MongoDB for Telecommunications

The telecommunications industry is one of MongoDB’s largest customer bases; we work with leading telcos worldwide, including AT&T, Vodafone, Verizon, Telefónica, TIM, and many more.

As MongoDB is a general purpose database, we are embedded in many different types of applications. One of the most common areas is business support system (BSS) modernization, where our billing solutions are ushering telcos through their digital transformation journeys.

MongoDB underpins 5G, mobile edge, AI/ML, and IoT solutions. Both Vodafone and Telefónica rely on MongoDB to scale their IoT ecosystem to hundreds of millions of devices.

Consolidation in the telecommunications industry has resulted in many mergers and acquisitions, with each business bringing its own systems and customers to be integrated.

This has driven many large telcos to modernize billing functions to embrace new architectures and data management approaches, including convergent billing. When done successfully, this can yield significant improvements in customer experience while at the same time reducing costs — critical in an increasingly competitive marketplace with compressed margins and rising customer expectations.

From CDR processing, to rated event storage, to billing distribution, MongoDB’s simplified approach to data management is enabling telcos to give customers a unified experience.

As partners in telco-adjacent industries work to streamline efficiencies in a cost-constrained future, many are turning to private 5G networks to optimize operations.

Modern industrial manufacturing processes are making greater use of connected IoT devices throughout the supply chain, from sensors on manufacturing equipment to mobile devices used by employees on the factory floor to connected vehicles transporting goods — all generating large amounts of data.

In the automotive industry, modern vehicles are more connected than ever. Today, almost all new models include embedded SIM cards that enable even more connected experiences. Additionally, parallel advances are being made to enable roadside infrastructure connectivity. Together, these advances will power increased data sharing between vehicles, and between vehicles and the surrounding environment (V2V2X).

In the telecommunications industry, there are two main groups of databases that compete with MongoDB.

One is traditional RDBMS, Oracle, or even the likes of MySQL, PostGres, etc. While telco developers have established skill sets in these technologies, they frequently modernize onto NoSQL technology. Why? Because the rigid structure of RDBMS inhibits innovation and growth. The schema must be changed for every new product or attribute of a customer that will be added, which slows down time to market, which is vital in a competitive industry. These technologies are also not built for the cloud. RDBMS architecture of active-passive is designed for a data center and does not provide the resilience and availability that is required for a 24/7 always-on service. For telcos and networks where downtime costs revenue, this is unacceptable.

The second is other cloud-available NoSQL databases services. The document or object model and always-on service is appealing, but many of these lack vital functionality. Some are merely key:value stores incapable of answering complex queries. With no secondary indexing capabilities, these services cannot serve multiple workloads performantly. It’s not uncommon to see telcos begin on these services, and then move to MongoDB when they realize their requirements are not being met by other databases.

If you are speaking with anyone in the telco industry, TM Forum will be an organization with which they are familiar.

At a high level, TM Forum seeks to help both telco providers and the wider ecosystem with the digital transformation necessary to succeed in today’s changing industry. Members are able to collaborate to solve complex industry-wide challenges to help them to deploy new services and create technology breakthroughs to accelerate change.

MongoDB has done significant amounts of work with TM Forum over the past couple of years. Read our blog to learn why telcos implement TM Forum Open APIs with MongoDB.

In the telecommunications industry, increased customer centricity is key to delivering an improved end user experience. The different parts of the business need to be more integrated in order to deliver this.

The future is automated. MongoDB helps telcos build automation across the business that is key to delivering real-time, self-serve capabilities while at the same time reducing cost and the scope for manual error.

Why now? A fully-integrated, customer-centric and data-driven approach to service delivery and assurance is needed in order to remain competitive. AI and machine learning are needed in order to identify correlations between disparate, diverse sources of data and to automate end to end network operations.

MongoDB helps organizations leverage AI and data science to gain network security, fraud mitigation, network optimization and better customer experiences. However, more than 50% of data scientists' time is spent wrangling data, while more than 80% of all essential data is unstructured.

The MongoDB Developer Data Platform is built on a battle-tested platform that enables telcos to run anywhere, allowing continuous uptime with advanced automation to ensure performance, no matter the scale. Our customers use elastic scalability to grow their platforms in line with the demands of the business.