The UK’s National Telecom Regulator Cut Analytics Costs by 50% and Achieved Real-Time Insights Using Azure Databricks Platform
Overview
The client is the UK’s national telecom regulator, responsible for overseeing and improving services across broadband, telecom, TV, radio, and postal sectors. As an independent public body, it promotes competition, safeguards public interests, and drives digital innovation. Managing access to the radio spectrum, enforcing content standards, and protecting consumers from harmful practices, the regulator plays a vital role in shaping the UK’s digital infrastructure - ensuring reliable, secure, and future-ready communication services for over 60 million citizens.
The regulator’s analytics platform faced mounting operational inefficiencies and could not keep pace with the demands of real-time decision-making. Key challenges included:
High operational costs from legacy licensing and manual data processing
Slow data ingestion for multi-terabyte mobile and broadband datasets from third-party providers
Limited scalability, restricting modernization and predictive analytics capabilities
Reliance on sampled datasets, reducing accuracy for policy and performance insights
Manual CI/CD processes are causing deployment delays and higher downtime
Solution
We deployed a scalable Azure Data Lake integrated with Databricks to enable real-time analytics, predictive modelling, and data-driven regulatory decision-making.
Solution highlights:
Replaced Alteryx with Azure Data Factory and PostgreSQL, cutting costs and improving process efficiency
Ingested and processed multi-terabyte datasets weekly from multiple mobile and broadband providers
Analyzed 3B+ data points from 150,000 mobile devices for predictive and performance analytics
Automated CI/CD pipelines via Azure DevOps, reducing manual effort and deployment delays
Leveraged Coforge accelerators for automated data standardization, cleansing, and validation
Enhanced governance and compliance using Microsoft Purview for complete metadata and lineage tracking
The Impact
50% cost reduction through optimized cloud infrastructure and license elimination
3x faster deployments with automation-led CI/CD processes
60% improvement in business continuity via proactive monitoring and self-healing pipelines
Improved call drop prediction accuracy for enhanced consumer experience
Delivered granular, multi-dimensional service performance assessments for better policy formulation
