Preparing the Back Office for 4G

“Device management is just one element of a capability set providers should consider as they look to address the challenge of the rising cost of customer support,” Geller said. Besides, he said, the OMA-DM standard is not as advanced in terms of capability and adoption as the TR-069 standards is on the landline side of the house.

Geller said that soon operators will need to stop thinking about the service in the context of the device and instead start thinking about the service in the context of the service itself. That is because if true convergence is realized in a 4G world, then the service, or application, may be required to work across devices.

No 4G Without 4G OSS

Long term evolution (LTE) wireless network technology and its all-IP paradigm presents both network deployment challenges and revenue opportunities, but as Leonard Sheahan, product marketing and senior director at Oracle said, “To operationalize LTE services you have to have the complete OSS stack working for it.”

You also have to avoid creating new silos as you deploy either an overlay or integrated inlay architecture. It’s hard to migrate customers from one silo to another. It’s also hard to continue supporting higher bandwidth services on an existing core infrastructure. That’s why Sheahan said optimization is a key area of focus for Oracle and its customers.

“We see a lot of CTOs at mobile operators getting concerned about the capacity requirements of LTE,” he said, giving the throat-constricting statistic that an increase of 10 percent in revenue requires about a thousand-fold increase in bandwidth. “From a core network perspective, capacity engineering becomes a major problem. Forecasting bandwidth requirements becomes more important for operators who historically have been able to do it statically.”

On top of this bandwidth, operators will need to finally enable quality-of-service policies. But questions remain about how to apply those policies.

After careful planning and capacity management practices have led to a flawless installation, the next step is migrating customers. This is not a new challenge to mobile operators that have taken their customers through several generations and an analog-to-digital conversion already. However, it will still be a challenge, Sheahan said.

Here’s why: Because business is so good, bandwidth requirements for existing users continues to grow. Therefore, CTOs who are under mandates to reduce costs are busy trying to figure out how to do that while managing growth on their current infrastructure; they don’t have the luxury of capping that growth to grow new capacity on an LTE network.

“They are finding themselves reactively spending more on the existing network, which is distracting them from their ability to invest in next generation infrastructure,” Sheahan said. In fact, Analysys Mason said operators already plan to spend five to seven times more on mobile backhaul capacity over the next five years. And they’re going to need it if Cisco Systems’ projection of global mobile traffic increasing 66 times between 2008 and 2013 holds true.