 | Issue: | Europe II 2011 |
| Article no.: | 4 | |
| Topic: | Meeting the network capacity challenge | |
| Author: | Stefano Nocentini | |
| Title: | Network Director | |
| Organisation: | Telecom Italia | |
| PDF size: | 266KB |
About author
Stefano Nocentini is Telecom Italia’s Network Director; he joined Telecom Italia shortly after graduating as an engineer and, over the years, has served in a number of increasingly responsible positions. Mr Nocentini is currently responsible for Telecom Italia Domestic Network – both fixed and mobile, managing all innovation, planning, engineering and operations network activities. He also leads the governance decisions processes over the TI networks abroad (Latam). Previously, Mr Nocentini was responsible for Telecom Italia Lab, internal TI organization in charge of innovation, engineering and testing processes of services platforms and network technologies. Mr Nocentini also contributed to TI project development of Next generation network, data network evolution, network intelligence platforms and services deployment and ISDN network. Stefano Nocentini graduated in Electronic Engineering from La Sapienza University in Rome.
Article abstract
Mobile and fixed network operators face unprecedented challenges to their core businesses and must evolve their networks to meet market requirements Mobile data is exploding, putting great pressure on the access and backhaul networks and complicating the management of limited spectrum resources to increase coverage and capacity. Fixed networks are facing mounting competition in their all-important voice services from over-the-top service providers; they need to evolve carrier grade rich media services with guaranteed quality of service and full service interoperability among carriers.
Full Article
The network is the core asset of service providers. Its technological transformation and its expansion are key challenges. Network development is very expensive and risky. Forecasting customer behavioural trends is essential for making the right investment decisions and for minimizing the related risks. Relevant market demand trends are reshaping network architecture, putting great pressure primarily on access, less on metro and minimal impact on backbone. Mobile data service The first big challenge is with the mobile network. The explosion of mobile data is significantly modifying the mobile access network. In Italy mobile data traffic grew 70 per cent in 2010, more than three times fixed traffic growth, even though mobile is 20 times less in terms of volume. Data dongles have a greater impact than smart-phones. The forecast for mobile traffic growth in Italy is even more interesting, tripling volume during the next three years and becoming 10 per cent of overall traffic – a big issue for installed access capacity. Mobile access network capacity is keeping up with this growth. Therefore it is necessary to focus on the following factors: • number of frequencies/carriers available – Increasing the spectrum utilised is expensive, but unavoidable. Western countries are defining new frequency allocation due to improved digital efficiency in broadcasting – the digital dividend – and are making additional spectrum available; • spectral efficiency – 3G+ and LTE technologies are significantly improving what can be carried by the single spectrum slice; • backhauling capacity – Fibre, microwave links and copper bonding technologies are efficiently increasing backhauling capacity needed to guarantee on-air capacity; and, • number of coverage cells – Micro and pico-cells are helping to fill the small coverage gaps, especially in dense urban areas while femto-cells are helping to better cover the indoor areas and offload traffic on the fixed network, where available. The increasing number of cells will generate a complex frequency coordination problem to avoid mutual interferences. Doubling of on-air capacity every year in order to meet new customer demand is expensive and the current business model, based on flat rates and no charge for the over-the-top service providers, should soon be revised because mobile operators face heavy investments and decreasing margins. New devices and applications, like e-books and tablets, are changing customer usage profiles, now based on always-on connection with continuous traffic data interactions with the network. The new usage profiles require dynamic capacity allocation models that go beyond the traditional static resource planning approach. Being always-on connected is making micro traffic flows more random and difficult to forecast and results in some temporary capacity crisis spots on the access network with poor performance. New technologies, like the evolution of self-organizing networks (SON), that enable fast adaptation of coverage to changing needs and maximise the exploitation of available capacity inside cells will help to manage micro demand peaks and deliver a better quality of service. Another mobile usage trend to carefully monitor relates to machine-2-machine (M2M) and Internet of things services. M2M solutions enable connection and management of remote measurement systems, its expected impact on the network in the medium term is not relevant. Nevertheless, M2M will require a different approach to network planning given the number of objects to manage – perhaps more than ten times the number of human connections – and the fine-tuning needed for coverage. New SIM management capabilities and additional micro coverage will be more important than additional on-air capacity. Proximity technologies can help the clustering of machine connections and simplify management of the Internet of things. The Internet of the things will probably have a much more disruptive effect on the network in the long term because the number of connected objects will be a much greater with, say, bottles or T-shirts connected, and the related traffic will have much different patterns. Fixed data services The next big challenge is the fixed network. Traffic growth generated by fixed data services in Italy will be impressive, with around 20 per cent CAGR (compound annual growth rate) during the next three years and volume forecast for 2013 of around two thousand petabytes. Two main market trends are reshaping access and requiring new capacity: • consumer video will shift from peer-to-peer to Internet video and visual applications and by 2014 will account for 90 per cent of overall traffic in Italy; and • cloud computing for the business segment that will generate high value traffic and require guaranteed quality of service. The first trend, consumer video, requires good quality very high bandwidth on the access and metro networks to deal with the high definition and 3D video traffic. Because of the limited access capacity of the copper technology still used by telcos, video applications will gradually force operators to shift to fibre access. Point-to-point fibre architecture is competing with more efficient point to multipoint implementations (mainly GPON) that are succeeding in large-scale implementations. In any case large-scale fibre implementation will depend on the success of new fibre-based services, the value perceived by the customers and upon a public financial commitment to avoid a new type of digital divide in non-profitable areas. Cloud computing will transfer many enterprise computing resources to the network as soon as security and performance issues are solved. The ‘x-as-a-service’ business model can be powerful – it will add flexibility and efficiency to current enterprise operational model. Like most business services, cloud computing will be less relevant in terms of contribution to overall capacity, but it will be relevant in terms of value generated by network usage. Implementing fibre access solutions for enterprise customers also introduces valuable spare capacity that will enable on-demand connectivity services with end-to-end quality. Virtualization technologies and use of fibre access will strongly enrich service offerings to enterprises. Conversely, consumer services will probably move to two different demands: current web-based applications access, mostly related to mobile infrastructure, and bandwidth-hungry applications that will require a powerful fixed fibre-based access. Other issues There are other challenges related to network capacity evolution. Efficiency and network capacity – One Gigabyte, on either mobile or fixed access network, has to be moved efficiently. This means that current networks must be simplified by collapsing different network layers and reducing technological complexity. This transformation is difficult because today’s network complexity is the result of a many years of accumulating leading network technologies; then too, backward compatibility is still a strong market requirement. Internal efficiency transformation projects are vital to guaranteeing a cost structure that meets challenging market requirements. Quality of service – Network neutrality is the cornerstone of current regulation, but there is a growing demand for quality-driven network services that guarantee a certain level of performance on the network. Quality is required not only by business customers that traditionally require a private network, but increasingly by premium consumers and by over -the-top providers that need network quality to deliver premium services to final users. Network application-delivery services need to give providers a specified level of network quality for their applications and guarantee end-to-end performance. This offers additional value both to application providers and to final users – easily perceived by OTT (over-the-top – services provided via the Internet) service providers and the final customer. Voice services – Voice services are gradually changing their nature. Plain old telephony services (POTS) are getting richer and richer; with IP implementation they are evolving into multimedia unified communication services with full social network integration. This transformation of fixed services, could become the standard implementation model for mobile LTE in the future. Traditional voice services are still the most important revenue and margin generators for a telco, nevertheless they are becoming more and more irrelevant in terms of their contribution to generated traffic. OTT providers are becoming the main competitors – including for voice. To preserve the telcos’ traditional markets, they need to seamlessly evolve carrier grade rich media communication services, and provide full services interoperability among different providers and guaranteed quality of service.
