Operators and governments across Latin America are committed to improve services of fiber optic networks, and Colombia is no exception. The pandemic has also acted as a catalyst for the roll-out of the technology, which is considered as a driver of economic growth that fosters productivity and entrepreneurship, and which gives the population access to many types of services.
Movistar Colombia, one of the largest internet service providers in Colombia, and an affiliate of Telefónica group, is today determined to bring broadband connectivity to Colombians. There are today almost 4 millions of homes passed with fiber thanks to Movistar, with more than 710,000 homes connected. The objective is to reach 5.9 millions of homed passed by the end of 2024.
The satisfaction of subscribers is at the heart of the operator’s interests, and the company is putting a strong emphasis on the quality of its fiber operations to guarantee a high level of service.
“The project with Deepomatic reveals Movistar Colombia’s ambition to implement digital solutions by design in our field processes in order to roll-out fiber optic efficiently. We have rapidly seen the great impact of Deepomatic technology on our quality indicators and we expect to extend its use to other fiber optic applications”.
When technicians were going to the subscriber’s home to connect them to fiber optic, they were not required to take pictures of the operation. Therefore, Movistar was relying on in-person audits that were carried out later on, in order to monitor the work performed by its own agents or its subcontractors on selected operations. Naturally, this could not reflect the reality of what was happening throughout all of its fiber connection operations.
It became key to Movistar to put in place a process to apply high quality standards across all its operations and to monitor their implementation automatically.
In order to increase its operational efficiency, Movistar partnered with Deepomatic at the end of 2021 to automate some of its field processes, by putting an AI-powered solution directly in the hands of fiber technicians, who simply have to take photos of the equipment they work on to connect subscribers (like the aerial distribution termination point, the face plate, the wifi repeater, etc.). Deepomatic solution analyses them in real-time and provides live feedback to the technician to validate their tasks and inform them in case of anomalies. This allows them to correct the detected defect instantly, before leaving the site.
Each operation and associated data is then centralized and accessible for review, and the solution provides indicators on the conformity of operations and the completeness of photo reports provided by the technicians. This enables Operations and Quality teams to monitor the quality of the work performed by Movistar agents and its subcontractors.
Thanks to Deepomatic, the rate of photo reports completeness rose from 60% at the beginning of the project to 98% at the end of June 2022.
Technicians have improved the quality of their work as the operation conformity rate is 3 times higher than at the beginning of the project.
And finally, the revisit rate dropped by 13% and therefore Movistar has improved its operational cost efficiency.
“By being the first operator in LATAM to leverage Visual Automation in its fiber operations, Movistar proves that it is a frontrunner in the region in the digitization of field processes and Deepomatic is glad to be its partner of choice for such an initiative. Thanks to our solution, the roll-out of fiber optic in Colombia embeds quality by design and we believe that this is the key to an outstanding end-customer experience”.
Augustin Marty, CEO of Deepomatic
Telefónica is one of the biggest actors of the digital economy in Colombia, with revenues of 7.86 trillion pesos in 2022. The activity of the company, which operates under the Movistar trademark, is fundamentally focused on the telephony and mobile connectivity businesses, broadband services,fiber optics to the home, pay television, fixed telephony and a complete offer of digital solutions for small, medium and large companies and corporations. Telefónica is present in 49 cities and municipalities in the country with fiber optics. Telefónica closed the fourth quarter of 2022 with a base of 24 million customers nationwide: 20.5 million mobile lines, 1.3 million broadband customers, including 854,000 connected to fiber optics.
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