Making the mobile internet a business reality

The business issues and back office integration will make or break the next generation cellular phone networks, says Alun Lewis.

Telecommunications engineers only have themselves to blame. The successes of the telephone, radio, television and, more recently, the Internet, has given both their employers and the general public the feeling that no communications problem is insurmountable.

The most recent incarnation of this has been all the marketing and financial hype surrounding the possibilities of merging the worlds of the Internet and mobile communications. The result, according to the visionaries, will be a permanently connected, always-on world of video phones and smart devices.

Before we get to this world, however, there are quite a number of issues to resolve at both ends of the service chain. For a start, the leap into content and higher bandwidths brings its own challenges in terms of the radio planning needed to deliver consistent levels of service. Secondly, how best are we to integrate all the new services that will become available into a manageable environment. Finally, there's the impact of moving towards an environment based on IPv6, the new version of the Internet currently in development.

Squeezing value from the spectrum

With many operators around the world having invested huge sums in getting 3G licences, they are no under pressure to extract as much value from this intangible asset. Not only that, but they must achieve this in the face of an unstable stock market and considerable uncertainty amongst the investor community. If 2G could be considered as having been a gamble that paid off beyond the wildest dreams of the initiators of the technology, 3G is looking like far more of a step into the dark ­ involving as it does a far broader portfolio of advanced services and interactive content.

After many years experience of TDMA technologies, mobile operators must now confront the comparative uncertainties of Wideband CDMA. Not only that, but the services that will be carried over this new air interface are going to vary greatly in their demands on bandwidth, the levels of service that can and will be offered and indeed the tariffs that can be charged for these. This is where the intricacies of W-CDMA radio planning begin to seriously raise their heads.

Unlike TDMA, W-CDMA does not operate in a linear way as a result of a number of complex interactions between different factors such as cell size, radio power fading and link budgets. Changes in the operation of one cell can impact on an adjoining cell and so on. GSM users who travel over familiar territory have become used to particular deadspots where reception is poor or non-existent. With GSM, these behaviours are consistent on a day to day basis, while with W-CDMA these conditions can change on a day to day basis, depending on traffic in adjacent cells. While these will have some impact on most users at some time or another, they can become particularly acute when dealing with in-building coverage at the edge of cells.

Issues like these naturally have a major impact on the overall planning of a network, dramatically affecting the number of base stations required for a particular region. These soon translate into substantial variations in the build out cost required to provide services to customers or to virtual network operators, piggybacking on top of existing infrastructure.

It's in this context that the discipline of radio planning for 3G networks begins to have to be considered as a tool for reducing business risk ­ rather than just as a straightforward engineering tool. As Paul Mullen, senior consultant at Hardiman Communications explains, "3G radio planning tools have to be integrated into the whole business planning cycle ­ and that includes the work involved in licence applications. Complex scenarios demand complex tools, especially given the increasing element of financial risk management that's involved in operating a 3G network. There's far more room for error in the 3G space.“

"The 3G service environment is obviously packet-based. Some of those packets are going to demand real-time delivery such as streaming video and voice ­ other applications are going to be far more tolerant of delays. We have to add insight into applications to the planning mix.“

This is a view echoed by Dr Charles Chambers, senior consultant at Quotient Communications. "2G tools and models might have served the industry well in the very early days of 3G when we were just looking to carry out very approximate network dimensioning. They will not be adequate however to deliver the detailed understanding that's going to be needed when we have a wide mix of services to support. Understanding this involves drilling down into more complexity ­ but it's crucial that the tools involved aren't actually complex to use. That ease of use issue is particularly important when it comes to applying their power to more directly commercial applications such as marketing ­ anything that can improve the dialogue between engineering and other business areas can only be to the good of everyone concerned.“

Links in the new service chain

This accent on the importance of understanding the whole business case and the ways that the new service value chain in 3G is also crucial when considering the wider issues of technology integration that must happen behind the scenes. Traditionally, most mass market telecommunications has involved the sale of only one simple product ­ dial tone. Services began and ended within the telecommunications world and, where other operators were involved, well understood mechanisms were in place to ensure that calls usually got through to the other side of the world and that billing and payment happened smoothly. The aback office' systems needed to deliver these kinds of functions were like the computer systems of other large businesses ­ slow to change, expensive to run and often based on legacy principles. As new services were developed, the functions needed to manage them were difficult to integrate with existing systems, leading to wasted time and money on developing application interfaces inevitably against a backdrop of limited human skills and experience in the appropriate areas.

In the 3G world, the new value chain is going to extend far beyond the confines of individual operators to include virtual network operators, e-commerce intermediaries and other industries such as the financial services sector, travel and entertainment who may be offering content and services, a mix of both or even on-line applications. While there are numerous technological issues raised here around factors such as security, service assurance, Quality of Service, self-provisioning and so on, some wider concerns are being raised about the validity of some of the business models proposed by 3G service providers. By extending the value chain outside the direct control of the operator, 3G introduces the possibility that users will become increasingly fickle when it comes to changing provider. Responding to this means that operators must become far more innovative in developing new services and move towards running their business development programmes at Internet, as opposed to telecoms, speeds.

As Peter Zeitler, senior consultant at ICL 3G Mobile comments, "3G means that operators can no longer apply atelco wisdom' to the situation. The underlying architecture means that there will be islands of information and that these will have to be interconnected. The customer will be there by choice and they'll be browsing - it will become far more like a traditional retail environment. If you look at prepaid services ­ and, given that a substantial part of revenues will come from the youth market these will be very important ­ you have the additional problem of customer anonymity. Supermarkets have got round this by introducing loyalty cards and concepts like this will become very important in the 3G world. It's also going to challenge the abilities of billing systems in that they are going to have to be able to bill in real time as transactions are likely to involve higher sums than in the 2G space.“

This is a view echoed by Dag Aberg, strategy and business development director at EHPT, "We're no longer talking about telco services ­ it's convergent services and that's gong to involve a completely new set of players in the market. Old notions of customer loyalty are going to become redundant and operators are going to have to realise that. The new applications environment that's involved is going to have to take an extreme modular approach, otherwise things are going to rapidly become unworkable. If operators continue to go for a astovepipe' approach in applications development they'll quickly find themselves trapped in a corner ­ slow to market and expensive to adapt to rapidly changing market conditions.“

Upgrading the Internet

It was decided in May 2000 by the 3GPP ­ the 3G industry's main body ­ to adopt IPv6 in place of IPv4 as the underlying architecture for the next generation networks. Despite being over twenty years old, IPv4 has shown a remarkable robustness in handling the intense demands currently being made on it by the emerging electronic economy. For a number of reasons, its working life is now coming to an end.

The primary driver behind the shift is the fact that we will shortly run out of Internet addresses given the continued expansion of the Internet and the implications of both 3G communications and the increase in asmart' devices'. With IPv4, 32 bits were allocated to provide address space, resulting in a total available number of addresses of 4.2 billion. Since there are already around a billion mobile phones in use around the world ­ a number that continues to grow daily ­ and in a 3G world each would need two addresses to operate, it's possible to see that address exhaustion is not that far away. In addition, the way that IPv4 address block were originally assigned means that there was a very heavy geographic bias towards the North America as a result of the Internet growth that began there.

To get around this problem, IPv6 uses 128 bits for the address space, creating an enormous potential pool of addresses. According to John Patrick of IBM, this translates into an Internet address for every proton in the observable universe.

A secondary concern behind the adoption of IPv6 revolves around security ­ an essential issue of the mobile Internet is going to be trusted with mission critical business information or act as a platform for e-commerce. The combination of mobile as opposed to fixed line customers and the anonymity of prepaid services results in enough of a security problem for operators when all that can be lost is voice traffic revenues. When we give users the ability to make purchases, download games, music and other content or carry out transactions with their bank or stockbroker and it's easy to see that high security is going to be an essential prerequisite for the mobile Internet.

Although various security fixes have been added to IPv4 over the years, these carry their own overheads and reduce the speed and efficiency of services. Kim Fulbrook, network technical architect at BT Cellnet explains the link between security and addressing, "Because IPv6 provides a very large number of IP addresses, it will allow applications to be developed which can directly address individual hosts by IP address ­ because each host can have a unique IP address . This potentially introduces its own set of problems, particularly relating to abuse and denial of service. Suppose a wireless network chooses to bill its customers on the amount of data sent over the radio interface and the mobile terminal is sitting on the open Internet with its uniquely addressable IPv6 address. Anyone on the Internet can fire data packets as it and rack up the customer's bill. Do we want this ?“

Unlike its predecessor, IPv6 comes with security features built in, although there are questions about how relevant these may be to all applications and the impact that they might have on the network overhead.

Another set of features within IPv6 addresses Quality of Service issues. Service providers must begin these days to differentiate themselves on more than just the commodity of basic connectivity and this involves great variations in levels of service such as download speeds, allowable file download sizes and so on and operators must be able to monitor and manage different levels of Quality of Service. Included within IPv6 are features such as Class Field that can identify particular types of traffic and Flow Label, which supports the delivery of real time traffic such as streaming sound or video.

From the behaviour of the radio network through the underlying packet technologies to the business strategies and processes of the service providers, the introduction of the mobile internet is challenging traditional concepts in telecommunications. As services start to take shape and become commercial reality, constant innovation across the length of the value chain is going to present major challenges for some time yet.

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