How telecom operators should develop IT infrastructure in 2022

We asked our expert Alexander Chekmenev, Head of Telecom, to tell us what difficulties telecom operators have to face and how they should develop their infrastructure in the conditions of import substitution.

The Russian market of telecommunication services is highly competitive and now the struggle is not for a new client, but for the retention of current ones. This situation has developed due to the fact that most of the people are already connected to the network and the number of new users has almost stopped growing. Therefore, now the main task of the operator is to fight the outflow of subscribers.

To fulfill this task, high quality of service provision is a prerequisite that is critical for the business. In the current situation, when foreign vendors are leaving the Russian market, continuing to use their equipment becomes risky for business. Without technical support, the operator may find itself in a situation where the quality of its services will noticeably decrease due to down times, which will lead to user churn.

ITGLOBAL.COM has in its portfolio a Russian solution for telecom operators – Traffic Control and Analysis System (SCAT). When we were approached by operators to replace the equipment of vendors who had left the market, we were able to transfer clients to SCAT in a short time. As a result, they not only did not lose service quality, but also received additional functionality specially adapted for the Russian telecom market.

SCAT is a comprehensive solution that combines in one hardware platform the software functionality of a DPI-system, BRAS-server and NAT-router. The solution is suitable for businesses of all sizes. In the last 3 months alone, both small telecom operators such as Telecom 21 (Kazan), Orgtekhservis (Adygeya), 12Bit (Magadan), and regional operators such as Nevalink (St. Petersburg) and Infolink (Moscow) have switched to the SCAT solution.

As we noted earlier, the telecom services market is no longer experiencing an influx of new clients, but traffic growth continues. Accordingly, the load on telecom operators’ networks and equipment maintenance costs are growing. Therefore, when choosing a solution with higher network capacity, not only its reliability, but also its economic component is important. SCAT allows to expand the bandwidth capacity with the help of software components. In this case, the entire platform does not need to be replaced, which allows the telecom operator to flexibly scale the infrastructure without service downtime and without capital expenditures for new equipment.

Thanks to this, our customers among small telecom operators have been able to maintain high quality of service without significant network upgrade costs. For large regional operators with complex geo-distributed networks, flexible scalability is also important. Our customers Nevalink and Infolink put their new communication nodes into operation this spring, the core of which is based on the SCAT solution. The solution was chosen based on the results of a market analysis of domestic solutions, in which the SCAT system showed the highest efficiency.

The main users of SCAT are telecom operators. Nevertheless, it is not a highly specialized solution. So ITGLOBAL.COM has implemented the SCAT system in one of the best data centers in Russia – DataSpace. Thanks to DPI technology, which allows prioritizing traffic, more efficient use of the data transmission network of the data center is ensured, and the designed level of fault tolerance of SCAT ACS is 99, 999%.