Telecom

Understand complex telecommunications networks with graph technology.

 

 

Telecommunications providers operate some of the world's most complex connected systems. Physical infrastructure, logical services, customers, network functions, and operational systems all depend on one another. Understanding these relationships is essential for maintaining network reliability, optimizing performance, and delivering high-quality services.

Tom Sawyer Perspectives helps telecommunications organizations transform complex telecom data into analytical models and interactive graph visualizations that reveal the structure, dependencies, and behavior of their networks.

An example microwave transmission network application that visualizes the relationships between devices and antennas, along with network load and capacity.

An example microwave transmission network application that visualizes the relationships between devices and antennas, along with network load and capacity.

Tracing connections from infrastructure to customer impact

Telecom operations depend on understanding more than where network assets are located. Operators must also know which services depend on those assets and how failures, congestion, or planned changes may affect customers and operations.

Graph technology connects these layers of information, allowing users to trace relationships from physical infrastructure, through logical and service dependencies, to operational and customer impact. This provides a more complete view than separate GIS, inventory, and monitoring systems can offer.

Physical relationships

Physical relationships

The hundreds of thousands of devices that make up a telecommunications network can be difficult to track and manage. Graph-based solutions are purpose-built to support efficient maintainance of these wide-scale networks, including device location, network bandwidth, and real-time incident management and mitigation.

Dependency relationships

Dependency relationships

A myriad of services, software configurations, virtual functions, customer connections and third-party services are part of separate but connected relationship graphs on the physical network. Graph-based approaches are uniquely able to trace dependencies and detect the root causes of issues within these highly connected virtual layers.

Impact relationships

Impact relationships

Failure of one connected part of the network can have wide impact. Graph-based analysis helps to minimize planned and unexpected outages, identifying network contingencies to minimize disruption and manage service contracts. Identifying bottle necks, rerouting traffic, and planning for network expansion are a few ways that impact analysis informs telecom operations.

Why graph analysis matters in modern telecom networks

Modern telecommunications networks are increasingly difficult to manage.

Traditional reports, tables, and static diagrams often fail to reveal how these systems interact. Critical dependencies remain hidden, making it difficult to identify service impacts, investigate outages, or plan network changes.

Graph technology provides a natural way to model and analyze these interconnected environments.  

Network operators must understand relationships spanning physical infrastructure, virtualized services, operational systems, and the customer services they support, including:

    • Physical infrastructure
    • Fiber and transport networks
    • 5G and wireless networks
    • Virtualized network functions
    • Cloud and edge resources
    • Operational support systems (OSS)
    • Business support systems (BSS)
    • Customer services

Applying graph analytics to telecom network challenges

Graph analytics helps telecommunications organizations understand how network assets, services, customers, and operational systems interact. By applying specialized algorithms to connected data, operators can identify routes, trace dependencies, assess risk, prioritize investments, detect patterns, and predict the impact of network changes.

The following sections provide examples of graph analytics at work.

Connectivity analysis

Connectivity analysis reveals how network assets are linked and how traffic, services, or data move through the network. It helps operators validate network design, identify available routes, and understand the paths supporting critical services. It answers key questions: "What is connected?" "How are assets related?" "How does traffic flow?"

Algorithms:

  • Shortest Path
  • K-Shortest Paths
  • Reachability Analysis
  • Connected Components

Applications:

  • Route analysis
  • Service path discovery
  • Network inventory validation
  • Transport network analysis

Dependency analysis

Dependency analysis traces the relationships between physical infrastructure, virtual network functions, applications, and customer services. It allows operators to determine what relies on a particular asset and assess the broader consequences of a failure or planned change. It answers key questions: "What depends on what?" "Which services are affected?" "What is the likely source of an issue?"

Algorithms:

  • Graph Traversal
  • Dependency Propagation
  • Reachability Analysis

Applications:

  • Service assurance
  • Root cause analysis
  • Change impact assessment
  • Digital twins

Resilience analysis

Resilience analysis identifies weaknesses that could interrupt service or cause failures to spread across the network. By locating single points of failure and insufficiently redundant paths, operators can strengthen network design and improve recovery planning. It answers key questions: "What can fail?" "What lacks redundancy?"

Algorithms:

  • Articulation Point Detection
  • Bridge Detection
  • K-Connected Components
  • Disjoint Path Analysis

Applications:

  • Network hardening
  • Disaster recovery planning
  • Fiber route diversity validation
  • Infrastructure risk management

Criticality analysis

Criticality analysis identifies the assets, connections, and facilities that play the most important roles in network operations. These insights help organizations focus maintenance, security, capacity, and investment decisions on the areas with the greatest operational impact. It answers key questions: "What assets matter most?" "Which components carry the greatest operational risk?" "Where should resources be prioritized?"

Algorithms:

  • Betweenness Centrality
  • Eigenvector Centrality
  • Closeness Centrality
  • PageRank Variants

Applications:

  • Critical infrastructure identification
  • Investment prioritization
  • Security hardening
  • Capacity planning

Community and behavioral analysis

Community and behavioral analysis uncovers groups, patterns, and similarities within large volumes of network and customer data. These techniques help telecommunications organizations identify unusual activity, understand customer behavior, and recognize emerging demand. It answers key questions: "What patterns exist?" "Which entities behave similarly?"

Algorithms:

  • Community Detection
  • K-Core Analysis
  • Similarity Measures
  • Graph Clustering

Applications:

  • Customer behavior analysis
  • Mobility pattern analysis
  • Fraud detection
  • Demand forecasting
  • Service adoption analysis

Predictive and impact analysis

Predictive and impact analysis evaluates how failures, upgrades, traffic shifts, or other changes may affect the wider network. It supports proactive planning by helping operators anticipate cascading effects and compare potential operational scenarios. It answers key questions: "What happens if something changes?" "How far could an impact spread?" "Which services or customers may be affected?"

Algorithms:

  • Impact Propagation
  • Influence Analysis
  • Temporal Graph Analysis
  • Cascading Failure Modeling

Applications:

  • Outage prediction
  • Capacity planning
  • Dynamic pricing strategies
  • Infrastructure investment planning
  • Customer experience optimization

Explore telecom networks as connected systems

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Build synchronized and interactive visualizations of connected networks with Tom Sawyer Perspectives that meet the demands for managing global, multi-layer networks.

Tom Sawyer Perspectives brings physical infrastructure, logical connections, services, and customer relationships together in coordinated, interactive visualizations. Users can move between network, geographic, schematic, and tabular views while maintaining the same operational context.

Selecting an asset, service, or customer in one view highlights the related information across the others, making it easier to trace connections, investigate dependencies, and understand the broader impact of network conditions or changes. Instead of piecing together information from separate systems and reports, teams can explore the telecom environment as a connected whole.

Telecom use cases

In the following sections we highlight several key use cases where graph-based analysis and visualization is essential to network management at scale.

Tom Sawyer Perspectives allows engineers, planners, and analysts to visualize the output of these algorithms, explore affected assets and services, and validate assumptions interactively—turning graph analytics into actionable operational insight.

Network operations

Managing the day-to-day basic operations of a vast network involve visualizaing the network topology and investigating service disruptions more efficiently.

Benefits

  • Faster root cause analysis

  • Reduced mean time to repair

  • Improved network reliability

Explore this hands-on example application yourself.

An example communication management dashboard for a world-wide retail network built with Tom Sawyer Perspectives.

An example communication management dashboard for a world-wide retail network built with Tom Sawyer Perspectives.

Service assurance

A graph produced with Tom Sawyer Perspectives showing load and capacity between towers in a microwave network.

A graph produced with Tom Sawyer Perspectives showing load and capacity between towers in a microwave network.

Managing customer expectations in the face of network disruptions demands that an operator knows precisely how infrastructure issues will affect customers. Graph technology is uniquely suited to analyzing disruptions, identifying solutions for rerouting traffic, and delivering the information when and where it is needed.

Benefits

  • Faster service restoration

  • Improved SLA performance

  • Better customer experience

Explore this hands-on example application yourself.

Network planning

Long-term management involves analyzing infrastructure relationships and capacity requirements, and planning for expansion, and eventual obsolescence of parts of the network. Visualize relationships among facilities, equipment, and maintenance activities.

Benefits

  • Improved asset utilization

  • Better maintenance planning

  • Lower operational costs

  • Better network utilization

  • Improved expansion planning

  • Reduced operational risk

Explore this hands-on example application yourself.

A swimlane analysis of connected devices in a microwave transmission network arranged by antenna type and manufacturer.

A swimlane analysis of connected devices in a microwave transmission network arranged by antenna type and manufacturer.

Security and fraud analysis

An example fraud analysis application built with Tom Sawyer Perspectives that visualizes a network of suspicious activity.

An example fraud analysis application built with Tom Sawyer Perspectives that visualizes a network of suspicious activity.

Telecommunications of all kinds are increasingly used to commit fraud against individuals, corporations, and connected networks of all kinds. Graph analysis techniques can assist in the identification of suspicious activity, hidden relationships, and bad actors.

Benefits

  • Improved threat detection

  • Faster investigations

  • Improved mitigation strategies

  • Enhanced operational security

Explore this hands-on example application yourself.

Customer and subscriber behavior analysis

Using graph analytics, telecommunication providers can understand customer usage over time to identify behavioral patterns, usage communities, mobility trends, and demand drivers that influence network performance and business outcomes.

Benefits 

  • Improve network planning

  • Optimize infrastructure investments

  • Support dynamic pricing strategies

  • Increase customer retention

  • Enhance service adoption

  • Improve customer experience

  • Forecast demand more accurately

An interactive dashboard produced with Tom Sawyer Perspectives that uses color, size, and labeling to illustrate the volume of customers using cellular network services for specific purposes, and how those consumer patterns change throughout the day.

An interactive dashboard produced with Tom Sawyer Perspectives that uses color, size, and labeling to illustrate the volume of customers using cellular network services for specific purposes, and how those consumer patterns change throughout the day.

Digital twins for telecommunication

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With Tom Sawyer Perspectives you can build a graph-based digital twin that connects telecom infrastructure, services, and operational data to support analysis and informed decision-making.

A graph-based digital twin provides a comprehensive representation of telecom infrastructure, services, and operational relationships. Tom Sawyer Perspectives enables organizations to create digital twins that combine graph visualization, graph analytics, and data integration within a single environment.

By modeling the network as a connected system, organizations can visualize network architecture, analyze service dependencies, simulate infrastructure changes, assess operational impacts, and make more informed planning and investment decisions.

Why choose Tom Sawyer Software

Telecommunications organizations depend on understanding relationships across networks, services, infrastructure, and customers.

Tom Sawyer Perspectives helps telecom operators transform complex telecom data into intuitive graph visualizations and actionable insights that improve network operations, service assurance, planning, and decision-making.

 

 

  • Interactive graph visualization
  • Powerful graph analysis
  • Federated data integration
  • Enterprise scalability
  • Flexible deployment

Our telecom customers

Telecommunications companies around the world rely on Tom Sawyer Software technology to support their complex network visualization and analysis needs.

Telecom Customers

Featured partner: Trask Network Genius

Trask is a global technology company trusted by leading enterprises such as Société Générale, UniCredit Bank, KBC, Erste Bank, VW, Bentley, RWE and many others. Since 1994, it has been delivering technological innovations and large-scale transformations for leading companies in finance, insurance, telecommunications, energy, automotive and manufacturing. With 12 offices in 7 countries, Trask provides more than 150 global enterprise clients with critical managed services and innovative technology implementations.

Trask used Tom Sawyer Perspectives to develop Network Genius, a real-time network operations platform for telecommunications providers. Network Genius brings together network topology, alarms, configuration data, logs, and operational context to help operators visualize complex dependencies, identify root causes, assess service impacts, and resolve incidents more quickly.

Key benefits

  • Cross-network topology map enabling near real-time visual detection of events

  • Fast and accurate fault detection with root cause analysis and remediation recommendation

  • Network failure prediction and predictive maintenance powered by AI

  • Industry agnostic AIOps

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Transform telecom data into operational insight

Contact us for a live demo, to talk about your network management project, or to start your free trial of Tom Sawyer Perspectives application development software.