Connectivity is extremely important for all Americans
Robust and reliable networks are mission critical for all the workers who are trying to be productive from their home offices. Networks are just as important for their children and their teachers, who are trying to learn and teach in a wholly different way. Networks are even more crucial to deliver the connectivity required by first responders and caregivers who face incredible pressures to maintain acceptable levels of public health and safety. All parts of American society are affected in some way by their ability to stay connected to the people and information they need in this unprecedented time.
We at Ericsson feel this pressure keenly. And we believe that our deep expertise, speed, and flexibility make us well positioned to handle the biggest challenge of our time. Today, our Managed Services team is working closely with our operator customers to ensure the level of connectivity needed for all Americans.
Connecting Americans and creating a new normal
One of our team’s most important efforts is delivering world-class customer support. Mission-critical networks simply cannot fail. We support Tier 1 operators who have deployed Ericsson technology, and they have our support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. This involves helping operators during downtime or any crisis related to their network. Keeping their networks up in crisis situations like now requires us to regularly stress-test our business continuity capabilities to ensure that operators can be supported as promised. Knowing that COVID-19 could be something serious, we quickly deployed our teams to simulate a worst-case scenario. We sent employees home to stress-test their ability to work remotely before the shelter-in-place mandates, and to make sure we were able to fully support our operators and their customers with proper levels of business continuity. I’m proud to say that the networks we help run have been extremely resilient and highly capable of handling demand through this crisis, and our business continuity plans have been successful.
One of the customers we support in this way is a New York-based biotechnology company that is working toward a COVID-19 therapy. Our team uncovered and fixed an issue within their network that could have impacted our ability to isolate network issues in a timely manner. This proactive approach helped the company focus on finding solutions for COVID-19, instead of worrying about their network stability. We are proud to support researchers working to find a therapy for COVID-19, as their work is critical for the entire country.
Many Americans are dealing with an evolving new normal. Due to shelter-in-place requirements, many people now have different needs from their rate plans, such as more data and lower prices. That’s why we worked closely with our Tier 1 operators to support them as they quickly moved to provision for these changes to provide new data and rate plans to their customers. Our team worked closely with operators to design, build, test, and run parts of these platforms while supporting their deployment to millions of Americans without any impact on provisioning and network performance. These changes were obviously not planned on the part of the operators, but we were able to make the changes they required within a matter of days, so they could be responsive to their subscribers. We place the highest priority on making sure the operators we serve can quickly respond to the changing needs of their customers in these difficult times.
We are also supporting a Tier 1 operator to keep their customers’ enterprise communications platforms up and running. These platforms are used by healthcare organizations, banks, retailers, and public-sector agencies, where our work includes providing routing capabilities for 911 lines. Ensuring these communication vehicles are running flawlessly is essential now more than ever.
Perhaps one of the groups in our country that most needs reliable connectivity is our children. Classrooms are becoming virtual as schools use applications to connect their teachers and students. These applications require high-speed internet to properly function. That’s why our team implements networks like the one we are supporting with a rural network provider. Sixty percent of the school-age children in the community do not have high-speed internet at home. We are building this network to augment their fiber rollout and while the network is in progress, Ericsson is a proud partner in providing this connectivity to this area.
When it comes to helping America through this crisis, our work doesn’t stop when the workday ends. Many of our data scientists are working on the White House’s COVID-19 Open Research Dataset Challenge during their personal time. They are working with hundreds of other data scientists to surface important answers around COVID-19 in the more than 44,000 articles that have been published about the virus since January 2020. This work is critical to help the global community better understand the disease and potentially find therapies as well. It’s an excellent example of Ericsson expertise and the incredible can-do spirit of our people.
We are working to Keep America Running
We are making sure people can focus on their health and their work, rather than their networks. Through the work our Managed Services team does every day, we are making sure people stay connected to the people who matter most to them. We are honored to keep America running, and will continue to work with leading operators to ensure our country stays connected in whatever way our new normal requires.
