Ray Bariso, Executive Director, Solution Strategy & Business Development, Telcordia

Which is more critical to the success of a mobile communications service provider (CSP), maps or apps?  The answer is of course “both,” but neither is easy to provide.

Both coverage and capacity for 3G and 4G services are crucial to every wireless CSP’s success, and tremendous multi-billion dollar investments continue to be made in this area.  In the past, rapid subscriber growth has been sufficient to maintain earnings.  However, with mobile broadband capacity demands, costs increasing exponentially and overall ARPU leveling off, wireless CSPs must now drive profitability by fostering increased use of value-added services and by addressing operational efficiency.  To make matters more challenging, all of this must be done in an environment where competition and churn mean that customers demand an outstanding experience.

The Map to Nowhere

A beautiful coverage map with lots of color is a great marketing tool and it’s a good start in terms of letting your customers know that you are investing in wireless data capacity.  As customers hunger for more and more wireless data, some pundits expect the wireless Internet to rival the importance of the “regular” Internet in the next few years.  To promote this, CSPs have devoted significant resources to deploying 3G equipment in numerous locations, and to marketing impressive 3G handsets.  Now most CSPs have put in place 4G evolution plans and begun lab trial testing as well.

But a slick handset talking to a conveniently located cell tower is just the beginning of the story.  In order to provide the mobile broadband data services that customers expect, all that wireless data has to move from the cell tower to the CSP’s core network and through to the Internet backbone.  Thus, wireless backhaul capacity coupled with the transition from TDM to Ethernet backhaul technology represent a bottleneck for continued growth in mobile data.  In order for the map to go somewhere, the CSP’s backhaul capacity has to be sufficiently sized, reliable, and correctly located.  Of course, investment in the backhaul network must meet the same standards for efficient utilization of capital as any other network deployment.  Yet backhaul, perhaps because it is a wireline network asset, has historically been managed reactively by most wireless CSPs operations.  Typically additional backhaul capacity is urgently requested by engineering, and thus, the CSP is paying top dollar each time for additional services they actually needed “yesterday”.   Instead, wireless CSPs should adopt proactive capacity planning and engineering in order to leverage “just-in-time” provisioning and to capture economies of scale through more favorable lease pricing.

The ideal solution for the wireless CSP can and should be borrowed from their wireline counterparts.  It includes network planning and engineering expertise, business process optimization experience, and sophisticated engineering and inventory management tools to efficiently plan, design, build, and provision the backhaul network for wireless traffic. 

This is a very real scenario for many wireless CSPs around the world. For one of the largest Tier 1 wireless CSPs in North America in particular, successful marketing campaign execution resulted in a significant increase in demand for mobile broadband services, and network capacity expansion had to be addressed.  Telcordia was called on to develop the complete Ethernet backhaul planning, engineering and implementation plan, complete with detailed site by site plans for each cell site. Telcordia helped define standards for carrier grade Ethernet, especially in the areas of Operations, Administration and Maintenance standards in the Metro Ethernet Forum, and provided the Ethernet Backhaul Inventory and Commissioning solution for them.

Where’s My App?

While a solitaire game might be an app that runs only on the end-user device, most revenue will be derived from the thousands of apps that interact with something: with other users, or with data or media found on remote application servers.  Without a clear, functioning path from the device, across the network, and to the application servers involved, the app won’t work, and the customer won’t pay (and may not stay).

The old model of monitoring and managing network elements in silos by technology or vendor for fault and performance issues is no longer sufficient.  With today’s intricate network and service architectures, it’s not unusual for each component to appear that it is functioning normally even though your customer knows the service or app does not work well, or at all.  The cause is often subtle errors – such as protocol mismatches – between devices, networks and/or servers that cause them to fail to work together despite each indicating a “green” status.  When you add in the capacity stresses from ever increasing wireless data traffic, the customer experience can easily be compromised.

The solution here calls for proactive and holistic service management that can rapidly identify service quality and performance issues at the service and individual customer level in addition to the network level.  Armed with this information, CSPs can respond quickly to preserve SLA performance, proactively communicate with customers, prioritize trouble response on the highest value users, and also define new areas of revenue generation.  In addition, these operational insights can be used to systemically solve and prevent future degradations.  Furthermore, CSPs can even feed this information back into marketing and product development to guide future investments, promotions and so on.

For instance, a large, multi-country Tier 1 mobile CSP in Latin America is working hard to gain market share by differentiating on service quality and customer experience.  They called on Telcordia initially to solve a specific problem with their pre-paid service.  They now use the Telcordia solution to broadly enhance the customer experience proactively, reduce troubles, and even generate additional revenue across multiple services including VoIP, SMS, MMS, Pre-paid and mobile data in 5 countries, monitoring more than 50,000 network, IT and device transaction components.

Wireless CSPs face even greater customer experience challenges for their mobile broadband users.  This segment is quickly growing, and high-value wireless modem users demand excellent, reliable service.  This service in some respects resembles more closely the residential broadband market, and Wireless CSPs can look to that domain for lessons learned.  For instance, CPE-based solutions for mobile computing (e.g., laptops and netbooks) are now available to monitor, manage and automatically resolve troubles quickly for wireless broadband connections, based on similar home network solutions.

By closely monitoring and managing the performance of wireless data services, and likewise by efficiently deploying the required backhaul capacity, wireless CSPs can offer both maps and apps to attract and retain high value customers in the rapidly changing and competitive wireless Internet.

For more information, please contact Ray Bariso, Solution Strategy & Business Development, Telcordia, at gbariso@telcordia.com or visit our website.  For more perspectives on Wireless Operations, be sure to download the following white papers:

Preventing a Growing Mobile Network from Becoming a CAPEX/OPEX Drain

Mobile Service Management: One of Today's Greatest Business Opportunities

Customer Experience Management Requires a New "Device Perspective"