New Filipino telco's cloud-native approach helps secure rapid subscriber growth

DITO Telecommunity, a joint venture between China Telecom and Philippines conglomerate Udenna Corporation, is the Philippines’ third national telecoms operator. Since it launched its LTE service in March 2021 it claims to have lowered the average unit price of data for Filippino mobile users by 65% and increased mobile broadband speeds by 350%. It passed the 10 million subscriber mark in July 2022.

In this interview TM Forum Chief Analyst Mark Newman speaks to DITO Telecommunity’s Chief Technology Advisor, Lin Rui about some of the challenges and opportunities that the Philippines’ newest telecoms operator has faced in its short history and what it is doing to deliver a strong customer experience and leverage new technologies.

Q. What are the main technology challenges to building a new telecoms operator business to compete with two strong incumbent operators?

Our main challenge has been building a network from scratch, during the Covid-19 global pandemic and meeting the timelines laid down by the government. We are audited by the government on our coverage and speed targets for the first five years of service. Covid-19 has made this difficult because of the shortage of engineers and disruption to the supply chain. To overcome these challenges we have had to use a range of different digital tools. These include smart capex and a lifecycle network resource management system.

Smart capex, which is based on AI data mining, provides us with in-depth analysis to optimize network deployment by using demographic data, economic data, POI data and market data about our competitors. This enables us to prioritize investment at a city level and at a site level

The lifecycle network resource management system covers the wired, wireless, access, backbone and core networks along with cloud and leased facilities. It delivers lifecycle management of all resources and all processes from planning to design to construction to delivery to acceptance and, finally, day-to-day maintenance. It ensures that as soon as the network is delivered it can start serving customers. And it also lays a good foundation for future network self-intelligence

Q. How important is the digital experience and digital touchpoints to the overall DITO experience?

A. Digital experience is very important for us because we’re a newcomer. We don’t have abundant resources with lots of physical channels, so we have to rely on our digital systems. We have a strategy called Digital First. Omni channel is a big part of this and it allows us to offer our customers a completely seamless experience. We also have a super-app that has approximately 80% Monthly Active Users (MAU). This is much higher than our competitors’ apps. We also offer a 24/7 customer service which integrates a hotline, live chat, social media, email and other channels.

When it comes to network experience we optimize the network end-to-end on a daily basis. We use big data capabilities to achieve cross-domain correlation and analysis of services and the network. This enables us to users to enable us to monitor how our users perceive the quality of services such as instant messaging and video games by bringing all these data together and using AI models to analyze it.

Q. To what extent have you been able to benefit from the fact that you’re a new telecoms operators in the context of the technology, systems, process and culture that you have deployed /built?

We build our network on IT platforms using most advanced technology and all our systems are cloud native. This applies not only to our IT systems but many of our network elements are also cloud native. We developed and deployed a professional unified network management software, which can monitor and manage the core network, wireless, transmission and other networks at the same time, our 4G-5G core is totally cloud. It took us only two months from installation and testing to making the first calls on the networks.

The architecture of our IT system is a platform plus application model which is microservices + containerized deployment. All the data and all the APIs are shared by all the applications which enabled to shorten the “time-to-market” for all of our applications. This is why our super app has been so successful, because it can leverage the new architecture of our platform and access all the data and APIs.

Q. How important is cloud computing to your business, both as a capability for your networks and IT and as a service delivered to your customers?

As I have said, we have designed our IT and network to be cloud native so we don’t need to think about migrating applications to the cloud. And this means that we are able to bring more applications into the market fast.