Teléfonica has made customer experience a brand differentiator, with an ambition to grow the Teléfonica and O2 brands by delivering superior customer experiences that subscribers will not find elsewhere. However, despite spending millions on probing systems, the advent of encrypted Over-The-Top (OTT) apps has greatly reduced Teléfonica’s ability to see the type of data that customers are using on its network.

The proportion of encrypted OTT data is fast approaching 100% with new traffic types increasingly encrypted by default, making it almost impossible for operators to assure service delivery on their networks, or to innovate based on customer usage needs. This is an unsustainable position for a mobile operator to be in, as data services have become the main driver for today’s mobile networks. Visibility of the level of the quality being delivered during the subscribers’ data services activity is therefore critical to any operator that views themselves as truly ‘customer-centric’.

Without compromising service encryption and therefore customer privacy, Teléfonica Deutschland and Huawei have used innovative Deep Flow Inspection techniques to re-connect the operator with its customer’s service usage. Through the deployment of
Huawei’s Encrypted Traffic Detection System (connected to the Huawei SmartCare CEM
Solution), Teléfonica can once again identify and measure service quality and Customer Experience for OTT App services.

This is an important first step for Teléfonica, as the operator embarks on its digital transform journey.