7 Things Telecoms need to do NOW, to help fight Corona and protect the economy

During the last few weeks, I spoke with many telecoms executives who are challenged by the Corona Virus outbreak. CSPs need to provide reliable communication platforms, to people, businesses and governments and need to ensure their network and services are ready for the new market conditions, while they mobilize their workforce to work from home. The demand for communication is quickly growing and changing its nature (massive demand from home and less from offices & more in-home entertainment and video calls), and the employees who provide the supply and need to align the CSPs’ network and service packages are required to work from home or even already sick. 

They all repeated the same challenges, asking for immediate solutions. Here is a list of solutions we prepared, which use AI, Deep Learning & Analytics to solve the burning issues. 

Challenge #1: The CSP needs to continue and provide critical communication services while it’s employees might be sick with the coronavirus, in-quarantine, or living in areas where the outbreak is unmanaged. The CSPs ask for our “Employee Health analytics” which help track the employee health condition and measure the impact of teams and sites, on critical telecom services should they be sick or not allowed to get to specific locations. 

Challenge #2: Employees are required to work from home which will hurt their productivity. The CSP asks for our “Employees transition analytics” which helps track the transition from office to home, measure productivity and analyze anomalies in employees' behavior.  

Challenge #3: The usage habits are changing rapidly, and the network isn’t ready to support those changes. Caused by the “work from home” programs and the closure of schools, the usage is changing from business centers and schools into the home. The CSPs ask for our “Usage & Patterns Analytics” to analyze the new usage patterns and help align their network to support it, at a massive scale. 

Challenge #4: The B2B/Enterprise packages were always focused on the ‘corporate office’ and now it needs to refocus on ‘home offices’. The CSPs ask for our “CPQ analytics” package to create a new type of packages like “Work & Enjoy from home” which includes secure communication, VPNs, collaboration tools and “after hours” entertainment package. 

Challenge #5: Many businesses find themselves with working capital constraints, and will be challenged paying for the communication services they consumed. The CSPs ask for our “AR & Collection analytics” to analyze customers at risk, forecasting who won’t be able to pay its debt, so the CSP can allocate the right programs to those customers. 

Challenge #6: The separation lines between B2B and B2C customers are blurred, as employees work from home and consume work-related video (like Zoom) and entertainment, via the home network. Employees are asked to use their communication infrastructure to support complex business tasks, which pose a security challenge and unbalanced cost-sharing. The CSPs ask for a new type of packages, transforming B2C customers from other providers to run on the B2B preferred provider’s network, so the usage is tracked and monitored. Our “Subscribers analytics” package helps solve this problem.

Challenge #7: The CSP need to comply with government regulations and internal SLA, to meet the new demand created by ‘working from home’ and ‘government quarantine’ requirements. The CSP need to provide accurate and timely reports and data to the regulators and its own management. Therefore our team created the “Government (& Internal) Compliance Analytics” Analyze and track network performance, and ensure the right capacity is allocated to critical businesses, government agencies and homes. Moreover, provide reports which helps the government manage social distancing orders, and share insights on usage trends such as data consumption, cell congestion, etc

Telecoms provide the core communication infrastructure to help fight the Coronavirus, pursue business continuity and support our spirit during the crisis. Telecom executives need to be proactive and decisive and take those actions to deploy new AI, Deep Learning and Analytics systems to improve their readiness for the new market conditions.