By allowing operators to focus on issues that directly affect the user experience, SON functionality across radio technologies helps ensure that mobile-broadband services are not only affordable, but also attract additional subscribers.

Growth presents many opportunities for operators, where the challenge is to maintain excellent user experience - a task that is becoming highly complex, time-consuming and, ultimately, costly. Carriers continue to develop intelligent networking architectures to keep up with bandwidth growth while preventing infrastructure spending from ballooning to extremes.

Global spending by wireless carriers on infrastructure equipment is expected to rise by 8.3 percent by the end of 2012 and reach USD 45.5 billion, driven primarily by investments among carriers in developed nations on next-generation 4G long-term evolution (LTE) technology.

The spending on infrastructure, considering a bellwether for gauging the overall prospects of the wireless industry moving forward, continues the strong 7.7 percent expansion of 2011-12, when global carrier expenditures amounted to USD 42 billion. Growth is expected to be moderate during the next few years to the three percent range, with total carrier spending on infrastructure equipment reaching USD 50.6 billion by 2016, according to IHS.

Growth in 2012 can be primarily attributed to investments of many carriers in the United States, Japan, and South Korea on 4G LTE technology deployments, supplemented by carriers in China, Europe, India, and other regions of the world investing in 3.5G network upgrades. Carriers are making the investments on infrastructure in order to keep pace with growing data traffic, especially on the mobile side.

The bulk of carrier spending in 2012-12 is expected to continue to be on older 3.5G technologies, equivalent to some USD 34.4 billion and flat from USD 34.3 billion in 2011. Spending on 4G, however, has experienced a remarkable rise of 132 percent to USD 8.6 billion, with 4G expenditure projected to take majority share starting in 2013. Carrier spending on 4G in 2013 is expected to touch USD 25.2 billion, while expenditure on 3.5G is predicted to drop to USD 20.9 billion.

Indian Market

The capability to accommodate data traffic is crucial, especially since business models are continually being developed by carriers to make the most out of the data traffic flowing on their networks and to monetize such opportunities. With voice revenues having flattened, data revenue is the best bet for carriers to keep growing in the Indian market as well as its global counterparts.

In the 4G LTE equipment market, Bharti Airtel has selected ZTE, Huawei, and NSN for Kolkata, Karnataka, and Maharashtra circles, respectively. Reliance Infotel is expected to launch 4G/LTE-TDD based wireless broadband services in Delhi and Mumbai by early 2013. The company is likely to procure over Rs. 5500 crore worth of network gear from Samsung Electronics to meet a sizeable chunk of its fourth-generation equipment requirement. The two companies are also discussing potential bundling of a 4G handset and devices supply deal within the contract. The company has also signed a deal with Ericsson for building and integrating Wi-Fi with its 4G network for deployment in Delhi and Mumbai. Ericsson would be setting up around 200 Wi-Fi hotspots as part of this deal.

Alcatel-Lucent has ongoing contracts with RCom, Tata Teleservices (TTL), Uninor, BSNL, and MTNL. In the last fiscal, Alcatel-Lucent was awarded an order of over Rs. 300 crore from Indian Air Force to deploy WCDMA-based wireless network covering many air force stations across India through HCL. This is a captive 3G mobile network and will offer a lot of value-added services to Indian Air Force. Once the network is completed, it is planned to be integrated with Indian Air Force network.

Alcatel-Lucent is also managing Bharti Airtel's enterprise network based on fixed WiMAX technology. Apart from this, the company has also been awarded an IP contract with Bharti Airtel. The IP win helps in creating access to network based on Carrier Ethernet Technology (CEN) whereby delivering faster mobile broadband speed to its customers.

Ericsson has ongoing 3G deals with Vodafone, Idea Cellular, Bharti Airtel, and Aircel. In FY12, Ericsson signed managed services agreement with Idea for three years. The contract is valid for five circles (Mumbai, Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Northeast, and Assam) and Ericsson will be responsible for managing network and field operations, operation and maintenance activities for 2G and 3G sites, network design and planning, network performance improvement, and program management for infrastructure.

Ericsson has also signed an agreement with Bharti Airtel across 15 circles for five years. Under this multi-vendor- and multi-technology-managed services agreement, Ericsson will operate, maintain, and provide services. In addition to the standard portfolio of managed services, Ericsson will also take responsibility for the intelligent network that manages Bharti Airtel's prepaid customer base.

Sistema Shyam Teleservices has extended its managed services contract with Ericsson and added four new CDMA circles (Uttar Pradesh (E), Uttar Pradesh (W), Gujarat, and Rajasthan). Under the three-year agreement, Ericsson will be responsible for network optimization, operations, and maintenance including field operations and 24/7 network service assurance, fulfillment of network service provisioning, customer problem management, and spare parts management.

Huawei has ongoing 3G agreements with Bharti, Idea, Tata DOCOMO, RCom, Aircel, BSNL, and MTNL.

Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) leads the packet core market as it handles data traffic for 250 million subscribers in India. The company has implemented intelligent mobile packet core solutions for Bharti Airtel, Datacom, Idea Cellular, Tata Teleservices, and Uninor.

With Motorola's acquisition, NSN has also entered the customer premises equipment (CPE) market. On managed services front, the company extended its contract in the fiscal with Bharti Airtel for five years in eight circles. Under the contract, NSN will manage and maintain Bharti Airtel's 3G and GSM networks as well as iWAN (internet Wireless Access Network), the operator's enterprise broadband service.

ZTE has ongoing deals with Reliance and Aircel. In the last fiscal, ZTE won the world's first CDMA EV-DO Rev B Phase 2 commercial contract from Sistema Shyam Teleservices Ltd. (SSTL). The company has also won CDMA expansion contracts and EV-DO upgrade contracts for 10 circles of SSTL. The EV-DO Rev B Phase 2 commercial launch will commence from Rajasthan.

Smarter Self-Organizing Networks

Carriers continue to develop intelligent networking architectures to keep up with bandwidth growth while preventing infrastructure spending from ballooning to extremes. As carriers migrate to 4G LTE, they are looking to deploy heterogeneous networking architectures involving a combination of macro and micro base stations, coupled with so-called metro cells and enterprise femto cells. Such cells, mountable on street or traffic lights, can be used to fill holes in wireless coverage and add networking capacity in areas of high data traffic.

Mobile broadband is growing faster than most industry observers dared predict. This is driving the need for rapid expansion in network capacity, coverage, and quality to meet rising user expectations in terms of speed and availability. With the introduction of 4G LTE technology, it has become clear that self-organizing networks (SON) can dramatically speed up deployment and reduce operational effort. Operators need SON capabilities that support their mobile broadband businesses to the full, by working intelligently across multiple technologies and all types of network equipment - managing complexity, boosting operational efficiency, and keeping the focus on delivering an excellent user experience.

Addressing the Growth Challenge the Smart Way

The increased use of smartphones, tablets, broadband-enabled laptops, and a host of other connected devices has led to unprecedented growth in mobile-broadband subscriptions and data traffic.

Growth presents many opportunities for operators, where the challenge is to maintain excellent user experience - a task that is becoming highly complex, time-consuming and, ultimately, costly.

The processes and techniques used to plan, deploy, maintain, and optimize 2G and 3G networks require a significant amount of skilled people and time. The scale of the capacity and coverage expansion required to meet mobile-broadband demand and rising user expectations in terms of speed and availability suggests that such skilled employees will be required to achieve more, and will consequently need support systems with much higher levels of automation.

The introduction of LTE has resulted in a new start for many areas of automation. The development focus for many SON capabilities has been on rapid, cost-effective rollout of 4G networks. Ericsson estimates that SON features have resulted in 40 percent faster rollouts, and as much as a 90 percent reduction in daily maintenance for new LTE networks. SON functionality needs to work across all radio-access, transport, and core networks, in such a way that the differences in these technologies are masked for higher-level operations - maximizing capacity, coverage, and quality gains and making networks more autonomous. The solution involves a combination of self-configuration, self-healing, and self-optimization functions in nodes and in the network management system (NMS) layer, together with high-level policies for meeting system service KPIs (S-KPIs).

By allowing operators to focus on issues that directly affect the user experience, SON functionality across radio technologies helps ensure that mobile-broadband services are not only affordable, but also attract additional subscribers - generating additional growth and revenue opportunities. To keep pace with rising demand for mobile broadband, operators need solutions to rapidly expand and quickly deploy additional radio capacity and coverage - irrespective of wireless technology.

Given the large-scale deployments involved, the traditional, mostly manual processes used to configure and optimize new radio sites need to be streamlined. To reduce manual intervention, greater automation is required in the planning steps and in configuring site parameters. For example, installing a base station should not require the involvement of highly skilled personnel, and neither computing equipment nor specialized tools should be needed on site.

Automation speeds up deployment, reduces the risk of manual errors, and optimizes utilization of network investments. With a higher degree of built-in automation in the network, operating costs fall and the services delivered to consumers improve.

The mobile network of a large operator typically includes a mixture of equipment from several vendors and multiple (radio) nodes with a range of different characteristics - combining macro, micro, pico, femto, and Wi-Fi cells - and a variety of support systems. A typical network deployment uses several radio technologies - two or more of GSM, CDMA, WCDMA, TD-SCDMA, and LTE - operating on different frequency bands - in short, a highly complex operating environment.

This complexity gives rise to some key requirements for managing network operations. Automated processes that enable constant monitoring of service and network performance are needed, along with automated tools that can analyze data collected from different parts of the network - providing useful feedback that can be used for benchmarking purposes and for making decisions outside system control, such as resource management. The SON capabilities being developed today aim to support mobile-broadband business priorities and manage network complexity in a smart way. Leveraging SON functionality leaves operators free to focus on providing an excellent user experience as the management of their multi-technology, multi-vendor, high-growth network is simplified and streamlined.

Operators who use network sharing for some or all radio technologies can benefit from SON functionality. Each equipment vendor and node may have its own SON features and implementation, but optimal overall network performance can be achieved through harmonization of various SON features. This is where standards, such as those developed by 3GPP, come into play to ensure optimal automation in a heterogeneous, multi-technology, multi-vendor environment. Until standardized procedures are available, proprietary solutions can coexist and be deployed to accelerate time-to-market.

Mobile Backhaul - The Power behind LTE

Optimizing mobile backhaul to cope with the vast rise in data traffic is a pressing concern. While the key to revenue growth undoubtedly lies in 3G/4G mobile broadband services for the Web 2.0 generation, these demanding customers are used to seeing a steady decline in the cost per bit for their bandwidth-heavy applications, and that is focusing attention on expensive and ageing traditional backhaul infrastructure.

The situation will change rapidly, especially for service providers, as they start to address radio access with LTE, the next-generation mobile standard. It will expose a major bottleneck in mobile backhaul, as much infrastructure around the world is rooted in legacy leased line and TDM architecture that simply will not scale up to provide efficiently the transport requirements of next-generation networks. Carriers across the globe are increasing the bandwidth on their backhaul networks to handle this exploding IP data traffic, and the most efficient, cost-effective way to do that is to transition from TDM to packet IP/Ethernet, which is driving the mobile backhaul equipment market. Service providers must plan for more than 100 Mbit/s backhaul capacity per site via a migration from TDM, factoring in resiliency, end-to-end network management, quality of service and SLA monitoring, and cost per megabit.

Backhaul transport is a strategic and critical part of the overall network optimization equation, which accounts for more than 30 percent of technical operation costs as well as 30 percent of the overall capital investments for many mobile service providers. Many service providers now need to decouple transport costs from capacity growth and increase network efficiency - and so achieve LTE readiness. But optimizing mobile backhaul can be highly complex, as it can involve multiple network layers and a wide mix of transport technologies and protocols.

The way forward lies in migrating all transport to the packet-based world. The key is to choose an evolutionary pathway that is as simple and efficient as possible, and which also fits in with present infrastructure outside of green-field implementations. There are a number of approaches currently in place for backhaul - principally leased lines, and self-built microwave systems sometimes supplemented with leased lines. LTE (with speeds in tens of Mbits/s per user) will require cost-effective Carrier Ethernet based backhaul running on microwave, fiber, or hybrid networks. Certainly, typical second generation (2G) cell sites have a few T1/E1 lines for cellular backhaul that will need to be overhauled for LTE deployments. Increasingly, the converged fixed/mobile broadband service mix offered by service providers also competing in residential and business fixed broadband are coming into play and can equally be integrated into one simplified Carrier Ethernet Transport backhaul solution.

EXPERTS SPEAK
SONs Enable Enhanced Quality of Experience

Madhukar Tripathi
Manager-Telecom Segment,
Anritsu India Pvt. Ltd.

3GPP introduced SON during December 2008 Release 8. Since then, SON has emerged as one of the best options for the ever-demanding network challenges. With growth of telecom sector and evolution of new technologies during 2010-12, the telecom network has increasingly become complex. SONs enable the operators to manage this complexity effectively and with ease. SONs are future proof and enable optimum resource utilization because of properties like self-configuration and self-optimization of network based on subscriber/load, leading to better customer quality of experience.

A typical network deployment uses several radio technologies - two or more of GSM, CDMA, WCDMA, TD-SCDMA, and LTE - operating on different frequency bands - in short, a highly complex operating environment. This creates interference that leads to call drop or poor data rate transfer. Passive interference modulation (PIM) is another issue that needs operator attention.

Global spending by wireless carriers on infrastructure equipment is expected to rise a solid 8.3 percent this year and reach USD 45.5 billion, driven primarily by investments among carriers in developed nations on next-generation 4G LTE technology. Indian telecom market growth has not seen an upswing in 2011, with cautious operator spending on T&M.

One feels that after 2G spectrum auction, due by the end of 2012, operator spending will pick up. The period 2012-13 is expected to see a wide-scale deployment of VoLTE (Voice over LTE) and may give the much needed boost to the sector.