What we’re doing in Texas to bring the 5G breakthroughs of tomorrow today
What we’re doing in Texas to bring the 5G breakthroughs of tomorrow today
For a few years now we’ve been hearing about how 5G is the key to unlocking extraordinary digital experiences, as well as a new era of revenue potential for service providers.
But knowing how to make all this come to life is a challenge still being faced by stakeholders all across the 5G ecosystem.
Some of the basic questions that have yet to find conclusive answers are – how can we roll out and monetize services quickly? What’s the most cost-effective approach to 5G private network design, integration, and optimization? What about the setup of edge nodes, private 5G core, ISV applications, and automated operations tools? – to name a few.
Much more than speed
To answer these and other questions, it’s important to recognize that the 5G story is not one of speed alone. It’s also about solving real business problems, mitigating competitive threats, leveraging disruption, and changing mindsets.
The first shift in mindset that needs to be made if we are to capture the full range of opportunities, is that technology is not the end-all. Rather, it’s the means to the end, which is – solving real business challenges.
This is the realization that drives everything we do at the Amdocs 5G Experience Lab in Texas. Our focus, commitment, and determination is to help service providers overcome some of the toughest obstacles to meeting business objectives.
It’s so exciting for me personally to be a part of the Lab. Along with my team, I get to work with service providers from all over the world, so we can help them to understand their pain points, whether it’s lost opportunities, operational inefficiencies, the need to meet customer expectations for performance and experience, or others.
Based on their input, and our own assessments and evaluations, we pinpoint where they’re losing money, when they’re leaving money on the table, which new revenue opportunities are theirs for the picking, and how to pick them.
Then, we guide them to and build the solutions they need.
A powerful combination
My day-to-day in the lab is to balance between deploying the next generation of technology and building a true business case for the technology. We in the lab first will look for a problem to be solved, not for a solution in search of a problem that technology led labs suffer from. We look to solve for real-world business and operational issues.
For example, one use case for which we recently developed a solution involved an employee parking lot that wasn’t being well utilized. So, we designed a 5G-driven IoT solution that can guide employees to this parking lot.The result is a win-win for all. For employees, this service is a perk that enhances their experience. For the organization, unauthorized individuals can no longer park in the lot, protecting income potential from this valuable piece of real estate.
One of the solutions we’ve recently worked on where 5G as a technology matters with a problem to solve is an employee only parking lot. The parking lot had a lot of unauthorized people taking spaces away from employees as well as taking away revenue from the enterprise. We defined 5G as a solution because of a few different advantages we are given with 5G technology, coverage area, latency, and edge computing. We are starting to show the capabilities and adding in value for the enterprise customer with the new capabilities enabled for operations and revenue by the 5G Network.
"Basically, we have all the building blocks we need right here in Texas, along with a lot of experience from a group of top tier experts who know how to ask the right questions and to find the best answers."
Additional verticals and domains that we have solutions for, and continue to work on include Industry 4.0, Medical, Transportation, Retail, and connected automotive 5G edge computing, and manufacturing, among others. For the Industry 4.0 solution we have in the lab with augmented reality for remote collaboration on equipment repair and maintenance we saw in some cases 40% savings in the on site technician’s time. That time savings has driven up productivity and lowered operational costs.
Like I said, it’s very exciting, especially since we get to solve every day problems with really exciting technology.
All the right pieces
What makes all this possible is that at the Amdocs 5G Experience Lab we have all the right pieces in place. We have network, applications, infrastructure, engineering, and testing teams who build solutions with both Amdocs and Amdocs partner technology and wrap it all up with advanced SI services.
The Lab’s architecture includes IoT devices, end devices, SIM, and eSIMs from many different partners, front, mid, and back-haul equipment from multiple vendors, on-prem and cloud cores for control and data, and internet and cloud equipment.
The solutions we bring cover private core and private RAN, spectrum, SPOG, security, private edge, and ISV apps and devices. And the services we provide include design, deployment, spectrum management, operations, and ISV integration.
We’re also completely agnostic. That is, we’re not beholden to any specific technology. So, it really doesn’t matter what kind of equipment the service provider has deployed; we can work with it. There’s nothing holding us back.
Basically, we have all the building blocks we need right here in Texas, along with a lot of experience from a group of top tier experts who know how to ask the right questions and to find the best answers.
And we do this for any kind of organization that service providers want to support, from small to medium to large enterprises, as well as very large, mission critical organizations. We have and can also test and certify for our customers the solutions from end-to-end in the lab before it hits a production setting.
In conclusion
With endless opportunities to innovate, I feel very lucky to be doing what I’m doing. The latest and greatest technologies are right here in our fingertips, and I have the privilege to be surrounded by some of the finest minds in the industry.
It really gives me the sense that there is no such thing as impossible and that the technology and business breakthroughs of tomorrow are absolutely possible today.
Want to see how the Amdocs 5G Experience Lab can help you make the impossible possible? I invite you to reach out to me at adam.lotia@amdocs.com .
