Win the Fibre: The Role of Service Orchestration in Fibre Rollouts

When it comes to fibre connectivity, New Zealand is a bit ahead of the curve.

That’s because the country committed to an aggressive fibre connectivity rollout with the 2009 launch of the Ultra-Fast Broadband (UFB) initiative. That plan aimed to deliver fibre connectivity to 75 percent of the nation’s resident population by 2020, and 90 percent of its businesses, as well as all schools and hospitals, by 2015. Thanks to the efforts of Comptel customer Chorus, which oversaw implementation, the country is well on its way to meeting and exceeding its fibre connectivity goals.

Chorus, which received a 2015 GTB Innovation Award for the project, recognised what operators around the world will need to understand about their own fibre initiatives: that addressing the inherent challenges of fibre rollout requires adopting a holistic and innovative approach to service orchestration.

After all, New Zealand isn’t alone in its pursuit of super-fast connectivity. There is strong worldwide demand for fibre – in Europe, the number of fibre to the home (FTTH) and fibre to the building (FTTB) connections increased by 19 percent over the first nine months of 2015, after an increase of 50 percent the year before. There are now more than 35.9 million fibre subscribers in Europe, and steady growth underscores fibre’s place as the preferred form of broadband connectivity in the years to come.

The question for operators, then, revolves around supplying connectivity to demanding customers. The solution starts with understanding the role service orchestration plays in connecting digital demand and supply, and how this function should be modelled to achieve maximum customer experience benefits.

Connecting Digital Demand and Supply

There are three layers to the customer experience, and buyers – either consumer, business or wholesale – sit at the top. In the middle are the digital channels these customers use to configure and purchase new services, and these channels are increasingly becoming more dynamic and self-service-oriented to suit changing buying preferences. At the bottom is a range of emerging digital services – cloud, apps, over-the-top (OTT) content and business services like VoIP or Web conferencing – plus the connectivity options that put those services into the hands of consumers. Fibre lives on this bottom layer.

The service orchestration layer effectively sits in the middle, enabling those digital sales channels to deliver an omni-channel purchasing experience. Today’s service orchestration function needs to be dynamic, automated and conversational to solve the typical challenges experienced in fibre rollouts.

Keeping the Customer Experience in Focus

There are six main challenges that could present roadblocks to an operators’ fibre initiatives, and an innovative, holistic approach to service orchestration solves each one:

• Time to Revenue – The IT architecture must support a fast fibre rollout to ensure short-and long-term revenue. An automated, templated, modular and pre-integrated architecture supports rapid fibre deployment, helping operators unlock revenue benefits quickly.
• Customers and Channels – Customers have high expectations for the quality and immediacy of service, and a number of sales channels and business systems are now involved in the modern buying process. A pre-integrated fulfillment platform to deploy fibre connectivity ensures operators can quickly and efficiently plug into a multi-channel BSS and multi-vendor network.
• Competitiveness – Fibre should be packaged and priced competitively to reflect consumers’ desire for dynamic digital offerings that include OTT and cloud services. The fulfillment platform should support the rapid creation and introduction of these complex fibre and service bundles.
• Existing Architecture – Not all transformation is wholesale, as operators still rely on legacy architecture and processes that could slow down the ramp of fibre connectivity initiatives. Flexibility is, therefore, a key factor for fulfillment, as your architecture should support gradual migration.
• Resources and Skills – Similarly, some operators are still developing the resources and skills to support fibre projects, and automated service orchestration can plug some of the skills gap by removing the burden of repetitive tasks.
• Platform Evolution – Finally, as operators embrace fibre, there will be gradual adoption of new platform components and services to support it. Therefore, the service orchestration layer must be vendor- and technology-agnostic to support platform evolution.

Fibre is one of many emerging technology innovations that is transforming the service reality for operators, and as with any new service, its implications are felt in the back office. Infrastructure evolution is essential, and operators need to seek certain capabilities from their service orchestration platform – modularity, automation, process-driven fulfilment and pre-integration – to ensure they can meet high customer expectations.

Learn more about the Chorus project from here.