Agile prototyping and hypothesis testing enabled rapid delivery of new analytics to operations teams.
Easy analytic enrichment and pattern finding provided analytic data that enabled operations teams to drill deeper into problems.
Fine-grained security controls and end-to-end governance met the intricate security requirements.
BT Openreach is the main provider of local-access networks in the United Kingdom. They provide the fiber networks for super-fast broadband that have been rolled out across much of the UK, as well as the copper networks that provide the telephony that most people rely on. BT Openreach supports 26.8 million homes and businesses passed with fiber based services and over 7.7 million homes and businesses are now connected to fibre based services.
As a network wholesaler, BT Openreach works with many different service providers who then provide the onward services to the end customers. There
are over 580 communications providers offering services over the BT Openreach network. BT Openreach tends to be responsible for the connectivity from the exchange all the way out to the actual customer’s house and responsible for fixing it and identifying issues in that infrastructure.
The organization’s stated mission is to build the best possible network with the highest quality of service, and make sure that everyone in Britain can be connected. And BT Openreach continues to invest heavily in fiber and increasing the speeds of the broadband infrastructure, creating a largely super-fast network even when there is an element of copper involved in the final delivery to the customer’s house.
Telecommunications and Network Services
Network Operations and Management
The Datameer platform allowed us to continually remodel our hypotheses and perform iterative analysis that increased our agility.
We find there’s incredibly powerful things we can do within Datameer that allows the end user analysts to really be in control of what they are getting out of the data.
With such an extensive network infrastructure, BT Openreach has challenges in ensuring their lines are working properly as part of the service for their customers. The organization manages more than 158 million kilometers of cable, and they are not stopping there, making super-fast broadband available to thousands more homes and businesses every week.
This also places a tremendous burden on BT Openreach’s service organization as well. In a one year period, BT Openreach carried out over 96,400 installation jobs and 85,800 repair jobs per week. That totals 9.5 million jobs in one year and over 37,000 every working day.
The intersection of these two areas — network infrastructure size and high volume of service jobs – presents critical business challenges to BT Openreach:
As BT Openreach started their analytics journey, they realized they had a tremendous asset at their disposal — a large volume of network and test data. The organization had a solid infrastructure and processes in place to capture these laarge volumes of data.
But data alone would not solve the problem. As BT Openreach looked to optimize how they serviced their extensive network, they saw some interesting challenges from a data and analytics perspective:
These regulatory requirements created an extra governance and data management challenge for BT Openreach. Although a division of BT, regulatory rules required BT Openreach to operate as an independent organization and wholesaler of services to other communications service providers. This resulted in ensuring that data and analytics that were part of BT Openreach’s data lake were 100 percent walled off from the rest of BT.
BT Openreach turned to Datameer to solve their unique and challenging operational analytics problems. The resulting solution used best of breed capabilities from the Datameer platform that were integrated seamlessly into their infrastructure solution to deliver rich network service analytics to the BT Openreach operational team.
Through Datameer, BT Openreach was able to:
The Datameer platform worked directly on their data lake to prepare, enrich, slice-and-dice, and deliver the resulting operational and analytics data to the BT Openreach operations team. The integrated security and governance facilities of the Datameer platform provided the facilities that ensured the fine-grained control of the data for regulatory purposes, while still enabling the data democratization to the operational team that BT Openreach sought.
With the Datameer platform, BT Openreach was able to achieve the following results:
The resulting solution used best of breed capabilities from Datameer that was integrated into a seamless solution to deliver rich network service analytics to the BT Openreach operational team.