For 99 years, Telefónica has thrived as a telecommunications provider by exploring the use of the latest technology to streamline business growth and satisfy customer demand. The company recently built a new service delivery and communications platform called Home Advanced Connectivity (HAC) that enables operations and customer services teams for the first time to have real-time, bidirectional data flows between customers’ in-home gateway devices and the Telefónica cloud at scale. Developed on the Microsoft Azure IoT platform, HAC simplifies and enhances connectivity management by overcoming technical barriers previously posed by third-party agents that were required to run on the routers. Today, 4.5 million devices process 6.5 billion messages per day, with plans to easily scale to 20 million devices in the next few years. The solution has streamlined device management across this huge install base and enabled new opportunities to rapidly develop and deliver new value-added services.
“Our new platform, which we built using the Azure IoT platform, greatly enhances the connectivity we deliver to our customers, and allows us to deploy a new level of digital services to them at home.”
Gonzalo Gómez, Executive Director of Customer Operations and Platforms, Telefónica
Addressing the challenges of an ever-changing telco market
Spanish telecommunications giant Telefónica operates in 12 countries across two continents, providing service to tens of millions of customers and employing more than 100,000 people. 2024 will be the company’s hundredth year, and throughout that history, it has continuously innovated products and services that apply the latest technologies to meet customers’ needs.
“The home ecosystem of connected devices is growing very diverse and complex,” says Gonzalo Gómez, Executive Director of Customer Operations and Platforms at Telefónica. “There are more and more devices people can connect to their home networks that have unique behaviors, and customers expect a good connectivity experience. As a communications provider, we need to guarantee this experience, and enabling the capability of understanding what’s happening in this ecosystem is key to make that possible.”
Key to Telefónica’s success is the ongoing digital transformation of its customers’ home experience through the development of value-added services beyond its TV and internet offerings. As part of this change, the company also sought to provide greater flexibility and efficacy in managing these services.
Covering the “last mile” of connectivity management
Starting in 2019, Telefónica started building a new connectivity management platform called Home as a Computer, now renamed as Home Advanced Connectivity (HAC). The company’s previous solutions fell short of addressing key complexities, such as the presence of third-party, customer-installed components in customers’ homes that limited Telefónica’s control over connectivity data. These limitations prevented the company from going the “last mile” of communicating freely with their in-home devices, including retrieving data for analysis and gaining insights through telemetry.
Telefónica has defined a new residential router strategy called Open Home architecture. This strategy enables the development of new services and use cases without updating the router’s firmware. Open Home uses a single agent on the router and a cloud-based platform, allowing Telefónica to offer network capabilities and resources to third parties through standard APIs.
“Open Home with HAC enables Telefónica to implement its softwarization strategy on customer-premises equipment (CPE),” says José Aranda Copado, Devices Development Center Senior Manager at Telefónica and leader of the single-agent development strategy. “By exposing the device’s information and capacities in the cloud through APIs, we can change the way we develop and deliver new services.”
However, before HAC, the Open Home solution still fell short of handling the data from the millions of CPEs that Telefónica deployed. HAC overcomes these issues by using the Microsoft Azure IoT platform—including Azure IoT Hub and Azure IoT Hub device provisioning service (DPS)—to offer bidirectional communication, with customers’ in-home routers using a single agent inside each device. To enable the full range of HAC functionality, Telefónica combined the Azure IoT platform with other Azure services, including Azure Databricks, Azure Event Hubs, Azure Data Lake Storage, and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). HAC uses built-in Azure security for customer data and enables governance for how that data is shared within the company, while achieving cloud efficiencies that were out of reach with previous on-premises solutions.
“In Telefónica, we are a cloud company," says Chema Alonso, Telefónica’s Chief Digital Officer. “We put our strategy in being a data-centric company, creating all our products and services based in the cloud.”
With HAC, for example, Telefónica operations teams can diagnose or predict connectivity issues by retrieving information directly from a customer’s router, and delivering a fix—all in a single, continuous data flow. HAC also uses IoT Hub device twins, a digital twin capability offered by IoT Hub, to help ensure precise, remote configuration of routers. Before HAC, these workflows were often complicated by the need for third-party agents, causing connectivity and issue resolution times to suffer. Consolidating the many agents into one helps Telefónica deliver higher-quality services and operations, optimize hardware usage and integration costs, and unify data access, including privacy controls.
“Improving device manageability was the central goal for us,” says Antonio Guzmán Sacristán, Discovery Director at Telefónica and former director of the HAC project. “HAC achieves this by simplifying connectivity down to a single entry point for the devices, enabling device twin operability, and moving complex service management workflows into the cloud.”
“Open Home with HAC enables Telefónica to implement its softwarization strategy on customer-premises equipment (CPE) by exposing the device’s information and capacities in the cloud through APIs, we can change the way we develop and deliver new services.”
José Aranda Copado, Devices Development Center Senior Manager, Telefónica
Centralizing on a single, versatile platform for service delivery
So far, Telefónica has connected more than 4.5 million homes in Spain to the HAC platform, with a goal of connecting 20 million homes by 2024. The company used Azure IoT Hub device provisioning service to deploy the devices at a grand scale, and to facilitate a broad reach by registering multiple instances of Azure IoT Hub. To ingest the huge volume of events tracked on the new platform, Telefónica uses Azure Event Hubs.
Getting to this level of capacity means the company required a technology backbone with the scalability and features that the Azure IoT platform provides. “Developing HAC in-house didn’t make sense, because the timeline would have been too long and would have required a great deal of prototype investment,” says Miguel García Longarón, Senior Engineering Manager at Telefónica. “We looked into going that route, and quickly realized it would be impossible.”
Using HAC, Telefónica delivers a new level of service and operations quality to customers, including:
- Improved router uptime, monitoring, and quality assurance.
- Anomaly detection for predicting and preventing router failures.
- Extensive diagnostic capabilities, including customer self-management.
- Minimal time for development and integration of new services.
- Scalable architecture, not limited by the physical (finite) resources of the equipment.
- Cybersecurity for threat detection and camera analytics for home security.
These enhancements add up to a more modern and effective experience for both Telefónica and its customers, with Azure IoT Hub at its core. “We use pretty much every feature of IoT Hub to run HAC,” says García Longarón. “It gives us high-band capacity for processing and filtering information in real time, and lets us run configuration instructions on any device by using the device’s digital twin.”
Optimizing platform operations in the cloud
The HAC project requirements were laid out by teams throughout the company—not only operations and customer service, but also individual product teams and business units. With the Azure IoT platform, the HAC engineering team could meet these teams’ needs, including data privacy controls, service-level agreements (SLAs), and API-level integration to ensure the new platform integrated with other investments and retained all preexisting functionality.
As part of this process, the HAC team engaged Azure IoT experts from Microsoft who could help align Telefónica business and technical requirements with the corresponding Azure components. “Deploying services in the cloud isn’t always easy,” says Laura Iriarte Tirapu, Global Operations Team Director at Telefónica. “The Microsoft technical team worked with us to identify the critical architecture components, coordinate data governance, and assure resilience so we could have predictable SLAs.”
Microsoft helped Telefónica get a strong start with the HAC project by having clarifying discussions early on with key decision makers within the company. The Azure team also worked with the HAC team to help focus on individual elements within the end-to-end data stack, such as Telefónica’s unique IoT portfolio and native integrations with analytics, AI, business intelligence, and DevOps technologies and processes. Along the way, the HAC team learned about many synergies with other Azure installations at the company that would benefit from integrating with HAC using Azure IoT.
HAC modernizes Telefónica’s approach to network-based device management and quality assurance in ways that achieve greater operational efficiency. The new platform gives the company:
- Streamlined device management across a massive, worldwide install base of customer routers.
- Efficient bidirectional communication between home networks and the Telefónica cloud.
- Virtually unlimited scalability and telemetry growth to meet the needs of ongoing expansion.
- Unified engineering and reduced time to market for new value-added products and services.
Thanks to the simplified design of HAC, Telefónica also faces fewer onerous technical tasks, such as maintaining data governance and privacy, using built-in security controls in Azure. “The Azure IoT platform greatly simplified our security requirements,” says José Altava Soligo, Head of Software Engineering at Telefónica. “We have many sensitivities around customer data that would have otherwise required a lot of ongoing analysis. That’s a lot of complexity we mostly don’t have to deal with now.”
Laying out a strategy for the future
The 4.5 million devices currently connected using HAC in Spain transact more than 6.5 billion messages per day. This pipeline will expand as Telefónica scales up to its next few deployment milestones, and as it brings more new value-added services online. The company’s latest HAC-connected three-in-one in-home device gives users access to the full range of Telefónica’s fiber capabilities by combining router, video bridge, and fiber optic hub.
As these plans progress, the HAC team continues to evolve the platform they created, with plans for expanding its capabilities to reach other non-Telefónica devices in customers’ homes. The team also continues to generate insights from platform activity that help guide decision making for operations, executives, customer service, and the individual business units.
“HAC is strategic for us as a company in many ways,” says Guzmán. “It puts us in a position to move forward more quickly and provide innovative new kinds of service.”
Another strategic element in the HAC story is Telefónica’s participation in the global Open Gateway Initiative, which helps app developers gain agility in producing mobile network applications. Led by the Global System for Mobile Communications Association (GSMA), the initiative is designed to promote rapid expansion of mobile technologies using platforms that all developers can share in common—platforms based on the same principles as HAC. Unifying efforts across the industry helps increase the speed of innovation, just as unifying into HAC has done for users and customers at Telefónica.
“The great success of HAC is that we are now able to take control of the data, and deliver services and perform operations better than before,” says Altava Soligo. “When we need information or a new service, the whole process of requesting it and implementing it is much faster, with fewer dependencies on other teams or outside resources.”
Chief Digital Officer Alonso agrees. “I’m excited about this project; it’s our foundation for creating something new,” he says. “Everything we provide to our customers—electronic security, e-health, cloud-based gaming, smart home technologies—everything is connected to HAC, and those services all take advantage of our data and the APIs, thanks to this platform.”
Follow Microsoft