Storage considerations for next-gen wireless services

Jul 17, 2002 12:00 PM, Kay Benaroch

As wireless service providers implement 2.5G and move toward the implementation of 3G, the information available through mobile devices will grow in richness, complexity and volume. Service providers are finding that their storage systems need to be re-engineered to deal with the wireless network's delivery of Internet-based information. Expanded access to customers through wireless delivery will drive content creation, content demand and more customized information services as consumer expectations grow with new technological capabilities. Wireless networks' data storage capacities will need to expand. And as wireless connectivity increases, the distribution of data will be moving across a network will require an equally safe information storage system providing continuous business operation.

Service providers need to consider how to best:

1. Share information across the network, regardless of location, source or technology

2. Provide a single customer view of services across heterogeneous environments

3. Ensure 24x7 availability of information

4. Integrate new services, processes and applications quickly and non-disruptively

5. Accomplish all the above while conserving IT resources.

Wireless networks: Evolving services, evolving IT systems

Although the total wireless market continues to expand the number of subscribers, the actual rate of growth has for the first time declined. Capital expenditures are being questioned more thoroughly and the very survival of many operators hinges on being able to collect enough revenue to cover the costs of keeping services flowing. Against this backdrop, operators are struggling to use their resources more wisely while still creating new services to keep existing subscribers and attract new ones. Because 40% of the U.S. population has yet to try wireless services, there is still considerable market potential. 

The convergence of content, mobile telephony services and the Internet is creating market expectations for wireless access to information - anytime, anywhere. Maintaining a leadership position among the growing number of companies offering these services will demand the highest levels of flexibility and agility. The leaders will be those organizations that can deliver content in any format to any device without disruption to service at the lowest possible cost.

The Information explosion: Content as a driving force

The amount of information being created each day continues to grow dramatically. A study by the School of Information Management Systems at the University of California, Berkley, found that more information would be created over the next two years than has been created over the entire history of mankind.  

As the wireless wave gains momentum, the information available through mobile devices will grow in richness, complexity and volume. The advances also will spur changes throughout the information technology industry. Expanded access through wireless will drive content creation, content demand and more customized information services as consumer expectations grow with new technological capabilities. The true value to both the business and the consumer markets will be in managing all this content. For example, as billing systems become more expansive, companies will generate more data and will need to do more with that content. In addition to transactional content, wireless expansion will also create network-based user information, which previously was not even available. 

Wireless services: A study in evolution not revolution?

With the financial pressures mounting daily for wireless service providers, new business models are constantly being explored and tested in effort to distinguish one providers' products from another while gaining the elusive loyalty factor that makes the service quality a distinction and, creates useful and "sticky" service offerings. Carriers in the U.S. and Canada are experimenting with a variety of offerings ranging from gaming sessions, downloaded ring tone and logos, instant messaging and data delivery pricing models.

In addition to designing and deploying new services, operators must also deal with significant changes in their billing environments. Trustworthy, timely and convenient billing is the bedrock of an operator's revenue assurance. With every call detail record (CDR) or IP data record (IPDR) generated, operators create data from which to generate bills, provide billing statements and ultimately collect revenues. Aligned with the many billing changes, operators also need to contend with a variety of internal IT management issues including:

• Deciding how much information must be collected to pay the content providers

• Managing the processes and costs associated with collecting information for new services such that they don't negatively affect the revenues generated from these new services

• Determining how carriers can offer the security needed to be sure an enterprise customers' content is delivered to only its mobile workers

• Provisioning new services on the fly - making sure operations systems are in synch with service inventory and call collection systems.

Given the terabytes of information a typical telecommunications service provider generates every month and the pressure to increase average revenues per user (ARPU) as well as reduce churn, a robust and specialized information infrastructure is needed. 

New services demand a solid infrastructure

Moving from a voice centric business model to an information services delivery model will undoubtedly take time to implement.  It will also require many changes to network elements, intelligent switches, added computer intelligence in the remote data centers and/or central offices, as well as changes in how often and where information is collected while it is stored and distributed to keep traffic revenues from slipping away without having to deny services for lack of current customer location and/or service order data.

This is where having the right infrastructure actually becomes "business critical". Simply put, an information storage infrastructure comprises hardware, software and services that allow an organization to manage and access information. Depending on each operator's billing environment, this information infrastructure will compromise tools that (1) simplify and automate the management of hardware or software from multiple storage network and server vendors; (2) speed access and smooth the movement of data to help consolidate and distribute information; and (3) improve data recovery and provide business continuance in the event of system failure. 

Today, many operators use a combination of tape and disk-based systems (often combined into storage area networks) to deposit the validated call records, which can number in the hundreds of thousands per hour. But what will happen when next-generation services enter the picture? How can systems struggling to process up to 500,000 calls per day if each call record is a couple of hundred bytes long, and be able to scale to manage 5 to 20 times that amount of data? Most analysts predict that deployment of IP-based services and mobile commerce can boost the amount of information collected substantially.

Microtransactions: The flood of telecom billing?

Current storage philosophies for wireless service providers have been built around traditional circuit-based voice messaging systems, and have created infrastructures capable of supporting multiple applications within the network data centers, including everything from network performance information to customer profile databases and fraud detection systems. In building this infrastructure, operators often rely on traditional quantification of the amounts of data stored to create invoices and batch-oriented approaches to call and network performance data statistics collection. 

A full financial, business and operational assessment will bring forth an extremely compelling case for data storage specifically linked to the needs and challenges of billing managers. These include managing and reducing costs, absorbing changes to the systems when new lines of business are added or dropped, and staying one step ahead of the competition by providing more information and consolidating bills. In practical terms, this involves timely access to current data that can also deliver several substantial benefits including:

• Reduce 'revenue leakage' due to call detail records lost during peak volume time or through information transfer inefficiencies

• Create a way of collecting and filtering information needed to bill for all services rendered to customers as opposed to "flat-rate" billing

• Provide faster access to call records for fraud detection processing

• Maximize cash flow by shortening the billing cycle and increasing the number of invoicing dates

• Analyze customer information for target marketing and service preferences

• Improve the time to market by speeding production of database refreshes after application software or process testing.

The capacity to store, manage, share and protect information is fundamental to achieving these benefits. Moreover, guaranteed information access is crucial for facilitating the data warehousing applications that improve fraud detection, partner revenue sharing and timely marketing information on a new service rollout.

Wireless billing architectures: Caution, changes ahead

With the advent of the wireless Internet, the need for more robust infrastructures will be vital to facilitate the daily movement of hundreds of millions of data records from the edge of the network to the central office. The major considerations for wireless operators will be the move from the traditional CDR for voice-based services, to the new wave of data, voice, multimedia and transactional services which will be represented by the IPDR (basically IP packets of data containing all the necessary information for charging, fraud analysis, QOS). IPDRs may sometimes represent a higher value item (i.e., revenue for current sports scores) than the revenue for voices calls. Thus, the need to implement business processes that will allow real-time mediation and billing is an imperative for any business that wishes to be successful in this economy by linking the transaction to a service-based approach.

Storage strategies need to be re-evaluated to encompass these requirements. It will no longer be a packaged solution sitting on a server vendor's hardware in isolation. There is a need to ensure that the transactional-based systems deployed link the data streams from user to provider and ensure that services are charged correctly and billed according to the customer's SLA, and that services purchased are delivered against that SLA. This will be essential to ensure market acceptance and success of new products such as gaming, advertising, financial services, or micro payment services for parking, vending machines and bus tickets, just to name a few.

Wireless content: Creating a ripple effect from data center to central office

Just as the intelligence resident within the central office, base station or service control point must be upgraded and dynamically structured to support changing network requirements--so does the data management within the network's distributed sites. Content caching or retrieval, access to subscriber profiles and rate table upgrades held at the switch all rely on scalable storage infrastructures housed within the network and at the service provider data centers. Many operators are currently working with equipment providers to migrate their circuit-based switch sites into packet-based networks.

Along with the migration from traditional equipment to client/servers and soft switches comes the need to migrate from software buffers of information to a reliable storage infrastructure at the "edge" of the network. Individually, each application (such as network performance, rate tables, service tables, roaming tables, etc.) may involve small amounts of information. However, the collective whole will add up to the equivalent of a small storage network that can be contained on a rack or shelf within a server "blade" appliance. From a content delivery perspective, the need to have an intelligent storage network at the edge of the network will be critical to manage, protect and move structured or unstructured content (video, photos) in a third-generation "always on" mobile world.

Wireless services deployment: BSS/OSS linkage is critical for fast time to revenue

Driven by requirements such as provisioning new services, expanding customer services and updating operational systems, many operators are experiencing increases in the size and quantity of data marts or data warehouses they manage. Here again a reliable, flexible storage network plays a vital role, but only if the overall solution is architected with the data management needs in mind. Wireless operators have an opportunity to change from an application-centric viewpoint to a service delivery viewpoint when architecting the data storage network for both operations and business systems.

In the final analysis, it is all about business performance: whether that performance is related to improving internal efficiencies and effectiveness, or external performance in terms of competitive advantage and return on shareholder equity. The real significance in deploying the "right" information storage strategy is allowing carriers to leverage this strategy (using its hardware and software) by extending its capabilities into additional business support systems areas while addressing operational support systems and networking. It is the deployment of this kind of a strategy that will indeed drive the right type of business performance.

Kay Benaroch is Senior Manager of the Telecom Strategy Group at EMC Corp.

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