Among global operators, 91% view real-time assurance as the most important priority for revenue protection, according to a research from telecom.com and Openet.
The study shows that, without a transformed approach to revenue and service assurance, over half of respondents admit that they will risk losing more than 3% of the revenues expected to come from digital services (i.e. TV services, etc) in 2017 alone.
The forecast leakage represents a significant level of risk as over 60% anticipating that revenues from digital services will account for 10% of total revenues, and 30% seeing this revenue figure at over 20% of total revenues.
Also, over three quarters (77%) of those surveyed believe that existing revenue assurance systems would struggle to collect relevant data in real-time from virtualized networks for new services.
The majority (87%) agreed that most existing revenue assurance systems were designed for traditional telecoms networks. With the advent of virtualization across operators’ infrastructure promising increased efficiency in the long-term, at a network level, it significantly increases complexity in the short term.
With this in mind, 83% of operators believe the complexity of network virtualization is adding greater need to solve the challenge of dynamic data collection for assurance in this sense.
“As the industry moves to roll out digital services enabled by new real-time systems and virtualized networks, revenue assurance needs a serious rethink,” said Jon Ross, GVP product and solutions management at Openet.
“Many service providers are anticipating more than 20% of their service revenue coming from digital services in 2017, therefore it’s important that any potential for revenue leakage is addressed now,” said Ross.