Thai Carrier Teams with Juniper Services to Build Competitive Network

Rising costs for 4G licenses and stiff telco competition in Thailand meant that operational efficiency was imperative when rolling out services and increasing network coverage and capacity. AIS needed help making sure it could keep operating costs under control as it grew its network to reach new markets.

More than 39.9 million people depend on AIS for mobile services, and with life increasingly digital, subscriber demands continue to grow. Ensuring that its mobile network is responsive and reliable is critical to AIS, because even a minute of service interruption can damage brand reputation, and negatively impact continued growth.

“People can connect with each other anywhere and anytime, and that has changed people’s demands and expectations forever,” says Nattawut Thipayapornkul, head of transport network operation at AIS. “Increased interactions are creating a deluge of traffic, and we need to stay ahead of the demand.” The telecom market in Thailand is highly competitive, and AIS faces rising costs for 4G licenses, making operational efficiency critically important. The ability to efficiently roll out new services, such as business cloud, is critical for revenue growth and market leadership.

AIS can now stay ahead of growing consumer and business network traffic demands while reducing its total cost of network ownership. The carrier has reduced its trouble tickets by 70 percent and accelerated new-service deployment times. “By relying on Juniper products, solutions, and services, we can stay ahead of growing consumer and business traffic demands while operating efficiently,” says Thipayapornkul. “We can reduce TCO with a highly flexible, high-performance transport network and be more agile to optimize our existing network resources and roll out new revenue-generating services faster.”

 With a network that scales easily and efficiently, AIS can profitably meet subscriber demand for mobile and broadband, as well as expand video, gaming, mobile money, enterprise cloud services, and Internet of Things (IoT) platform services. Working with Advanced Services enabled AIS to reduce network downtime on the transport network. In one particularly challenging instance, an incident occurred that did not cause an alarm, but that could have led to service downtime. The Juniper Service Manager collaborated with internal experts and external related parties to explore the best solution to address the issue in the future. As a result, a special method to monitor and detect the trigger point was developed, and operational procedures and troubleshooting instructions were created. With these expedient actions, the risk of future network interruptions and downtime related to this issue was effectively mitigated, and AIS was pleased by how astutely and quickly Juniper managed the situation.

AIS can now resolve incidents more efficiently and quickly with the Juniper Resident Engineer, who uses a strong service mindset to better understand the essentials of the network and the crucial nature of the services AIS provides its end customers. Positioning business success as the top priority ensured that AIS and its systems integration partner could always reach out to Juniper when help was needed—24/7—so that incidents could be resolved more quickly.