Wireless World

When all wireless had to provide was voice service, running a network was a lot simpler. Today, enhanced services have quickly evolved beyond voice mail and short message service (SMS) to include unified messaging, which itself is expanding to include connectivity to more of the user's office desktop.

"We're talking about the ability to take that entire environment, whether it be voice, e-mail or PIM (passive intermodulation), and provide that same functionality to somebody who's away from his desk a good amount of the time," said Gary Hermanson, Glenayre senior vice president & general manager, consumer-products group.

Providing a single point of access to a wide range of information, including speech and text, can be a tall order, especially when it requires devices that traditionally haven't been part of the telco realm. Ericsson's new unified-messaging platform, for example, uses an IP backbone to store and forward voice, fax, e-mail and images as e-mail attachments to a single message box. That should help streamline network configuration as carriers begin to add more IP to their core networks and virtually every element becomes an IP-addressable node. "IP certainly assists to provide a common delivery transport for future-generation networks providing a wide range of information-based services," said Mark Ozur, PulsePoint CEO.

Today, however, unified messaging isn't a service with one interface.

"In the past, the voice-mail system interfaced to the wireless network using a TDM connection to the MSC and in some cases an IN connection via SS7," said Tim Miller, Siemens Information and Communication Networks product manager, carrier messaging. "When you deploy unified messaging, you now need to support some of the interfaces that an ISP has serviced. For example, a carrier needs to make sure that the solution has the required bandwidth and that the security of messages is protected when accessed from the Web."

An accurate network map improves reliability and security by tracking down all the potential access and interconnection points. It also helps ensure that the services can accommodate growth. Tools such as Telcordia's Common Language and Granite System's Xpercom compile information about network elements and transport facilities into a user-friendly central database.

"Your provisioning system could identify the different network elements required to provide that service and the bandwidth on the facilities between different points to carry that service," said Roger Savidge, Telcordia Common Language manager of technical customer support. "Your system adds up the bandwidth requirements of each service riding on those facilities and (shows) your residual available bandwidth."

That database now must also include information about non-telco devices and facilities.

"We're tracking the bandwidth of that port and the assignment of that port to a source, but that can be a port on a server or on a 5E (switch) or on a power card," said John Borden, Granite Systems president & CEO. "In some of our customers, we're tracking routers, IP connections and server locations for CDPD traffic. Wireless e-commerce, 3G and networks built out of hybrids of telephony, data-processing and IP-networking equipment are right down our alley."

A facilities database also can help when the network operations center suddenly is inundated with alarms. Network-management tools then can tap that database to identify, say, a bad card and then check an inventory to see if a replacement card is available. It's also possible to work backwards to identify other elements, services and even subscribers affected by a particular element's failure.

"If we lose a DS3, right now, we are restricted to going through several pages of spreadsheets and documentation and shared databases to try to locate what facilities are on that DS3," said Frank Bassano, OSS director at Powertel, which is using Xpercom. "What are those 28 T1s connected to? What's the impact of losing this DS3? This allows us to come up with a quick impact assessment."

AVOIDING GROWING PAINS So far, unified messaging remains a fledgling, sporadically deployed service as carriers assess the market's potential. One temptation is to launch it as a free service in an effort to seed the market. But in the long run, that can cause problems if the service becomes wildly successful.

"Offering unified messaging as a free service can cause the overall performance monitoring to be handicapped," said Siemens' Miller. "In many cases, the unified-messaging systems come with performance and billing plug-ins that can provide valuable quality-of-service and market-uptake numbers. When it doesn't, you can use the IN signaling and the IP access telemetry to get a solid understanding of your system's performance."

Parameters such as response times indicate how long subscribers have to wait to hear the next message or check their mailbox inventory.

How voice mail affects usage is well understood. Not so with unified messaging, even though it builds on the same basic premise of wireless: Give subscribers more ways to communicate, and they'll communicate more.

"What we're seeing in the initial trials is much longer hold times," said Jack Barnett, Lucent director of service architecture and operations. "A subscriber might call into his mailbox and stay on-line longer. This is good to the provider because it gives them more minutes of use, but it does lead to different configuration and troubleshooting requirements."

Tracking how subscribers access their messages and manage their mailboxes helps both with troubleshooting and accommodating growth.

"Your SMS platform is going to be expected to provide a lot more horsepower because it's providing things such as alerting and notification that it never was designed to do," said Stewart Hampton, Comverse Network Systems manager, new-services group. "Before, SMS was used just to send message-waiting indication for voice mail. Now, they might get used by a stock-quote application or weather service to send updates. You're going to have to upgrade the data capabilities of the switches to handle packet and circuit data, not just from a laptop that's connected through a phone, but from a regular phone to the data network."

It's a no-brainer that any enhanced service should have high availability and quick response times, but perhaps less obvious is that services such as unified messaging have their own busy hours. For messaging platforms, the busy hours coincide with morning and evening commutes when people are checking messages while on the road. Incoming calls requesting playback flood the service, which has to be able to accommodate those calls without presenting a busy signal.

Usage peaks during other times, so it's important to understand which demographics a service appeals to and how it fits their lifestyle. In Japan, for example, SMS is popular among teens.

"Our platform becomes highly loaded between 10 p.m. and midnight," Hampton said. "People are exchanging messages about homework and boyfriends."