The Customer Wins: Competition, The Enabler of Improved Customer Experiences

Upon reflection, disaggregation that historically occurred within mobile networks during 4G deployments marked the start of an industry shift towards a customer-centricity that has historically been difficult to achieve. Since the millennium, most countries have been investing heavily in new fibre networks and the new telco back-office ecosystem, all of which are being deployed in parallel to global fibre investment and copper-line or PSTN switch-off.

As disaggregation occurs, new operating models appear that naturally encourages competition at every stage of the value chain. In turn, this friction drives new innovation and operational efficiencies as companies strive to offer better services at competitive prices. With more players entering the market, the end-user will become the true beneficiary of this industry transformation, finally having access to a wider range of exceptional services on demand.

Key improvements that consumers will benefit from include:

Transparency and Control: increased competition brings a commitment to transparency, resulting in clearer pricing and charging structures, and detailed service metrics being made available.

Consumers will be able to make informed decisions about their usage, optimise their expenditure, and ultimately have more control and understanding of what they are paying for.

Choice and Flexibility: the traditional model, where consumers are offered inflexible pre-defined packages with set services at fixed prices, are not suited to today’s hyper-personalised world. These bundles often include services the end-user may not need or use.

In the new, open world order, consumers will have the freedom to curate their own experiences, selecting individual services from various providers based on their needs and budget.

More Value and Enhanced Performance: as network operators and retail service providers are able to focus on optimising their specialised areas, this translates into significant benefits for consumers in terms of enhanced performance and value.

By allowing companies to focus on specific aspects of the value chain, such as infrastructure or service provision, not only does this encourage widespread innovation and efficiency, but the increased efficiency in network operations and service delivery inevitably translates to cost savings for consumers.

The prevalence of a competitive vibrant ecosystem drives continual improvements in network reliability, service quality, and pricing. As a result, consumers enjoy faster and more reliable connectivity, more attractive pricing, innovative value-added services, and exceptional value for money.

The Ripple Effect: The Broader Impact on Society

While these improvements signify the paradigm shift towards a more consumer-centric telco industry, where greater freedom exists to customise individual services, or exert more control over their data usage and privacy - this step change will deliver a lasting impact beyond increased broadband speeds, because Vitrifi are enabling an entire sector transformation that carries wider economic implications, creating a far-reaching positive ripple effect on society at large.

Economically speaking, “true gigabit capable” fibre broadband has been proven to uplift GDP whilst also fostering new innovation and job creation across every industry sector. Furthermore, with improved access to high-speed internet, more online education and digital inclusion can occur, empowering marginalised communities and enhancing educational and healthcare access. Customised service plans and modular offerings further empower individuals and communities to tailor their connectivity solutions, fostering even deeper social inclusion.

Moreover, fully optimised network infrastructure that can dynamically self-manage capacity will materially contribute to environmental sustainability, by dramatically reducing energy consumption and related carbon emissions. Reliable networks that are self-healing, also aid in emergency preparedness and disaster response scenarios, ensuring effective communication for emergency services and citizens alike during a crisis.

Globally, those economies that deployed real fibre (FTTP/FTTH) connectivity and swapped out their national copper networks early, are now seeing the material economic savings across their populations. Overall, the shift towards new consumer-centric telco models not only improves societal communications services but also contributes to a more inclusive, resilient, and sustainable economy longer term.

Empowering Consumers: Embracing Disaggregation for Enhanced Telco Efficiency

Disaggregation presents an enormous opportunity for the Telco industry to reset as organisations can now focus on their specialised areas, rather than continuing with the historical complexity and burden of operating legacy systems at national scale.

The fixed internet broadband of the future requires a hyper-collaboration approach, that is much needed to help manage a diverse Telco (fixed or mobile) ecosystem that can deliver superior repeatable services with reduced cost-to-serve.

At Vitrifi, we started from scratch during the pandemic and have developed a completely new operating system that can help our industry modernise, transform, innovate and better serve individuals, businesses and society as a whole - propagating a Telco ecosystem that provides the operating environment for participants to sell freely, service efficiently and co-evolve cooperatively, and ultimately deliver personalised exceptional experiences to the end-user.

Our machine learning-powered autonomic platform was developed to serve global telecoms at scale, by essentially re-expressing traditional Business Support Systems (BSS) and Operational Support Systems (OSS) as code, which importantly enables our platform to be delivered as a cloud-native microservice. This capability empowers fibre network asset owners to rapidly deploy multi-tenant wholesale capabilities, multi-vendor management, increased customer penetration, and improved market economics for both buyside (ISP/Retailer) and sellside (Fibre Owner/Network Operator) platform customers.

For the naysayers, Telco disaggregation is finally happening and the entire value chain is being disrupted as a result.