Mobile telecoms has become a ferociously competitive business. To maintain revenue growth, operators need to be able to offer their customers new services to extend their revenue streams, stimulate subscriber spend and ultimately boost profitability – all against a background of shrinking profit margins on the core service, voice. To combat this, service providers also need to slash their operational and capital expenditure (OPEX/CAPEX).
In the near future, consumers will want to watch TV remotely, through a smart device they carry with them. They will want to discover and share all types of content, including music, video, instant messaging (IM), email, MMS, SMS, chat and so on. Location-based services (LBS), gaming and interactive TV will become commonplace. Take-up of these services will largely be dictated by price, although cultural and social change will also play a big role.
Access is the key
Previously service providers rolled out services by deploying dedicated infrastructure, back-offices and network management, which meant deployment was expensive and time-consuming. Most importantly, though, the difficulty of integrating all these disparate systems made offering converged services impractical, both technically and commercially.
Now mobile service providers need to leverage all types of access technology – fixed, mobile and wireless – to provide true mobility. Services need to be available across fixed and mobile infrastructures to deliver fixed/mobile convergence (FMC) services, but with the complexity of integrating the back-office systems (from ordering to provisioning, billing and aftercare) hidden behind a user-friendly, seamless interface. Put another way, to provide apersonalised customer experience that encourages spend and loyalty.
The move to IP
IP backbones are gradually replacing legacy, circuit-switched infrastructure. Carriers must optimise and consolidate their biggest asset, their infrastructure, while ensuring Quality of Service (QoS) needs are met by the common, IP, service-agnostic architecture. This is where Next Generation Networks (NGNs) come in. They are designed to deliver the appropriate QoS across backbone networks running IP, for example, to ensure there is no delay to timesensitive traffic such as voice.
The European Telecommunications Standards Institute TISPAN group has worked with the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU Study Group 13), among others, to develop standards for the migration of circuit-switched networks to packet-based infrastructure, through NGNs that apply to the fixed and mobile sectors, including FMC.
Golden opportunity
All of which gives operators a golden opportunity to rethink both their marketing and network strategies. Mason Communications is working with a number of carriers, advising them on how they can best exploit NGN technology in a complex and fast-moving market.
Most mobile operators have now deployed 3G technology to complement their 2G infrastructure. Through the Bearer Independent Core Network (BCIN), specified in Release 4 of the 3GPP standard, operators can connect 2G and 3G access networks to a single core infrastructure, hence BCIN helps reduce OPEX/CAPEX in the long run.
In the short term though, it could put services at risk because having a single core for both access networks reduces resilience: potentially all customers could be affected by core problems.
Option 1
Some markets are more sensitive to service quality than others. In those that are sensitive, prolonged service outages could result in churn. In such circumstances, network resilience is key and integration plans should be designed to minimise service quality risks.
Mason recommended this integration plan to one such customer:
- implement an independent 3G (3GGP Release 4) core network, ensuring that all elements were 2G compatible to remove any risk to 2G services;
- test and operate the 3G network until it is stable;
- upgrade the 2G circuit-switched core network by implementing BCIN Release 4, which primarily involves upgrading the mobile switching centre (MSC) software to an MSC call server and installing a new media gateway;
- upgrade the 2G packet-switched network to become 3G compatible, which is usually achieved through a software upgrade;
- implement a geographical diversity strategy by connecting the 2G and 3G access networks to more than one media gateway;
- pool home location register (HLR), serving GPRS support node (SGSNs) and MSC servers;
- interconnect the two networks to form a resilient infrastructure.
Option 2
Some service providers are more concerned about cost than resilience. In which case, a converged 2G/3G core network is more suitable. It involves upgrading the core 2G network to make it 2G/3G compliant and connecting the 3G network to it directly.
This is much less resilient as it doesn’t include new core equipment in pools, but it enables the operator to make significant savings in OPEX and CAPEX.
Mason ensures that its recommendations on technology strategy and network design meet customers’ business objectives. Whatever the case, the migration strategy needs to be planned carefully so that customers don’t suffer a degradation of legacy services and switch supplier.
How successful mobile operators will be largely depends on their ability to adapt to new market conditions and how well they exploit the technology they have as well as new investments.
