Can Carriers Adopt Agile Practices?

Posted on June 16, 2014

Recently I attended the Telecommunications Industry Association Network of the Future Conference in Dallas. The conference was well attended and featured a combination of informative keynotes and a series of lively panel discussions. I participated as a panelist for the 5G Networks track Carrier Aggregation Across Licensed and Unlicensed Spectrum. (I wrote about this in my last blog.) Over the next few months I plan to blog about some of the conference’s themes But for this post, I want to focus on the conference’s front-and-center issue: the adoption and growth of Software Defined Networks (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV). SDN allows network topologies to be defined via software. Think of it as using “digital wires” to interconnect the network. SDN enables the decoupling of the system that makes decisions about where traffic is sent, called the “control plane”, from the underlying systems that forward traffic to the destination, called the “data plane.” The key benefit here is that ease in changing network topology. The first network area to really benefit from SDN is called the vGI-LAN. That’s the IP network between the packet gateway and the public Internet. It’s also the natural starting place for this type of network…

Monetizing the Entire Data Experience

Posted on June 2, 2014

It’s remarkable how well mobile operators navigated the challenge of massive growth in mobile data consumption. For a mammoth industry—oft criticized for slow movement—things moved extremely fast over the last two years. The big shift to shared data plans drove alignment of data growth with revenue growth, while the technology transition to LTE helped improve the experience and allow faster data consumption at lower operating cost. It now seems clear that shared data plans have changed users’ mindsets around paying for and using mobile data. People use a lot more data than before and appear happy to pay for it. Thinner tiers and usage spread across family members (and friends) take the sting out of exceeding monthly allocation. Plus, it’s easy to add another device and to get more value and convenience from the service. All in all, it’s a remarkable transition to better monetize the mobile data experience. Presto! Crisis averted! As Devicescape’s customer base has gone through this transition, we’ve measured a fascinating additional fact: people are using a lot more mobile data but they’re also using a lot more Wi-Fi. In fact, LTE has doubled consumption over 3G, and Wi-Fi use has kept in lockstep and doubled,…

Carrier Aggregation over Unlicensed Spectrum

Posted on June 1, 2014

Recently I’ve been following the proposals to use unlicensed (i.e. Wi-Fi) spectrum to augment cellular capacity. The most prevalent camp proposes using LTE-Advanced carrier aggregation, introduced in 3GPP release 10, where the 5Ghz Wi-Fi bands are used for downlink data, and all other traffic, such as signaling, is ‘anchored’ on licensed spectrum. The 5Ghz unlicensed bands offer close to 500Mhz of bandwidth, and in the U.S., South Korea, and China can be freely used without coordination with radar and safety services. This means that unlicensed LTE, or “uLTEA” as it’s being called, could be rolled out without having to make complex changes to the LTE specification in these countries. Other countries will have to wait for 3GPP release 13, which will handle the ‘listen before transmit’ requirements present outside of the U.S., South Korea, and China. The two main advantages of this approach are: It’s all LTE and fully integrated into the packet core, without any gateways or other complex coordination. QoS is maintained by the licensed spectrum anchor point, so if unlicensed spectrum degrades, traffic and signaling quality can still be maintained. This sounds great, but only really works if both the LTE eNodeB licensed and unlicensed radios are…