Yves T'Joens

Using big data to improve customer experience and business performance

In an environment where communications service providers (CSPs) increasingly have the same service offers and devices, offering a superior customer experience is a priority to compete. Solutions that have the ability to highlight what really matters in driving customer satisfaction and deliver actionable insights from their wide-reaching customer, network, and service data are key differentiators for CSPs. This paper explores ways of integrating big data insights with automated and assisted processes related to key customer touchpoints to ultimately improve the customer experience. We show how innovation from Alcatel-Lucent and Bell Labs helps CSPs improve their business performance, using unique methodology designed to select the right key quality indicators, build accurate key business objective “formula,” predict customer behavior, and ultimately understand which factors are influencing the most. This can be used for example to improve the Net Promoter Score (NPS). The net result is a happier customer and a higher customer value.

Impact of the evolution of the metropolitan network on the DSL access architecture

Without any doubt, broadband Internet access is one of the most successful services offered by telecom operators today. It gives the operator the potential of offering many new services to residential and business customers, thereby introducing new revenue streams. ATM today provides a solid solution for this. At the same time, packet-based aggregation technologies -especially Gigabit Ethernet are becoming popular for offering connectivity services to business customers. The success of packet-based aggregation technologies is mainly driven by their lower cost compared to established cell-based solutions. This article addresses a number of requirements that must be fulfilled by the access network if it is used to provide multiple services. It will be shown how MPLS and Ethernet can be used in a broadband access architecture. Both meet many of the identified requirements, but still require some standardization before reaching the same maturity as their cell-based counterpart. It will be shown how MPLS technology can be used to seamlessly link cell and packet-centric networks together. This gives operators the possibility to keep the benefits of their existing cell-based infrastructure and smoothly evolve toward a packet-centric approach when the time is right.

A service-centric IP quality of service architecture for next generation networks

IP Differentiated Services is widely seen as the framework to provide quality of service (QoS) in the Internet in a scalable fashion. However many issues have still not been fully addressed, such as: the way per-hop behaviours can be combined to provide end-to-end services; the specification of admission control and resource reservation mechanisms; and the role of management plane functionality and its integration with the control and data planes. This paper presents the service management aspects of an integrated control and management architecture for supporting end-to-end QoS-based IP services in next generation networks. It introduces a two-phased approach for service negotiation, namely, service subscription followed by service invocation, and describes the interworking between service and resource management based on the concept of a resource provisioning cycle.

Address reuse in the Internet, adjourning or suspending the adoption of IP next generation?

Since is development a couple of years ago, the Internet has grown immensely. Nowadays the Internet is no longer a communication tool dedicated to universities and governments for research purposes and low cost communication. In a period of more or less 5 years, the Internet has become a very familiar and popular tool. However, the growth in the number of Internet users, the number of hosts connected to the World Wide Web, and the number of companies establishing a Web presence has brought to light a weakness in the Internet protocol (IPv4): the network address space is not adequate to sustain its continued growth into the next millennium. This paper explores an emerging architecture of the Internet based on network address translation (NAT) and the alternatives thereof. To this end, it presents and compares various mechanisms for alleviating the network address shortage by separating public and private address spaces. The benefits and shortcomings of NAT are described, as well as a new network address reuse mechanism known as Realm specific IP (RSIP). Furthermore, this paper extensively describes improvements to the latter mechanism which is becoming very popular. Finally, the paper explains how network address reuse technologies are about to break into the adoption of the newly designed Internet protocol, IP version 6.