STC is the largest provider of integrated telecommunication services in the MEANA region. With presence in 11 countries and a customer base in excess of 178 million, STC has continued to be seen as a success story.
STC has consistently been seen a leader in many areas: from being a leading telecom service provider to a being a leading employer, from having the most diverse product and services portfolio to being among the best customer service providers.
Yet, it is STC's leadership in bringing technological evolutions to its customers and the state-of-the-art network that is probably the most prominent differentiator.
In this feature, Dr. Khaled Biyari, Senior VP of technology and operations leading the Network, IT and Field Operation sectors for STC, talks to Telecom Review about the company's latest plans.
In the fast paced technology world, new solutions and technologies are emerging every day. What sets STC apart from competition in terms of its technological capabilities and ambitions ?
STC has a proud tradition of being among the pioneers in terms of the introduction of latest technology solutions for our customers. STC differentiates itself from the competition by focusing upon the tri area of access, quality and solutions.
• Infrastructure - Access for all: STC is totally committed to ensuring that its customers have access to the latest fixed and mobile communication services over the most modern up to date network infrastructure with the widest geographic reach possible.
For example, our 4G LTE services are already accessible to more than 75% of the populace within the short period of two years since rollout began, while the more mature 3G and 2G services are available to 93% and 99% of the Saudi population respectively.
And this is just mobile infrastructure; laying down physical fiber infrastructure is considerably harder in comparison. However, we have literally gone all out for the purpose of installation of our Fiber to the Home (FTTH) solution.
Within a short span of time, we have been able to provide access to more than 600,000 locations with a huge fiber optic network already laid and much more in the pipeline.
Our submarine cables cover vast distances ensuring optimal connectivity with partners in multiple countries across the globe and with capacities that ensure quality services are delivered to our clients.
• Quality focus: Quality here means that our networks are constantly being upgraded in terms of technology and capacity to ensure that our clients are served even beyond international quality standards. Moreover, with our robust, multi-channel networks, the fault tolerance is built around ensuring near 24/7 availability and quality based delivery. Other than that, our state-of-the-art network ensures clear voice quality, no congestion and lightning fast data speeds.
• Latest technology - Turnkey solutions: Last but not least is the solutions aspect where we see that a robust ICT infrastructure is the basis for delivery of a broad spectrum of services and products to the customers. This modern STC network infrastructure is being used for delivery of voice, streaming video, audio, content, e-government, financial, health and education services related solutions among many others.
As an organization, our basic aim is to provide the quality, robust infrastructure, and as subsequent steps we have been working on solutions and services as per customer needs ensuring that the tri-aim of access, quality and solutions is upheld.
What are some of the key challenges that a senior technology leader like you faces?
It is very important for any organization's technology function to be increasingly efficient in terms of decision making and action. What is state-of-the-art now can very easily become obsolete in a matter of months.
Efficient decision making and quick implementation means that one needs to work with a team of partners that are completely reliable and trustworthy. STC, as part of its strategy, focuses on developing longer term relationships with key technology partners. This enables a clearer roadmap and more sustainability for our partners ensuring stronger ability to respond to quickly changing technology trends.
Technology deployment, innovation, industry trends, consumer behavior and evolution of vertical markets are amongst the main elements that a technology leader must fully understand in order to make relevant business decisions capitalizing on new trends, while ensuring the stability of the current business.
Speaking of innovation, there is a need for consistent flow of investment to keep up with the rapidly changing technology landscape. With Saudi Arabia being a highly competitive market, do you believe that quick adaption of new technology and investment is really worth it?
Obviously, any investment into infrastructure demands a solid business case and needs to be driven by a smart balance of business demands and technology push. There are also two perspectives when looking at an investment decision: a leadership mindset and a safe follower mindset.
Moreover, our consistent strive for best-in-class services and infrastructure is based on the leadership mindset that exists within STC. We firmly believe that having a finger on customers' pulse is more important than keeping a finger on other telecom operators' pulse to come up with solutions that they are offering.
Being the incumbent operator in KSA, we understand what our customers need and continuously strive to provide just that. It is important to state that customer centricity forms the base for all our technological investment decisions.
With the advent of modern business practices, a technology person has a dual role of being the technology specialist as well as business partner for commercial, and customer services area to have a pulse of customer demands, needs and aspirations.
Networks in KSA are in a unique position where during the time of Hajj and Ramadan, a tremendous amount of additional load is exerted on the networks. How do you deal with that? If this results in excess capacity, what do you do with that the rest of the year?
It is definitely true that during Hajj network capacity and load management become increasingly important; not only from the perspective of continuity of services, but also from the perspective of facilitating communication, to the pilgrims who have come to discharge their religious obligations at the holiest of places.
In 2012 alone, over 3 million people performed Hajj. During that time, our subscriber numbers in the holy areas surpassed 2.7 million out of which close to 250,000 were roaming subscribers.
In Mecca, the number of mobile users increased by 16% with an increase of up to 50% in terms of voice service traffic. Data services utilization increased by a whopping 228% as compared to the previous year. This is unprecedented by any global metric.
We have been working with our partners, and year on year we continue to deliver quality and capacity during Hajj and during the peak Umrah season of Ramadan. We go through a very rigorous process of comprehensive network management including network planning, design and service optimization.
Our teams are competent in providing all sorts of on-ground support in case of problems. We ensure increased level of network robustness through multiple back channel and long haul solutions.
The planning for this network utilization hike includes precise traffic forecasting and flexible network adjustment before the event and real time traffic monitoring and dynamic network adjustment during the event.
Even as we speak today, we are in the final stages of preparation for this year's Hajj. From increasing the capacity of the network, its optimization and increasing WiFi hotspots, the work is in full progress to ensure delivery of quality service not just to the pilgrims, but also to ensure that the services to our regular subscribers are not affected in any way.
This is being done in spite of the mega expansions to the holy sites where we need to ensure that the vast construction taking place does not impact our service.
Last year, STC had increased network capacity by approximately 60% and increased connection capacity between its servers by 100%, in addition to supporting its networks in Mecca and Madinah with more than 747 new locations, aiming to raise the efficiency of mobile and 4G LTE networks.
STC has consistently been the technology leader among regional operators. What is coming up next, and what are the key focus areas for STC in terms of technology over the next 1 to 2 years?
Well, there is a long list of ongoing and upcoming initiatives and activities.
Let me run you through some of them:
Mobile Network Enhancements
For instance, STC is the first in KSA to have successfully completed Voice over Long Term Evolution (VoLTE) testing using single radio voice call continuity (SRVCC) that enables a very smooth handover between 3G and 4G networks during calls without any perceived interruption or latency. This will be a key technology enhancement required for the rollout of the VoLTE service.
We are currently researching the concept of self-organizing networks that makes planning, configuration, management, optimization and healing of mobile radio access networks simpler and faster. With the massive growth in mobile data traffic, we are also testing small cell technologies to enable mobile data offloading and more efficient use of radio spectrum. Finally, LTE Advanced will define the next generation of mobile network, and STC is closely monitoring its progress through the standards to ensure its infrastructure is fully ready for its support.
Multimedia Services
STC has started deploying IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) on which the VoLTE solution is based; these voice service offerings will be further enhanced with GSMA defined Rich Communications Suite (RCS) that will add chat, instant messaging and content (image, video) sharing capabilities to enrich the user experience.
Fiber to the Home (FTTH)
As bandwidth demand per user continues to grow exponentially, STC will continue its aggressive rollout of FTTH for increased population and enterprise customers' penetration that will provide end users with up to 200Mbit/s of bandwidth. The highest demanding customers will be provided the 10G-GP ON and WDM-PON FTTH variants with speeds of up to 1Gbit/s.
MPLS-TP
The accelerated growth in STC's IP-based services such as IPTV and internet, has resulted in dramatic increases in access rates that are, in turn, also driving dramatic increases in metro and core network bandwidth requirements.
To reliably and efficiently backhaul this traffic from the access nodes, STC will be considering a newly standardized packet transport technology called MPLS-TP that will enable the provisioning of deterministic, protected and secured services.
DWDM Optical Infrastructure
To support all the massive growth in bandwidth in the core network, the underlying STC DWDM optical infrastructure is today being expanded with 100Gbit/s rate channels that enable 8 Terabits/s to be carried on each optical fiber.
The focus over the next few years will be to make sure that the optical infrastructure is developed and ready to carry 400Gbit/s rate signals to enhance the capacity of each fiber to over 30Tbit/s.
IPv6 Services
With the global depletion of IPv4 public address space, STC has been diligently working to enable its customer services for the support of IPv6 to ensure their continued growth and to validate its IP infrastructure is fully IPv6 capable. Over the next few years, these efforts will come to fruition as both residential and business customer IPv6-based services will be rolled out.
Customer Experience
Management (CEM)
Finally, Customer Experience Management (CEM) has been a key area of investment by STC that focuses the operations
and processes around the needs of our individual customers.
CEM will continue to be developed in order to keep up with the constant demands of providing an exceptional customer experience.
© Telecom Review 2013
