Killer mobile data networks: Better than killer apps

Apr 24, 2002 12:00 PM, Alan Cohen

The odds of picking a killer application correlate to the chances of picking the winning number for a multi-state lottery. Yet despite rumors of its demise after the Internet bubble burst, the hunt for the killer app is alive and well in the world of mobile data. Caught between the inevitable decline of voice ARPU and the cost of GPRS and 3G buildouts, the wireless industry still quixotically yearns for a silver bullet which will support the business case for continued network deployment. As sensible as this may seem, it unfortunately also flies in the face of many repeated attempts by carriers over the years to predict and control customer needs--from the full service network vision of the early '90s to the disappointing WAP deployments of recent times. 

In actuality, mobile operators face a bigger responsibility: providing subscribers with greater choice and control over the range of services they can access and use, all while operators make money in the process. Rather than picking killer apps, operators must build killer mobile data networks (KMDNs), networks that allow them to create new business models where they can use the power of subscriber identity and user context to support thousands of new services as well as share revenue with the content and application providers.

But first, lessons from the last round

In the wired Internet, service providers essentially followed a commodity 'dumb pipe' business model: They received low, flat-rate transport fees for both dial-up and broadband services, irrespective of the value of the content that traveled on the network. This led to significant and sometimes fatal price competition among undifferentiated carriers. How will we ever forget NetZero?

Successful next-generation mobile operators will deploy KMDNs that allow them to share value with content and application providers through granular, user-specific billing and payment settlement tools, essentially taking advantage of the flexibility of IP technology without following the ISP business model. KMDNs allow service providers to rapidly roll out applications themselves, as well as connect thousands of third-party applications with millions of users. The renowned progenitor of this approach, NTT DoCoMo through its i-mode service, provided the object lesson for all KMDN (see Figure 1).

Building a killer mobile data network

Building a KMDN requires both a business vision and a clear technical foundation. There are five mission-critical technical networking requirements that will impact a carrier's ability to monetize traffic and raise ARPU from data services:

1. Subscriber management and identity

2. Service-enabling IP infrastructure

3. Flexible accounting and smart billing

4. Reusable building blocks streamlining back office integration

5. True carrier IP reliability, availability, scalability and serviceability.

A network for one: Subscriber identity

Mobile operators must focus on building data networks that can robustly and flexibly support powerful subscriber identity profiles and offer them, with subscriber permission, to creative application providers that can customize services for a user.  Successful mobile operators will deploy a subscriber management system that drives the high-speed utilization of IP Services, committing information to the rest of system such services configuration or content filtering.

Packets, policies and priorities: Service-enabling IP infrastructure

Unlike the SS7 network, IP networks traditionally possess great flexibility in rapidly applying many different types of policies to data services, including user classification, service personalization, policy-based forward and steering, QOS and COS, and firewall and security. Not only do carriers need reusable IP building blocks to create powerful, compelling services, they can also benefit from moving toward a common set of IP services embedded directly in their data networking infrastructure. This provides 2 key benefits:

1. Allows IP service capabilities to be shared by all applications instead of being re-implemented, again and again. This reduces the cost of operations and management overheard, the marginal costs of adding new services to a portfolio

2. Allow operators to combine multiple services for a user across multiple applications, increasing the ability to create new services. This allows them to create, for example, a broad range of enterprise services that would utilize a firewall and VPN capability.

No dumb pipes: Flexible accounting and smart billing

To continue evolving the billing and revenue-sharing models of the mobile Internet, operators must be able to not only bill for airtime, but also account for the kinds of data services running on the network. Indeed, a subscriber may have multiple services and sessions open and running on their mobile device simultaneously. The data network must account for not only the amount of bandwidth used (i.e., meter packets on egress from the routing platform), but establish and account for even more granular accounting methods that discriminate among classes of content--e.g., corporate e-mail secured through use of additional network resources such as VPNs--or functions like prioritization for latency-sensitive applications like streaming-rich media or voice over IP. To develop and extract value from these new kinds of revenue sharing and billing models, operators will need a new type of accounting capability not currently available from legacy network equipment or servers. 

Reusable building blocks streamlining back office integration

One of the significant changes in the IP world remains integrating network platforms into a full range of OSS and back office systems. To say the least, this has not been the strong suit of IP equipment vendors. Yet this issue is non-trivial, as the lifecycle operational costs of integrating and managing networks are multiples higher than the initial capital outlay of deploying a network.

KMDNs must be fully integrated with mobile operators systems at the network management system level to support fault management, configuration and performance systems. And they must integrate at the service management layer to support provisioning and billing systems.

Carrier scale and robustness

Mobile operators must deploy data platforms that aggregate and route hundreds of thousands, even millions of subscriber sessions at a time. Hardware- and software-based redundancy will be required--as it would be unacceptable for a single card failure or software bug to take down a large portion of paying subscribers.

Performance requirements for KMDNs are measured by reliability, availability, scalability and serviceability metrics. For each category, mobile operators must determine the business and technical implications of performance gaps:

• Reliability: How often does the network go down? What are the drivers of failure?

• Availability: What network capacity and resources are available at different traffic loads?

• Scalability: What happens if an operator witnesses radical success in attracting users? Will the network scale among multiple dimensions, including services, sessions, and addresses and user/machine interactions?

• Serviceability: Is the network future-proofed through the ability of performing in service upgrades?

It's about traffic and revenue

No one argues that you need great applications to stimulate network usage--applications drive traffic, and traffic drives revenues. There is a lesson to be learned from the "Willy Sutton" view of the world. This 1930s American outlaw achieved immortality when a reporter asked him why he robbed banks, and Sutton simply replied, "because that's where the money is."

This is why mobile operators must take advantage of the first opportunity they've had. For the mobile Internet, the network is the bank, and the challenge facing operators will be to recognize and build a network that supports this new business model and fosters a healthy and growing content community that endlessly delights and provides tangible value to subscribers and grows revenue for the operator.

Alan Cohen is vice president of marketing at Tahoe Networks He can be reached at acohen@tahoenetworks.com.

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