As operators have confronted the double hit of high licence fees and major new network infrastructure investment, 3G network sharing has seemed the obvious route. Costs and risks could be spread, while the involvement of additional players could help in developing new and innovative services.
However, underneath these benefits lie some serious issues. Perhaps the most challenging of these involves creating, delivering and guaranteeing service quality over third party networks. Without controlled and managed Quality of Service (QoS), user experience will fail to meet user expectation — especially where advanced premium services and content, the key 3G differentiators, are concerned.
The 3G value chain in a single operator environment is complex enough. Add in network sharing, and suddenly operators must be able to span and have visibility into multiple network domains if they are to understand the user experience of services in a truly end-to-end context. To do this, service quality management techniques must be skilfully applied. If done correctly, then many of the additional issues relating to network sharing can be resolved more easily.
For a start, there are numerous interpretations, both legal and technological, about what exactly is meant by the term ‘network sharing.’ From the regulatory perspective in Europe alone, each country has its own different view on when and where network sharing is allowed under licence conditions. For example, in Denmark, network sharing is forbidden until full coverage is achieved by the licensed operators; whilst next door in Sweden, network sharing will be allowed in rural areas, but not in cities.
Secondly comes the issue of how network sharing is implemented in the infrastructure. Here it can range from straightforward site sharing, through base station sharing, down to the actual sharing of antennas. Closely linked into this are the different commercial relationships that these options present to the operators concerned — should they form joint companies, develop MVNO operations, offer bilateral roaming agreements or resell actual network capacity? Whatever the final decisions, there will certainly be plenty of scope for lawyers to play their part.
Finally, as if the complexities of the regulatory, technical and commercial environments were not enough to contend with, there is also the whole uncertain area of the advanced services themselves. It has become a cliché to state that 3G services need innovation and experimentation if they are to capture the user’s imagination. For this to happen though, operators must be able to see and understand how these new services — often involving content that will place unexpected loads on the network — are actually experienced by the customers. Only then can the chain be balanced to accommodate both business requirements and technical resources.
The QoS guarantees needed to drive this new vision — whether they are between different operators or between operators and customers — involve gathering appropriate data from the networks for monitoring and analysis. Although techniques have been developed for doing this, things still remain relatively vague, especially around the standards for exchanging data between the different parties involved. Much of this data may be commercially sensitive and what operator would want their competitors to monitor their traffic flows at particular sites?
On top of this are the characteristics of 3G QoS parameters. Estimates vary, but it is generally accepted that effective 3G QoS monitoring will involve a significant increase in the amount of data to be gathered when compared with 2G. It will be difficult enough for an operator to manage their own performance issues, before looking at ways in which this data can be safely shared with another company. So what are the answers to the above issues? Certainly for the early years of 3G it is unrealistic to expect any over-standardised ‘off-the-shelf’ total solutions, given the underlying complexities.
In the absence of defined standards for this area, it is instead essential that operators are able to apply QoS strategies flexibly as their own individual conditions dictate, and for this a modular approach to service quality management solutions is a prerequisite, especially given the multi-vendor characteristics of even a single 3G network. In this context, it is also important to be able to logically separate service quality and network performance monitoring and management issues — but relate the two as appropriate to provide network partners with the right levels of information.
If we are to ‘square the circle’, and balance the advantages of cost and time to market that come from network sharing with accompanying guarantees of performance to manage and meet user expectations, then a far more sensitive approach is needed to fulfil each operator’s own specific set of conditions. This involves an awareness of not just the technical issues involved in delivering QoS across multiple network and service domains, but also an understanding of the broader commercial, regulatory and even human factors that are implicit in any sharing agreement.
There is potentially even the possibility for some specialist suppliers to play the part of trusted intermediary between two network partners, combining appropriate products and the right levels of technical knowledge — leavened with a major sprinkling of business diplomacy at the right time — to bring an element of human mediation to solving the problems that are inherent in the network sharing model.
Paul Jeffs, product and marketing director at ADC’s Metrica division