Introducing Telecom Data Fabric: Unlock the value of your data

Communications Service Providers (CSPs) are on a journey to deliver the next generation of innovative services by modernizing their networks by transitioning to cloud, and those network systems and services generate large volumes of data. To improve their products, user experience, and move towards a data-driven autonomous network, CSPs need to find a way to draw insights from all that valuable data that they generate. But to do this, CSPs must first easily extract this data from various network elements, cloud infrastructures, and from operational and business support systems. Making matters more complicated, this data is currently fragmented across multiple data lakes and warehouses, across on-prem, private, and hybrid cloud environments, and stored in multiple vendor-proprietary formats.

Today at Mobile World Congress 2023 Barcelona, we announced several new telecom products, including the preview of Telecom Data Fabric, a data and analytics platform designed to help CSPs capitalize on their data assets, solve their data challenges, bring innovation to market fast, and run their networks effectively and efficiently. 

Customers like BT, Deutsche Telekom, Elisa  and Vodafone and others have already embarked on the journey of cloud and network transformation using Google Cloud’s rich data and AI/ML capabilities. And with Telecom Data Fabric, CSPs can further accelerate their data transformation, harnessing the power of a simplified automated data platform, ready-to-use data curation adapters, reusable data models, and AI/ML tools. Telecom Data Fabric also can enable a variety of third-party applications, such as predictive analytics for actionable insights and network operations, data-optimized network planning, enhanced customer experience management, energy saving, and many more. 

A new approach to accelerated data value

CSPs face many unique challenges in putting data to use. CSPs’ legacy data pipelines are generally not designed to keep up with evolving telecom standards, multi-vendor formats, cloud-based architecture, or control-loop automation. Moreover, CSPs’ data handling is typically delegated to each domain owner, each with its own suite of data tools, controls and processes. This divided responsibility and tooling can lead to data silos, data duplication, and an overall lack of reusability of valuable data across the organization. In addition, CSPs often spend a significant amount of time collecting, cleaning, transforming, and storing data in the right format — disproportionately higher than the time spent using that data. The CSPs challenges are further compounded by complexities of data sharing, governance, sovereignty, and privacy.

Let’s take a look at the wide range of data analytics and data management automation capabilities in Telecom Data Fabric that can help CSPs overcome these challenges.

Simplified, holistic and efficient data management 
Built on Google’s core strengths in data management and AI/ML, Telecom Data Fabric helps CSPs accelerate telecom data management and analytics with a ready-to-use automated approach, leveraging multiple Google Cloud data and AI & ML products. Telecom Data Fabric automation can give CSPs a fast way to collect, process, and put data into use without compromising data quality, privacy, and security.

Telecom Data Fabric offers multiple mechanisms to collect the data from different sources, a rich set of data adapters for curating the variety of network and CRM data, and a unified open data model to store data and facilitate easy access for different applications.

Telecom Data Fabric integrates with Dataplex to support centralized security and governance, as well as unified search and data discovery based on business context, across distributed data.

Rather than having to stitch together disparate products, Telecom Data Fabric provides CSPs and system integrators (SIs) with an end-to-end data management and analytics platform that is automated, integrated and orchestrated out-of-the-box, so it can be easy to build and maintain.

Fast path to high-value data
Telecom Data Fabric supports a unified open data model in BigQuery that can bridge the gaps across standard and complex proprietary models. The unified data model provides repeatability, which can enable CSPs to build, deploy, and scale machine learning (ML) models fast using Vertex AI and ML tools. With Telecom Data Fabric, CSPs can granularly control data access, allowing them to expose data across the organization selectively and  securely. In addition, Telecom Data Fabric APIs and Google Cloud data products can make it easier for a variety of applications to use that data. 

Integrated automation
Telecom Data Fabric integrates with Google Distributed Cloud Edge and GKE, providing a mechanism for ready-to-use data collection from Google Cloud infrastructure. It’s also integrated with Telecom Network Automation, another member of the Google Cloud telecom portfolio, making it possible to act on data insights via closed loop actuation. These advanced capabilities represent a significant step towards self-managed autonomous networks.

A robust telecom data ecosystem

Telecom Data Fabric is integrated with several partner analytics and AI/ML applications. Multiple CSPs and ISVs are actively working with Google Cloud as design partners and early testers of Telecom Data Fabric. For further details, reach out to us at telecom_data_fabric@google.com.