Leading UK telecommunications provider
A leading UK telecommunications provider wanted to see what every one of its broadband customers was actually getting, not just what the network reported. C4C ran the programme end to end: the requirements, the market evaluation, the commercial negotiation, the supply of the platform and the infrastructure it runs on, the on premises architecture, the integration with CRM, OSS and big data, and the handover into business as usual. Twelve months from planning to full production, the platform gives operational and frontline teams real time usage and performance visibility across more than four million connections, around 90 percent of the fixed line estate.
The provider already ran robust performance testing between customer premises equipment and the core. What it could not see was the customer’s experience in between: per customer throughput and usage, contention building in a particular part of the access network, and whether a customer was on the right package for how they actually used the service. As consumption patterns changed and regulatory expectations rose, that gap became a business problem rather than an engineering one.
C4C ran the programme as one accountable engagement: acquisition strategy, supply, architecture, delivery and governance under a single delivery model, using the IDEAL framework from first requirement to lifecycle oversight. C4C supplied the ActiveLogic platform and the HPE infrastructure as well as selecting and negotiating them, and said so from the start, so the client could see the commercial terms next to the evaluation that produced them.
Delivered through our IDEAL framework, the disciplined method behind every C4C engagement.
Following national deployment, the provider had measurable improvements across customer experience, operational efficiency and regulatory confidence. In the words of its Broadband Product Manager: “Working with C4C Group, we were able to bring structure, technical depth, and governance discipline to what was a strategically important initiative. The result is greater visibility for our teams and a stronger foundation for delivering consistent customer experience at scale.”
National scale programmes fail in the gaps between the people delivering them. On this one there were no gaps, because the same small C4C team owned the acquisition, the supply, the architecture, the delivery and the governance, and answered for the outcome rather than for a product. We supplied the platform and the hardware, and we say so: the evaluation was run in the open, the terms were negotiated on the client’s side of the table, and years on the vendor side meant both were bought on evidence and sized for what the network actually does. This programme is also the origin of our observability practice.
Key technologies
It is the capability to see, in near real time, what each broadband customer is actually using and receiving, and where the access network is under strain, rather than relying on synthetic tests between the customer premises equipment and the core. Here that meant per customer throughput and usage, contention and utilisation insight across the access network, and the same data made available to customer service, operations and regulatory reporting, across more than four million connections.
Two reasons. The platform sits inline with the data flow of a national network, which rules out a round trip to a public cloud, and the regulatory position on customer usage data required it to stay within the provider’s own estate. The architecture was designed and sized for that from the start, on enterprise grade HPE infrastructure, rather than adapted to it afterwards.
Through a structured market evaluation run by C4C, judged on capability, scalability and fit with the regulatory and inline data flow constraints. AppLogic Networks’ ActiveLogic was selected on that basis. C4C held the commercial side throughout, so the platform was bought on evidence and on fair terms rather than on the strength of a vendor relationship.
Because it shows which customers are on a package that does not match how they use the service, in both directions. A customer paying for more than they use is a churn risk; a customer constrained by too small a package is a revenue opportunity and a complaint waiting to happen. Proactive identification of both, backed by data the frontline can see, supports retention and revenue per customer at the same time.
Everything between the business objective and business as usual. Requirements with the stakeholders, the market evaluation and commercial negotiation, the supply of the ActiveLogic platform and the HPE infrastructure it runs on, the technical and infrastructure architecture, the on premises deployment, the integration with CRM, OSS and big data platforms, the programme governance and stakeholder coordination, and the handover and enablement. One small team, accountable for the outcome rather than for a product, and transparent about what it supplied.
This one ran twelve months from planning to full production across more than four million connections. The time is set by the integration and the governance, not by the platform: feeding CRM, OSS and big data systems, sizing infrastructure for national scale, and getting operations teams to trust and use the result. Programmes that skip that work are quicker to deploy and slower to deliver anything.
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