How has the pandemic influenced technological development in the sector of mobile operators?

It has been three months since the beginning of the pandemic in Poland. Remote work, closed schools, as well as recommendations related to staying at home contributed exponentially to increased traffic on the Polish Internet. The new unprecedented situation has led to a number of challenges related to traffic growth, network continuity and security issues. In order to maintain the quality of the services provided and ensure smooth and secure data transmission, technicians from telecommunications companies have entered the front line. As a long-term technological partner of the four largest mobile operators operating in Poland, Atende S.A. actively supports them in this process. When analysing preliminary results and forecasts, sales of Atende S.A. to this sector are likely to increase by approx. 10% year-on-year as a result of these activities.

Due to the dynamic growth of Internet traffic, the needs of mobile operators for both dedicated software and devices for network infrastructure development have increased.

The pandemic has brought a number of limitations, but it has also shown how many of them can be avoided thanks to modern technologies, in particular remote access and cloud.

When sort of called out to the blackboard by the crisis situation, the IT industry, and the telecommunications sector in particular, has experienced a kind of an ′upswing′. Once the epidemic has been announced, the number of requests for assistance in organising remote work, either by implementing the VPN technology or by transferring corporate resources to the cloud, has rapidly increased in the market — said Andrzej Jaśkiewicz, Director of the Mobile Solutions Department at Atende S.A.

Forced widespread application of remote work solutions has, in turn, significantly increased the demand for services related to the security of communication and data storage and the use of systems facilitating remote operations (e.g. telemedicine, distance-learning). Therefore, development of software-defined networking as well as automation and remote control of industrial processes is gaining momentum. This, in turn, requires the possibility to obtain data from a large number of sources that are often distant from one another, and to process them on an ongoing basis in growing cloud computing. Speeding up the use of modern telecommunications tools and solutions due to the pandemic will require an increasingly denser communication network, greater capacity, shorter delays and handling of more terminal devices.

While the operators in Poland managed the traffic growth well, they did not experience any significant failures during that time, it can be observed that addressing the increasing communication needs will be possible by expanding the existing infrastructure, especially in places that were not a priority for operators today, due to their distance from large cities, and by building the next generation network – 5G — added Andrzej Jaśkiewicz.

Remote work and distance-learning, entertainment, shopping, or settling formalities over the Internet are some of the most visible changes in recent months. Proprietary software solutions of the Atende Group are also well suited to addressing these needs. This applies, for example, to Atende Software’s redGalaxy online multimedia transmission platform (recently implemented by Canal + as part of the TVOD service and used for the transmission of TVN’s Concert for Heroes) and Atende’s system for the management of IP services in the operator networks called SMaCS.

Telecommunications operators rose to the challenge in a crisis situation. We are proud that we had the chance to support them in these unusual, dynamically changing circumstances — concluded Andrzej Jaśkiewicz.