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. And it’s all forcing operators to make new investments in the back office as their business models fundamentally change. Having the right price and device just isn’t enough.
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.
Shifting Competitive Sands
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.”
In many segments, such as wireless, there are literally no new customers, so carriers have to take them from others. “Meanwhile they need to hang on to the customers they have and increase revenue with new services, all against a backdrop of rapidly commoditizing basic wireless voice, 3G access, DSL, and things like that,” he noted.
To boot, in many markets the entrance of the cable companies as fully fledged telecom providers has taken everyone by surprise; clearly in the United States this has been a phenomenon for a long time, but IBM’s Moynihan says cableco presence elsewhere is growing too.
