By Steven R. Harris, Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers, Inc.
Today’s global broadband and telecommunications companies are deep into their digital transformation strategy, compelling operators to be more analytics and data-driven shortly to remain highly competitive in our industry. Liberty Global and other organizations like Comcast, Cox, Rogers, Orange, Plume, and Vodafone all are spearheading digital transformation in broadband and telecommunications. The paper intends to provide an understanding of how operators can utilize statistics, AI, ML, and automation to drive data-based decision-making as well as call to attention the skills needed by our workforce. Operator data can be used to personalize a customer’s experience as well as drive business decisions more effectively. The paper provides definitions and illustrations of practical real-world applications of supervised and unsupervised AI/ML big data, along with how big data applies to broadband and telecommunication networks. The use of complex data sets or big data requires advanced workforce skills, innovation in operator tools, and updated techniques to process and analyze the information. Managing big data involves the use of data pipelines to ingest, organize, and store large amounts of data from various sources. Using SQL for data is an option today, looking beyond at unstructured big data databases and their benefits to our industry and workforce. Summarizing and visualizing broadband and telecommunication data helps make it more accessible and understandable for decision-makers, as well as our workforce. Proficiency in data science, data transformation with Alteryx, visualization tools like Tableau, and programming languages such as Python and Scala are crucial for the effective handling of big data. Additionally, a working knowledge of architectures like Hadoop or Microsoft Azure is essential for managing unstructured data. Finally, for immediate action and takeaway, this session will share a view of SCTE’s new programs for Python and data analytics, and how attendees can start the occupation redesign process while earning skill-based badges and professional credentials.