This article was first published on March 20, 2020.
Telecom operators and the services they provide have always been critical to the well-being of societies and the global economy, but never more so than they are today.
Thanks to a collaboration with more than 20 telecom operators across the world, we can share insights on the ways in which the industry is coping and overcoming the various challenges caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
Although not comparable to the inspiring sacrifices of the healthcare community, the telecommunications industry is stepping up to ensure the resilience and reliability of fundamental services in order to support economic activity and social cohesion.
We would like to invite you to stay connected with how telecom operators are managing the crisis. Our intent is to create a stable place for COVID-related best practices for the industry. We will update the hub regularly to continue to share new findings on how the industry is overcoming the immediate COVID-challenges and how to deal with the aftermath.
The current document shares best practices on the immediate COVID-challenges along the following four themes:
- Staffing of essential roles and functions; how operators identify and protect critical personnel and keep essential services running
- Customer-facing roles and service; how operators continue to serve customers under constant threat of infection and under constrained mobility regimes
- Network operations; what operators are doing to sustain and build network services to manage increased levels of faults and customer premises visits while coping with greater network demands
- Working from home; how operators safely manage thousands of employees shifting from one day to the next and working from home
Future updates will focus on the aftermath and the opportunities and risks that arise from the crisis.
This is a living document. If you believe we are missing an insight, please reach out to the authors and we will update our findings live.
