The importance of location intelligence in a world of 5G
As the pandemic transformed our homes into our workspaces, schools and entertainment venues, the telecoms industry has been under pressure to provide widespread, secure, and high-speed connectivity. 5G has come to the rescue.
However, launching a 5G network presents high financial risk, among other challenges. The competitive pressures are significant, and network performance matters greatly when it comes to new business acquisition and retention. It's vital to make wise decisions on network build-out to ensure that investments yield the anticipated returns.
Telcos can therefore not afford to be frivolous when it comes to deciding where to invest; they need reliable data at their disposal. This is why 5G location intelligence and big data can provide an incredible amount of clarity when it comes to optimising investments, increasing marketing effectiveness and improving customer satisfaction.
Leveraging location intelligence for informed decisions
Using location intelligence, telcos and communications service providers (CSPs) can gain useful insight regarding the most desired locations of specific populations and what they require the bandwidth for. They can build a clear understanding of customer location and mobility, mapping existing infrastructure and competitive coverage against market requirements to work out new opportunities for investment.
By creating complex customer profiles that are rich with demographic information, such as age, income and lifestyle preferences, telcos no longer need to make estimated guesses when it comes to deciding where they should or shouldn’t deploy new 5G towers. This form of granular location data adds important context to existing data, enriching the data quality – a key pillar of data integrity, which describes the overall quality and completeness of a dataset.
Until recently, telcos have largely had to rely on trial and error to work out where to invest. However, by learning more about the boundaries, movement and customers’ surroundings, telcos can make predictive insights based on demographic changes and future telecom requirements within a particular location. They can then use this information to form the basis of their data-backed 5G expansion strategies.
Benefits of location intelligence for serviceability and consistency
When telcos are deciding where to build, market and provision 5G, there are many advantages to improving location precision. For example, organisations that deploy fixed wireless services often find that customers cancel their plans due to inconsistencies of signal performance. Typically, these issues are caused by the misalignment of sites with network assets. However, by using location-based data, providers are able to adapt their networks for signal consistency and serviceability as sites and structures change.
Telcos can also benefit from better information on residential, commercial and mixed-use locations, thanks to easy-to-consume, scalable datasets, which allows for highly accurate, in-depth analyses for marketing and servicing customers, meeting market demand. Complete and accurate location insights can also develop a comprehensive view of serviceable addresses where products and services can be delivered to current and new customers. This helps to improve return on investment (ROI) and means that customers can be serviced adequately.
The 5G future
It’s clear that location intelligence is crucial in, not only accelerating development of new broadband services, but also driving ROI for businesses in a 5G world. The element of data integrity it adds can inform network optimisation, customer targeting and service provisioning, meaning telecom service providers can ensure they are much better informed to make their strategic investment decisions.
With the modern pressures of our interconnected world on current bandwidth availability, providers can utilise location intelligence and big data as part of their plans to deliver more efficient and reliable networks and deploy 5G services.
