NBN said it has developed a new ‘Tech Lab’ to help improve the experience of end users.
The Tech Lab will take advantage of big data and machine learning to “provide insights, identify patterns, preferences and trends in people’s use and delivery” of NBN services.
It will also be able to help determine whether faults require a visit from a field technician or if they can be resolved remotely.
“Our Tech Lab sees us utilising existing capability to solve a complex problem and will help provide us with crucial insights about the way people are using the nbn network,” said NBN’s Chief Systems Engineering Officer John McInerney.
“Faults are an inevitable part of any technology network but minimising the disruption is key to improving the experience. We expect to see significant improvements as a result of early detection and quick resolution,” McInerney said.
Information used for Tech Lab will be collected from users who have consented to sharing their experiences in a series of surveys.
Among the open source technologies used by Tech Lab are Apache SPARK, Kafka, Flume, Cassandra and JanusGraph, while partner technologies include Amazon Web Services S3 storage, RStudio, H2O.ai and ArangoDB.
“Developing these insights will help enrich the customer experience of services over the nbn access network and make our systems and processes more agile by synthesising massive data sets. Once the investigation and implementation of the Tech Lab research is complete we could, for example, easily identify trends that occur in a failed activation in order to pre-empt problems before arriving at a house,” McInerney said.
