Heading toward all-IP

ATLANTA--"The best definition of IP is intellectual property," said Simon Buckingham, Mobile Lifestream (www.mobilelifestream.com) founder & CEO.

Certainly, migrating to all-IP networks is a bit of an intellectual pursuit for wireless carriers for the moment. But one of the key visions dancing through their heads is the dramatic cost reductions as they alternately  increase value with 3G.

As part of Wednesday's  "Migration from Circuit-Switch Networks to All-Wireless IP Networks" panel, Buckingham and his fellow panelists agreed that wireless carriers need to move to high-value, high-margin mobile multimedia services with faster time-to-market delivery of services and find a way to take advantage of cost savings.

"Even though data rates will go up, customers aren't going to be willing to pay more," said Paul Mankiewich, Lucent CTO (www.lucent.com) . Because of this, Mankiewich said it'll be imperative for carriers to drive costs down quickly so they can deliver their new 3G services without having to pass the costs along to end users.

Mehmet Unsoy, BT Wireless (www.bt.com) VP & chief technical architect, told the audience to expect significant challenges as they move to IP networks. Wireless carriers want to protect their current circuit-switch investment. In fact, many may retain the circuit switch network to carry voice. As they evolve, the core network to all-IP, carriers will need to support legacy devices and new services, migrate to open services architecture for service control and maintain quality of service and reliability.

Also, current base stations must evolve to support multiple air interfaces as opposed to requiring new antennas. "In bringing the wireless and IP worlds together, there are other critical elements such as billing, customer care and OSS issues that are only now being considered," Unsoy said. Further, he suggested that moving to all-IP merely for messaging would be a waste of the network capabilities. He said that many new 3G capabilities, even messaging, should become multimedia-enabled so that carriers and their services can move up the value chain for their customers.

Minimizing operational and implementation complexity also will ease the migration, according to Peter Russo, Telecordia senior director. Russo said carriers will be able to do this if they re-use as many assets as possible, migrate to open standards and scale with distributed systems.
Rhonda L. Wickham is Wireless Review editor-in-chief. She can be reached at rhonda_wickham@intertec.com.