Smart, fast and cheap: This is the profile of the future network, especially when it comes to mobility, be it HSPA, WiMAX or LTE, with 100G in the core soon to become reality. The availability of ultra-broadband is ushering in an era of hyper-competition and more stakeholders (app developers, anyone?) than ever before.
Much of the action is centering on mobility. Millions of smartphones shipped last year, along with mobile-embedded e-readers, GPS, portable devices. And there is certainly a shift to the personal cloud and anywhere-access to content across devices. Service providers want to offer this type of capability as a service via a digital locker.
And so, DPI, service management and network visibility regardless of access type is the “smarter,” enabling operators to understand the content flowing through the pipes and enable policies based on that. The “faster” is 4G and HSPA+, which expand spectral efficiency, and fiber and DOCSIS 3.0. And the “cheaper” is femtocells and picocells, blade architecture and modular OSS to enable capacity expansion a more efficient way.
As the network layer evolves, so does the OSS needed to manage it. That becomes particularly true as the arrival of an ultra-capacitive network also means dealing with incredible competition from over-the-top players and rivals with full stables of innovative and third-party services.
“When we sit down with CTOs, the first and biggest challenge or concern is the fact that the competition has intensified to an unprecedented level — and that’s across wireless, fixed broadband, fiber, cable, IPTV and all the new services like VoIP and video over IP,” said Kieran Moynihan, vice president and CTO of telecoms, Tivoli Software division at IBM. “The sheer level of options, particularly in the more mature markets like South Korea, Singapore, Australia, the United States and Europe, is really driving significant challenges within operators’ own businesses.”
The ongoing battle over television revenue and video on demand content is playing to the strengths of existing cable and satellite companies. And so by extension, operators are placing more focus around control of the home based on the amount of bandwidth they can push to it.
“People want to establish a gateway into the home to offer a lot of services and to be the focal point of the smart home of the future,” said Moynihan. “Imagine a world where your fridge and smart energy appliances all connect to a gateway/hub. That makes for interesting battlegrounds.”
On the enterprise side, there continues to be a significant convergence of UC, VoIP, cloud services and managed services. “The telecom service providers looking at the cloud model over the last 12 to 18 months and they realize they have a critical asset in the customer base,” Moynihan said. “AT&T and Verizon are getting into the cloud service provider business as a value-added extension to current portfolio. Smarter telcos are spotting the opportunity in bringing it all together: broadband, VoIP, wireless, the cloud, unified communications. It represents the best way to secure the customer, develop new revenue streams through the provision of these cloud services.”
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