Today, firms across various industries benefit greatly from digital twins. The technology enables real-time site inventory control, predictive maintenance, advanced modeling, and prototyping. The main benefit of using a digital twin is that it allows an organization to observe what is happening at every level of the process, reducing project time and expense while decreasing errors and hiccups. Digital twins are more significant than ever, especially for the telecoms industry, as the much-discussed FTTH and 5G rollouts may put more demand on already-existing network hardware, and the availability of additional spectrum bandwidth may drain already-existing infrastructure.

Current Market Scenario:
How big is the global market right now? The global digital twin market is anticipated to grow from USD 6.9 billion in 2022 to USD 73.5 billion by 2027, at a CAGR of 60.6% throughout the forecast period, according to Markets & Markets.

The rapid adoption of digital twin technology in the automotive sector is followed by the telecommunications, residential, and healthcare sectors, which are predicted to increase substantially throughout the forecast period. Digital twin technology assists telecom service providers in creating complicated network designs and upgrading current network infrastructures to accommodate new solutions such as Fiber to the Home (FTTH) and 5G. 

Digital Twinning: A Revolution in Telecom Sector:
Prior to this point, telecom infrastructure upgrades relied on a wide variety of tools and technologies for planning, design, deployment, operations, and management of networks from various vendors, most of which were used in isolated silos.  Although conventional approaches to networking administration have been successful thus far, there is a pressing need for greater intelligence and coordination between the planning, implementation, and maintenance of networks and their associated services.

The telecom business is presently seeing a revolution due to the digital twin. The global telecommunications industry is undergoing a quick digital process due to various dynamic factors, including consumer, digital, and business trends. Telecom operators worldwide are implementing digital twin technologies to monitor networks, automate workflows, enhance network performance, lower customer support calls, and cut costs. Let’s take a look at the ways in which digital twins are transforming the telecom sector.

Benefits to Telecom Sector:
Digital Twins offer numerous advantages to telecommunications operators of all sizes. These include network optimization, planning, design, and deployment efficacy throughout the operational life cycle. Telcos benefit from the saved time and resources, and the simulated results offer insights into innovative, cutting-edge business concepts. With the use of a digital twin, companies in the telecommunications industry may better understand network performance, company operations, consumer behavior, and how they are interconnected and interdependent.  It encourages telecom operators to stop allowing delays of up to several months between actual field modifications and their digital depictions.

In terms of network design, the use of this technology enables an operator to keep an accurate inventory of deployed networking assets and change management. Furthermore, Probe and Discovery-enabled Digital Twins provide proper monitoring of existing infrastructure, easing the installation of additions, upgrades, and alterations. The machine learning component of a digital twin enables an extensive what-if analysis of use patterns, network abnormalities, and failure forecasting.

3 Types of Digital Twins for Communication Service Providers:

• Network Twin: During exceptionally high network demand, such as natural disasters, this twin can aid in forecasting breakdown points.  Since it considers weather patterns and their potential effects on the signal strength and the general health of the network, the network twin is very useful.
• Customer Twin:  The creation of a virtual customer persona for a firm might help a telco identify specific issues that might have an impact on users. This enables the operator to tell these customers and avert any further support issues.
• Process Twin: These twins serve as models for the majority of the essential network business operations that keep the system operating efficiently.
  

Role in Telecommunication Sector: Network Design and Build.

• Field Service Administration – Troubleshooting network outages is every telecom operator’s worst nightmare. According to recent research by Gartner, businesses lost an average of $5,600 per minute due to network disruptions. Often, field service workers visit areas with only a rudimentary understanding of what they would encounter there. No matter how well-equipped they are, sites and towers are nonetheless vulnerable to malfunction, but valuable time can be saved with the usage of DT. With the benefit of additional remote support from the command center, a DT will enable the extraction of accurate information and solutions before they arrive on-site.

• Tower Control – For cell towers to operate properly, effective monitoring is essential. However, operational costs increased as a result of the complexity of growing networks, and security concerns made remote monitoring of cell towers more challenging. Using a digital twin, tower owners are able to remotely monitor and manage all of their telecom assets. Data from remote sensors might be collected on characteristics including temperature, proximity, motion, and position, assessed using AI/ML algorithms, and then integrated into the tower’s DT. By examining the tower’s digital twin, operational and management teams may be able to remedy any issues. Furthermore, it enables operators to provide this data and insights to equipment providers as a service and charge compensation for the data.

• Network Planning and Design – Telecom companies can also benefit greatly from using DTs for capacity planning and design of their networks. Because of the need to make large changes to preexisting network configurations to accommodate the introduction of new technologies, network capacity planning and design is time-consuming for network engineers. Keeping up with configuration changes and keeping an up-to-date inventory of network components presents a constant problem for operators. On the other hand, Digital twin technology uses AI and machine learning to aggregate data from a variety of sources to build a comprehensive inventory of live network and user/device information, allowing for immediate course correction. Growth, modernization, and transformation have all been sped up by the advent of the Internet of Things. Incorporating all of these concepts into network design and planning would yield significant benefits.

The crux of the Matter:
DT technologies have made considerable strides in recent years, and telecom companies of all sizes are now using them globally. Network functions that are autonomous and software-based, like SDN and NFV, have replaced hardware-based networks. With the launch of 5G, the connection is being redefined for IoT and M2M applications and supported fiber networks, offering faster speeds, greater efficiency, and lower latency. The communications sector is being affected by disruptive waves, which are bringing both new opportunities and problems.

Magnasoft services include integrating GIS models with drone (UAV) surveys and aerial imagery, LiDAR point clouds, and the generation of 3D models in a virtual environment, all of which assist in transforming business operations and enhancing the customer’s experience of digital twin adoption. Some of the key offerings are tower structural comparison, digital tower inspections, tower structural design analysis, site acquisition, environment and design (SAED), small cell planning, as-built services.

In the future, communication service providers will benefit from using geospatially powered digital twins. We can provide our clients with one-of-a-kind services by combining our telecom, AI/ML, and geospatial engineering knowledge.

Contact us for digital twin data solutions! If you’d like to learn more about how these cutting-edge technologies can help your business remain competitive, one of our experts would be happy to contact you.