The Vodafone Unified Performance Management (UPM) platform will centralise network performance data from numerous markets, allowing for improve monitoring and management
Today, Vodafone Group has announced a launch of its new UPM platform, which it says will help it to plan, build, and manage its networks throughout Europe.
The UPM platform, built in collaboration with Google Cloud and data analytics specialist Cardinality.io, will serve to pool network performance data from all the markets in which it is deployed, making it easier to monitor and analyse using AI and machine learning.
Currently, Vodafone uses over 100 separate network performance applications to monitor this data, making monitoring and analysis cumbersome and inefficient.
The new platform will be able to process up to eight billion mobile network performance events per day, giving Vodafone a ‘real-time view’ of the health of its networks. As network functions become increasingly automated, this will allow the network to respond instantaneously to incidents effecting performance, as well as providing data scientists more insights for larger interventions, such as adding capacity in response to major incidents.
All of the data collected is encrypted, aggregated, and anonymised before being held at Vodafone’s own on-premise data lake on servers in Europe.
“As the needs of our 300 million plus mobile customers evolve so will our network using this new platform,” said Vodafone CEO Johan Wibergh. “It is a global data hub that gives us a real-time view of what is happening anywhere on our network, uses our global scale to manage traffic growth cheaper and more efficiently as customer data consumption grows by around 40% per year, and supports the full automation of our network by 2025.”
Vodafone says it will also use the platform to guide its future investments, analysing traffic patterns to identify areas that need improved 5G coverage and capacity. It will also serve to monitor energy efficiency across the networks, thereby helping Vodafone Group to keep track of a major element of its net zero carbon emissions target, currently aimed at 2040.
The platform will be rolled out in 11 European markets, though it is unclear exactly which ones; Vodafone has operations in 12 European countries, so it will be interesting to see which one is excluded.
Major operators around the world are increasingly turning to public cloud players for their data management needs. Just yesterday, BT announced a new partnership with Amazon Web Services, aiming to shift their internal applications to the cloud to improve efficiency and time-to-market for new digital services.
By: Harry Baldock (Total Telecom).
Image: Xataka Movil.
Broadcast: FM.