Home Africa and the Middle EastAfrica and the Middle East 2011 Adapt to survive: Next Generation offload strategies addressing the mobile broadband capacity crunch

Adapt to survive: Next Generation offload strategies addressing the mobile broadband capacity crunch

by david.nunes
Michael HomeierIssue:AME 2011
Article no.:5
Topic:Adapt to survive: Next Generation offload strategies
addressing the mobile broadband capacity crunch
Author:Michael Homeier
Title:VP Product Management
Organisation:Stoke
PDF size:375KB

About author

Michael Homeier, VP Product Management, Stoke

Michael is currently VP of Product Management at Stoke Inc. He has more than 15 years of experience in developing and executing product strategies and product portfolio management for communication systems within the carrier, enterprise and government sectors. As a senior manager over the last ten years, he has successfully developed and managed a diverse set of product portfolios including integrated wireless networks for Motorola, wired and wireless broadband access solutions for Commworks and IP telephony and soft-switching for 3Com.

Michael Homeier has a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology, possesses a strong technical background and has filed for more than ten patents.

Article abstract

In response to the mobile data tide wave, operators are driven to solutions to expand the network, increasing its speed and capacity. Alternative solutions, such as picocell and femtocell, are proving to be too expensive, but offloading traffic to the unlicensed WiFi is a cost effective solution. However, to get the best out of it, Internet traffic should be piped separately through a monitoring gateway that provides vital information of usage and helps to retain customers’ relationships.

Full Article

Introduction
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.

This applies across the board. For example, in India, while the rest of Asia prepares to move on to 4G, wireless carriers are just beginning to roll out 3G. But even in this new 3G environment, with every opportunity to learn from the data avalanche hitting the US and Europe, operators have been stunned by the extraordinary ramp in usage and are already examining options to relieve traffic pressure. Worldwide, demand for mobile data services is outstripping operators’ capacity to deliver, and not just in established markets: adoption is particularly rapid in areas marked by low fixed-line penetration.

Mobile broadband is the fastest-growing segment of the Africa and Middle East telecom market, with numbers of subscribers expected to leap from approximately 12 million in September 2010 to about 265 million by 2015. In Africa, mobile broadband subscribers outpaced fixed broadband users for the first time in the early 2010, and broadband networks are already experiencing congestion. The region is continuing a very robust adoption of mobile broadband, especially given the scarcity of fixed broadband options. The mobile networks are affected to such an extent that LTE has already been deployed in three African countries, in an attempt to stay ahead of the growth curve.

Maximizing the potential of the existing mobile broadband network, developing the revenues required for building next generation networks, and for maintaining and increasing customer levels is a tough balancing act for any operator. It’s an even worse scenario in the face of the data tsunami.

User-Operator Disconnect
Unlike users in the West, for many consumers in Africa and the Middle East, the first Internet experience is via mobile handset. Operators see this as both the next revenue frontier and a problem in the making. Operators in AME (Africa and Middle East) are still experimenting with pricing strategies to keep driving healthy revenue growth in the mobile broadband segment, including how to satisfy the mobile broadband needs of the low-usage customer. However, rising usage of mobile broadband goes hand-in-hand with greater drains on network capacity. Competitive pressures are fierce in much of Africa, so operators looking to maintain margins are increasingly shifting their focus from revenue generation to cost management.

Old technology cannot be adapted to this new reality. Fresh thinking must be applied to support user demand for mobile data, to the evolution of new operator business models, and the slow but inexorable transition from 3G to 4G/LTE.

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. To 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 technology changes. Meanwhile, operators cannot look solely to next-generation architectures to solve current problems.

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 relief but don’t address all the underlying issues, because demand is always going to outstrip raw network capacity. AT&T estimates that demand will grow by 5,000% in the next five years, yet LTE networks will offer only a tenfold improvement in capacity. Data management solutions other than network expansion must therefore be applied, and will need to include a variety of offload options.

Offloading: The New Imperative
While 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. Operators are examining options for diverting non-essential traffic off their networks in order to protect the performance and throughput of these vital assets. Such offloading solutions are increasingly seen as the answer. Experts, including FCC chief Julius Genachowski, are focusing on WiFi, noting how well it works in adding unlicensed spectrum to the broadband mix and making it possible to offload as much as 40 percent of traffic from carriers’ networks. But WiFi 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 is all about helping operators deal with unimaginable traffic growth without buying multiple, very expensive additional equipment. The problem started with the emergence of the smart phone, exemplified by the often-maligned iPhone. Its multimedia capabilities and user-friendly interfaces drove adoption, application development and data traffic at a rate that astounded operators. Content optimization vendors were quick to step in, 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+ and WiFi, which really signalled the birth of the offload concept. This stage also included the beginning of spectrum re-use and the launch of femtocells and picocells, where the backhaul is in need of offloading, rather than the radio 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 favour 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 may be envisaged 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 offloading approaches. Of these, Mobile Data Offload, or Iu-PS Breakout (pioneered by Stoke in 2010, 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 work group which is 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 while 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 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 local coverage, and is considered as a cornerstone of an offload and/or spectrum re-use strategy. The challenge for femtocell is the high cost of the CPE. Unless it delivers additional services, will subscribers pay directly for the operator’s network building?

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, unlicensed spectrum, is delivered on proven technology, and is available and ubiquitous on mobile devices. 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 can be solved, 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 Wi-Fi 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 the Internet, this ‘unmanaged Wi-Fi’ is the simplest for the mobile operator to deploy and manage. 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. Such an untethered Wi-Fi customer is not controlled by the operator, and unmanaged/unmonitored offload doesn’t allow for monetizing these sessions or retain customer relationships for these services. Recognizing this issue, KT (Korea Telecom) and rival SK Telecom are building their own networks of Wi-Fi hotspots. KT alone plans to have 100,000 Wi-Fi zones by the end of 2011, which will make it the owner of the world’s largest Wi-Fi network operated by a single carrier. In past years, KT and SK Telecom have been investing massively in advanced communications technologies, such as wireless broadband, but the present key focus is currently on Wi-Fi.

These operators have acknowledged what many choose to ignore: the long-term impact of a completely unmanaged offload solution. It weakens the relationship between operator and subscriber, particularly if unmanaged Wi-Fi subscribers have a better Internet experience than when connected via the 3G network. 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, increasing 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.

The difference between managed and unmanaged Wi-Fi offload is elegantly simple: 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 Wi-Fi 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 drawn to investigate new marketing and technology solutions. It’s an exciting moment in the history of communications worldwide. Operators around the world 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 portfolio of pragmatic, non-linear solutions supporting the advancing tide of mobile data usage.

 

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