The need for businesses to think small for smart home success

By: Thomas Rockmann

The cry of ‘think big’ has been a business credo for years, a mantra to every bootstrapping start-up and growing enterprise alike—live the dream, think big! While the smart home market is growing fast—figures from analysts IDC predict sales of smart home devices will rise by 18.5 percent annually to reach a considerable 939.7 million devices by 2022—it has yet to reach capacity or peak ‘bigness’ by any measure. In many ways, the market is still in its early days. Opportunity abounds…

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Better Data, Better Decisions

By: Scott St. John, Pipeline

Big Data, BI, AI. These buzzwords seem to have been circulating in the industry for years now. They have been used as the battle cries for look-at-me technology companies who want to always appear on the edge of innovation. And, perhaps rightfully so. With the success of so many companies relying on their ability to leverage data, those that have tangible solutions should beat the drum often—and loudly. Recognizing it can be difficult to sift the hype from actual technical progress, it’s important to note that the technology companies are typically the ones who lead the market in leveraging new technology…

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Intelligent File Transfer as part of Service Agility in decentralized IoT Networks

By: Dmitry Kachan

The growth in IoT is explosive, impressive—and unsustainable under current architectural approaches. CSP and DSP are moving away from a centralized network with challenges related to latency, network bandwidth, reliability and security. The new IoT business model requires decentralized networks and data lakes in order to support scalable service agility. As a result, service providers are partnering or building their own new data centers around the world. As they do so, they are turning to software-centric architectures with the principles of Software-defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) to unlock their constrained and disjointed network infrastructure…

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AI Why? Turn Insights into Action by Being Data-Driven First

By: Robert Hingston

The goals of increasing sales and service delivery efficiency and effectiveness have never been more important for digital service providers, media, and high‐tech companies. The ever-shifting market demands of the digital economy require extreme business agility to attract customers, keep them happy, and run profitable businesses. To achieve these goals, many vendors and service providers are looking at artificial intelligence (AI) to save the day. While AI may indeed be the savior, there’s a real danger in putting too much faith in AI, given that the technology is still relatively immature and may be entirely impractical or inappropriate for the problem it is trying to solve…

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No Digital Transformation is Complete Without AI

By: Krzysztof Blusz

As brands continue to build and expand their online presences, the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has transitioned from something ‘nice to have’ to something essential. AI-driven solutions play a crucial role in any business’s digital transformation. In many sectors—and certainly in the telecom sector—failing to take advantage of the power of AI means risking falling behind competitors, disappointing customers and starting down the path to marketplace irrelevancy. The evidence is in and there’s hardly any disagreement that a digital transformation without AI is a digital transformation that doesn't go as far or as fast as it should—put another way, it’s a digital transformation that falls short…

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A Real-World Guide: Using Big Data Analytics and AI

By: Wojciech Dziunikowski

Big data analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have both had their fair share of hype in recent years. Despite the rhetoric, however, both these technologies, working in sync, are now starting to emerge as fundamental building blocks shaping future networks to be more reliable and more automated—leading to a better customer experience. Not every implementation, though, has been executed in the optimal way, which means that there are still years of challenges ahead for some service providers…

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Pre-show Guide to INCOMPAS 2018

By: Chip Pickering

INCOMPAS, the internet and competitive networks association, may be best known for its high-profile work in Washington, D.C., advocating for competition across all networks—from fiber and wireless, to streaming services, cloud and edge providers. But an equally important part of the association’s work is its annual INCOMPAS Show, which has fostered hundreds of millions of dollars of deals in the communications industry, building a vibrant ecosystem that enables companies in all facets of the industry to meet, develop partnerships and do business…

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Leveraging Big Data to Improve the Customer Experience

By: Paul Hughes

For most communications service providers (CSPs), understanding the customer is no simple task. Back in the day when connectivity meant a single analog landline in the home, all you needed to know was whether the customer had connectivity and where to send the bill—and that the bill was actually paid on time. In today’s multi-account, multi-device and multi-user households and businesses, getting a true understanding of customer demands, decision processes, expectations and methods of communication and payment must now be based on a large-scale data management strategy…

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Letter from the Editor

By: Scott St. John, Pipeline

Data—and what we do with it—may be the final frontier for all of mankind. At its core, data is information. Information which has been digitized and, as a result, made instantly storable, accessible, and sharable. Data is knowledge. Something so strong, once obtained, is virtually impossible to take away. It makes us smarter. It makes us better. It makes us capable of things we would not be able to do without it. With data, we are building machines that build machines. Machines that can make independent decisions and do jobs that are impossible for humans to do…

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Telecom Industry News

By: Scott St. John, Pipeline

August brought plenty of news in network evolution. INCOMPAS made two FCC filings to continue to promote healthy competition and innovation in building fiber, while efforts to expand networks into rural and unserved areas of the U.S. continued. Strategic partnerships to advance connected and self-driving cars were announced, and a new range of routers for first responders debuted. Newly released research showed Google Assistant is gaining on market leader Alexa, and that cybercrime is predicted to affect 146 billion consumer records within the next five years…

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