Managing network build-outs requires revenue assurance

Details: James Barton; Category: Revenue & Billing; 17 July 2012; 8159 views

Across much of the EMEA region there is an increasing demand for managed network rollouts. With such a large investment, providers need to monitor the physical assets of their networks with care, ensuring that sites are maintained and managed correctly. Just as important as keeping track of stock, however, is ascertaining the available connectivity...

With revenue concerns rising, many operators in Africa are keen to begin generating revenue as quickly as possible, meaning that a swift and well-managed rollout is increasingly essential.

In Asia meanwhile, the trend is towards revenue and mobile assurance. This is driven by the data explosion. The key factors driving this in Asia are the natural subscriber growth and the massive uptake of smartphones – with the large populations of many Asian countries, even a small percentage of smartphone adopters equates to a large number of subscribers. With data used at a phenomenal rate, operators have to upgrade their networks, building out WiFi and WiMAX extensions to support their existing 2G and 3G infrastructure.

However, while these systems were suitable in the past, operators can no longer rely on the vendor’s network management systems. They no longer have a holistic view of the network as -particularly with the deployment of 4G technology - there is so much infrastructure going into the network. Therefore, a unified, consolidated view is required. According to Judi Gill of network management specialist Clarity, this trend is particularly prevalent in Asia.

Another key trend is the demand for a better awareness of operational activity – this has led to the growth real-time network monitoring. “As there are now so many more value points in the chain, operators need to establish the cause of any revenue impact”, says Gill. A revenue impact could be caused by a BTS going down, or a glitch in an OS update – with real-time monitoring, the source can be determined swiftly by process of elimination, allowing a solution to be implemented quickly by the operator.

For example, an operator could attempt to tackle congestion in a specific area by rolling out a new network, while in fact the problem is being caused by rogue users acting as the hub for illegal downloading – in this situation, the solution would be a throttling policy rather than a new network. Operators need to make sure that they receive a return on their investment, so avoiding mistakes such as these is critical.

Assurance players must therefore monitor all aspects of the network, capturing data from within the network and correlating it with external events, it’s possible to manually or automatically initiate action to remedy any faults. Mobile operators know that they are crippled if their network is down – particularly in emerging markets, where there is often no alternative to mobile coverage – so mobile assurance is therefore vitally important.

It can take years to deploy a new OSS, and in the past the emphasis has been on tailoring the OSS implementation to suit the company’s needs – a project could be stymied by users insisting that a system should fit in with their previous methods. However, OSS companies are now realising that adapting their system gives them no ROI – so new delivery avenues are being explored.

One such solution is the NOC (network operations centre) ‘in-a-box’. According to Gill, “The concept of an ‘out of the box’ implementation is simply to follow the proven best practice. Changing the system to suit the client might make users happy, but ultimately increases the cost and risk of the project, as it is defining processes from the start.”

The NOC-in-a-box features preconfigured inventory models for all of the components of 2G, 3G and 4G networks, as well as all of the work processes for identifying, correlating and automating all of the common issues in a network. The standardised NOC allows for maximum ROI, and deploys very quickly, allowing the operator to focus on other areas such as BQM.

In most cases, companies are installing a new network on top of their pre-existing legacy networks that can’t be managed with their existing OSS. The NOC-in-a-box is particularly common in emerging markets – developed markets typically do not have the flexibility afforded to emerging market operators. Often the latter have the liberty of making big decisions very quickly, with a focus on improving customer experience as quickly as possible so that they can obtain new market share.

Operators are beginning to rely on the extended supply chain in which the network is the delivery method but the services are supplied by a third party. While currently these services are more frivolous, such as games, when it comes down to health monitoring or traffic telemetrics, it becomes far more critical for the network to support these – and it is here that the service assurance can (and should) be monetised, as the QOS requirements will vary between applications. Operators can therefore get into the value chain, guaranteeing the quality of service for their own network or extending their monitoring capabilities to third party components.