MasterStream Blog

At some point in our professional lives, we’ve all run into a situation where one organization in a partnership isn’t able to hold up their end of the bargain. 

Given the significant cost of building telecom infrastructure to serve a single market, telecom providers have to pick and choose where they build their own technology, and where they’re content to lease the use of infrastructure built and maintained by other providers—including their competitors.

In telecom, leasing of infrastructure to enable local network access is known as carrier aggregation, and it’s an important component of the business models for both carriers and solution providers.

Solution providers, for example, can use carrier aggregation to build a regional or nationwide network of telecom infrastructure. From there, the provider can use suppliers to lease access on a scale ranging from local markets and regions to individual buildings. Carriers, meanwhile, rely on aggregators as a demand driver to justify expanding their coverage area, increasing their market share in targeted regions.

Although carrier aggregation offers a lot of potential value to solution providers, the cost and resource investment of this process can be a significant obstacle for providers to clear without software solutions to simplify this process.

Through improved infrastructure and expanded serviceability, the telecom industry is itself an engine of digital transformation, supporting innovation across all industries. But the benefits of this digital transformation can also be applied to the software used in the telecom industry.

Modern software solutions open new doors and unlock new potential for telecom businesses still stuck in the traditional ways of doing business. As adoption of these innovative solutions gains steam throughout the telecom industry, it will create a wider gap between the haves and have-nots among carriers, service providers and resellers of telecom services.

Here’s a look at how digital transformation is creating new opportunities through telecom software.

In telecom, as in other areas of digital disruption, the speed and scale of transformation is often set by the quality of data driving that change. Serviceability quality can be quantified in multiple ways, including not just the volume of data, but the relative age of that data.

Being the Texan that I am and knowing how I love to grill, BBQ, and smoke meat, this thought popped into my head: When you’re shopping around and searching for solutions to optimize your business, increase sales, and drive profitability do you want the pork belly or the whole hog?

The term quoteception is meant to be a play on words related to the 2010 science fiction thriller starring Leonardo DiCaprio called Inception.  In the film, Dom Cobb (Leonardo’s character) spends his time in a dream world using dream technology in corporate espionage activities. As the story progresses, they move into deeper layers of dream states with each layer becoming more complicated and potentially impactful. As things get more complicated, Dom uses a spinning top to know if he is still in a dream or back in reality. If the top spins without falling, he knows he is still in a dream and if it falls, he knows it is reality.   

We all know the tension that can be maintained between sales and operations.  Even the best teams struggle with the quality of new orders and the ability to deliver on customer expectations.  A slightly misaligned product configuration from a salesperson can produce quota attainment, but that same sale can translate into a missed installation interval for the project manager assigned.  Round and round we go … doing our best to hit the sales number and also hit the installation-revenue numbers. All the while dealing with challenging customers who don’t understand or appreciate the complexity behind the scenes.