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NextGen Voice

May 13, 2011
Technologies and Strategies for the Mobile Broadband Capacity Crunch

By TMCnet Special Guest
Dan McBride, Product and Solutions Marketing Director, Stoke

The sheer scale of mobile broadband uptake is breathtaking: in less than five years’ time, it’s estimated that worldwide users will be accessing mobile services via 50 billion connected devices. In response, mobile broadband operators are accelerating the search for new solutions.

That’s just one part of the challenge. At a fundamental level, the industry is shifting its emphasis from building revenues by customer acquisition to a service-based revenue improvement model. Here, the provision of value-added services for users and carrier customers becomes an even more important factor in generating revenues, maintaining the user base, and increasing ARPU.

User-Operator Disconnect

In this environment, there are still disconnects between vendor strategies and operator requirements. User behavior and expectations for the mobile broadband network have irrevocably changed, bringing opportunities as well as issues in the aftermath. It’s disconcerting to see mobile operators behaving as if they can turn back the clock with punitive pricing geared at curbing usage while they work out their network overload problems behind the scenes. Time is running short: new feature phones offer rich multimedia experiences and even the ability to maintain two or more connections at once, and the rising tide of cloud computing and usage signals yet another mammoth burden on the mobile data network. Old technology cannot be adapted to this new reality. New thinking must be applied to support both user demand for mobile data, and the transition to new business models.

Identifying the Problem

With overload occurring both on the control plane and on the data plane, the planning and investment implications for 3G networks will continue to be problematic even while the transition to LTE and 4G is touted as a solution to all network woes. Let’s be honest: the wholesale transition to LTE will be long-drawn-out, taking anything up to 12 years if we look at what has happened with previous generational changes. Meanwhile, operators cannot look solely to next-generation architectures to solve current problems.

Understanding the User

How does a mobile broadband operator administer usage-based pricing and maintain competitiveness when always-on is the order of the day? Most social users have difficulty working out what a Gigabit actually means yet their phone can automatically download 25MB of data in a text or email. Excessive restriction of consumer usage is a scenario for damagingly high customer churn. Tomorrow’s revenue streams must come from understanding the customer.
Infrastructure options such as increasing bandwidth, larger network elements or even partial transitions to LTE are like creating an extra lane on a busy highway. They provide a temporary solution, but don’t address all the underlying issues because even LTE networks won’t be able to cope with the exponential growth in demand for mobile data - a surge that cannot be addressed with linear solutions. Data management solutions must be surgical, in the sense that they can be applied with great precision to specific data traffic types, and should include a variety of offload options

Offloading: The New Imperative

While the usual techniques for expanding capacity in the RAN, backhaul and core networks, together with traffic optimization solutions are holding back the floodwaters, they will not do so for very long. Traffic growth is just too great. Spectrum capacity will run out (and/or services will suffer), costs of continual expansion of core network and backhaul capacity will undermine operator profitability. Operators are all juggling with the need to divert non-essential traffic off of their networks in order to protect the performance and throughput of these vital assets. Offload is seen as the answer. Pundits including FCC chief Julius Genachowski are focusing on Wi-Fi, noting how well it works in adding unlicensed spectrum to the broadband mix and making it possible to offload as much as 40% of traffic from carriers' networks. But Wi-Fi has its downsides as well as benefits, and is not the only option.

“The iPhone Ruined Everything”

Offload has come to mean many confusing things, but at heart it’s all about helping operators deal with unimaginable traffic growth without buying multiple, very expensive items of equipment. The problem started with the emergence of the feature phone, exemplified by the often-maligned iPhone, whose multimedia capabilities and user-friendly interfaces drove adoption, application development and data traffic at a rate that left operators standing. Content optimization vendors were quick to step up to the plate, helping to squeeze down the content of the traffic to a rate that 3G networks can handle. Surely it’s better to deliver poor quality video than none at all? Hmmm.
Next came the introduction of two alternative solutions: HSPA+, which some call 4G, and Wi-Fi, which really signaled the birth of the whole offload concept. This stage also included the beginning of spectrum re-use and the launch of femtocells and picocells, where backhaul is offloaded rather than the radio network. This latter is an essential element in the LTE network.

As we see it, the immediate future of mobile data traffic will depend on path optimization, where the 3G hierarchies of data traffic are broken in favor of identifying and selecting specific types of traffic, content, and even devices, and creating new paths - outside the operator network core – for access to and delivery of content. Further down the road, it is all but inevitable that the mobile data network will become a fully distributed environment that behaves like the Internet today, with no central core.

There are three principal offload approaches. Of these, Mobile Data Offload, or IuPS Breakout (pioneered by Stoke in 2010 and since attracting a substantial body of emulators) is the only option providing the ability to deliver precise control over specific types of traffic while selectively diverting traffic streams away from the data core infrastructure to the Internet. This technique is incorporated into the 3GPP working group looking at local IP access and selective traffic offload (LIPA/SIPTO). As this approach matures, more focus is being trained on its role in improving the mobile Internet experience but distributing and managing content and functionality at the edge of the operator network, closer to the user. Iu-ps Breakout supports the path optimization approach, enabling functions to be located right next to the RNC rather than close to the core, even in LTE networks.

Femtocell offload is a ‘converged’ voice and data solution designed primarily to deliver improved coverage, though more and more is being considered as a cornerstone of an offload and/or spectrum re-use strategy. The challenge for femtocell is the cost of the CPE. Unless it delivers additional services, will subscribers pay directly for the operator’s network build out?
Wi-Fi offload has moved rapidly to the forefront of offload discussions since it relieves pressure on the most costly component of the mobile network, the RAN. This approach uses free spectrum, is delivered on proven technology, and is available and ubiquitous on mobile devices. It’s even more in the news following Apple’s introduction of the iPhone 4, which offers video calling via Wi-Fi only: a strong message to users, operators and developers that Wi-Fi is the logical – and presumed to be available – choice for bandwidth-heavy wireless applications. There are, however, several ways to incorporate Wi-Fi access into a mobile operators’ service mix, and choosing the right solution can have long term implications.
The UMA/GAN and WLAN Interworking products and standards have been available for many years and provide a vetted blueprint for embracing unlicensed Wi-Fi spectrum into an operators service mix. However, they have never achieved mainstream acceptance. Even with today’s widely acknowledged data overload challenges, these solutions are not at the top of the list. Cited reasons include the complexity of integration with core network systems (e.g. HLR, GGSN, etc.) and mobile equipment complexities. All of these challenges are solvable, but the motivation to deliver the solution is not there today.

An alternative to these 3GPP standard Wi-Fi solutions is simply to allow the mobile equipment to connect to any WiFi network and access desired content over the fixed line operator network. Since most Wi-Fi-connected users – most mobile data users in general – primarily consume content from Internet, this ‘unmanaged Wi-Fi’ is the simplest to deploy and manage for the mobile operator. Problem solved, right? Well, maybe.

Managed Wi-Fi Offload

Unmanaged Wi-Fi offload presents a particular challenge to both content providers and operators as the Wi-Fi connections are unrecognized by the mobile network infrastructure, making it difficult to track usage and market and sell new services to them while connected over Wi-Fi. This can significantly impact mobile content and other revenues. An untethered customer is basically not yours any longer, and unmanaged/unmonitored offload doesn’t allow for monetizing those sessions or even to retain those customer relationships.

What is the long-term value of a completely unmanaged offload solution if it means that operators have no opportunity to market new services to users? Moreover, unmanaged Wi-Fi subscribers will often have a better Internet experience than when connected via the 3G network, and with usage untracked and ‘free’, subscribers will seek out Wi-Fi more and more. This will set a preference for Wi-Fi among mobile users, putting downward pricing pressure on the 3G service and reducing the time users are connected via 3G and available to consume for-fee mobile services. There is a better way to embrace Wi-Fi access, with managed Wi-Fi offload.
If operators hope to include WiFi usage in their pre-paid subscriber byte limit plans or expect to develop additional revenue via advertising, content, or network services, then they have to - at the very least - know what their customers are doing even when they have been offloaded to a Wi-Fi network. Carriers need to maintain visibility and control over Wi-Fi connected subscribers to avoid the pitfalls of unmanaged Wi-Fi, and do so while minimizing mobile equipment modification and core network integration. The difference between managed and unmanaged Wi-Fi offload is the placement of an intelligent, session-aware gateway through which the subscriber’s Wi-Fi session traverses on its way to the Internet. This gateway then reports on usage by subscriber back to the mobile operator network for use in gathering market intelligence or to support usage quota tracking regardless of which wireless technology is used. The managed Wi-Fi offload gateway also provides some session control, which will be even more important in the near future when mobile equipment is capable of maintaining a RAN and a WiFi connection to the network, providing operators with the means to determine based on network conditions which radio network to send the requested data. This enables the operator to balance network asset management and mobile device battery life to deliver the best user experience.

Conclusion

In attempting to address the explosion of demand for mobile broadband data, the operator world is being drawn to investigate new marketing and technology solutions. It’s an exciting moment in the history of communications, with the potential to bring operator and customer into a close and mutually beneficial relationship. Operators need to optimize traffic on the network to meet both user needs and their objectives, and offload needs to take its place as part of the phalanx of pragmatic, non-linear solutions supporting the advancing tide of mobile data usage.

http://next-generation-communications.tmcnet.com/topics/nextgen-voice/articles/174397-technologies-strategies-the-mobile-broadband-capacity-crunch.htm