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Tue, 3/05/2022 - 16:32
Competition in the UK full fibre sector has never been fiercer with newcomers looking for ways to differentiate in a saturated market.
These service providers must reduce focus on price-driven competition and instead prioritise service quality and customer experience, says Axon Networks Europe CEO Thomas Sørensen Boye.
Boye’s priority this year is to increase the market reach of Axon’s AI-driven, analytics-based orchestration platform, which is designed to improve network experience. He told FibreProvider.net: “We want every altnet to understand the breadth of what is possible. As the UK’s fibre rollout continues apace we want to make it easier to be a service provider.”
Axon Orchestrator is designed to grow service provider’s customer base, reduce customer churn, increase ARPU, lower demand for support calls, eliminate truck rolls and deliver a total networking experience.
Boye said: “Networking is such an integrated part of our lives, but it is unfortunately not flawless. There has historically not been a big enough focus on creating the correct solutions to improve these experiences.
“We enable the entire infrastructure to become intelligent, so you get good enough data to service your network and understand when and where you have challenges.”
The platform allows altnets to be proactive and not reactive when facing issues on their network. Axon will either fix the error automatically or notify a customer and suggest how to fix it.
The platform can inform support teams that a user is having challenges and that they might soon be in contact, then give them the answers to fix it. The missing intelligence is then passed to the service providers so issues are fixed and business decisions can be made to avoid the same challenges cropping up again.
“The rollout of fibre is obviously a very positive trend but increasing the size of the line into the home does not change the need for better management tools,” said Boye. “In the end we still see network fallouts, and inside the home it is still a router that needs to enable the devices on the network to work.
“This service is all about giving the consumer a better experience and lower the negative interactions and thereby lower costs for the service providers.”
Whilst Axon is helping altnets overcome the issues of expensive truck rolls, lack of control over third party devices and high failure rates, some customer experience challenges will need external intervention.
“Governments and regulators can help fibre providers to support collaboration between providers and local municipal utilities companies for better synergies and renting utilities,” said Boye. “Last-mile fibre-dropping work from buried to aerial mode can be achieved more quickly by collaborating with house developers.”
Axon Networks was founded with a dream to change the world by Martin Manniche after he left Cisco in 2010. Manniche gathered a team of people from management roles, HW and SW engineers and network architects.
The goal was to design network optimization, both locally on the edge and in the cloud, that would give a better consumer experience, enable new services, and ease the operations for the service provider.
Boye joined Axon in December 2020 having served as CEO of NCC Group Europe, ensuring 2-digit growth for five consecutive years and tripling revenues. “In general, I can say that people and innovation have been the headlines of my career and what I really enjoy working with,” he said.
