Last Year Was a Booming Year for Telecom. What’s Next, and How Have We Adapted to New Trends?

Posted by John Sarkis on Jan 23, 2023 1:00:00 PM

The State of Telecommunications

With the world adjusting back to normalcy post-pandemic, 2022 was another booming - and some would say a hectic year for telecom. The momentum from the increased dependency on broadband has continued to reflect on the growing telecom market. Broadband and Telecommunications are entering a new landscape of competition as the demand for faster speeds and higher data consumption continue to force telcos to adapt to new technologies. With that, both CAF and ACAM testing is in full swing now that pre-testing has finished for CAF recipients.

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Topics: Telecom Data Analytics, connect america fund

How to Ensure Success in the Next Phase of Performance Measures Testing

Posted by John Sarkis on Nov 4, 2021 10:30:00 AM

Complying with the USAC’s requirements can be stressful. However, being non-compliant during the pre-testing phase isn’t the end of the world. In fact - it’s part of the process in most providers' deployment journeys. 

As we jump into the fourth quarter of ACAM-I pretesting and prepare for the upcoming 2022 official testing, it’s important that providers determine what tactics they used to be successful this past year.

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Topics: Telecom Data Analytics, Regulatory, Broadband, FCC, stamper box, connect america fund

Translating Data Into Invoices For International Customers

Posted by John Sarkis on Oct 19, 2021 1:00:00 PM

 

Phone calls have no boundaries, borders, or language barriers. However, billing for them does. 

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Topics: Telecom Data Analytics, Inter-Carrier Billing, Cost Savings, Data Driven

Small Telcos in the Big Picture

Posted by John Sarkis on May 18, 2021 11:53:49 AM

 

With the first quarter of performance testing behind us, we’d like to reflect on how our stamper technology performed. As we rolled out hundreds of stamper box devices across the United States, our years of experience in telecom were put to the test to adapt to new challenges that performance measures testing created. 

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Topics: Telecom Data Analytics, connect america fund, A-CAM

Next Time Call A 'Plumber'

Posted by Ryan Guthrie on Aug 21, 2018 11:00:00 AM

Tell me if this story sounds familiar. You have an idea, a hunch, a theory that you'd like to 'flush' out. BUT, in order to do so, you need access to data from last month, maybe it's CDRs, billing data, smart meter data, etc. The emails, conference calls, and requests you'll have to make to get your hands on that data are daunting at best. But it's your data right? Why should you have to jump through so many hoops to get access to it? By the time you can even figure out who "owns" the data, you're onto the next task and your great idea is wasted, yet again.

Over the years, I can't tell you how many times the 'data access' issue has delayed or even completely stopped a project we've been involved with. Not because the idea didn't make sense or the business case didn't prove out, simply because getting the data from 'Point A' to 'Point B' was going to take too much time and effort. This is the definition of a 'data plumbing' issue. Big data tools are getting better, faster, cheaper, and more available every day. But the challenge of extracting and integrating data from a variety of sources has become an issue that organizations simply can't ignore. It's the ugly truth behind data analytics - it often takes more time and energy to extract, clean, and integrate the data than it takes to do the analytics itself.

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Topics: Telecom Data Analytics, Big Data, BigQuery, ESAP, Data Plumbing

How Open-Source is Reshaping our Business

Posted by Peter Mueller on Jun 29, 2018 1:09:10 PM

Being in the software business for 20+ years, I’ve both feared and admired open-source.  On the one hand, we’ve benefited from it so thoroughly that it’s easy to overlook that we’re standing on ‘shoulders of giants’ every morning from the moment we boot up a Linux VM, to whatever PERL or Python module we’ll download or upgrade during the day.  We’ve made modest contributions along the way, but we’ve never taken the plunge of actually open-sourcing our own wares -- even though, economically and technically, our own customers have benefited from indirectly from them. After all, building our apps around open source has - over the long-term - kept our own customer’s total cost of ownership down, and kept openness and reliability up.  In this post, I’d like to explore an often-overlooked aspect of open-source:  it’s ability to help you close more sales by including an ‘infrastructure call option’ for your prospects.

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Topics: Telecom Data Analytics, MapReduce, Inter-Carrier Billing, SS7, Workflow Automation, Fraud Prevention, Cloud Storage

Is Safe Harbor Safe Enough for Rural Call Completion?

Posted by Ken Babcock on Nov 15, 2017 1:04:48 PM

The FCC is currently struggling mightily to arrive at a fair and equitable solution to the need to promote uniform quality of telecommunications for both large urban centers and very small rural areas of the United States.

The FCC fully recognizes that the existing Rural Call Completion reporting requirements are not capable of providing a reliable measurement of the “of how answer and call completion rates differed for various small non-rural carriers compared to the overall rate provided to larger non-rural carriers in total. “

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Topics: Telecom Data Analytics, Regulatory, Rural Call Completion

What Does Data Driven Mean For The Telecom Industry

Posted by Ryan Guthrie on Oct 17, 2017 10:30:46 AM

Big data is big news in almost every industry, and telecom is no exception. The report “Big Data and Telecom Analytics Market: Business Case, Market Analysis & Forecasts 2014 – 2019” from Mind Commerce forecasts a 50% growth by 2019 in the big-data-driven telco analytics environment, which will deliver annual revenue of $5.4 billion. Apart from opening up a multitude of jobs for telecom data scientists, data will increasingly become a competitive differentiator for telcos.  

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Topics: Telecom Data Analytics, Big Data, ESAP, Data Driven

Is There a Life After Rural Call Completion Reports?

Posted by Ken Babcock on Oct 5, 2017 10:10:47 AM

Over the last two years, the FCC has been in the process of determining whether it still makes sense to have telecom service providers collect and report on call answer and completion rates on long distance domestic calls that were handed-off to Interexchange Carriers who provided routing, transport and completion functions for the calls made to customers of a NECA-provided list of small ILECs as well as to the much larger non-rural local exchange service providers in aggregate.

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Topics: Telecom Data Analytics, Rural Call Completion

5 Reasons Why Big Data Analytics is Critical to The Telecom Industry

Posted by Ryan Guthrie on Sep 6, 2017 11:09:55 AM

The telecoms industry in the U.S. is expected to continue growing in 2017, according to Deloitte’s latest outlook report. Furthermore, we anticipate providers will work hard to remain competitive in the battle to attract customers and create new revenue streams. With data generated from every customer touch point ranging from calls to text messages, video downloads, mobile commerce and service calls, telcos have access to significant amounts of information. Implementing big data analytics (BDA) is critical to enable them to make use of this intelligence to get ahead.

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Topics: Telecom Data Analytics, Big Data