UniCare Helps Operators Deal with the New Normal and Create New Network Value

The global telecom market has entered a stage of slow growth. With the popularity of intelligent terminals and impact of OTTs, traditional voice and SM services are shrinking and mobile data services are developing rapidly. The revenue structure of telecom industry will continue to be optimized. According to data released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of China, in 2014, non-voice service revenues accounted for 58.2% of the total revenue but the annual revenue growth rate fell to 3.6%, which indicates slow development of the telecom industry. The rapid growth of data traffic has brought in no extra revenue and compounding this problem is the fact that traffic charges have been decreasing.

Facing the new normal state, telecom operators put effort into exploring a transformation road. On the one hand, operators want to enhance data services by deploying LTE networks. On the other hand, they participate in internet services by means of self-operation, cooperation, and acquisition. When operators implement transformation strategies, the following three major issues arise:

●    how to use LTE networks to provide differentiated services.

●    how to enhance ROI of LTE networks.

●    how to explore traffic and data values and find new service forms.

With strong R&D capabilities and deep market insights, ZTE develops its UniCare—a technical service solution that is designed to help operators meet new challenges and transform their operation. UniCare deconstructs customer experience and service quality from three layers—network, service, and customer—and focuses on end-to-end (E2E) network optimization, which achieves visualization and manageability of mobile data service experience and lays the foundation for LTE networks to provide differentiated services. In addition, UniCare realizes network traffic and data values insight and exploration, effectively helping operators improve investment efficiency and open the possibility for new service forms.

LTE Service Quality E2E Optimization to Provide Differentiated Services

With the mobile internet becoming increasingly closer to people’s lives, operators must quickly locate and solve service problems, or even predict problems to eliminate hidden problems and attract more users. Differentiated user-based services require visual and controllable networks. ZTE’s UniCare solution provides operators with optimization schemes of LTE service quality E2E optimization, helping them achieve the following goals:

●    traffic visualization: display and monitor the distribution of network traffic in terms of network types, NEs, areas, and sites. With UniCare, operators can dispatch and allocate network bandwidth to solve traffic congestion and improve network quality.

●    service quality visualization: support quality assessment and monitor mainstream mobile internet services, such as web browsing, online video, instant messaging, social platform and app store, in real time.

●    automatic delimitation of service quality problems: support E2E fast and automatic delimitation of service quality problems (involving mobile internet, CSFB, and VoLTE services). Orders can then be automatically dispatched to related maintenance departments of terminals, wireless devices, core network devices, and services.

●    E2E network optimization: by associating wireless CDT/MR data, it can accurately locate service quality problems and facilitate problem handling. By combining with the experience database and professional optimization methods, it can implement E2E optimization of the bearer, wireless, core, and service networks.

Insight into Valuable Areas to Enhance Investment Efficiency

With the boom in mobile internet applications, the Pareto principle and tidal effect play an increasingly important role in mobile networks. The traffic in hotspots accounts for a large portion of the total traffic volume. Operators are focusing on how to assess network value of a different area from the perspective of service quality and user experience to make the most efficient investment. By introducing UniCare, ZTE helps telecom operators improve investment efficiency from the following aspects:

●    traffic prediction: according to the existing network traffic, UniCare can predict future traffic growth and provide a reliable basis for network expansion to avoid blind investment.

●    valuable areas discovery: UniCare assesses the maturity and benefits of networks in a different area. Network maturity mainly includes network coverage, load, speed, and other indicators. Network benefits involve traffic, service composition, and user composition (such as VIP user ratio). With a comprehensive assessment, valuable areas with high benefit ratio can be discovered. ZTE can, in line with network maturity and benefits, give advice on areas of development and investments to increase ROI.

Data Value Mining to Achieve Win-Win Cooperation

Breakthroughs must be made in the simple traffic selling model of network pipelines. The breakthrough point lies in exploring data values of network pipelines. With data, operators can implement precise marketing strategies. Moreover, by knowing service development trends from traffic data, operators can cooperate with relevant OTT service providers or carry out self-operated services to create new service forms. It has been proven that third-party applications introduced to data-based open platform are more likely to stimulate data usage and generate new service directions. ZTE’s UniCare solution innovates network data values from the following aspects:

●    supports big data technology and achieves aggregation, storage, and analysis of massive data.

●    forms customer portraits from terminal selections, service preferences, and position tracks, so as to implement precision marketing strategies.

●    provides service quality benchmarks and references for self-operated services as well as OTT cooperation.

●    supports open data interfaces and helps operators build an open telecom data ecosystem.