Last week, we discussed why scalability is crucial to building out the New Diameter Network. Today, we’ll examine the role of reliability.

Mobile data is the greatest opportunity that service providers have ever seen. Mobile data revenues are expected to reach $1.2 trillion by 2020 – a seven fold increase over 2011, according to the GSMA. This growth in data is being driven by mobile application store revenues which are increasing from $1 billion to more than $25 billion and enterprise cloud services, which are growing from $ 5 billion to more than $20 billion over the same period (Yankee Group).  It is also being impacted by the rapid growth in connected mobile devices including smartphones, tablets, smart meters, traffic cameras and many others, which is doubling from $6 billion today to $12 billion by 2020 (GSMA).

With this plethora of connected devices and data usage, always-on, reliability is key for global service providers to establish strong customer relationships. However, enabling and maintaining that level of reliability in IP networks is complex. Data and signaling loads are unpredictable – as recent outages have shown. A single event, such as the World Cup, or even a new iconic devic,e such as the third-generation iPad with LTE, can create a sudden, huge spike in traffic. And, when M2M devices begin to dominate the network, billions of new connections will create unimaginable data and signaling volumes.

To maintain reliability in the all-IP world, service providers will need a rock-solid Diameter network with a common operation, administration, maintenance and provisioning (OAM&P) framework to handle network management, analytics, congestion control, and overload protection.

This article is part of the series Architecting the New Diameter Network. Next week, we’ll examine the need for a software-based approach as you build your robust Diameter network. For more information about Diameter protocol, check out the Diameter Learning Center.

CTO Doug Suriano explains how the new iPad will create signaling challenges for mobile operators in a recent Forbes article:

The iPad 3 supports HD video, over-the-top services such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as a wide variety of data-heavy consumer and business applications. However, the rise in mobile data traffic will not be operators’ primary problem. They have been aggressively addressing data capacity for years with strategies such as migration to 3G and LTE, policy control and offloading traffic to Wi-Fi.

With LTE, operators will need to handle network signaling messages. Signaling involves the underlying communications that enable charging, billing, user authentication and authorization. These essential messages support data activity over 3G and LTE networks. The impact of network signaling, however, has gone largely unreported.

Click here to read the entire article.

As we’ve mentioned previously, the New Diameter Network is the foundation of a successful mobile data business. But what does it take to create this network architecture? Over the next few weeks we’ll examine the seven things you need to consider to create the New Diameter Network:

• Scalability
• Reliability
• Flexibility
• Security
• Standards and interoperability
• A software-based approach
• Integrated Diameter solutions

The focus of today’s blog will be on scalability.

The growth in 3G and LTE services and devices is unleashing a signaling storm on mobile networks. The number of data-enabled devices and applications is multiplying rapidly as subscribers increasingly rely on mobile networks as their primary access to the Internet. This shift is driving not only a surge in the overall signaling and data traffic, but also in the amount of traffic each subscriber generates.

Global service providers are already feeling the impact of these shifts through outages triggered by signaling overloads. For a network of five million subscribers, a single major outage can cost tens of millions of dollars. Service providers clearly need to get ahead of the curve and design and build their networks from the start with the scalability to support hundreds of thousands of messages per minute, tens of millions on concurrent sessions, and hundreds of millions of subscribers and devices.

Next week, we’ll examine the need for reliability as you build your robust Diameter network. For more information about Diameter protocol, check out the Diameter Learning Center.

Think you need to wait for 4G/LTE to deploy Diameter signaling? Think again! 3G networks can realize many of the advantages that LTE brings by implementing a Diameter signaling router. Watch this short video with Travis Russell, technologist, Tekelec, where he explains some of the benefits that a Diameter routing agent can provide for 3G operators.

The mobile data business is growing rapidly, To fully capture this mobile data opportunity, service providers need to become a service and content enabler. Click on the video below to hear Travis Russell, technologist, Tekelec discuss why adding value to the network should be a top priority for service providers.

Technologist Travis Russell explains what makes up the New Diameter Network.

Like many in the telecom industry, Tekelec was at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last week. A topic that generated a lot of discussion at the show was Diameter signaling. Take a look at a quick interview that our sales leader, Boudewijn Pesch, had with Telecom Asia. Boudewijn explains how collaboration with partners is driving open systems with the help of policy control and Diameter routing.

Video: Diameter is key to handing signaling storm