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Scale and scaleability
Operators need to be able to test end to end in an LTE environment, drilling deep into complex information, whilst also keeping control of a manageable number of KPIs, Paul Gowans tells Keith Dyer
KEITH DYER:
Paul, what are the key concerns of your operator customers around LTE strategy at the moment?
PAUL GOWANS:
Well, first off, I think the important thing to remember is that although you hear a lot about the technical challenges of LTE, the whole debate needs to take place in the context of the commercial challenges that all operators are facing. There’s a lot said about the gap between the exploding usage of data, and the revenues operators will see from that. But with the number of Smartphones set to grow from perhaps 300 million now, to 1 billion in five years then that problem’s not about to go away. Operators know they need a new business model to cope with that, and that is why LTE, with its focus on reduced cost per bit, is so important in addressing that.
The whole drive to LTE infrastructure is that it is intended to deliver an 80% reduction in cost per bit compared to 3G, and 50% over HSPA. But allied to that, operators know that they will see service complexity and the volume of data rise. The balance operators need to strike is in between the needs to service the growth in data usage, with the need to reduce costs both on the network and in delivering service complexity.
KEITH DYER:
As operators address that balance, what stage are they at now in addressing LTE?
PAUL GOWANS:
If you were to look at this from our perspective of the test lifecycle, then at the moment carriers are committed to early stage tests in pre-deployment. This involves looking at real live interoperability testing and pre-deployment testing, prior to moving to live and end to end assurance testing. We are seeing the network equipment vendors testing in their labs, and the following stage is to see service providers go through their trial deployments – which also means doing their pre-deployment and interoperability testing.
Next we will see operators move to RAN optimisation, including ensuring they have hand-offs between LTE, 3G, HSPA and 2G networks.
From a JDSU perspective, as I said, we are seeing a lot of our experience being brought to bear in that pre-deployment testing, helping carriers to see how they can make sure that this technology is going to work for them.
KEITH DYER:
What are the key testing issues likely to confront operators as they move through that lifecycle?
PAUL GOWANS:
A key issue is that the old lifecycle of test, optimise, deliver, is going to be squeezed, by competitive and cost requirements, into a much shorter time frame. LTE will be rolled out in a lot shorter timescale. So from that perspective there is going to be a lot of expectation that the technology will be ready, and already operating optimally.
I think that one other issue that is likely to arise is that although the architecture in LTE moves to that flat, IP model, that could create a problem for operators in terms of visibility into services. Operators need to know what their critical connections are, what guarantees they have made to users on the end of that pipe and what’s going on within it. The complexity of the service environment means that operators need to try and look into the pipe, and pull out per-service data when that’s much more difficult to do.
They will also be faced with the need to do this in an end to end manner, from the core, across the backhaul, and into the radio access network.
So the test and monitoring questions will move away from where to what to monitor, and how to monitor end to end, and what to do with the vast volumes of data that are going to be created.
We already have a customer that generates 20 billion records a day, before any LTE deployment. That’s a daunting volume, and one that’s only going to go up.
KEITH DYER:
How can operators balance the need to measure end to end, with being able to cope with such increased volumes of data?
PAUL GOWANS:
This is really an area where the industry is moving on, and will continue to. Operators and carriers will need to move to a one-to-many technique. It’s not just about grabbing data, but about doing something intelligent with it, sharing it to lots of different applications – to revenue assurance, roaming management, which ever business function needs access to that data.
This will really mean that the focus moves from the attention that is currently paid to a host of KPIs. The industry went down the path of saying we want everything delivered and measured in terms of KPIs. And they ended up with hundreds of KPIs that most service providers didn’t really need. The marginal benefit of extracting so much information was not right, and the cost of getting it was quite high. Additionally, that information wasn’t processed in a way that allowed service providers to do anything meaningful with those KPIs.
What we’ve been involved in as operators look at this changing business model is to ask what’s really important to the network and to what’s needed to manage the networks? If you developed a dashboard with perhaps those five essential KPIs, then what would they be?
We are working with a major Tier One service provider to manage their entire network on five KPIs, aside from their current 200. We have learnt a lot from that as they were continually asking what data they needed, and what they can do with it, and how they can pull data from multiple sources to do that.
KEITH DYER:
And how did they build that system, so that they could manage the data the needed?
PAUL GOWANS:
You still have a control plane, and still have a user plane. You will need to have 100% visibility of the control plane, bearing in mind it is also a plane that has got a lot more complex over the years. That’s fundamental. At the same time the operator needs to be looking at the user plane, but here they can be more flexible. They can drill into the user information only when they need to – looking at data over time, and when you need to resolve an issue, perhaps. I think you’d also look for KPIs around service completion, so that you know when someone uses a service you know it was delivered. And you might have a KPI on roaming connect, which will be fundamental to LTE. But by keeping these at the dashboard level, whilst knowing you can drill into it when you need to you can really improve your business efficiencies whilst keeping control of revenue-critical services.
KEITH DYER:
Finally, do you think operators require new tools and infrastructure for testing and monitoring LTE?
PAUL GOWANS:
I think that will depend very much on the operator. You can retrofit as an extension of where you are now, mapping over, say, HSPA to manage the same services. Having said that some carriers will build from the ground up for LTE, seeing the increased scale and the need for end to end monitoring in an environment of increasing complexity. Our job at JDSU is to help operators manage that transition in a way that best fits their business needs.
About Paul Gowans:
Gowans is Marketing Manager, EMEA, for JDSU