Modernizing telecom networks with AI-powered Azure for Operators

I’m trying ahead to becoming a member of our prospects and companions at Cellular World Congress (MWC), February 26 to February 29, 2024, in Barcelona. Developments in generative AI proceed to speed up the tempo of business transformation, with telecommunications rising as a pacesetter in AI adoption.

Learn the weblog Accelerating Telco Transformation within the Period of AI by Jason Zander, Government Vice President, Strategic Missions and Expertise, to find out how operators are utilizing Microsoft’s AI and Copilot options to raise buyer experiences, streamline enterprise operations, monetize 5G investments, and modernize their community.

On this weblog, I’ll share various thrilling updates about our Azure for Operators portfolio of cloud-based options that allow operators to drive innovation and effectivity within the community. We’re proud to announce an increasing buyer base and the infusion of AI throughout Azure for Operators merchandise.

Modernize networks with a hybrid carrier-grade platform and AI-powered automation and insights

Deep integration of the community with the Azure cloud is basis to utilizing AI-powered automation and insights to unlock improved effectivity, scalability, safety, and reliability. Because the normal availability announcement of Azure Operator Nexus—our provider grade, hybrid platform, our progress consists of:

• Further Operator Nexus deployments supporting 5G standalone roll outs as major platform.
• Increasing capabilities to deal with nationwide safety necessities in a number of areas.
• Growing help for frequent operational necessities and refining strategy to the DevSecOps fashions supporting multi-vendor community perform deployments.
• Further kind components to help RAN and extra workloads.
• As a service mannequin to help buyer and associate lab deployments in Microsoft datacenters.
• Expanded Nexus Prepared program with over 20 licensed companions and over 80 community capabilities.

Operator Nexus allows operators to run workloads on-premises or on Azure, seamlessly deploying and managing all the things from the naked steel to the community to the tenant. Function-built for and validated by tier 1 operators to run mission-critical workloads, Operator Nexus:

• Accelerates time to marketplace for new providers.
• Lowers complete value of possession (TCO).
• Drives operational effectivity and resiliency.
• Critically, improves the safety of extremely distributed, software-based networks.

“As a part of e& UAE’s transformation to changing into a digital telco we’re excited to collaborate carefully with Microsoft as we drive innovation in our providers and excellence in our buyer expertise. The usage of Azure Operator Nexus and Azure Operator 5G Core to help our core community will higher allow us to leverage the facility of AI and automation and supply new avenues for monetization.”

—Khalid Murshed, Chief Expertise and Info Officer, e& UAE.

Azure for Operators

Find out how telecom operators are remodeling with Azure.

“AT&T is shifting to the following part of our cloud migration that features deploying Microsoft’s Azure Operator Nexus platform in our community as a part of the following part of our 5G SA deployment. Persevering with its management in cloud networking, AT&T is utilizing cloud native DevOps instruments to drive enhancements comparable to one-touch deployment, vendor-agnostic framework, CI/CD integration, automated community testing, in-service upgrades, and superior safety and compliance administration. Azure Operator Nexus’ API-driven answer helped us to considerably simplify, automate, and enhance the deployment cycle time for cloud infrastructure software program and configuration in our knowledge facilities.”

—Yigal Elbaz, Senior Vice President, Community CTO.

Learn our tech group weblog to be taught extra about Azure Operator Nexus.

AI-enabled insights for operators

Azure Operator Insights and Copilot in Azure Operator Insights empower operators to drive effectivity, velocity, and accuracy in community operations. Copilot in Azure Operator Insights, now in restricted preview, represents a game-changer for community engineers. Copilot in Azure Operator Insights will empower community engineers to spend extra time fixing and fewer time diagnosing buyer issues by effectively figuring out, mitigating, and resolving community points. This service brings operator-focused gen AI-infused product allows operators to maneuver from reactive, to proactive, and predictive community administration. Community well being could be repeatedly monitored throughout a number of underlying administration programs, permitting for anomalous well being metrics to be detected and the interplay of complicated providers to be extra simply visualized. Community well being alerts proactively inform the LLM-based prompts, accelerating the power to mitigate utilizing strategies analyzed from knowledge sources comparable to product manuals, help web sites, consumer boards, and troubleshooting guides. Amassed experiences are used to additional tune the AI mannequin utilizing data maintained within the operator’s subscription.

At present, Azure Operator Insights and Copilot in Azure Operator Insights are delivering AI-infused insights to drive community effectivity for patrons like 3UK and collaborating companions together with Amdocs, Accenture, and ServiceNow.

Azure Operator Insights removes knowledge silos and delivers actionable enterprise insights by enabling the gathering and evaluation of huge portions of community knowledge gathered from complicated multi-vendor community capabilities. Leveraging ingest and question know-how designed to help Azure itself, Azure Operator Insights can analyze knowledge streams sized at a number of petabytes per day in timeframes that can’t be achieved with typical toolsets. Operator Insights helps operators deal with complicated eventualities comparable to community well being, efficiency, safety, end-to-end buyer expertise, and operations effectivity.

Azure Operator Insights makes use of a contemporary knowledge mesh structure enabling complicated domains to be damaged into manageable sub-domains known as knowledge merchandise that combine huge datasets from completely different sources and distributors. This new functionality, knowledge product manufacturing facility, allows operators, community gear suppliers, and answer integrators to develop distinctive knowledge merchandise that may be printed to Azure Market or for particular person buyer use. We’re excited to be working with Accenture and Amdocs as our preliminary collaborators with the Azure Operator Insights knowledge product manufacturing facility.

“3UK is utilizing Azure Operator Insights to leverage the newest AI developments by the Copilot in Azure Operator Insights product. That is an thrilling growth that brings collectively the newest in generative AI and helps our dedication to raised connectivity, day-after-day, for each buyer.”

—Iain Milligan, Chief Community Officer, 3UK.

Go to our tech group weblog for extra use instances.

Fashionable cell packet core

Azure Operator 5G Core, now in public preview, is designed to fulfill the evolving wants of cell community operators, providing a totally containerized carrier-grade, any-G, hybrid cell packet core with absolutely built-in community capabilities that run on-premises or in-cloud. It’s a trendy structure confirmed within the area at scale based mostly on acquired packet core know-how from our Affirmed Networks acquisition.

Key options since personal preview embody:

• Inline consumer aircraft providers present operators with environment friendly community useful resource utilization in a decreased footprint whereas bettering total consumer expertise.
• APIs for repeatable and constant automation for speedy, error-free service rollouts.
• Micro service structure helps 2G to 5G in single deployment.
• Containerization drives excessive efficiency and effectivity.
• Built-in with cloud-based providers for zero belief safety, AI based mostly automation, and superior analytics.
• Speedy time to market with DevSecOps-based strategy.

For extra details about these enhancements for Azure Operator 5G Core, go to our tech group weblog.

Safety and compliance for telecom workloads

We’re dedicated to supporting our prospects’ safety and compliance obligations. In deepening our dedication, we’ve joined the GSMA Community Gear Safety Assurance Scheme (NESAS) to assist make sure the safety and compliance of our merchandise. Particular to the UK (UK), we help the UK Telecoms Safety Assurance (TSA) code of follow.

“We’re delighted to welcome Microsoft Azure for Operators to the Community Gear Safety Assurance Scheme (NESAS). By becoming a member of NESAS, Microsoft demonstrates its management to offering safe and reliable options for the telecom business. NESAS offers a standard safety framework that enhances transparency and confidence within the community gear provide chain. We sit up for working with Microsoft and different members of the scheme to advance the safety and reliability of telecom networks around the globe.”

—Samantha Kight, Head of Trade Safety, GSMA.

Monetize 5G investments and improve buyer experiences with trendy linked functions

For operators, the power to monetize a differentiated community expertise requires exposing key capabilities to builders and ISVs, whose efforts speed up the event of recent linked functions, rushing adoption, and worth creation. The bulletins on this part make it doable for operators to monetize AI, programmable community, and edge compute.

Saying Azure Operator Name Safety in public preview

We’re saying a brand new service that makes use of AI to guard shoppers from phone rip-off calls. Azure Operator Name Safety makes use of real-time evaluation of voice content material, alerting shoppers when there’s suspicious in-call exercise. Operator Name Safety works on any endpoint (cell or landline) and is fully network-derived (no app obtain required) making for easy monetization of the service as both a premium characteristic or a part of a service bundle. It’s constructed on Azure Communications Gateway, which allows connectivity between an operator voice community and Microsoft Groups and different cloud communication providers. Operators collaborating in preview embody British Telecom Group and Far EasTone.

“We’ve already carried out varied measures to guard our buyer base from many hundreds of thousands of rip-off calls and texts, however with fraud a rising downside within the UK, we’re all the time how we are able to take shopper safety to the following stage. That’s why we’re collaborating with Microsoft to pilot Azure Operator Name Safety and analyze how, through the use of superior (AI) capabilities, we are able to additional improve our defenses towards fraudulent exercise.”

—Reza Rahnama, MBE, MD Cellular Networks, BT Group.

Go to our tech group weblog for extra details about Azure Operator Name Safety.

Azure Programmable Connectivity (APC) is now out there in public preview as an Azure service. Now absolutely built-in into the Azure Market, APC empowers operators to commercialize their community APIs and simplifies their entry for builders. APC offers seamless entry to Open Gateway for builders to create cloud and edge-native functions that work together with the intelligence of the community. By offering a unified, customary interface throughout operator networks, builders can create cloud and edge-native functions that work together with the intelligence of networks.

We’re actively collaborating with world operators integrating their community APIs to develop a powerful associate ecosystem (comparable to AT&T, BT, Claro, Deutsche Telekom, MEO, Orange, Rogers, Singtel, Telefonica, T-Cellular, TIM Brasil, Verizon, and Vivo). We additionally proceed working with community know-how companions and community programmability aggregators, comparable to Ericsson and Vonage, in addition to Nokia and Nokia’s Community as Code platform, making concrete progress accelerating the ecosystem on community programmability.

“Verizon’s community APIs allow builders to create new experiences, ease ache factors in buyer interactions, and enhance buyer safety by enabling entry to Verizon community APIs by Azure’s APC, builders throughout the globe can profit from Verizon’s deep information of the info setting and expansive community useful resource.”

—Srini Kalapala, Senior Vice President of Expertise and Product Improvement, Verizon.

Find out how APC is revolutionizing the best way builders work together with community API providers and find out how enterprises are benefiting from network-aware functions.

Azure personal MEC allows operators to help trendy linked functions with high-performance, ultra-low-latency edge options. Listed here are a number of examples of how enterprises are remodeling operations with 5G:

• Noble Company, one of many largest offshore drilling contractors on the planet, is deploying Azure personal MEC to offer mobility options for the crew whereas rising effectivity. “With Tampnet’s Personal Offshore Community and Azure personal MEC, onsite connectivity is now not a problem for Noble. Related staff, and secure and safe networks are accelerating implementation of digital initiatives for improved offshore operations.”—Juan Vesga, OTG Undertaking Supervisor, Noble Company.
• Trinity Broadcast Networks (TBN), has put in a non-public 5G community deployment from our associate, Trilogy NextGen Networks, within the Dallas-Fort Price metroplex. “As the brand new house for a lot of of TBN’s hottest information and leisure applications, in addition to ‘Dr. Phil Primetime,’ it was important to create a facility that delivers the last word state-of-the-art expertise. Our partnership with Trilogy NextGen helps us invigorate the world of broadcasting, as we push the boundaries of content material creation to encourage, inform, and uplift audiences around the globe.”—Russell Corridor, Senior Vice President of Manufacturing, TBN.
• 5G PORTAL–the Offshore Renewable Vitality (ORE) Catapult, along with Microsoft and a wider consortium of companions, have created an offshore 5G geared up testbed, protecting the Port of Grimsby and the  operational Lynn and Internal Dowsing Wind Farm. 

Increasing associate ecosystem for contemporary linked functions

Our companions are actively growing trendy linked functions that run on Azure personal MEC. We’ve onboarded greater than 20 ISVs and dozens of SI and operator companions. Study extra under about among the new associate options out there on Azure Market.

• Glartek’s Augmented & Related Employee platform makes use of AR to help enterprise operations.
• Scenera’s MAIstro software program as a service (SaaS) presents a complete answer for orchestrating AI analytics seamlessly from edge to cloud.
• Tampnet’s offshore personal networks present safe connectivity for offshore operators and vessels.
• Taqtile Manifest® Combined Actuality Work Instruction Answer leverages blended actuality to enhance operational workflows.
• T-Cellular’s 5G Superior Community Options offers “right-sized” options for enterprises.
• Zebra Applied sciences Company’s Workcloud Communication platform allows safe and dependable communication for front-line staff.

See how ISV companions are powering AI-enabled functions.

Get began right now

Microsoft and our ecosystem companions are constructing a really “higher collectively” structure that holistically addresses the wants of community operators as they rework their networks. Trying forward, we stay dedicated to being essentially the most trusted co-innovation associate by each stage of the digital evolution, working with operators and enterprises to future-proof networks and unlock new income streams in a cloud- and AI-native future.

Invitation to operators, system integrators, and community managers

Invitation to enterprises, builders, and ISVs

• Whether or not you’re an enterprise trying to leverage our options, a developer wanting to create network-aware functions, or an software ISV looking for to collaborate with Microsoft on MEC options, we invite you to take the following step. Join now to hitch us in constructing the way forward for telecommunications with Azure for Operators. 
• To find out how Microsoft helps organizations embrace 5G with trendy linked functions, join information and updates delivered to your inbox.