The Next Generation Mobile Networks (NGMN) Alliance, an operator group that produces requirements and specifications to the mobile industry, has used Mobile World Congress to call for equipment providers to harmonise on multi-band LTE devices and on standardised OSS interfaces.
The first requirement is to produce a list of key essential radio bands that devices must support, so that devices will be able to roam globally on LTE networks that operate in different spectrum bands. At the moment, with operators operating in LTE spectrum from 700Mhz up to 2.6GHz, there are already 10 bands being used for LTE, Yuhong Huang, Deputy General Manager China Mobile Research Institute.
The mobile operators therefore see a need in the future for a single, global device platform, and through the NGMN Alliance have launched a “Multi-band multi-mode” project together with major chipset and device manufactures to work on a roadmap towards multi-band multi-mode devices.
Huang said, “The NGMN Alliance invites all device ecosystem vendors to join the MBMM activity to enable cost effective multi-band multi-mode global UE platform and ecosystem, significantly enhancing the economy of scale and seamless LTE global roaming”.
The Alliance has also called for the industry to allow operators to standardise and integrate their OSS, in the same manner as Deutsche Telekom has achieved.
Klaus-Jürgen Krath, SVP Radio Networks, Deutsche Telekom said that today’s operator have to manage a variety of network and service production infrastructures, from mobile and fixed network environments up to converged networks. This has an enormous impact on network operations, with high integration costs.
The NGMN project is intended to produce standardised interfaces between the Telco infrastructure and the OSS (Operations Support Systems) to reduce that.
“The detailed operations requirements, developed by the NGMN Alliance, have already been shared and reviewed with all leading Telco and IT vendors and involved industry organisations”, said Krath. “The NGMN operators encourage all these industry stakeholders to support in a joint effort the further enhancement of the requirements and, in particular, the implementation of NGCOR results in order to achieve the targeted benefits and savings. The deployment will be driven by operators putting the requirements in upcoming tenders.”