Preparing the Back Office for 4G

Sheahan added that Oracle is involved in five or six network planning and optimization engagements and used its Oracle Communications Network Intelligence planning and optimization solution to help operators maximize their current infrastructure. “You have to be pragmatic and avoid spending today what you should be spending on tomorrow,” he said.

It’s the Service, Not the Smartphone

While operators figure out how to spend for tomorrow on their network infrastructure, there’s no reason they can’t spend for today when it comes to software, said Krishnan Padmanabhan, director and principal consultant of Telcordia Consulting Services.

“To a large extent, the problems that need to be solved for 4G are present in 3G already. There’s no need to wait for these problems to be solved; they need to be solved now,” Padmanabhan said.

He agrees that initially, the smartphone will drive a lot of the BSS/OSS requirements in 4G because the device is so intricately involved in the user experience and tied to the application. He also agrees that bandwidth management will be (and is) an important function in the 4G network, especially in the last mile of the radio access network. But that’s only for starters.

Ultimately, Padmanabhan said, smartphones are only as good as the service being offered over them. And as it is with the iPhone, those services will be removed from the network in the way they are offered. However, the services themselves will be more network based.

“So managing those services and the network will be much more intertwined,” Padmanabhan said.

He sees the need for bringing the service management and service delivery frameworks closer together. One reason for this is because already much of the customer care around smartphones has to do with provisioning and activating services. Add the need for supporting different levels of quality and demonstrating that quality, as well as the need to support customer profiles across services and devices, and you have the need for a single platform of enablers, Padmanabhan said.

“When you are talking about money-making services over broadband, quality is as much a core element as the service itself. That’s particularly true in 3G AND 4G,” Padmanabhan said. He added that the same philosophy that holds true for services — that silos are evil — holds for service management. “It is highly inefficient to construct different service management silos,” he said.

There also will be a need to provide solutions around managing profiles across services as the idea that the mobile device will be the only entry a user has into a service disappears. Service providers need to know not only who their customers are but where they are and what device they are currently using and what their preferences are when using certain devices.

Some of that profile and location data presents its own challenges. And perhaps the biggest is how to open them and other network services to third parties. “They have to be sufficiently powerful to expose the functionality and enablers you want to be exposed while not making it cumbersome for developers nor exposing too much of the network,” Padmanabhan said.