Author: Dr. William Bain, CEO, ScaleOut Software
Telecom operators today face a balancing act as they manage service level agreements (SLAs), unpredictable traffic surges, and an estimated 20-22 billion connected devices worldwide in increasingly dynamic networks, a number expected to rise sharply toward 30-40 billion by 2030. These pressures play out not only in core telecom infrastructures but also for individual customers, where even brief service disruptions can affect daily life, remote work, education, and access to important services. A single outage can ripple out to hospitals, transportation systems, and communities, making reliable connectivity more essential.
Traditional monitoring tools, built for more static and centralised architectures, are increasingly unable to keep pace with today’s dynamic, high velocity network environments, where high impact outages can take time to detect and resolve. As a result, these tools remain largely reactive, lagging behind incidents instead of preventing them, even as the average cost of an IT outage has climbed to more than $14,000 per minute for large enterprises. Telecom personnel need a solution that delivers continuous visibility, anticipates problems before they escalate, and supports rapid, informed action, including dynamic network reconfiguration.
Turning telecom challenges into predictive solutions: The network digital twin
The Network Digital Twin (NDT) is a new software technology that addresses the needs of today’s telecom infrastructures by providing a live, continuously updated replica of a telecom network that ingests and analyses telemetry in real time. Unlike legacy tools, an NDT gives network managers a dynamic, real-time model – a digital twin – of their infrastructure, letting them identify issues, like failed components and emerging bottlenecks, in real time. Beyond monitoring performance, an NDT allows managers to use predictive modelling techniques combined with AI to anticipate potential issues and test network re-configurations in a virtual environment before deploying them. The combination of tools helps improve uptime, maximise customer satisfaction, and minimise the network’s energy use.
Building an NDT requires the creation of a software model for the network’s components, which can number in the hundreds of thousands or more. As telemetry flows in from their physical counterparts, these component models must update their individual states and analyse incoming telemetry for issues. To provide predictive analytics for network managers, they also need to simulate changes to network configurations with guidance from generative AI.
Implementing the myriad of software components that comprise an NDT and analysing telemetry in real time require software technology that can ingest and manage large volumes of live data with low latency. ScaleOut Software’s in-memory computing platform, called ScaleOut Digital Twins™, was designed to meet an NDT’s performance requirements. It hosts large numbers of software digital twins in memory distributed in a cluster of physical or virtual servers, and it uses the cluster’s combined computing power to analyse incoming telemetry with millisecond responsiveness. In-memory computing technology like this can provide a scalable software platform which lets the NDT monitor network performance in near real-time, continuously updating the state of network elements as conditions evolve. These abilities let managers spot anomalies, proactively evaluate corrective actions, and make timely changes.
NDTs in action: Emergency response
In times of crisis, from hurricanes to wildfires, telecom networks become lifelines. People rely on them to reach loved ones, first responders depend on them to coordinate relief efforts, and government agencies use them to disseminate important information. Demand can surge in seconds, overwhelming even a well-provisioned telecom infrastructure.
Traditional network monitoring technology often struggles in these conditions, alerting managers only after service degradation has already occurred and failing to offer timely strategies for network reconfiguration. Using an NDT changes the game by giving telecom managers real-time visibility and an accurate understanding of evolving issues during emergencies. By continuously modelling live network conditions, an NDT can help managers identify where bottlenecks have been created, simulate traffic management strategies, and guide decisions on how to re-allocate resources during periods of unusually high demand. It lets providers prioritise essential services and maintain stability even when networks are placed under extreme pressure.
Final Thoughts
Telecom networks have become the backbone of modern life, carrying important communications for hospitals, emergency responders, businesses, and billions of consumers. Even brief disruptions can have far-reaching consequences. Traditional monitoring tools, built for a less complex era, cannot provide the abilities that network managers now require.
NDTs open a new frontier for network monitoring by delivering continuous visibility and predictive intelligence that can test solutions virtually before they ever touch a live environment. At its core, an NDT marks a shift from reactive troubleshooting to proactive, informed action. Beyond just increasing network uptime and efficiency, an NDT helps ensure resilience when communities need it most. It provides network managers with a new level of situational awareness and lets them act before disruptions occur.
Using advanced in-memory computing platforms, like ScaleOut Digital Twins™, an NDT can be constructed to tackle the needs of very large telecom networks. The combined technologies let managers keep up with the ever-increasing complexity of today’s telecom infrastructure and deliver a new level of network management.
To see how this future is coming together, visit scaleoutdigitaltwins.com.
Author: Dr. William Bain, CEO, ScaleOut Software
Image source: Unsplash
