CTO Doug Suriano discusses how mobile data will spur innovations in 2012 – especially in terms of pricing models – in an article for RCR Wireless. He predicts that this year will see advancements in personalized plans and cloud services, as well as a major rise in signaling traffic.

According to Suriano:

As mobile data matures in developed markets, we expect several significant evolutions in 2012. The biggest for subscribers will be pricing plan innovations, providing new personalized service and cost options. In addition, we forecast rapid cloud service adoption, new content business models and new device segmentation.

The full article can be found here.

By Matt McCann, Principal Architect

The Diameter protocol is widely used in 3G, IMS and LTE architectures to transport policy, charging, authentication and mobility management messages – traffic that will rapidly rise as mobile data usage increases.

To best manage the growth of Diameter traffic, operators are examining how to create a separate Diameter signaling infrastructure at the network core. The goal is to facilitate signaling between network elements, eliminating a mesh-like architecture of direct connections between endpoints such as mobility management entities (MMEs) and home subscriber servers (HSSs). This would relieve endpoints of handling all session-related tasks such as routing, load balancing, congestion control and failover management.

Initially, implementing an IMS or LTE network without a signaling core may be sufficient, but as traffic levels grow, the lack of a capable signaling infrastructure poses a number of challenges, including:

• Scalability: Each endpoint must maintain a separate SCTP association with each of its Diameter peers as well as the status of each, placing a heavy burden on the endpoints as the number of nodes grows.
• Congestion control: Diameter lacks the well-defined congestion control mechanisms found in other protocols such as SS7.
• Protocol mediation: Vendors are likely to use their own variants of the Diameter protocol based on how they believe a specific interface should be implemented. This implementation can vary slightly from those of another vendor, creating potential interworking issues when multi-vendor equipment is combined in one network, a common approach for operators that take a best-of-breed approach.
• Network interconnect: A fully meshed network is completely unworkable when dealing with connections to other networks because there is no central interconnect point. This also exposes the operator’s network topology to other operators and can lead to security breaches.
• Interoperability testing (IOT): Protocol interworking becomes unmanageable as the number of devices supplied by multiple vendors increases. With no separate signaling or session framework, IOTs must be performed at every existing node when a new node or software load is placed in service.
• Support for both SCTP- and transmission control protocol (TCP)-based implementations: SCTP-based elements cannot communicate with TCP-based elements unless they are upgraded or all of the elements support both protocol stacks.
• Subscriber to HSS mapping: When there are multiple HSSs in the network, subscribers may be homed on different HSSs. Therefore, there must be some function in the network that maps subscriber identities to HSSs.
• Policy and charging rules function (PCRF) binding: When networks require multiple PCRFs, operators must have a way to ensure that all messages and sessions associated with a particular user are processed by the same PCRF.

Centralizing Diameter routing creates a signaling architecture that reduces the cost and complexity of the core network and enables core networks to grow incrementally to support increasing service and traffic demands. It also facilitates network monitoring by providing a centralized vantage point in the signaling network. A centralized Diameter router is also the ideal place to add other advanced network functionalities like address resolution, Diameter interworking and traffic (roaming) steering.

How can operators communicate to consumers the bandwidth they are using and its value? Will tiered pricing or unlimited data pricing dominate in the 4G world?

These are just a few of the key questions that will be addressed during next week’s Fierce Wireless “The Path to 4G” on March 22. Tekelec’s Randy Fuller, Director, Strategic Marketing, is a featured speaker on the panel. For more information click here.

To view Tekelec’s recent whitepaper, “Rethinking Mobile Data Rate Plans: What Consumers Think,” click here.

Tekelec is at Mobile World Congress this week. Stop by our booth, Hall 1 Stand 1F44/1G49, to learn about two key challenges facing mobile operators: increasing mobile data revenues and improving the customer quality of experience (QoE).

By Randy Fuller, Director of Strategic Marketing

Recent news that YouTube mobile views have tripled to 200 million a day has probably increased the urgency with which mobile operators need to examine new service definitions to handle the growth. To help operators define potential mobile video service plans, Tekelec conducted research in conjunction with industry analyst firm, Strategy Analytics. Several key observations were derived from the research survey:

• While video consumes nearly half of mobile bandwidth, consumers valued video as only the fourth most important service behind web browsing, email and navigation.
• Usage-based billing is not the ideal solution to manage many subscribers’ increased usage of mobile broadband.
• There is an opportunity for “win-win” service plans that lower costs by restricting usage of lower value/higher cost applications like video while allowing unlimited usage of higher value/lower cost applications like web browsing. Almost half of subscribers would pay a 17 percent premium over their current service for such a plan.
• Premium video services like live television and video-on-demand (VOD) can be a source of additional value, but the incremental cost to deliver service must be weighed against the potential increase in revenue.

To view the whitepaper “Mobile Video Consumer Survey: Identifying Win-Win Pricing Plans,” click here. Let us know what you think.

By Bob Wallace, Principal Engineer

The adoption and deployment of LTE is presenting challenges across all aspects of the mobile industry.  On the technical front, carriers are making large capital investments to upgrade the infrastructure in their access networks in order to satisfy the subscriber’s demand for bandwidth.  Likewise, upgrades to the core networks are also required to handle both the increased bearer traffic as well as the signaling traffic.  But the change LTE is driving reaches far beyond the technical challenges.

LTE enables a different kind of mobile.  Initial roll-outs are offering bandwidth that is comparable to fixed broadband access, and the technology offers a roadmap with continued bandwidth growth.  The subscriber devices connecting to LTE networks also have much greater processing power, allowing the subscriber to effectively perform tasks previously reserved for desk-top devices.  This combination of available bandwidth and the processing power to take advantage of it has the mobile world on the brink of an unprecedented transformation.  Far more important than the technology introduced with LTE will be the emergence and development of entirely new usage models and business models.

During the initial roll-outs, carriers must rely on traditional services and business models to fund their investments.  Virtually all of the traffic carried on initial LTE networks will be data, and existing data services are billed simply by volume of traffic.  This means that even though subscribers are using more bandwidth for a greater variety of applications, the revenue returned from the increased bandwidth will grow at a reduced rate.   The biggest challenge for carriers will be to develop new services and business models which allow them to capitalize on these new usage models, while in the interim focusing on minimization of cap-ex and op-ex.

Carriers are caught between these two opposing forces – subscriber demand for more mobile bandwidth and reduced “cost-per-byte” value of that bandwidth.  There is more than enough demand (revenue) to justify the network infrastructure to carry the increased bandwidth, but there is not enough demand to justify multiple network infrastructures.  In other words, carriers can’t afford to provide complete vertical solutions as they do today.  On the low end, backhaul from the access nodes to the core network will be shared by multiple carriers.  On the high end, individual carriers will not be able to keep pace with the rate of innovation demanded for application content and other services.  In order to compete in this environment, carriers will need to open their networks – and their business philosophies.

Most carriers seem to be embracing one of four basic approaches to mobile data development and growth:

• Completely open networks.  Flat rate data access, no caps, no traffic classification.
• Controlled access to networks.  Even these carriers acknowledge there are going to be Over-The-Top (OTT) services that they can’t exert control over.  However, there is an expectation that the carrier will partner with 3rd parties and enterprises to create Value-Added Services which are unique to their networks.  Not quite the “walled garden”, but not really embracing fully open concepts either.
• Open access networks with a new set of Value-Added Services (VAS) through CoS/QoS, API’s for unique network information (presence, location, etc.), and other “smart pipe” features.
• Broadband service for unserved / underserved subscribers.  These carriers are using the lower “greenfield” deployment costs of LTE wireless service to bring broadband access to rural users who do not have cost-effective fixed broadband access.

Depending on which of the above approaches a particular carrier has adopted, the degree of the impact LTE has on network architecture and security will be different.  However, in all cases it is important to understand that LTE networks require a new approach.  While past experience and philosophies won’t be abandoned, the differences in LTE networks reach beyond technical changes to the underlying usage and business models.  As a result, value propositions for products and services that worked in the past may not work in the future.

Bob is a Principal Engineer at Tekelec, with a focus on core signaling systems architecture. He has more than 16 years of experience in the telecom industry, and more than 25 years in development engineering.

Mobile data traffic is growing beyond our imagination. After the introduction of the latest iPhone in June, Google stated that the mobile upload of video increased by 400% over the previous day. The introduction of Android powered phones including the recently launched Nexus One will only increase this rate. Over the next four years, it is projected that global mobile traffic will exceed 50,000 Terabytes per day! I believe that this humongous data avalanche that is taking over the mobile world will remain the single most important factor that will influence mobile infrastructure trends in 2010 and beyond.

So if I have to pick the top three mobile infrastructure trends for 2010 what will they be?

• 3G/4G Network expansion will continue through this year at an accelerated pace. We will see more and more deployments of HSPA, HSPA+ and LTE.
• Convergence of Wireless LAN/WAN – Traffic growth may be huge, but operators are yet to find that magic formula to monetize all this traffic growth. That means cost optimization of network expansion is critical. Wi-Fi and Femtocell micro-sites will complement 3G/4G networks by offloading much of the data traffic.
• Just throwing money into mobile bandwidth infrastructure will not by itself address the problem of exploding mobile data traffic. Networks will get smarter in handling the traffic. Better traffic management and differentiated treatment of different traffic types are the essential short-term solution. In the long run, the industry also needs innovative pricing that monetizes different types of traffic that can fund infrastructure growth. Net Neutrality driven regulation may be a wild card that will influence this in certain regions, but I still think this will be the case globally.

What would be your top 3 trends?