Blog from Cisco's Mobility Community, https://www.myciscocommunity.com/community/sp/mobility

1. Service Provider Mobility: The Three
Dimensions of LTE Readiness
Posted by Ritesh Kumar Jan 13, 2010
Mobile operators want an assessment of how they can evolve their environment
to be LTE ready. Going from 2 Mbps peak downlink rates with basic 3G to 50-100
Mbps with LTE—among numerous other great new all-IP capabilities and their
impact—has gotten every operator’s attention. But what does the move to
LTE entail? And how much will it cost? And how can the evolution to LTE be as
seamless and painless as possible?
To get ready for LTE, mobile operators must align the three dimensions of business,
technology, and operations. This involves asking and answering a variety of questions and
collecting metrics and other information about the following:
• Business Alignment includes a clear articulation of what business drivers make it necessary to move to
LTE. What is the cost and benefits equation? Is the market clamoring for LTE or can the operator wait?
What are the new business models for the cost effective running of the enhanced network? What is the
impact on the vendor ecosystem? What are the new business initiatives that need to be driven? What is
the impact to the internal organization? This was discussed in two recent blog posts; Organizational Impact
of a Flat Network and LTE Brings the Importance of Organization Collaboration). Are particular applications
or partnerships behind the need for LTE features? How can services that rely on LTE be marketed to
appeal to customers and increase ARPU? What are customer requirements for those services? What are
the operator's medium- and long-term objectives and timelines with LTE and what specific new services
will be introduced? What are the price points for the devices? Should LTE be introduced first only in
hot spots instead of throughout a mobile operator's entire market? If an internal or external consultant
is conducting the assessment, discussions with key executives who are responsible for strategy and
marketing will be crucial.
• Technology Alignment begins with clearly understanding the current network state and then determining
what technologies and platforms must be added or can be reused for offering LTE services. Architectural
layers and service elements include the radio, backhaul, aggregation layer, network core with the
gateways, data center, and services and applications. How do these areas stack up today in terms of their
IP evolution with respect to the and Key LTE Metrics (discussion here)? What areas need improvement?
How does the network compare with comparable networks based on industry best practices? The result
of this aspect of the readiness assessment is an analysis and findings and then an LTE architecture and
design blueprint. Key LTE performance metrics should be used when proposing an architecture and
design, IP implementation plan, and upgraded approaches to scalability, resiliency, security, QoS, latency,
mobility of applications, and management. Impact relating to call flows, roaming, and service offerings
Generated by Jive SBS on 2010-04-08-06:00
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2. Service Provider Mobility: The Three Dimensions of LTE Readiness
must be evaluated. Decisions related to the degree of distribution of gateways, IPv6, policy, deep packet
inspection, and billing are all part of the technology alignment.
• Operations Alignment for LTE should encompass the tools, processes, and skills necessary to support
the IP and Ethernet environment required for higher speeds, capacity, and features of LTE. Another
important aspect to consider is that the existing services must not be impacted during this transition. The
existing traffic (especially data traffic) may need to be migrated to the new infrastructure and that may
be more cost effective, an example being backhaul. What legal and regulatory requirements (e.g., Legal
Interception, 911 routing, etc.) must be considered? Are there different features that must be included in
LTE support models that differ from those used currently?
Leading industry analysts believe that most mobile operators will be moving
to LTE within the next three years, so it isn’t too early to begin asking these
and other questions. LTE is likely to be a lot more than just a technology
enhancement. Given the rapid pace of social networking, business collaboration,
and other user-driven behavior that is extending beyond traditional network
borders, LTE will probably quickly spawn new applications and new opportunities.
It’s hard to anticipate what pressures these will bring to mobile networks, but
now is the time to carefully plan the move to LTE and to ask the questions,
gather the metrics, and devise solutions based on what we know now.
447 Views Tags: readiness, 4g, lte, mobile_internet, mobile_operators, ipfication, ip_transition, ip_index,
ip_transformation, organizational_impact, alignment, technology_impact, operations_impact, lte_readiness
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