The amount of data on AT&T’s network has grown 50,000% over the past 6 years. In response, AT&T is looking to new technology to help improve customer experiences, reduce costs and become more efficient, according to the Wall Street Journal. AT&T researchers created a tower-outage analyzer to give the company an accurate, data-driven picture of the customer experience and the area impacted by an outage. The Wall Street Journal reported, “The tool has been used to prioritize and escalate repairs to cell towers based on how it impacts customer experience. AT&T learned that some outages involving a significant number of towers had little customer impact, while others with fewer failed towers had a bigger impact.” These efforts helped to drive a “59% improvement in customer experience,” said Mr. Nilson, who was the first employee of AT&T’s Big Data internal startup. There are also opportunities to shave costs in some areas, he said. With tens of thousands of service vehicles, AT&T spent $7 million in towing charges and $1 million in jump starts for batteries last year, said Mr. Nilson. AT&T is taking in over 80 different metrics generated by service vehicles and proactively identifying the ones that need maintenance. “We’re predicting when they’re going to fail,” said Mr. Nilson. That means batteries that are about to fail can be identified and replaced before they ever die. “We’re moving from time interval maintenance to just-in-time maintenance,” said Mr. Nilson. (Source: Wall Street Journal)
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