How can Telcos Offer Edge Assurance to Customers and Partners?

The diagram below shows the main options that a telco might have to deliver assurance products at the edge to its customers and partners – assuming that this is something that a telco with an aggressive strategy in IoT would want (or need) to do.

The pink arrows across the top describe groups of capabilities that a telco could choose to develop themselves or work with vendors to create:

• On the far left, they have assurance data coming off their network and infrastructure which they could mix with other data sources
• The processing and storage capabilities will be a necessary part of telco assurance products – including options for doing this activity at the network or customer edge
• Analytics can also be added at various points in the network and edge
• Then “Products Created” on the far right hand side describes models that the telco have for delivering this assurance.

There are then 5 options for the telco to deliver this assurance – shown in the rows of the diagram:

A: this is the provision of assurance to those who require it internally

B: the telco could pass “raw” assurance data straight to the customer or partner without processing it or adding analytics capabilities.  Here also are potential options for summarising the data in some way in order to allow the complexity of telco assurance data to be easily ingested by the customer or partner

C: the telco could act as a channel for the assurance products of vendors

D: the telco could create assurance products offered separately on top of their products

E: the telco could create assurance products which are offered as part of their end-to-end services.