Data is everywhere.

The amount of digital data that exists is growing at a rapid

rate, doubling every two years, and changing the way we live.

Big Data refers to humongous volumes of data that cannot be processed

effectively with the traditional applications that exist. The processing of Big Data
begins with the raw data that isn’t aggregated and is most often impossible to store
in the memory of a single computer.

Gaining new subscribers, retaining customers, and expanding within current

subscriber bases are top priorities for telecommunication service providers. The
solutions to these challenges lie in the ability to combine and analyze the masses of
customer-generated data and machine-generated data that is being created every
day.

A buzzword that is used to describe immense volumes of data, both unstructured

and structured, Big Data inundates a business on a day-to-day basis. Big Data is
something that can be used to analyze insights that can lead to better decisions and
strategic business moves.

The definition of Big Data, given by Gartner, is, “Big data is high-volume, and
high-velocity or high-variety information assets that demand cost-effective,
innovative forms of information processing that enable enhanced insight, decision
making, and process automation.”

What is Data Analytics?

Data analytics is important because it helps businesses optimize their

performances. Implementing it into the business model means companies can help
reduce costs by identifying more efficient ways of doing business and by storing
large amounts of data.A company can also use data analytics to make better
business decisions and help analyze customer trends and satisfaction, which can
lead to new—and better—products and services.
Telecom companies are sitting on a gold mine, as they have plenty of data. But
what they require is a proper digging and analysis of both structured and
unstructured data to get deeper insights into customer behaviour, their service
usage patterns, preferences, and interests real-time. Here is where Big Data comes
in. In this post, we present a list of 11 interesting Big Data case studies in Telecom.

The telecom industry is a highly competitive one, providing consumers with

numerous options and the industry with many challenges. Given this competitive
environment, market share among the Mobile operators is continually in flux,
changing by the second. Mobile operators and device manufacturers rely on our
customer, a Global provider of Telecom Industry analytical solutions, to provide
them with the analytics they need to understand and analyze their market share,
across the US and Canada, by the minute. These analytics are provided via a
telecom market measurement product that our customer sells to the telecom
industry

BIG DATA ANALYTICS IMPACT ON TELECOM INDUSTRY

The rapid rise in the use of smartphones and other connected mobile devices has
triggered a spurt in the volume of data flowing through the networks of telecom
operators. It is necessary that the operators process, store, and extract insights from
the available data. Big Data analytics can help them increase profitability by
helping optimize network usage and services, enhance customer experience, and
improve security. Research has shown that the potential for telecom companies to
benefit from Big Data analytics is substantial.

The potential of Big Data, however, poses a challenge: how can a company utilize
data to increase revenues and profits across the value chain, spanning network
operations, product development, marketing, sales, and customer service.
Big Data analytics, for instance, enables companies to predict peak network usage
so that they can take measures to relieve congestion. It can also help identify
customers who are most likely to have problems paying bills as well as those about
to change operators, thus exacerbating churn.

Operators are usually advised against taking the usual top-down approach when it
comes to Big Data analytics, which marks out the problem to be solved and then
seeks out the data that may help resolve it. Instead, the operators should focus on
the data itself, using it to make correlations and connections. If done correctly, the
data could reveal insights that could form the basis of more streamlined operations.

This paper provides a retrospect on how telecom operators have been striving,
before the era of big data, to analyze

large volumes of data in order to support their business and

operation. We then examine the driving forces of big data

analytics in the telecom domain and the benefits it offers.

Finally we provide example use cases of big data analytics

and the associated challenges, with the hope to inspire new

research ideas that can eventually benefit the practice of the

telecommunication industry