Vodafone partners up with Google Cloud to boost 5G in Europe

Vodafone has released its new platform with Google Cloud that claims to provide a more reliable mobile experience for Vodafone’s European customers.

Combining Google Cloud’s smart analytics portfolio, machine learning and artificial intelligence tools alongside analytics platform Cardinality.io, the new platform will update Vodafone’s pan-European networks more efficiently via hybrid cloud architecture.

The platform, called the Unified Performance Management (UPM) platform, will be implemented across 11 European countries and will allow the operating companies to draw billions of network performance datapoints from a secure cloud data pool.

It will replace over 100 separate network performance applications currently in use, providing a single source of data in the cloud that can be optimised and analysed by artificial intelligence.

Vodafone will use the data to monitor, manage and enhance its entire pan-European mobile network, including Critical National Infrastructure (CNI).

The platform will allow Vodafone to focus 5G investment in the areas where the demand is greatest such as in cities, travel corridors, ports, industrial hubs, and in specialist areas such as mobile private networks, as well as target those rural areas with spotty coverage.

Johan Wibergh, chief  technology officer of Vodafone, said: “As the needs of our 300 million plus mobile customers evolve so will our network using this new platform. It is a global data hub that gives us a real-time view of what is happening anywhere on our network, uses our global scale to manage traffic growth cheaper and more efficiently as customer data consumption grows by around 40% per year, and supports the full automation of our network by 2025.”

Vodafone added that the UMP platform would make simplifying data operations at scale and generating real-time insights more efficient, more secure and more personalised.

The mobile phone operator reports that it has already seen major networks and IT incidents fall by nearly 70% this year by simplifying and digitalising core operations.

In the next few years the firm believes it will resolve 80% of all incidents without human intervention so that Vodafone’s technology workforce is free to develop new products.