 | Issue: | North America II 2015 |
| Article no.: | 7 | |
| Topic: | LTE’s hidden revenues | |
| Author: | Pravin Mirchandani | |
| Title: | CMO | |
| Organisation: | OneAccess | |
| PDF size: | 385KB |
About author
Pravin Mirchandani joined OneAccess as Chief Marketing Officer in May 2011. A graduate of both the University of Edinburgh and the London School of Economics, with more than 20 years experience in the Telecoms industry, Pravin has held key roles in Marketing, Product Development and Sales at major telecom equipment manufacturers and software vendors such as Bay Networks, Nortel, Orchestream and Codima Technologies. Most recently, Pravin was CEO at Syphan Technologies UK, an innovative organisation providing security services to Managed Service Providers (MSPs). Pravin has excellent experience of working in France and is fluent in English, French and German.
Article abstract
Deploying enterprise connectivity services over 4G makes a lot of commercial sense for today’s CSPs, says Pravin Mirchandani, CMO, OneAccess Networks.
Full Article
Discussions on opportunities to generate revenue from the rollout of 4G almost always focus on data bundling for consumer and device-oriented lifestyle and entertainment services, like mobile gaming, for example, or the live streaming of movies and sporting events. What is often overlooked is 4G’s commercial potential to generate much needed income for communication service providers (CSPs) in the enterprise market.
When bonded with an organization’s other communications links, LTE can give the corporate WAN a real shot in the arm. It can boost whole-of-network performance, by intelligently load-balancing network traffic during peak usage times or by accelerating data throughput. Backup is another no-brainer. In high density areas, 3G networks are easily overloaded when the primary wireline link goes down. An LTE link, on the other hand, is much faster and, as a result, far more capable in a crisis.
Another of LTE’s ‘key enablers’ lies in its ability to help CSPs get new business customers up and running quickly; a process which is rarely as easy as it seems.
Take, for example, the opening of a new branch office for an enterprise customer. This customer’s operations are heavily reliant on a high-speed fiber link, but due to engineering works required to lay fiber to the customer’s office, the service provider is forced to make them wait weeks, or worse, months, before they can complete the implementation of the fiber required to enable the customer to reach optimal operational efficiency. For many businesses delays like this are simply unacceptable, they impede the day to day running of the business to such an extent that they can make the difference between them signing or renewing a contract with their CSP, and taking their business elsewhere. After all, being denied access to critical applications and services can quickly damage competitiveness and, ultimately, the commercial viability of the business.
For CSPs, all this matters because the market is becoming ever more crowded and contested. A new breed of agile over-the-top players are stealing business from longer established CSPs, who are finding it tough to keep pace with steep hikes in bandwidth requirements from business customers moving into the Cloud. In these conditions, new contracts are hard-won and existing contracts must be stoutly defended. LTE is almost perfectly suited to these market conditions; it can not only help CSPs find new revenues, but help them protect old ones, too.
How can a LTE link be provisioned so quickly? By redeploying a single piece of already-essential network equipment: the access router. Purpose-designed solutions, like the OneAccess One1540-4G, have transformed the router into a centrally managed platform over which service providers can deliver applications and bundles of revenue generating managed network services to enterprise customers, including the provision and management of bonded LTE as part of a multi-link hybrid-WAN model for enterprise connectivity.
LTE can offer high throughput speeds capable of supporting critical Cloud-based business applications, corporate VPN links and voice communications that can help maintain ‘quality of experience’ parity across the corporate WAN. OneAccess’ range of advanced, router platforms include support for 4G alongside fiber, xDSL, satellite and wifi broadband access options, extending the flexibility for service providers to rapidly get customers on line with minimal delay. And once the primary link is finally wired in, the LTE option can either be closed, or redeployed as a dedicated backup or business continuity option.
Another possibility is for the LTE link to be redeployed as an option for network performance optimization, by using link bonding or aggregation techniques to boost the performance of the wireline infrastructure. By leveraging recent multi-path technologies such as 3GPP IFOM and MP-TCP these latest hybrid devices can be used to improve the user experience, increasing the performance and resilience of a combined 4G / wireline infrastructure.
OneAccess router platforms support the widest number of access technology combinations available on the market. This means operators and CSPs can ‘mass-customize’ their network access capabilities and drive down TCO through higher-volume purchases. A second TCO reduction factor is the elimination of site visits: installing the same access platforms with all customers, and provisioning only the services and connectivity combinations required by each, which also greatly simplifies costly maintenance requirements. This level of centralized access control and management is a trend that will only increase as demand for multi-link and Cloud-based enterprise connectivity solutions intensifies.
These are all quick wins for CSPs, whose fixed line networks are already under strain from network equipment obsolescence and dramatic year-on-year hikes in data volumes. In a market dogged by falling ARPUs and increasingly complex network demands from customers, providers of enterprise WANs should not only welcome the chance to introduce an LTE link to their customers, they should be seizing the opportunity with both hands.
By introducing enterprise services over LTE, CSPs are, in fact, doing far more than opening up hidden revenue opportunities, they are also enhancing their competitiveness by quickly delivering the performance enhancements needed to future-proof their enterprise network offerings. These advantages lead to market differentiation, which in turn, better positions the business in the market for the long term. In this way, 4G’s enabling potential, for both enterprise organisations and the service providers that support them, is vast.
As always, the key for CSPs lies in thinking laterally about how the technology can be deployed and then moving quickly to turn those ideas into commercial services. Maintaining an open relationship with a specialist network access partner, like OneAccess, is a shortcut to this capability. The equipment exists, as does the market demand. The business case is also well established. The only remaining question is ‘who will seize the moment to get ahead of the pack?’.
