As one of the most technologically sophisticated industries with access to modern connectivity infrastructures and engineering talent, Telecom has been at the forefront of the Internet of Things innovations. However, there still remain challenges stemming from the sheer scale of IoT use cases for Telecom, such as overcoming the risk of overstretching resources and ensuring reliable quality of service.
In order to flourish in IoT, cloud, and AI intensive environments, telecom communication service providers (CSPs) will have to take initiative as leaders in technology development. Here are several types of IoT solutions enabled by Kaa that CSPs should add to their roadmaps when embarking on their IoT transformation.
One of the most common IoT Telecom use cases is asset management and remote system monitoring. By using an IoT platform like Kaa, telecom companies can connect their diverse physical assets to the cloud and remotely manage their operations, investigate malfunctions, run firmware upgrades, and keep track of inventory.
Telecom operators can also utilize their infrastructures to offer new services such as tailored consumer applications, wide-area IoT solutions, and IoT managed services. Using a highly versatile IoT cloud platform such as Kaa, any telecom operator can provide its own IoT solution to a variety of business verticals. Uniquely positioned with unlimited access to network infrastructure and vast pools of user data, CSPs can provide better performance, wider scale, and much better usability than other IT service providers.
Another opportunity for CSPs is to open up new revenue streams by providing edge computing infrastructure for over the top (OTT) service providers and application developers. Enabling cloud capabilities for network hardware such as modems, IP DSLMs, CMTSs or base stations, will allow telecom operators to offer their infrastructure as a valuable service from which consumer behavior patterns can be extracted and acted upon. This is where Kaa, as an enterprise cloud-native platform, can streamline the growth.
IoT is also a crucial part of cloud migration strategies for telecom companies. Apart from driving operational efficiencies, cloud helps CSPs modernize application infrastructures and deliver better customer experiences based on IoT, analytics, machine learning, and other tools. The only problem is that cloud providers may not be able to offer the best-of-breed IoT capabilities and solution flexibility that genuine IoT vendors have been polishing for years. That’s why in order to effectively combine cloud and IoT technologies, CSPs should strategically work on their partnerships as well as gradually internalize these core competencies.
Finally, CSPs can minimize operational costs by applying IoT technology for software defined networking and network function virtualization.
Using Kaa, cloud-based deployment, and container technologies, rolling out new services and deploying large-scale IoT solutions can be done in a fraction of a time it takes with legacy tools. This will provide a great edge to IoT-savvy CSPs, as they can grow beyond just maintaining their communications networks and emerge as big players in the IoT market.