Race to 4G should impact OSS strategy, as well as approach to rollouts

Netcracker was a key part of NTT DoCoMo’s massive roll out of LTE last month. Though Santa Claus lost some headlines to the Christmas Eve announcement by DoCoMo, it’s probably safe to assume that people in Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka were probably happy to hear about their “gift”— Xi—a next-gen cellular data service that offers data downlink speeds of up to 75Mbps (10x faster than DoCoMo’s current FOMA 3G service).

Connected Planet spoke to Sanjay Mewada, NetCracker's vice president of strategy, about what critical OSS components operators like DoCoMo should be thinking about as they move to deploy LTE infrastructure and services.

Connected Planet: What’s different now with LTE than all other instances of ‘upgrades’ in the past?
Sanjay Mewada: Nowadays, once a competitor goes to 4g or LTE, you have to respond, so the cycle times that service providers enjoyed before are gone. With DSL or fiber-based rollouts you went market by market in a methodical way, scaling up as you went. But now, the cycle between planning, deploying and going live is very short; no more three-year cycles because of competitive pressures and the push to make public announcements to keep investors and the market happy.

Also, when upgrading bandwidth on the access side, it has a dramatic cascading effect now on the backhaul and core networks. So it’s not enough to go 4G on mobile and not to do the same on fixed. If you are offering 60 Mbps on a smart phone, then your RAN has to be able to handle that, and your backhaul and core simultaneously have to. It would be of course smarter to do it even earlier than when you roll it out on the access side, as you don’t want to bear the consequences of a huge surge.

It’s a mistake to roll out 4G in certain areas just so you can say you have it for marketing purposes, without considering the whole footprint and the impact on service.

Connected Planet: How do tighter cycle times impact OSS strategy?
Sanjay Mewada: Your rollouts have to be as efficient as possible and bring to bear the right capabilities and tools right from the start, as there is little room for error when customers have so many choices to churn. That means something like workforce management for next-gen networks in fixed and mobile will be very important. You can’t have multiple truck rolls because of scheduling problems, or because a technician forgets certain pieces of hardware, electronics or tools, or even hammers and nails for that matter! You have to do it right the first time, especially since resources are increasingly limited (physical, logical and human). Everything from the municipal approvals necessary to build base stations, to the antennae, to the hammers and nails needs to be managed in a comprehensive and complete manner.

Quality of service and service management will also be very important now that you are going beyond SMS and onto offering HD TV on mobile phones or high-quality videos. Customer expectations and tolerance for failure will rise, and drop, respectively. The stakes are much higher now that you are offering a 70-Mbps service like video streaming or video conferencing over iPads, smart phones and other devices. Now more than ever, end end-to-end management of quality will mean a lot; there cannot be unrecognized and unplacated drops of IP packets if you are going to compete successfully in terms of customer satisfaction. I think I saw a Spiderman cartoon that read: “With more power comes more responsibility.” Well, with more bandwidth comes more focus on quality.

Third, I think device management will be crucial with the proliferation of devices. If you have 50 billion devices (and that’s before M2M comes to the fore) then you have to manage reading, messaging, viewing, interactions—connectivity among Kindles, iPads, Blackberrys and so on. Ensuring connectivity is optimal for a device, for an application, for a location, for a preference will mean you will need very robust networks and very intuitive and aware OSS capabilities.

If you’ve been kicking the same can down the same road with your legacy systems, this is the moment of truth to invest in future proofing your systems to accommodate changes in a really rapid way.