Telecommunications companies manage and monitor massive networks that serve hundreds of millions of customers nationwide. If you see a road, there’s a communication line beside it.
The challenge is that when issues occur to the network there’s only one method to fix it. That method is to send a crew member out and assess what happened. In the medical field, this is equivalent to taking an ambulance to the emergency room for every doctor visit. It’s expensive and when everyone is going to the emergency room, the service level slows and satisfaction drops.
Springboarding off of this analogy is the question at heart of this article; can the telecommunications industry cut costs and improve operations by leveraging methods used in telehealth?
Telehealth is a technological way to pass critical information from patients to doctors. It’s made-up of a combination of the healthcare industry and the telecommunications industry.
In 1924, an issue of Radio News magazine was the first to publicize telehealth as we know it. There was not any traction to this idea until 35 years later when the University of Nebraska performed the first case that used video for a neurological examination.
In recent years, telehealth’s exponential growth is directly correlated to the advancements by the telecommunications industry. Today, telehealth is one of the fastest growing industries. The market size is $40B, which continues to grow at a staggering, 22% year over year. If telehealth didn’t utilize telecommunication’s information technology advancements, they would still be using traditional communication methods like voice and text- which is what they were doing in 1974.
This brings us to how the telecommunications industry diagnoses issues.
Nowadays, telecommunications companies are interconnected with a dozen other telecommunications, which means that their networks affect each other. When one network goes down, it takes the other’s with it.
How this process works is, when a network goes down and takes out others, all of those companies send a technician out to assess the damage. After the technician figures out the problem is coming from someone else, they begin to search for who owns the problem by calling and emailing other telecommunications providers. Then they wait to hear back on who the problem is coming from. Typically, it takes two hours to get an answer and eight hours for the problem to be solved.
What this means is that every telecommunications company spends $1,000 for the assessment and then wastes a full workday in waiting for the answer.
This sounds much like what the healthcare industry was dealing with prior to the advancements of telehealth. Telehealth not only made it easy to do a video call with a doctor, but it opened up in-person visit congestion so that more serious issues could be worked out faster.
At the end of the day, the lack of speed in telecommunications diagnosis and troubleshooting is due mostly in part to a data flow problem. If accurate information could flow across interconnected organizations in an automated and seamless manner, the industry would save $1,000 on hundreds of repairs that occur per day.
Gisual has created that automated network where telecommunications and utilities share incident reports and restoration times with each other to reduce repair costs and time. And so you’re delivered lightning fast information without adding a step to your workflow.
There are myths out there that telecommunications companies don’t want to work together and that they're too competitive to help each other. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. Many of these companies work together in various ways and are a part of associations that share best practices with each other.
