TELUS puts customer focus at the heart of autonomous network transformation

The term autonomous networks (AN) has become a catch-all term as communications service providers (CSPs) transform their networks, IT systems and processes. Each CSP has a view on the business outcomes that AN can achieve. For Canada-based TELUS, AN is the evolution of many different domains that together will deliver better customer experiences, new services, and increased efficiency.

In an interview with TM Forum Inform, Tim Fell, Vice President of Networking Technology and Services at TELUS, discussed the CSP’s approach to AN and how some of the technology pieces are coming together to enable its vision.

“For us, it's all about the management of that evolution across multiple dimensions,” he said. These include network and IT technologies, artificial intelligence (AI), and the people and processes involved in the technologies.

“If we’re successful in bridging all these pieces, then we produce a network ecosystem where we can move resources to where they're needed in real time, anticipating and meeting the needs of our customers in a more efficient and reliable way,” he explained.

Examples of the various network and IT capabilities coming in the next several years are disaggregation that enables greater choice and ability to rapidly deploy network functions where needed; commonly defined application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow applications to interact with the network; as well as IT technology and operational support systems (OSS) that have access to networks and services to provision capabilities or access data.

“To be effective, we have to be able to manage those [transformations] in parallel. If we just build the network and enable disaggregation and don't have the right tooling in place, don't bake in AI from the start, and don't have the right connectivity to the front-end systems, then we won't be able to extract the efficiency and improvements that we're going to get for our customers as well,” he said.

Differentiating services and operating like a cloud

TELUS is aligned with industry efforts to realize the promise of “zero delays” and “zero-touch interactions” for the primary purpose of being able to “deliver exceptional customer experiences on the network through seamless reliability and intuitive connectivity,” Fell explained.

Although many CSPs are pursuing AN, TELUS believes the transformation will enable differentiation for itself and its customers by improving reliability as well as delivering new services and getting them to market faster.

TELUS will be able to provide “dynamic” scaling of services as customer demands for connectivity or resource capacity change with “the agility to do that on demand.”

“That enables us to have much richer conversations with our customers and understand what they want to do with their data and applications and whether they are going to do more business in the cloud or on premises,” he said.

In addition to the benefits of better reliability and service innovation, there are also efficiency gains in network operations. For example, with the ability to scale capacity up or down for customers, the CSP can recognise energy savings when the network is not busy. Automated operations also enable faster fault repair.

“[The network is] going to operate much more like a cloud. We’ll be able to move resources around the network as they’re needed and more efficiently”, he said.

CSPs predict where network capacity is needed, but if their projections are not accurate this can result in stranded capacity in some places or not enough in others. The ability to spin up capacity when and where it’s needed will avoid these issues and minimize inefficiency.

“There’s been talk of bandwidth on demand and services on demand for a long time. It’s exciting now to see all the pieces are available to make that happen. With the network, IT and cloud technologies … you can see that we’re going to get there over the next few years,” he said.

It all starts with data

As TELUS manages parallel evolutions across network and technology domains, the CSP has prioritised data management from the beginning. This is to ensure that it has a single “source of truth,” which is an essential foundation for building AI and other automation systems. TELUS has been an early adopter of generative AI across its organization, equipping more than 50,000 team members with in-house tools, helping to boost productivity and creativity in their everyday work.

Along with data inventory, the operator is also focused on the OSS that accesses the network.

“We’re building the fundamental enabling capabilities so they’re available and reusable across all the networks and services…and going after high priority use cases. One of the first ones is fault management and self-healing because that will drive customer experience benefits more quickly,” he explained.

As TELUS progresses towards its AN vision, Fell said the biggest challenges so far have been in data management and synchronization as well as managing multiple technology evolutions at the same time. For the latter, it has adopted new ways of working to support the changes.

“To manage this evolution, we’re working very closely with network and IT people together in the same teams. This is beneficial for the deep expertise we have in both, but they don’t always speak the same language, so there is a lot of work to get on the same page… In the next three to five years, we’re going to be working much more like an IT or cloud project and in a scaled agile fashion,” he said.

“We have to build on our rich history in networking and IT, and the whole transition is facilitated by software technologies and AI. So, we're integrating people with new skills as well as leveraging the tremendous skills that we have,” he added.