Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:05):
We are in Copenhagen. We're at DTW Ignite 2024, the annual TM Forum event. I'm here with Nastasi Karaiskos, who is MD of Rakuten Symphony uk. Nastasi, good to see you. Thanks so much for joining us.

Nastasi Karaiskos, Rakuten Symphony (00:19):
It's great to see you, Ray. It's great to be back here at DTW Copenhagen.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:23):
Well, at this event every year, essentially everybody comes together and the big talking points are, what are the big challenges for this industry? So let's get your perspective on that. For the network operators, the communication service providers, what are the biggest challenges facing those companies today

Nastasi Karaiskos, Rakuten Symphony (00:43):
We love to get together to talk about the challenges in the industry. I think first of all, this event, how I've seen this event evolve over the years is it traditionally was focused on OSS and quite heavily on the IT side. And we see this happening generally in the industry, how IT and networks are coming closer together. And this event has evolved in that way as well. So the people that you have coming here from an operator perspective as well as the vendors who are here to sort of talk and help solve those challenges, often taking that conversation of merging the IT aspects of OSS and BSS with the network side as well. And it's great to see that because this is one of the significant challenges. Typically operators have been siloed with these internal departments. They haven't discussed or talked to each other. And we've ended up with a situation with multiple different systems, siloed systems that do not interact, do not talk to each other, heavy on the manual process side. And we're trying to fix that as an industry now as we move towards autonomous networks. And with the early adoption of AI solving some of those manual processes,

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (01:50):
Rightly, there's a lot of talk at this event as well about business outcomes and serving the customer. But at the end of the day, a lot of that comes from the implementation of the right technologies. What kind of solutions can the network operators to deploy to help them get from their legacy past to the digital here and now?

Nastasi Karaiskos, Rakuten Symphony (02:19):
The journey towards efficiencies and automation has to be done in layers. It's not a complete rip and replace. Some of the areas that we find operators are asking for support in that they are typically heavily reliant on manual processes are things like site acceptance. So they're deploying new sites around their network. There's so many people in so many stages throughout that process involved passing of paper emails, for example, and it's taking a long time. So we look at what we achieved in Japan. So Japan at our peak when we built the Rakuten Mobile network, we were deploying somewhere between six to 800 sites a day almost with zero touch provisioning. I heard one operator tell me today, they'd be lucky if they brought that many sites up in a decade and they were joking, but it's not far from the reality because it's such a slow, heavy process and it doesn't need to be with the right tools, with the right applications, you can completely automate the site planning and acceptance when you are planning out new sites, whether it's rolling out 5G or rolling out into new areas.

(03:33):
We use drone technology, for example, to look at exactly how the sites have been built, are the components built and connected in the right way? And you basically will not get a green light for that site acceptance unless all of these areas components have been put together in the right way. Everything from the adjustment, the tightness of each bolt, for example, how it's been put together, the health and safety aspect of the engineer, who's on site themselves, are they wearing the right gloves, the right helmet, for example. This can all be done on one screen, not a laptop or anything like that. It's automatically uploaded. Once it's gone green, the site will be brought into live and commissioned.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (04:13):
And how can Rakuten Symphony work with the network operators to help them make this transition and help them get to the next stage of their evolution?

Nastasi Karaiskos, Rakuten Symphony (04:25):
So our OSS platform covers a number of different modules from an operation perspective, from planning and building to operating and maintaining the network. It's vendor agnostic, it's cloud and ran agnostic. So this isn't just for an open ran network. This can be deployed on whichever hardware vendor they are using. And we have deployed this on all of the major RAN providers. We typically look to start small and it's either solving a challenge where they have multiple systems that are not talking to each other and our platform is deployed as an umbrella system to bring those together or potentially to reduce the number of apps and tools that they have. Or it's to go in and bring new automation and efficiencies in by replacing one of the existing tools that they've got. So we typically look to start somewhere very, very small, avoiding any kind of disruption, not particularly huge costs either.

(05:21):
We know costs and budgets are to prove that the model works. And if you can prove on a very short, small number of sites that automation is introduced and you've gone from 80% manual work to 20% on a hundred sites, it gives you a very nice business case for the operator to then say, if we roll this out across a thousand or 5,000 or 10,000 of our sites, we should expect to see the same. And then all of those people that we're doing those manual processes can be redeployed or they can focus on more critical needs and solve these easier problems.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (05:54):
Now of course here, and in pretty much any conversation in this industry, AI is a really hot topic. How do you think AI can transform the telecom sector?

Nastasi Karaiskos, Rakuten Symphony (06:08):
So I personally think that the telecoms industry will be one of the biggest industries to benefit from ai. And we've already started to see this in our Rakuten mobile deployment. So maybe two examples that I would share using AI to predict and identify potential faults that might arise in the network and preventing them before they happen. I think we would all agree that this is a great saving of time, but also then the impact it has on a customer, fewer outages, fewer disruptions within the network. Then on the other side, I would think about how we are using AI to predict churn. For example, if there is an unhappy customer, maybe they've complained maybe about a specific area or they're not happy about a service, they're coming towards the end of their contract and they're at high risk of churning. Maybe they don't take multiple products from you.

(07:02):
We can see this. We can identify this potential risk of churn in advance, approach the customer to address maybe some of their concerns that they've had, turn them back into a green light, a happy customer again, and avoid that churning customer. So these are two areas that we see as two particularly big impacts that AI is helping and then this insight full data that we see and gather in our network. We can then use AI to offer personalized experience that are unique for that customer based on their own algorithms that they're generating products that they might be specifically interested in. So it's not a general blanket promotion across all of the subscriber blade. They're getting bespoke promotions specifically for them for their own interests. If they're a coffee drinker, they're getting a promotion for coffee. If they're a wine drinker, it's maybe something for wine. And we've seen that this personalization can really, really help improve customer loyalty and customer stickiness.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (08:01):
I mean, at a bigger, broader level, what can the rest of the industry learn from what Rakuten Mobile has done in the past four years and how it has operated and behaved and built itself out in a different way.

Nastasi Karaiskos, Rakuten Symphony (08:20):
So it's not lost on us that we started this journey into telecoms as a greenfield operator. And I think when you're starting off with a blank piece of paper, of course it makes sense to choose the latest technology and the technology that is being used more and more in the future. And this is technology that is built around automation, the cloud and AI of course, but for the vast majority of the industry, this isn't a luxury that they might have. However, the journey that we took and this rapid speed that we achieved to build a network, we did gain a lot. And it wasn't easy. It was a great challenge and we overcame many challenges during that journey. And we want to share these experiences with the operators as they start their journey layering into this transformation, which they've all now, I think openly accepted, this is what needs to be done. What we often see as it comes up in the discussion is not necessarily an agreement of yes, that we have to do something, but it's where should we start that's going to have the biggest impact. And that's where we try to lend our experience to help the operators as the software vendor, as Rakuten Symphony where you can start, we'll identify where the biggest impact on this journey towards automation, a beneficial impact it's going to have for them. And we'll try and prove the model works in a very small, low impactful way.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (09:43):
Well, I mean, there's no doubt that the rest of the industry is always very interested in what Rakuten Mobile has done, what it's doing, and how it's operating. It's a company that a lot of people talk about in the industry. So I'm sure you'll have plenty of conversations here at DTW and other industry events in the future. Nastasi, thanks so much for joining us. Great to see you.

Nastasi Karaiskos, Rakuten Symphony (10:07):
Thank you.