Over the last 12 years, discussions around telco activities in the data provision and related ecosystem have been around the provision of aggregated/anonymized data about telcos customers coming from the BSS systems, augmented with location data from the network.
This is beginning to change with discussions from vendors about the need for data from the network and OSS for control/automation use cases and opportunities for the telcos to create technologies which provide analytics, AI and automation (A3) for their customers. These opportunities are not easy and will require the telcos to work with an increasing number of specialist A3 providers.
In addition, telcos already offer some types of data platform as a service to their customers (usually partnering with companies who have popular products). The category “Data Products” (in the diagram below) considers the potential for telcos to broaden this range of capabilities to cover areas such as data management, governance and data security – as provided already by some of the larger Tier 1s with SI businesses.
