Have We Learned from the iPhone? Part II

Maintaining Application Quality in the Face of Rising Data Traffic and Customer Expectations

By Marc Lippe, Director, Worldwide Field and Corporate Marketing, InfoVista

If we’ve learned anything from the rapid adoption of the iPhone, it’s this—capacity and bandwidth are quickly becoming both an expectation and a commodity.

Service providers no longer face the choice of, “Do I or don’t I evolve my network to a next generation environment?” In order to move forward and compete in the mobile data services space, they’ve got to go to 3G+, and have their sights set on 4G/LTE.  Additionally, maintaining quality in application delivery is becoming more and more critical.

In my last blog post, I raised the question whether or not operators will be hesitant in taking on the iPad, considering the additional load that will likely be put on the network. My thoughts, it can be quite the opportunity for growth, just remember that the ability to quickly respond to rising data and customer expectations will be key. Here are just a few tips:

• To start, service providers should look at the way they operationally handle their data services. If moving to an end-to-end mobile data environment underpinned by IP MPLS technology, they’ll need to be looking at the silo-focused manner in which they have built their operations teams.
• For example, there currently tends to be teams that are completely separate from each other; a team that looks after mobile data and is purely responsible for the Mobile Packet Core domain of GGSN and SGSN devices, a team that looks after their IP MPLS transport network, and a team focused on the Radio Access Network.
• The iPhone, as well as other bandwidth hungry devices and applications, are also driving an increased need for more wireless backhaul capacity, where it’s widely acknowledged that it will be totally unviable to buy E1s and E3s to backhaul this traffic. According to reports from Infonetics, most service providers have short term plans to move towards an Ethernet-based backhaul environment.

Application quality is dependent upon performance across the multiple domains that a service will cross, which means providers should be employing a more holistic approach in operational environments. This need for a holistic view across all domains and equipments that the service can transition will allow for collective use of infrastructure monitoring, existing IP OAM instrumentation, and DPI.

Stay tuned as I explore this in more detail in my next blog, “Achieving a Holistic Approach to Mobile Data Quality,” and as always, I welcome your thoughts.