Ved Antani, MD India & SVP Engineering, New Relic

Ved Antani is a seasoned technology leader with over 15 years of experience in building scalable platforms for CPaaS, eCommerce, gaming, and enterprise solutions. He currently serves as SVP Engineering and MD, India at New Relic. Previously, Ved Antani  held senior leadership roles at Twilio SendGrid, JioCinema, and Myntra, driving product engineering, business growth, and large-scale operations. He also leads the Bengaluru site, overseeing global teams and strategy.

In this article, Ved Antani highlights the critical role of intelligent observability and agentic AI in helping India’s telecom providers predict, prevent, and swiftly address network outages to ensure seamless connectivity and maintain customer trust.

It’s happened to all of us. One minute you’re glued to your screen, scrolling videos on social media or video calling a loved one, the next, videos take forever to load and calls drop. At a time when mobile phones are practically an extension of ourselves, mobile outages are far more than a minor inconvenience. They throw a wrench into our daily lives, disrupting work, education, and essential communication. 

This has been a pervasive challenge telecom operators have battled for far too long. In fact, telecom organisations experienced high-business-impact outages at a higher frequency than other business types, with 37% reporting these outages at least once a week compared to the average of 32%. These outages come with a hefty price tag too. The 2025 Observability Forecast for Asia Pacific found high-impact outages carry a median annual cost of $76 million USD per year for Indian organisations. The stakes are far too high to ignore.

Intelligent observability doesn’t just report issues, it predicts them before they impact users.

 

A Perfect Storm

India’s telecom providers are navigating a complex landscape. With a population of 1.4 billion people and skyrocketing smartphone and internet adoption, network traffic volumes have never been greater. The ambitious leap to 5G and the adoption of hybrid cloud infrastructures have heightened the risk of technical glitches. Imagine trying to monitor millions of endpoints spread across sprawling urban centers and remote rural areas the challenge is profound.

Perhaps the most unique challenge is Indian customers’ unwavering reliance on mobile services around the clock. For millions, mobile phones aren't just for socialising; they're an essential service for work and education. This dependence translates into a very low tolerance for downtime and latency. Outages don't just cause inconvenience; they ignite an immediate firestorm of complaints online and erode trust and revenue.

Also Read: The Art of Scaling Technology through Product Innovation

The Telecom Industry’s New Best Friend

When users are left high and dry, they are likely to jump ship to a competitor. This is where intelligent observability, strengthened by agentic AI, can provide benefit. Traditional monitoring often acts as a passive sentry, tracking predefined metrics in isolated silos. It’s like having multiple guards watching different parts of a vast estate who don’t share their logbooks with each other, making it harder to piece together the full picture during a crisis.

Intelligent observability doesn’t just report issues, it predicts them before they impact users. It can also automate solutions, enabling a shift from reactive problem-solving to predictive optimisation, and even auto-remediation. Here’s how it can help mobile service providers:

A single source of truth: Telecom networks are vast and complex, encompassing millions of mobile endpoints, diverse technologies, and hybrid cloud infrastructures. Traditional, siloed monitoring tools create blind spots, making it incredibly difficult to identify the interconnected issues that lead to an outage.

Intelligent observability unifies all telemetry data, ingesting, storing, and correlating it in context. This provides a single, comprehensive view of the entire network. By consolidating data from every corner, it allows operators to spot subtle anomalies or cascading failures across different layers before they escalate into widespread outages.

Predicting and preempting network disruptions: Intelligent observability leverages the power of generative and agentic AI to transform a deluge of raw telemetry into plain language insights and actionable outcomes. It analyses massive quantities of data, identifying subtle patterns and predicting potential failures before they manifest as outages.

For instance, AI algorithms can foresee traffic bottlenecks, anticipate hardware degradation, or detect unusual data patterns that might indicate an impending service disruption. This predictive capability allows telecom providers to schedule proactive maintenance or automatically re-route traffic to prevent an impending outage, moving beyond reactive firefighting to fixing things before they break.

Agentic automation for an integrated ecosystem: The true power of agentic AI lies in its ability to act autonomously. Intelligent observability integrates seamlessly with existing operational workflows, allowing AI agents to trigger automated remediation actions. Imagine a scenario where a specific cell tower starts showing signs of degradation.

Instead of waiting for a human operator to intervene, agentic AI can automatically reconfigure network paths, restart services, or even dispatch repair orders, all without human intervention. This capability is crucial for mitigating issues like call drops or no-signal zones before they become widespread, preventing minor glitches from snowballing into nationwide outages. This enables networks to become 'self-healing', minimising the duration and impact of any disruption.

Looking Ahead

Constant outages are unacceptable for Indian customers, whose reliance on mobile services is profound. To India telecom giants, intelligent observability is not a nice-to-have, but a survival necessity. It is the strategic investment needed to maintain continuous connectivity, recreate and maintain customer loyalty and eventually, protect the revenues in a highly competitive market by creating resolute and self optimising networks.

It is time to have a more intelligent, deeper observability, one that is proactive in combating outages and is what is required to ensure future reliability and trust.