Connect

Walking down the main avenue here at Mobile World Congress I watched some gulls having an arial battle, oblivious to the crowds below who all work for companies fighting it out in the turbulent mobile industry. The pace of change in mobile was a theme running throughout the keynote/panel with John Chambers, CEO of Cisco, René Obermann, CEO of Deutsche Telecom, and Ben Verwaayan, CEO of Alcatel-Lucent. The topic was ostensibly mobile cloud, but the discussion touched on subjects that affect all of the mobile industry, primarily from carrier and network infrastructure standpoints.

Oberman on how telecoms need to get away from the ghosts of their monopolistic, slow-moving pasts: "We have a hard time as an industry to cannibalize ourselves. We need to think differently in the future."

Verwaayen on the changing role of telecom service providers: "Telecoms will no longer be verticals, but will be a horizontal in other people's businesses."

Chambers on the improvements in performance and service that companies must provide: "Average is over. And being above average will only be good enough for the next 3-5 years."

Lots of statistics flew around as well: 26x increase in mobile traffic from 2010 to 2015; 50 billion connected devices by 2020 (machine-to-machine or Internet of Things); in 2011, mobile traffic exceeded internet traffic by 8x.

Aricent Group will of course be at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona again this year, and we are hosting a variety of events ourselves both at the main site and at the Hotel Arts, all of which promise to be thought provoking, insightful, fun, and often including libations (click through the deck below for details):

Beyond our own events we have scoured the interwebs for as many other similarly interesting and stimulating talks and get-togethers as we can find. Here's a handy list, in roughly sequential order:

February 26

Last week in our discussion on monetizing the explosion of data, we had looked at the challenges imposed by the explosion of data and the need to re-think the existing architecture and take a holistic approach by integrating multiple silos into a cross-leveraged network infrastructure that delivers fair-play, tiered services supported by personalized premium & value-added options.. Fundamentally this requires a new data-centric approach that builds the ability to distinguish & differentiate various use-cases, a dynamic policy control structure, and intergration with real-time charging, self-care, payment & notification systems.

The new architecture opens up the opportunity to introduce new types of services, products that meet the diverse requirements of the growing connected society.

Introduction of new services, products  & offers for a new breed of connected entities

With the advent of ultra-thick pipes (4G) and the available capacity, there’s a need to invent new services other than the traditional PSTN/Voice or Internet/Data services. The advent of the “Internet of Things”, Hyper-Social networking and Machine-to-Machine communications are expected to be the emerging trends that will drive capacity utilization and monetization. However, this will also lead to a plethora of challenges in terms of adequate service management frameworks for fulfilment, assurrance, monitoring and revenue management for these new breed of services and connected entities.

A holistic approach to monetization through these new implementations would drive an expanded experience.

Effective data pricing is not about simply rolling out new pricing plans - it requires a re-think of strategies: implementation of new capabilities like policy control & traffic management; innovations in self-care, loyalty programs and cross-marketing; and  integration of all these dimensions into real-time charging, notification & payment solutions.

The discussion on the ideal model to monetize the explosion of data is live again! The classic one-size-fits-all  approach does not make sense any more.

Last year saw most of the major operators eliminating unlimited data plans to move to tiered pricing. There is very little support for the operators from the community as everyone sees it at an inhibitor to the connected world. Questions afloat on whether it will impede the growth of video-centric applications (still in their infancy) – be it the multi-player gaming or the video calling,  media streaming or the many anticipated new applications. But it is being recognized that growth in data traffic is impacted by multiple drivers – as was seen in India over the last year after introduction of 3G services, where data growth was  impeded due to high tariff’s, inadequate coverage for 3G across the regions and lack of seamless interoperability of many services (e.g., Video conference) across operators. It is clear that monetization of higher bandwidth networks cannot be taken as given -  a more holistic approach is needed to facilitate the adoption of data services and thereafter manage the explosion of data.

Aricent recently conducted a webinar on the topic of MPLS-Transport Profile. We had several hundred people participate and they asked more questions than we were able to answer in the time we had! Here are answers to the ones we didn't get to in the webinar.

What is the difference between MPLS-TE and MPLS-TP?

TE stands for Traffic Engineering. Traffic Engineering is the term used to describe the methodology of pre-determining the routes that user data packets (traffic) will take through an operator’s network. This is done by binding the user data packets to specific MPLS tunnels (LSPs) at the ingress point in the network. The tunnels are laid out with constraints about which nodes they will go through in the network, which nodes they will avoid, what QoS treatment will be applied, what bandwidth guarantees are available, etc. The result is that the paths that traffic takes through the network are controlled well and the operator thereby has much more predictable network behavior.
TP stands for Transport Profile. A Transport Profile refers to a set of attributes for the technology that make it usable in a transport network. One aspect of the Transport Profile is the capability to do Traffic Engineering. Other aspects of the Transport Profile are connectivity verification, path tracing, tools for problem isolation, performance measurement, performance management, fault management, etc. TE is thus one toolset within the set of TP attributes.

How does MPLS-TP compare to Carrier Ethernet networks (which have extensive OAM and redundancy)?