Pramod Gummaraj, Chief Executive Officer, Aprecomm
Amidst rising internet penetration, delivering quality experience has become a key issue for service providers. Aprecomm is one such company that is helping internet service providers address this issue by leveraging artificial intelligence (AI). In an interview with tele.net, Pramod Gummaraj, chief executive officer, Aprecomm, discusses the company’s key focus areas and future plans…
What are Aprecomm’s focus areas in the telecom domain? What are the company’s key offerings?
Aprecomm’s primary focus is on improving the quality of the internet experience and empowering service providers to promise service-level assurances to the end customers. Service providers need to be completely aware of core networks, things on the premises and how customers are experiencing connectivity. Aprecomm is exactly solving this problem. Our products like Virtual Wireless Expert and Virtual Network Expert provide a reflection of what the end customers are experiencing. These systems are smart enough to analyse the complex networks and remediate or provide recommendations to overcome any shortcoming in the deployments.
How does Aprecomm use AI to improve the quality of experience for Wi-Fi users?
We deploy AI models to analyse the patterns that cannot be seen through human eyes and precisely measure the quality of the experience. At Aprecomm, we believe that whatever cannot be measured can never be improved. We measure the experience at any point of time when there is degradation in the experience, and we have built our AI algorithms to identify the root cause of the degradation.
Aprecomm analyses 10 million customer devices every day. Managing the quality of experience of 10 million devices 24×7 generates a huge amount of data, which cannot be sent to the cloud loading servers. Aprecomm heavily uses edge AI to solve these kinds of scalability issues. We follow distributed architecture to manage certain aspects in the cloud and certain aspects in the edge. With a minimal impact on the servers, Aprecomm is highly scalable.
What benefits do Aprecomm’s solutions provide to ISPs and FTTH providers? How does Aprecomm enable them to reduce their opex?
We are helping internet service providers (ISPs) and fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) providers transform the way issues are resolved. Aprecomm is helping ISPs to be proactive by getting to the root cause of the issue without asking questions to consumers. We are talking about a scenario where engineers are the systems in place. They are virtually able to look at what is happening inside the user’s home and able to pinpoint the root cause of the problem. In addition, our systems give control to ISPs to fix these problems.
Aprecomm’s, engines help the customer support teams as well as the ISP customer support teams to reduce the support call time. We are deploying a kind of a bot wherein the customers can troubleshoot issues through self-diagnostic applications without reaching out to any customer support engineer. As we are increasing the effective experience of the network, the churn would be reduced. Aprecomm has helped ISPs bring down the churn by over 30 per cent.
What are Aprecomm’s expansion plans in terms of user base and geographies?
We have a very strong base in India. Today, close to 20 per cent of the market share is owned by Aprecomm. We are willing to expand heavily into the home experience as well.
Currently, our deployments in India are over two million. We are already present in markets such as Japan through enterprise sales. We are getting into Southeast Asia as well. We are also aggressively going into the African and European markets as well. We are looking to be present in at least 10 countries at the end of the next year.
What are the future trends that you foresee in the network automation space, particularly in the Indian market?
The consumption of the Indian customer has been growing at a very rapid pace. Things like over-the-top (OTT) platforms have contributed to it. Since the pandemic, we have seen the OTT trend gaining momentum in India, and the consumption has become extremely high.
Further, we are moving towards data-intensive applications, immersive applications, virtual applications, augmented reality and virtual reality, which is where 5G is coming into the picture. India is very actively putting its 5G plan in place. Cloud migration is another significant trend. In a booming country like India, understanding the end-to-end quality of experience for networks is going to be essential. A system such as Virtual Wireless Expert or Virtual Network Experience is going to play a larger role in the coming years. We also expect to launch a network intelligence product this quarter. We are also very actively looking at tapping 5G and then ensuring the end-to-end quality of experience of the networks.
