Research Center

It’s hardly a secret, but it’s certainly something that service providers are increasingly reluctant to talk about. Billing errors have long been the bane of the industry, surviving assaults from technologies ranging from business intelligence to revenue assurance systems.... More Info

Today’s customers are increasingly digitally minded in the ways they interact with each other and the businesses they patronize. A recent Oracle survey found that 70 percent of consumers are highly engaged with their mobile devices and check mobile apps at least several times per day.... More Info

For over ten years, The Cable Center (TCC) in Denver, Colorado, has been bringing together top customer experience management (CXM) executives from the cable industry to advance the practice of customer experience (CX). Under the banner of the C5 (Cable Center Customer Centric Consortium), our group meets twice each year—alternating between TCC (Denver) and the headquarters of a C5 member.... More Info

As the world undergoes a digital transformation, broadband is the enabler. Today, we are connected in ways that we would never have dreamed of just ten years ago.... More Info

In the letter from the editor last month, I wrote about how pervasive mobility was—at the end of the day—all about connecting people. This month, our issue theme is "Enriching the Customer Experience," and it's all about serving people.... More Info

The Internet of Things (IoT) is not new. Neither is the rapid rise of connected devices or customers’ demands for instantaneous service.... More Info

It’s almost become a telecom tradition for operators to push a great new offering into the market, only to eventually struggle with maintaining quality and delivering a great customer experience as the service matures. The stumbling blocks were always going to be there, but because service assurance wasn’t planned from the start, operators kept themselves in the dark.... More Info

It’s no secret that the way businesses communicate with their customers can make or break the relationship. As we see a shift in customers’ communication preferences, it is paramount that businesses adapt to provide the experience and service levels that customers have come to expect.... More Info

In 1965, Birmingham Press and Mail opened the first-ever call center, made possible by the invention of the Automatic Call Distributor (ACD), which helps to better route calls. Since that time, we’ve seen telephony advancements like 1-800 numbers and IVRs—but perhaps nothing is changing this landscape more than the onset of conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI).... More Info

In today’s competitive landscape, customer centricity is at the forefront of successful and thriving businesses. Organizations around the world—regardless of size or industry—are embracing major shifts in business models, strategies and mindset in order to strengthen customers’ perceptions of their brand, better known as customer experience.... More Info

This month's telecom industry news included a bumper crop of research updates and ‘world-firsts’ released in advance of Mobile World Congress 2019. Reports on the pace of 5G rollouts, the strength of consumers’ desire for the technology, and key shifts in content consumption were among the headlines this month.... More Info

It seems the hype surrounding 5G has been with us for a few years now, but 2019 figures to be the year when actual deployments begin and things “get real.” This article takes a look at four critical areas of the new network environment that will come with 5G networks and how things may develop as the year goes along. 5G will drive virtualization in 2019 Momentum is building behind 5G.... More Info

In the cloud, the ‘softwareization’ of everything has already arrived, delivering a variety of benefits via innovative applications that created entirely new business models and revenue streams. When it comes to the network outside the data center, however, many functions are still performed manually—especially in long haul backbone environments.... More Info

Digital transformation is turning out to be a double-edged sword for businesses across the world. There is no doubt about its positive impact.... More Info

This need for more bandwidth is driving a requirement for reliable high-capacity, high-performance scalable networks to move towards 400G services—providing rapid optical backbone network support for all 10G and 100G customer service scenarios on a carrier’s network. What is behind this evolution to 400G services?... More Info

5G, the next iteration of wireless cellular technologies, is currently reaching its final stages of development and commercialization by MNOs and industry stakeholders. Previous iterations of technologies (3G and 4G) were developed with a consumer-oriented focus.... More Info

A New App Store As RCS continues to make great strides in becoming the global standard for carrier-based messaging and provides a new opportunity for brands to communicate with consumers, a new brand discovery experience has emerged: the chatbot directory. Launched by AT&T and Samsung to a growing number of capable devices, the chatbot directory gives consumers a new channel.... More Info

Although towercos are relatively new to the mobile and wireless industries, they are playing an increasingly important role: they are needed to roll out 4G and 5G network upgrades. These sites are complex, and their resources must be properly managed to fulfill their purpose of broadening the reach of mobile networks.... More Info

Pervasive mobility, this month's issue theme, is an interesting topic. It's a topic that is fueled by compelling technology and new innovations.... More Info

News on key road-to-5G updates was dominant this month. The completion of the world’s first over-the-air 5G data transmission using 2.5 GHz and Massive MIMO on Sprint’s live commercial network was a collaborative accomplishment between Sprint, Nokia, and Qualcomm.... More Info

Media planning worksheet for Pipeline marketing and advertising opportunities.... More Info

2019 should be a very good year for operators. Fearless forecasts reveal the potential IoT revenue profit that awaits.... More Info

As part of your strategy to digitally transform your organization, you’ve made the decision to move key applications—even mission-critical parts of your business—to the cloud…for all the right reasons. Doing so is key to creating a more agile, responsive and competitive IT organization, a highly efficient and effective environment where finite resources are able to focus more on creating new business capabilities and less on maintaining IT operations.... More Info

Network downtime isn’t so much a question of if, but when, and the financial costs to businesses can be overwhelming, to say nothing of the adverse effects on productivity and brand reputation. According to a recent report by IHS Inc.... More Info

The telecom industry is undergoing a massive transformation as service providers across the board seek to transition their networks from proprietary closed box solutions to more open SDN and NFVI-based architectures. The goal of these network transformations is to reap the benefits associated with economies of scale, reduced CapEx and OpEx, as well as gain the agilities of service introduction.... More Info

For many people, mentioning the term cybersecurity typically conjures up the Hollywood vision of an individual in a dark room running sophisticated code and typing furiously on a keyboard to access critical government data or to steal money from big financial institutions. This vision, though, is not reality.... More Info

Thirty-five years after it first came to life, today’s Internet comprises thousands of public and private networks, across which more than 4.7 zettabytes of IP traffic have flowed globally, according to the Cisco Visual Networking Index. To put that figure into perspective, that traffic is equal to all the movies ever produced crossing the world’s IP networks in less than a minute.... More Info

Everywhere we turn, there is constant industry chatter around the leap to 5G, or the paradigm shift to Software Defined Networks (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV), or even the explosive growth in the Internet of Things (IoT). These are all valid issues facing operators, yet they aren’t the issues that will have the largest, most significant impact on their bottom lines.... More Info

Robocalling, spamming, scamming, spoofing. Whatever you want to call it, these unwanted calls invade consumers' phones.... More Info

Transformation is a messy thing. But, it can also be beautiful.... More Info