A Better Grip

Wireless data brings together two previously unconnected worlds: voice, with its priority on minutes, and IP, which counts packets. So far, operators still are catching up to the idea of an effective marriage of the two, Schabel said, but the need for an answer is becoming all the more pressing as those BlackBerrys fly off the shelves.

“Radio operators, wireless operators today are faced with a situation that when they only had five or 10 or a handful of subscribers using 3G services, data services, they shrugged their shoulders because they had more than enough capacity to absorb that kind of stuff,” Schabel said. “But now as penetration is becoming, dare I say ubiquitous … data is becoming very real. It is here and now, and what we're seeing is that it's exposing a lot of issues in these networks that basically the existing tool set, from the manager's perspective, can't support.”

A solution such as the WNG, which looks at airtime impact, sheds light on applications that previously hadn't been considered problems. Though bandwidth intensive peer-to-peer apps have drawn a lot of fire in the DPI debates, seemingly harmless apps such as push e-mail can be just as taxing on the network. Schabel said that with just about every operator he's looked at, push e-mail has accounted for up to 60% of signaling activity in the network. Merely looking at the capacity used by push e-mail, as most solutions do, wouldn't reveal this network drain.

“For your average operator, they may think it's enough to know ‘here's the amount of Web, here's the amount of video, here's the amount of peer-to-peer,’” said Peter Jarich, research director for Current Analysis. “And it may not seem like they need to know the level of impact of that. They may think they already know.”

Jarich said the WNG's view into airtime adds an extra dimension of awareness that makes it unique and added that other vendors are already following Alcatel-Lucent's lead. Nortel's Silva, too, has noticed a general shift in North American vendors toward a user-focused view in management solutions. Having spent time in Nortel's European arm, he saw how operators there, after investing earlier and more extensively in 3G, needed to make services more appealing and efficient to earn quicker returns.

And as wireless data use continues to grow in the U.S., operators may find more than a little wisdom in that approach.

“When you have an infrastructure and you've made that investment, you want to drive increasingly — and they have no choice to differentiate themselves in the market but to try to drive an enhanced experience for the subscribers,” Schabel said. “If you're not using the network efficiently, that's bad for everybody.”