Manuela Montagna is a dynamic and forward-thinking business leader, renowned for her innovative approach to digital transformation and data governance. With a proven track record of driving growth and efficiency, Manuela has successfully led numerous high-impact projects that have reshaped the digital landscape of her industry. Her expertise in leveraging cutting-edge technologies and her unwavering commitment to excellence have established her as a respected figure in the business world. Manuela’s vision and leadership continue to inspire her team and set new benchmarks for success in the ever-evolving digital business environment. Notably, she served as a judge for the inaugural and second editions of the Antonio Meucci Telco Awards (2023 and 2024) and was also a judge for the Genesis Lions’ Den in 2024.
The Journey
With over 30 years of experience in the Telco industry, Manuela has always been passionate about the technical side of mobile network implementation. She stepped into the telco industry from the university and just applied for a job that sounded interesting even though she knew close to nothing about it. She spent a few good years working at the core network vendor side and in R&D departments. In those years 2G was starting to be deployed, so Manuela became familiar with technical specifications (by ETSI at that time) and was able to provide implementation guidelines.
Math’s, R&D and vendor experience have been the key pillars of her professional journey and the foundation for building her growth in the telco industry. Later in her career, she took a big step forward when she moved to the operator side and then joined CKH Innovations Opportunities Development (CKH IOD).
Working for mobile operators, especially in the technical department gave Manuela the opportunity to develop a new perspective in approaching new challenges and her background facilitated reaching objectives.
“Those were the years when I developed a passion for providing technical guidelines.
Working in an international environment and a mixed cultural and background team became a way of work that even increased my passion. More recent years in CKH IOD, as a member of the International Carrier Service departments (ICS), are the years when I have been able to express myself in a more complete way, where my background showed his value and it was crucial in bringing me to the professional level I am in now,” she shares.
A Role Full of Opportunities
In her role of Quality of Service (QoS) and Customer Experience Manager, Manuela is responsible for providing competitive QoS level of Outbound and Inbound international Roaming of Operating Companies. The role evolved over time. First, a new mindset was necessary to approach roaming QoS in a holistic view. To do that she set up a new framework that included processes and tools engaging all Opcos. The main purpose was to best share experience, knowledge, and support and to coordinate a QoS “Virtual” Team that focuses on Quality of Services results. QoS Virtual Team is made of references within each Opcos organisation: every single member belongs to his local organization & all members work together in analysing the quality of services monitoring results, support each other in troubleshooting and sharing best practices. The team is using a single system to measure roaming quality and has access to each other measurement details to facilitate cooperation and best sharing. All of the above was the foundation of the role, then QoS monitoring became BAU activity and QoS became a familiar topic at various management levels in the company.
But QoS is a technical topic. To be recognized for its value it must be communicated in an agile and “easy to sell” way, and Manuela thought that what is provided by the industry specialized in the matter, although fundamental, is not good enough to meet that scope. She then took a step forward and implemented a new concept for measuring the Quality of Services: a Single Quality Indicator (SQI) provides a single number to measure quality, aggregating a single number to measure services, for each technology and from each type of traffic (i.e. live traffic, test traffic, network related traffic, device-related traffic).
SQI has a layered structure to deep dive into, from the top level which is the single number down to the bottom level which is the single KPI. The new SQI concept was awarded among “THE MNO INNOVATORS 2021” (Rocco Award) where CKH IOD received third place as MNO INNOVATOR. Manuela was awarded among ROCCO100’s “Top 10 Most Influential People in Roaming and Interconnect 2022”. CKH IOD QoS monitoring solution set CKH IOD among the front runners and models in the QoS space. In more recent years Manuela engaged with the industry and supported the implementation of new guidelines (GSMA) QoS related by chairing a few working groups.
Overcoming Challenges and Emerging a Leader
Manuela had to overcome prejudices, for being a woman working in a technical environment that for too long was considered almost off-limits to women. She was too young, not prepared to react and not able to stand up and stick to her point. It was a long time ago and this industry has come a long way. Unfortunately, one cannot avoid such an attitude to show up, and when it happened again later in the years, she was strong enough to confront it and stop it.
“The only strength to help in such circumstances is the confidence in yourself, and confidence can only come with awareness of one’s abilities. If you are confident in yourself, you cannot go wrong. I am proud to work now in a company where such attitude is unknown,” she says.
As a leader, Manuela has a lot of experience in managing big teams. That experience gave her the opportunity to work closely with different personalities and attitudes and to learn how to adapt her leadership skills according to circumstances.
In CKH IOD she is coordinating a team that she does not manage since each team member belongs to his own organisation: respect, open mind, a sharing approach, welcome every single member’s contribution to global performances facilitated the creation of a strong team that grown in confidence and became more and more autonomous in QoS monitoring performances.
In a different environment (GSMA working groups) Manuela is leading working teams where members come from mobile operators, vendors, and highly knowledgeable profiles with various levels of seniority. She coordinates the teams bearing in mind that each member’s contribution is fundamental to achieving the objectives. She must be humble enough to acknowledge that she does not necessarily need to have all the right expertise(!), while the team does! She has to guarantee that every single contribution is welcome and makes the team achieve its objectives.
“In a more broad sense, my leadership in the QoS space as one of the front runners in the matter has been recognized by the industry. That gives me the opportunity to support with more strength ICS projects,” says Manuela.
The Company
CKH IOD adds value and efficiency that OpCo’s can’t create on their own. It was created in 2017 with the agility, fast pace and high energy of a start-up and backed by the stability and security of a big corporation. Various departments in CKH IOD contribute to the objective:
- Enterprise Services, working with the customers helping them to boost efficiency and drive growth through better connectivity, mobility, communications and collaboration.
- MVNO & IoT, to access to a world-class global network and the core systems that will transform how the customers offer their services.
- Digital Products, building the best digital services portfolio to be able to support current and future consumer needs.
- CK Delta, innovating with data to deliver transformational business performance and creating measurable and impactful solutions through data-led design.
- Group Technology, developing and supporting CKH IOD solutions.
- International Carrier Services, Single point of contact for negotiating wholesale roaming and carrier services with CK Hutchison’s mobile networks.
Key Factors Driving QoS
Quality of Service (QoS) in telecommunication was considered for too long as to be provided only in “best effort”. It is only during the last few years that the industry realized that it has to be provided with the support of proper framework, processes and tools and therefore no more as best effort but as regular activity.
Manuela shares that the major key factor to drive QoS is to realize that it does not come guaranteed! It could sound like an obvious sentence, but it is not: it was the underlying approach of a “best effort” mode. Quality of Service needs to be measured, and to be measured it needs to be monitored, and to be monitored it needs to have the right framework in place. That is why “QoS” on its own could be too vague, while QoS monitoring conjugates better what quality of service is about.
Telecommunication services can degrade in quality since telco networks can be affected by faults and faults may have an impact on services. Depending on the type of faults, the service offered to customers can have a minor impact that can be unnoticed or a major impact that can prevent the service from being used.
Without a proper framework in place, in best-effort mode, mobile operators can only react to a service degradation that has affected end customers. There is a way to detect service degradation in time, so as to avoid the end customer having to suffer to use a service. Technology is there to support; implementation guidelines are there to support (by GSMA) and quality of service monitoring is the answer. With new technologies, especially with 5G SA in the international roaming environment, QoS monitoring plays a crucial role, from core network implementation to roaming agreement negotiation.
Ensuring a High-quality Customer Experience
CKH IOD puts in place a QoS monitoring framework that allows them to measure the quality of roaming services that their customer get when roaming abroad, as well as to measure the quality of services that they offer to customers roaming into their networks.
They measure all service-type quality in a proactive way. They try to detect quality issues in advance, prior to the customer experiencing the fault. The best example of their proactive approach benefit was monitoring during the pandemic: without roaming traffic, they generated test traffic to measure the quality of services and were able to spot and fix quality issues.
In the unfortunate events of faults affecting customer experience, with the right process in place, CKH IOD’s QoS Virtual team can take action quickly, replicate in a test environment the fault and fix it, and then double-check on live traffic. The process is circular until the issue is finally resolved.
CKH IOD measures services on all different technologies, including the latest one which is 5G (NSA). They apply technical guidelines (by GSMA) with Manuela being active in the QoS monitoring guidelines area and the chair of the working team that is delivering guidelines to cover the 5G environment. They will be ready to measure the quality of 5G SA as soon as technical guidelines for 5G SA are released.
Working in an international roaming environment CKH IOD liaises with roaming partners to ensure high quality experience. They also benchmark QoS per country. On their roaming inbound, they support RP complaints troubleshooting. They reassure RP’s concerns about quality by adapting their QoS model to the partner’s needs. They also provide QoS monitoring for partners roaming into their networks and on their roaming outbound they provide QoS assessment to RP’s.
Innovation for Enhanced Quality
CKH IOD supported Manuela with no hesitation when she first came up with the idea of the Single Quality Number, and that was not obvious, since she was deconstructing a concept that was used for years. That was the turning point in embracing innovative practices to enhance service quality.
CKH IOD QoS model started to be exposed to the industry and it became one of the models to inspire others. The whole team she is working with (ICS) is supporting her. It is feeding her with inputs and innovative proposals that are integrated into their QoS model to adapt to new needs, with a common purpose to ensure a competitive level of QoS for outbound and inbound roaming.
CKH IOD recently submitted a QoS Initiative proposal to the industry (IO) to highlight the benefit of QoS monitoring and to stimulate the discussion around the reasons why mobile operators are not up to speed yet with a proper QoS model. They have had a model in place for a few years, they can understand objections and constraints that operators might raise, and they can support the discussion in identifying and overcoming showstoppers. Manuela and the team identified major questions to be asked to mobile operators to identify obstacles for setting up QoS monitoring and a survey has started.
Trends in Customer Experience Management
Manuela believes that customer experience management needs to adapt to a variety of customers expecting exciting experiences. Customer demand has changed, voice data and SMS which have been driving customer experience until now, are now overtaken by what customers expect to get. She also refers to the experiences offered by new technologies.
“New terminologies like Augmented Reality, Self-driving car, Smart Home, and Smart City, are familiar to customers in these days, not to mention Gigabyte per second’s power! Customers demand those types of experiences! It is our responsibility to meet customer experience but also to be realistic and offer an experience that is manageable, and not all the above are at this point in time. The whole industry is working to implement all new futuristic scenarios, but we all know that the future needs time to become a reality,” says Manuela.
Her excitement is to keep up as fast as possible with new scenarios, and to be ready as quickly as possible to measure the quality of new scenario services! The QoS model that CKH IOD has in place is already considering customer experience when measuring quality, where customer experience is a subjective experience while network performance is by definition an objective measurement. The next ambitious step will be to incorporate in QoS Model 5G new customer experiences.
Focusing on the Goals
In the international roaming space, Manuela shares that the main goal is to be ready to use new technologies and to implement new use case scenarios. Quality of roaming services cannot be statically provided since roaming services are evolving. QoS they are used to knowing is becoming obsolete: the new objective is to evolve QoS so as to incorporate the newest technology which is 5G SA.
In 5G SA QoS has a fundamental role, since 5G core network implementation is based on a QoS model, whose core is QoS flow. 5G services QoS monitoring is based on the QoS model, whose core is network performance and customer experience. The ambition is to combine those 2 models, so as to have a comprehensive QoS monitoring capability and the work has already started.
“Another big goal is to be ready when the time will come that a Roaming Service Level Agreement will be required, and for 5G SA, it won’t be an option any longer. QoS control is a fundamental procedure in 5G: in a roaming relationship scenario, both network parties must be able to ensure that the QoS parameters of roamers are within the limits of the roaming agreement. The only way to ensure that, is to have in place the right QoS monitoring framework and the work has started,” concludes Manuela.
