In a fiercely competitive telecommunication world, scale is often the only way for operators to make ends meet. Regardless of the service on offer, this means growth in subscriber numbers. Sometimes a service provider has been lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. Witness the explosive growth in Zoom video conferencing, Cisco Webex, and Microsoft Teams collaboration amongst the major players during covid lockdowns.
Under normal circumstances, the classic way to achieve scale is by acquisition of other telco subscriber bases. We see this happening everywhere. Evolve IP in the USA. Gamma, Enreach and Destiny in Europe. There will be others.
Both rapid organic growth and growth by acquisition come with challenges. The former needs a strategy for rapid expansion of infrastructure. The latter involves the challenge of integrating customer bases, systems and networks and is particularly difficult to achieve.
The movement of infrastructure into the cloud does help when it comes to scalability. Scalability is, after all, one of the cloud’s value propositions. Netaxis has made a point of positioning its solutions to help telcos meet the challenges of growth.
The Session Routing Engine (SRE) for example, has been designed with cloud and scalability in mind. SRE makes use of the inherent scalability of cloud infrastructure to make it easy to grow the number of concurrent routable calls. The architecture of SRE also helps. Additional processor nodes can easily be added, especially helpful when considering the incorporation of new networks, subscriber bases, and, of course, international growth.
Complimentary to the scalability is the simplicity of the SRE user interface. A graphic drag-and-drop UI means new routes can easily be added. UK wholesale telco AQL was an early adopter of SRE and quote the efficiency improvements they have managed to achieve since their implementation. AQL has seen a 5 x reduction in route provisioning times with SRE over the previous routing engine used.
"Implementing SRE as a centralised Sip Routing Engine has improved efficiencies and dramatically simplified routing logic, routing changes which used to take in the region of 10 minutes are now completed in seconds. SRE’s fast and intuitive UI enables our Technical Operations Team to make customer routing plan changes with ease and removes the requirement of understanding the intricacies and ramifications of making changes that were a technical overhead of the original SBC vendors routing logic. Amongst the many other benefits the API enables automation for customer creation and routing changes in the event of fraud. The granularity of control within SRE plays a pivotal role in meeting Ofcom obligations and our voice product team are already dreaming up new services to empower our channel partners. As SRE is VM based within our infrastructure rapid scalability as our business grows is easily achievable."
Scalability and efficiency are two of the facets of SRE that make it highly desirable for implementation in an expanding modern telco network. To find out more about how SRE can help improve your telecoms network check out our white paper. For more information, please do get in touch.
