High-speed connectivity is critical for businesses to deliver the services customers are demanding. However, the ordering and delivery of connectivity services between communications service providers (CSPs) remains a slow, outdated process. Despite legacy system investments, CSPs are still limited by their use of siloed tools, which makes adopting new business models around artificial intelligence (AI), cloud-based services and network-as-a-service (NaaS) difficult.
TransUnion® Senior Vice President, Carrier Provisioning John Denemark joined Tara Neal, Executive Editor at The Fast Mode, for its annual Trends & Outlook segment to discuss the key trends shaping 2025. Specifically, they discussed:
- What’s shaping the wholesale network connectivity space in 2025
- Challenges faced by buyers and sellers of off-net connectivity and suggested solutions
- How TransUnion solutions help CSPs eliminate operational bottlenecks and improve efficiency across back-office processes, particularly in areas like order management and number portability
- How AI will transform order management processes within the telecom industry.
A recap follows.
What trends do you foresee in the wholesale network connectivity space this year?
When it comes to connectivity, on the enterprise side, we continue to see increased demand for SD-WAN and secure access service edge (SASE) services, including network-as-a-service. Much work is being done by CSPs around the world on these initiatives because the demand is being driven by several different trends in the industry, including hybrid work, 5G and IOT, along with edge and cloud computing and a host of other technological and societal advances.
Service providers must deliver ubiquitous coverage for the applications their enterprise customers depend on, no matter where those customers are located — even when it’s outside their network footprints. When that happens, CSPs need to purchase services from other service providers.
How are your solutions helping CSPs eliminate operational bottlenecks and improve efficiency across back-office processes?
We have several automated solutions to assist our customers on the voice and network services sides. On the wholesale side, we're one of the pioneers of interoperability. We’ve been active participants in organizations working to standardize the way the industry operates.
We built a platform that streamlines the entire order management process for buyers and sellers of Ethernet and broadband services. It’s called Universal Order Connect, UOC for short. In fact, it’s the only end-to-end wholesale order management solution in the industry that modernizes how service providers buy and sell connectivity.
UOC simplifies the ordering process and provides advanced order enrichment capabilities via a product catalog-based translation engine. We support any standard or ordering format, including ASOC, MEF, TM Forum and even proprietary broadband standards. This flexibility makes it easier for our customers to do business with one another — regardless of their API preference or system workflows.
Universal Order Connect enables service providers to simplify and automate in two major areas: intercarrier workflows, which simplifies how service providers do business with each other, and intra-carrier workflows, meaning their internal order management processes.
The internal part is crucial because to get the full benefit of intercarrier workflow simplification and automation, carriers need to look at their own internal BSS stacks and abilities to automate data sharing between these systems. That's where UOC can help. We have functionality built in that can either replace or supplement legacy BSS systems and stitch them together in a way that automates internal order management processes. When everything is connected, CSPs can truly achieve end-to-end automation.
On the voice services side, we have several solutions to help our customers simplify and automate in a few different areas. One is Telephone Number Inventory Management and the other is the Intercarrier Porting Process.
In the number porting area, we provide a solution called Enhanced Service Request (ESR). ESR simplifies and automates the telephone number porting process by providing a single interface to all US and Canadian service providers, and for many international service providers as well. This is for all types of services, including wireline, wireless, toll-free, domestic, international, residential, small business, enterprise and government number portability — all via the same interface.
There are still many outdated systems for managing both telephone number portability and wholesale network access orders that service providers continue to support, but they're losing staff in these areas and the knowledge that comes with it, leading to a shortage of resources. TransUnion can also provide knowledgeable experts in this space to help streamline operations, cut costs and safeguard the customer experience.
How will generative AI transform order management processes within the telecom industry?
We believe AI will eventually have a big impact on order management processes. I can see today’s order management solutions becoming powerful AI-based agents, leveraging generative AI to automate processes like error resolution and workflow management.
We do believe, however, a lot of work still needs to happen to make this a reality, especially when it comes to data quality and automation of the underlying BSS systems. As the saying goes… garbage in, garbage out.
For CSPs to fully harness the capabilities of generative AI, they must ensure the right tools and processes are in place for maintaining accurate and up-to-date data across the organization. Obviously, feeding accurate information into the AI training process will result in better outcomes, otherwise it's just not going to work.
And then in terms of automation between the various BSS systems, generative AI isn’t going to work when you're still dealing with manual processes and disconnected systems that don't talk to each other. There’s still a lot of work to be done around automating and connecting internal BSS stacks so automated workflows are possible, enabling you to then build your AI capabilities on top of them. There needs to be clean data underneath all that automation.
Ultimately, it’s all about creating a path for improvement that includes continuously improving efficiencies, reducing costs and safeguarding the customer experience.
