This is where my conference story gets interesting. That Verizon engineer explained how they actually made their 5G rollout work, and it wasn’t what anyone expected.
Automation Everywhere Instead of sending technicians to manually configure each cell site (imagine doing that thousands of times without making mistakes), they automated everything. One person with a laptop can now configure hundreds of sites in the time it used to take to configure one.
The engineer showed us a script that automatically provisions new cell sites, configures the network settings, runs tests, and even schedules maintenance. It runs 24/7, never gets tired, and never makes typos.
Testing Everything Before It Goes Live They built CI/CD pipelines that test every network update in a simulated environment before it touches the real network. No more “let’s try this and see what happens” – everything gets tested thoroughly first.
A friend who works there told me they catch about 80% of potential issues before they reach customers. That’s the difference between a network that works and one that doesn’t.
Teams That Actually Work Together This might sound boring, but it’s revolutionary. Network engineers, software developers, and operations teams actually collaborate instead of fighting each other. They sit in the same rooms, work on the same projects, share the same goals.
The engineer told a story about how they discovered a configuration issue that would have taken weeks to fix using traditional methods. But because all the teams were working together, they identified the problem, developed a solution, and deployed the fix in two days.
Monitoring That Prevents Problems Traditional network monitoring is reactive – it tells you about problems after they happen. DevOps monitoring is predictive – it notices when things are heading toward problems and fixes them automatically.
They showed us dashboards that track thousands of metrics in real-time. Latency creeping up in one area? The system automatically redistributes traffic. Security threat detected? Automated response kicks in immediately.