Vodafone has built a network performance platform to improve mobile experience to Vodafone’s customers across 11 countries in Europe.
Vodafone will be able to draw billions of vital network performance datapoints from a cloud data pool using the new platform. It will replace over 100 separate network performance applications in use today, providing a single source of clean data in the cloud that can be optimised and analysed using artificial intelligence (AI).

Cardinality.io and Google Cloud are the partners of Vodafone.

Vodafone will use the data to monitor, manage and enhance its entire pan-European mobile network, including Critical National Infrastructure (CNI). The platform will enable Vodafone to focus 5G investment with pinpoint precision in the areas where the demand is greatest such as in cities, travel corridors, ports, industrial hubs, and in specialist areas such as mobile private networks, as well as target those rural areas with patchy coverage.

Vodafone data scientists are capable of processing and analysing up to 8 billion mobile network performance events per day. Vodafone’s data scientists will have have deep insights into network data such as traffic patterns to make network-changing decisions. This means Vodafone can add capacity and integrate new network connectivity in response to major incidents, public and political events, manage energy efficiency and restore services after severe weather storms.

Johan Wibergh, Chief Technology Officer of Vodafone, said: “It is a global data hub that gives us a real-time view of what is happening anywhere on our network, uses our global scale to manage traffic growth cheaper and more efficiently as customer data consumption grows by around 40 percent per year, and supports the full automation of our network by 2025.”

Vodafone has seen major network and IT incidents fall by nearly 70 percent this year by simplifying and digitalising core operations, and within a few years, it expects to resolve 80 percent of all incidents end-to-end without human intervention. This is freeing up Vodafone’s expanding technology workforce to develop new products and services 50 percent faster, cheaper and at scale.

Vodafone, using these advanced ML (machine learning)/AI monitoring tools, can detect and block fraudulent or suspicious activity on the network. It will underpin Vodafone’s work in smart planning across its entire European footprint – a method of using key network metrics to prioritise upgrades whilst significantly reducing the cost of maintaining and extending its networks.

Vodafone Unified Performance Management (UPM) platform combines Google Cloud’s smart analytics portfolio and ML/AI tools with Cardinality.io’s telecom industry expertise and cloud-native DataOps and analytics platform to deliver the solution.

“Moving data to the cloud while providing governance across multiple on-premises sites is an immense challenge,” said Vivek Gupta, Director, Network AI and Telecom Partnerships, Global Telecom Industry Solutions, Google Cloud. “Cardinality.io’s close integration with Google Cloud unlocks immense value for Vodafone as it seeks to provide an unparalleled customer experience to its European subscriber base.”

“With Vodafone UPM, Cardinality.io provides the bridge that makes it possible to efficiently move data from multiple far edge locations to a centralized Google Cloud data repository,” said Prashant Kumar, Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder of Cardinality.io.

Vodafone’s new hybrid cloud architecture from Cardinality.io and Google Cloud provides a scalable and real-time mechanism for on-premises data to be ingested, parsed, formatted and enriched in memory before being streamed to a Google Cloud HDFS cluster.