For success in the mobile data business, a Diameter Network is crucial. As one of our tier 1 service provider customers put it, “A hundred percent of my revenue-generating mobile data services will run on the New Diameter Network.” In previous posts, we’ve examined the key architectural choices you need to make for robust Diameter network. Today we’ll look at the value of having standards-based interfaces and integrated Diameter solutions.

Standards and interoperability

To create a flexible Diameter network, you need products that can plug-and-play, using a full range of standards-based Diameter interfaces, as well as support for proprietary interfaces.

Diameter underpins several network control functions in 3G, IMS and LTE networks. For maximum flexibility, each control element in the Diameter network must demonstrate proven interoperability through a broad array of standards-based Diameter interfaces such as Gx, Gy, Rx, S6, S9, Sy and Sh. Taking a standards-based approach frees operators from the cost and constraint of proprietary solutions, allowing them to create a plug-and-play Diameter network built with best-of-breed products.

Integrated Diameter Solutions

And finally, to take full advantage of the New Diameter Network, you need innovative, integrated Diameter solutions that leverage the combined functionality of Diameter applications.

The ability to combine multiple Diameter applications to create integrated, standards-based solutions is a critical requirement of the New Diameter Network. Integrated signaling, policy and subscriber data management solutions give service providers the ability to create use cases uniquely tailored to their market, subscribers and business models. For example, by combining Diameter routing with policy and subscriber data, a service provider can steer premium roaming subscribers to its preferred partner’s network. Similarly, operators can provide preferred network and policy handling to premium enterprise customers by routing the Diameter messages from that group to a particular policy server for special treatment such as enhanced quality of service.

To summarize, your success in the mobile data business will be dictated by the architectural choices you make for your New Diameter Network in terms of scalability, reliability, software orientation, flexibility, security, interoperability, and integrated Diameter solutions. For more information about Diameter protocol, check out the Diameter Learning Center.

The architecture decisions you make now for your New Diameter Network will have far reaching implications. These decisions will impact how your network will perform and how successful you will be in delivering mobile data services. That being said, the New Diameter Network must be created with flexibility and security in mind.

Flexibility

Rolling out services quickly – in days or weeks, not months – is a critical weapon in the battle to capture customers and generate revenues from OTT, Cloud and M2M services. In this competitive and rapidly changing market, service providers can’t afford long development and test cycles. They need the flexibility to rapidly develop, test, implement, and get feedback on new services. To do so, operators must take control of their own service creation with easy-to-use policy creation tools that support integrated analytics, open interfaces, and a wide variety of pre-configured use cases. By coupling those tools with a unified subscriber database with open application interfaces, service providers can leverage dynamic data to create highly personalized, targeted services.

Security

Operators are quickly realizing that they face the real threat of being marginalized by non-traditional, Internet players. To prevent this erosion, they need to sharpen their focus on the more profitable part of the mobile data chain – enabling content and personalized services – by forging revenue-sharing relationships with third-party players. Operators have the opportunity to claim their stake in the mobile content ecosystem by leveraging their unique network assets and customer data to add value to OTT, Cloud and M2M applications. But, they’ll have to tread carefully as they do to ensure the security of their networks and the privacy of their subscribers. That requires a Diameter network that allows providers to securely exposure select subscriber data, policies and analytics to third parties while shielding the underlying network architecture from view. The network must also enable providers to protect the privacy of their subscribers by allowing them to easily opt-in and out of advertising campaigns and special promotions that use subscriber data.

For more information about Diameter protocol, check out the Diameter Learning Center.

This article is part of the series Architecting the New Diameter Network. Next time, we’ll examine the need for Standards and interoperability as you build your robust Diameter network.

Tekelec is a Bronze sponsor and speaker at this year’s LTE Latin America conference, held April 17-18 at the Windsor Barra Hotel, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Tekelec will participate in two sessions:

• “Managing Data Traffic and Monetizing the LTE Network: The Importance of Diameter Signaling and Policy Control”
  • Houck Reed, vice president, product management and operations, will discuss the New Diameter Network, the foundation for a successful mobile data business on April 17th at 4:55 p.m. The New Diameter Network is comprised of control elements – policy servers, charging systems, subscriber databases, gateways, and session and mobility management equipment – that rely on the Diameter protocol to exchange network, subscriber, policy, and charging information.
• “OTT and Operators Partnership and Cooperation Potential for the Latin American Market”
  • Travis Russell, technologist, strategic marketing, will speak on a panel about how over-the-top providers such as Facebook and Netflix and mobile operators can collaborate for future mobile data revenue opportunities. His panel takes place April 17 at 2:40 p.m.

Last time, we discussed why reliability is crucial to building out the New Diameter Network. Today we’ll look at why it is important to have a “software-based approach” when building out the network.

Change is the new norm in the fast-paced, volatile mobile data market. The days of inflexible software and proprietary hardware are gone. Creating an elastic Diameter network requires a new software-based approach that’s architected for scalability and adaptability, using cutting-edge middleware and standard servers.

Taking a software-based approach to network design provides substantial benefits over legacy, proprietary models. Databases, message processing, OAM&P, and policy applications can be configured individually or in logical combinations on standard server blades or rackmounted servers in a central office or data center. Each application scales independently, allowing the Diameter network to grow incrementally to support increasing subscriber and traffic growth with a pay-as-you-go model. Service providers can reshape hardware with only software-level changes to create new features, applications, use cases, or technology. Applications share subscriber, network and device data to enhance performance, policy control and subscriber quality of experience. And, the total cost of ownership is lower because having a common platform simplifies interoperability testing, maintenance and support.

For more information about Diameter protocol, check out the Diameter Learning Center.

This article is part of the series Architecting the New Diameter Network. Next time, we’ll examine the need for a security and flexibility you build your robust Diameter network.

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.