC and NOC analysts already have similar responsibilities – they monitor incidents, analyze incidents, perform triage and handle escalation. The telecom NOC and SOC toolkits are also similar. However, both teams often investigate the same issues from different angles, which often proves redundant and increases the mean time to repair (MTTR).

By combining NOC with SOC, telecommunications can achieve:

• Better insight into the entire monitored infrastructure
• Greater scope of cyber security
• Faster response time to various incidents
• Lower total cost of ownership for both units
• Improved level of customer service

Article

Read more about the reasons for integrating NOC and SOC in telecommunications.

Browse in detail

5. Cultivate comprehensive NOC experts instead of narrowly focused domain specialists

More applications and more complex network architectures require NOC specialists to develop new skills and work comfortably in multi-functional environments.

At the same time, automation and predictive technologies are freeing downstream NOC analysts from mundane tasks – raising the question of their redeployment to more complex, service-oriented tasks.

Benefits of nurturing versatile NOC specialists:

• Comprehensive delivery of services within several products that results in a higher degree of customer satisfaction.
• Tier 1 staff can manage NOC/SOC tasks and processes to reduce troubleshooting time and minimize unplanned downtime.
• Hands-on support for wider digital transformation initiatives such as network sharing or creating a private network in collaboration with other entities.
• Overall higher employee productivity as more people are available to handle cross-service issues (reducing escalation requests and processing delays).

In light of the current technology talent crisis, hiring more experienced NOC experts can prove challenging. While64% of IT directorsadmit that insufficient skills are one of the main barriers to the adoption of new technologies.

There are two ways to solve this problem:

• Internal changes in the team– upskill existing NOC employees and cultivate a knowledge-oriented team that works closely with other units and borrows best practices from them.
• NOC's external consultancyto help your organization improve overall NOC maturity as well as specific NOC monitoring services by improving processes and adopting new technologies. In this case, you can choose an "advisory" scenario, where you will receive a roadmap for necessary improvements, or an "as a service" model, which also includes the provision of demand-based NOC services.

In any case, your ultimate goal should be to get a holistic view of the NOC landscape (and its secondary role within other functions - service management, security, expanding the service portfolio) to provide a comprehensive customer experience.

To summarize

Data proliferation and increasing bandwidth consumption have pushed network upgrades higher on the telecommunications agenda. The NOC was forced to "catch up" - and most teams are lagging behind operational and technological changes.

As the business environment continues to change, telecoms must rethink the role of the NOC and take tangible steps to define the function around new strategic goals – faster service delivery, better customer service and innovative technology changes to enable revenue generation. This is no small task, but one that can provide a significant return on investment if done right.