VanillaPlus Magazine August-September 2012 Edition

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ISSN 1745-1736 DRIVING

PROFITS

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COMMUNICATION

SERVICE

PROVIDERS

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TALKING HEADS Arieso chief explains why CSPs have got performance engineering all wrong

HOW BIG IS BIG DATA? 16-page Spotlight on big data in telecoms offers the answers

SHARED DATA PLANS Satisfaction, pricing and fraud prey on CSPs’ minds ▼

LEAPING FROM THE BIG BOARD How to cope with the CSP brain drain

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CLOCKING OFF! Low tech answers to high-tech questions – with added ketchup Reproduced from Vanillaplus magazine

PLUS!

Syniverse buys MACH for €550m • Amdocs and Subex sign five-year deals with CSP customers • Planning problems impede small cell roll-outs • Indonesian interconnect for Redknee • Who’s winning in The Contract Hot List • What’s on when • Read the latest OSS & BSS news online now at www.vanillaplus.com

A new name, a new look, a new direction.

CSG and Intec are now CSG International.

With our recent acquisiƟon of Intec, CSG InternaƟonal is now a globally focused leader in helping clients ĂĐĐĞůĞƌĂƚĞ ďƵƐŝŶĞƐƐ ʹ ĂŶLJǁŚĞƌĞ͘ At the core of our union is a transformaƟonal partnership. As a combined enƟty, we now oīer our clients an unprecedented set of business support soluƟons and services to help them capitalize on dynamic market changes and opportuniƟes. With more than 25 years of experience, and serving over 500 customers in 24 countries, CSG is even beƩer posiƟoned to help businesses accurately capture, manage, generate and opƟmize revenue, strengthen customer relaƟonships, and exploit emerging opportuniƟes. We are commiƩed to long term partnership with our customers and believe collaboraƟon and communicaƟon are an integral part of helping our clients achieve success. We invite you to proĮt from our experience. Visit us at: www.csgi.com

www.csgi.com © 2011 CSG InternaƟonal, Inc.

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IN THIS ISSUE EDITOR’S COMMENT George Malim asks who’s taking the strain for the CSP brain drain?

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TALKING HEADS Shirin Dehghan, chief executive and founder of Arieso

19 VANILLAPLUS SPOTLIGHT ON BIG DATA

37 CLOCKING OFF

Arieso provides customer-centric, location-aware software and services that enable operators to focus their business on the evolving desires and experiences of their customers. Arieso’s solutions locate, store and analyse data from every call, providing operators with a rich source of information to boost network performance and enrich user experience. This detailed insight, which transforms the effectiveness of radio network capital planning and performance engineering, opens new possibilities for customer experience assurance and geomarketing. Operating on five continents, Arieso’s clients include América Móvil, AT&T, MTN, Portugal Telecom, Telefónica O2, Vodafone and equipment vendors including Alcatel Lucent, Ericsson and NSN. www.arieso.com

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COMPANY NEWS 5 Syniverse to acquire MACH, CSG International buys Ascade and Accanto sells probe business MARKET NEWS Survey reveals small cells planning bottleneck

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CONTRACT NEWS Subex and Amdocs score five-year deals

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PEOPLE NEWS Jason Bandy explains how to negotiate your salary, Syniverse appoints new COO and Americas sales president

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THE CONTRACT HOT LIST VanillaPlus’s round up of the major contracts recently announced worldwide

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TALKING HEADS Shirin Dehghan, chief executive and founder of Arieso, says network inefficiency is inexcusable as the pressure to optimise intensifies

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SHARED DATA PLANS CSPs need to support all the strands of family plans, says Amit Daniel

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THE BILLING EXPERIENCE The bill plays an important communication role, CSPs should maximise that, says Cullen Davidson

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VANILLAPLUS SPOTLIGHT ON BIG DATA 16 pages of big data mining start here

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CASE STUDY Inside CenturyLink’s deployment of Tribold EPM

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DIARY Where to go and what to see

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CLOCKING OFF! Nick Booth seeks out low-tech solutions to high-tech problems

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CSP brain drain raises barely a ripple as vendor CEOs avoid the splash back of M&A rumour mill

George Malim, Editor: VanillaPlus

As usual there’s been a reasonable amount of gossip about mergers and acquisitions in the telecoms software market.

There’s something about the summer season that seems to suggest that if you put a chief executive by a pool, buy and sell rumours proliferate, like so many fat kids dive-bombing the deep end. A big splash, diminishes to a barely detectable ripple, calm is restored and the serious business of improving the suntan continues.

Now the silly season is over, it’s time to assess what, if anything, of substance is going on. First item on the agenda is Nokia Siemens Networks and what it might do with its BSS business. The vendor needs cash and appears to prefer to focus on its small cells strategy rather than devote time and money to BSS. Ericsson and Amdocs have been mentioned as suitors – perhaps because they’re big enough to buy the assets, rather than because they need the technology.

Amdocs itself has been linked with Microsoft over the summer season. Microsoft has tried hard and often to crack telecoms with some success but it may see value in a partner that can bring it greater industry-specific heft.

What is becoming clear is that telecoms software procurement has changed, probably forever. Network equipment vendors are either piling in to OSS/BSS or getting out.

Ericsson and NEC are notable for their commitments to building their portfolios. The traditional IT vendors have taken similar approaches coming from the IT side of the Venn diagram that centres on telecoms software.

That leaves a select group of telecoms software specialists still independent of network equipment or IT vendors. Amdocs is probably the largest of these, although CSG International and Comverse are substantial businesses with sufficient scale to remain independent.

All these machinations, along with ever-present consolidation among smaller vendors, illustrate how procurement is changing. Intelligence is shifting from the CSP to the vendor. The summer season saw five-year deals done by Amdocs with TIM Brasil and Subex with MTN. Professionals who would have been employed by CSPs now work at vendors and the brains are draining away from them. Some, of course, are being retained to maintain management insight into the performance of long-term deals but CSPs are de-skilling. Should that be a concern for the CSP CEO? Absolutely not; they’re shifting expensive headcount to their suppliers and gaining access to innovation and the economies of scale managed services providers can deliver. It’s the mere clink of ice in a long, cool drink. It’s the vendor CEOs that have to deal with the waves caused by the belly flop from the big board.

EDITOR George Malim Tel: +44 (0) 0208 292 4036 george@vanillaplus.com DIGITAL EDITOR Nathalie Bisnar Tel: +44 (0) 1732 808690 nathalie@vanillaplus.com

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BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR Cherisse Draper Tel: +44 (0) 1732 897646 cherisse@vanillaplus.com BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT MANAGER Mark Bridges Tel: +44 (0) 1732 897645 mark@vanillaplus.com

VANILLAPLUS AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2012

OPERATIONS DIRECTOR Charlie Bisnar Tel: +44 (0) 1732 844017 charlie@vanillaplus.com PUBLISHER Jeremy Cowan Tel: +44 (0) 1420 588638 jc@vanillaplus.com DISTRIBUTION UK Postings Ltd Tel: +44 (0) 8456 444137

EDITORIAL ADVISORS

John Aalbers, chief executive, Volubill

Dan Baker, Research Director, Technology Research Institute

Martin Creaner, president, TM Forum

Andreas Freund, VP Marketing, Orga Systems GmbH

Louis Hall, chief executive, Cerillion Technologies

Gabriel Matsliach, general manager, BSS Product Line, Comverse

Pat McCarthy, VP of Global Marketing, Service Delivery Solutions, Telcordia

Simon Muderack, COO, Tribold

John Rainger, vice president, EMEA, CSG International

Mac Taylor, CEO, The Moriana Group

Chris Yeadon, director of Product Marketing, Ericsson

Dr Reinhard Zuba, CMO, Vipnet (Telekom Austria)

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be copied, stored, published or in any way reproduced without the prior written consent of the Publisher © Prestige Media Ltd 2012

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Syniverse to acquire data monetisation specialists MACH for €550m

Jeff Gordon: Acquisition will grow revenue

Syniverse has signed a definitive agreement to acquire MACH for approximately €550 million in cash, subject to regulatory approvals.

Once closed, the transaction is expected to be accretive within the first year of closing.

“The proposed acquisition will benefit both mobile users and the entire mobile ecosystem with greater reach, agility and solutions for the Mobile 3.0 environment, simplifying the increasing complexity of interoperability and service ubiquity,” said Jeff Gordon, president and chief executive of Syniverse. “As mobile continues to permeate everyday life around the globe, Syniverse will have the added scale to provide mobile service providers, such as mobile operators, internet service providers, cable MSOs (multi-service operators), emerging providers, enterprises and more, improved time to market and capabilities that deliver the quality of experience that end users demand.

Ultimately, mobile consumers will

benefit from more advanced services and applications while mobile providers will realize additional revenue opportunities and cost savings from service efficiencies.”

The acquisition would add to Syniverse’s existing global customer base of more than 900 mobile servive providers in over 160 countries and will enable the collective company to rapidly address the latest marketplace demands by bringing to market new solutions such as real-time intelligence, fraud prevention, revenue assurance as well as more flexible roaming solutions that address ecosystem interoperability, WiFi offload, multi-SIM solutions and mandated provisions to support local breakout.

“The proposed acquisition will grow our top line revenue, while providing the scale and critical mass to further develop and speed to market advanced solutions that will give providers throughout the mobile ecosystem the ability to deliver a better mobile experience for end users worldwide,” Gordon added.

Accanto Systems sells probe business to NetScout Accanto Systems has reached an agreement with NetScout for the sale of assets and technology associated with the probe technology component of its intelligent Customer Michele Service Assurance (iCSA) Campriani: Probe sale a product line. By logical transferring the probe progression technology to NetScout, Accanto Systems says it will focus more on the evolution of its Customer Service Assurance solution portfolio.

“The sale of our probe technology to NetScout is a logical progression for our business model,” said Michele Campriani, chief executive officer and director of Accanto Systems. “By transferring these assets to NetScout, we are able to provide an even stronger end-to-end solution to our customers to enable the deeper level of service assurance capabilities they need to meet their growing data and voice operational challenges. With this technology

divestiture, Accanto Systems may now focus more on its Customer Experience Management (CEM) solutions. We are very excited to become a reseller of NetScout technology as we can leverage NetScout leading service management portfolio as part of our end to end Customer Service Assurance solutions.”

Anil Singhal, president and CEO of NetScout, added: “The technology acquired is consistent with our packetflow strategy and brings important voice service monitoring capabilities that will strengthen our unified service delivery management strategy and accelerate our time to market to support emerging technologies like VoLTE. In addition, NetScout will be able to address a broader range of voice assurance requirements for both NGN and legacy deployments for wireless, wireline and cable operators.”

The technology acquisition includes all of the Pantera hardware probes as well as middleware and session analysis applications.

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CSG International buys Ascade for $19m CSG International has acquired Ascade, an independent Swedish software company that provides trading and routing software solutions to telecoms companies. The total cost of the acquisition, excluding transaction fees, was approximately US$19 million. The purchase price was paid in cash from CSG’s existing cash resources.

By bringing together Ascade’s flagship trading and routing solution, Ascade7, with CSG’s Wholesale Business Management Solution (WBMS), CSG plans to strengthen its capability in the telecoms wholesale marketplace.

Peter Kalan, president and chief executive officer of CSG International, said: “Our acquisition of Ascade will help us continue to deliver market-leading solutions that help our clients operate nimbly and efficiently. Our combined offering and global presence ensures that operators of all types — fixed, mobile, wholesale, broadband, MVNOs and ISPs - have a partner in CSG with the breadth of functionality and flexibility in delivery models to meet their current and evolving wholesale needs.”

Verint to acquire Comverse Technology Verint Systems has signed a definitive merger agreement with Comverse Technology. Following the completion of Comverse’s previously announced distribution of its telecoms business and substantially all of its other assets, other than its holdings in Verint, to its shareholders, Verint will acquire Comverse, eliminating Comverse’s majority ownership in and control of Verint. Comverse currently holds approximately 41.0%, of Verint’s outstanding common shares and all of Verint’s outstanding convertible preferred shares which, if converted, would result in Comverse holding approximately 53.7% of Verint’s basic outstanding common shares.

“We look forward to becoming a noncontrolled and independent public company. Clarifying our ownership structure is a significant positive for Verint as we continue to focus on increasing shareholder value,” said Dan Bodner, chief executive and president of Verint.

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Amdocs survey reveals network planning bottleneck for small cells deployment N E W S U P D AT E

Mobile transactions to hit $730bn by 2017, says Juniper Research The value of remote transactions for digital and physical goods purchased via mobile devices is expected to exceed $730bn annually by 2017, a new report from Juniper Research has found.

According to the report, transaction growth will be driven by the increasing scale of real-world, non-digital purchases from major brands and retailers, with companies such as Domino’s in the US and Argos in the UK already seeing 6 to 7% of all sales occurring via the mobile channel.

The report – Mobile Payments for Digital & Physical Goods: Opportunity Analysis 2012-2017 – noted that as consumer tablet adoption continues to rise, there will be significant migration of purchasing activity from laptops and desktops to tablet devices, with consumers increasingly engaging in online shopping while watching TV. Indeed, it found the development of this ‘couch commerce’ trend would result in mobile and nomadic devices accounting for 30% of eRetail within five years. However, it also observed that such transactions would continue to comprise a small minority of a global retail sales marketplace currently worth more than $16tn.

Gartner Quadrant on integrated revenue and customer management for CSPs in full In our feature on billing across the digital value chain last issue (p. S8 VanillaPlus June/July 2012) we referred to analyst firm Gartner Group’s Magic Quadrant for integrated revenue and customer management for CSPs (November 2011).

We provided only an incomplete list. A full list is below: Leaders: Amdocs and Oracle Challengers: Ericsson and Huawei Visionaries: Comverse and Nokia Siemens Networks Niche Players: Alcatel-Lucent, CSG International, Convergys, MetraTech, Orga Systems, Tecnotree and ZTE Apologies to those companies omitted from the original article.

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David Chambers: Money will shift to small cells

Amdocs has released the findings of a survey that highlights the challenge facing CSPs’ network planning and logistics departments as they seek to meet a more than 20fold increase in data demand over the next five years.

According to the study, conducted by Rethink Technology Research, service providers are planning to deploy millions of small cells to increase network capacity. This move is critical to service providers’ ability to handle increases in 3G demand and to deliver on 4G promises, both of which will vastly increase the burden on planning and logistic departments. The survey found that 59% of service providers expect to deploy at least ten times more small cells by 2017 than in 2011, yet almost half of network planners (47 %) say a lack of network planning resources is the biggest challenge facing them today, leading to rollout delays.

“The money is going to shift,” said David Chambers, director of OSS

solution marketing at Amdocs. “There are things we can do with existing macrocells but the big capacity gain will be in having more smaller cells, the cost of which will be comparatively low. The biggest issue [for small cell deployment] is around the logistics.”

“The specific expertise we bring to bear is around network planning and logistics,” he added. “We have a single click network roll-out system that enables you, once you’ve identified a cell site, to fill in the parameters and allocate backhaul capacity. It takes time to design down to matter of minutes and you can activate tens or hundreds of cell sites per day.”

Chambers pointed out that, while there are around 4.5 million cell sites in operation worldwide to support six billion users, Amdocs expects that to increase by anything up to ten times in developed markets.

“The market spends about US$50bn on base stations each year and our survey shows that up to half of that expenditure may shift to small cells within a five year timeframe,” he said.

Openet and Huawei announce mobile broadband research partnership Openet and Huawei have signed a memorandum of understanding to jointly explore opportunities within the telecoms market. Openet becomes the latest company to partner with Huawei's mLAB to create new business models for global operators in the mobile broadband era.

Under the terms of agreement, Openet and Huawei will be committed to creating, validating and promoting new business models. With these business models, operators will be able to optimise network resources, offer differentiated services to end users and increase sales revenues to achieve greater success.

Huawei's mLAB is a mobile broadband solution research laboratory that facilitates close cooperation with industry players. It will benefit from Openet's understanding of business

VANILLAPLUS AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2012

innovation and telecoms industry experience. Openet will provide its Policy and Charging Control (PCC) solutions working with Huawei's wireless and EPC networks to determine valuable mobile broadband business models.

"Openet is pleased to work with Huawei in mLAB. This joint effort will give us the opportunity to complement each other in the areas both are best. We will be able to effectively explore and hatch future mobile broadband business models," said Apollo Guy, Openet global vice president, alliances. "We firmly believe that our software, with the ability to quickly adapt to new business requirements, will innovate new business use cases in mLAB. The end results will give both Huawei and Openet a chance to present to the outside world what the future mobile broadband business models entail."

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Skype chooses MACH for direct operator billing MACH has been selected

by Skype as the first vendor to deliver direct operator billing to new and existing Skype users in key markets across the globe, starting in October.

Morten Brøgger: Direct The rollout will enable operator billing Skype to offer its opens new customers a fast and opportunties convenient way to purchase Skype Credit, creating new revenue streams in existing markets, as well as in new markets where other payment methods have low penetration rates.

offered by this payment method. Direct operator billing will also reflect the same price points as current payment methods, ensuring a consistent user experience.

When the solution is live, Skype users will be able to purchase Skype Credits from desktop PCs and mobile devices, through browser-based purchases and in the future, through in-app functionality.

Direct Operator Billing will enable Skype to bring a vital alternative payment method to these channels: Skype users will be able to charge their Skype credit to their mobile phone bill or pre-paid account, and enjoy the frictionless user experience

Morten Brøgger, chief executive officer of MACH, added: “With MACH’s Direct Billing Gateway, Skype has a far more flexible, secure and reliable billing solution than, for example, premium SMS. Our Direct Operator Billing solution also provides a great boon for the operators we work with by allowing them to enter the ecommerce value chain and start to win market share from the credit card brands.”

Neil Ward, general manager, business operations, Skype Division - Microsoft, commented: Delivering a strong userexperience has been at the heart of Skype’s adoption by millions of users globally, and we want to extend this philosophy to the payment options we provide. We expect ease of payment to attract new users, while existing users will become more profitable customers as they increase their spend with us.”

Suntech launches network roll-out management system OSS/BSS solutions provider, Suntech, has introduced its SunVizion Network Rollout Management system. The system is specifically designed to support a telecoms network roll-out processes and claims to speed up network roll-out, reducing capex and improving key business processes related to network built-out and maintenance.

"SunVizion Network Rollout Management is our response to the needs of the telecoms market," says Magdalena Jablonska, marketing manager of Suntech.

"The financial downturn and falling ARPU force the operators to lower capital expenditures related to network construction. On the other hand, operators need to carry on these investments, because without a modern network they are not able to meet the expectations of customers and to compete effectively. " The system can detect and eliminate abnormalities and frauds by pointing out significant differences between costs of realization of the same tasks in different departments or regions.

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Amdocs signs five-year agreement with TIM Brasil

Subex awarded five-year group deal by MTN

Amdocs has entered into a five-year managed services agreement with TIM Brasil across its wireless, wireline and broadband lines of business. As a result, TIM Brasil, the country’s second largest mobile service provider, will be able to focus on customer needs and service innovation while realizing operational cost efficiencies.

Subex has been awarded a five-year deal to deploy its Revenue Operations Centre (ROC) fraud management and revenue assurance solutions across 14 networks of the MTN Group. MTN is the largest operator in Africa and the Middle East, with over 170 million subscribers.

Under the agreement, Amdocs will manage TIM Brasil’s operational support systems (OSS) across all lines of business, providing application development and maintenance as well as assuming responsibility for legacy systems and all third-party OSS vendor contracts. On the business support systems (BSS) side, Amdocs will manage its products deployed across TIM’s businesses, including the end-to-end order to cash solution suite at TIM Brasil’s new fibre optic residential broadband service.

As part of a turn-key model, along with hardware vendors, Subex will provide ROC fraud management and revenue assurance solutions to support MTN’s networks. The solutions will be deployed individually in each of the operating countries, with a central programme office provided by Subex, which will work with the MTN Group and the individual countries to roll out the systems in phases across the 14 networks.

“The IT organisation needs to evolve, following the company’s growth. We are standardising TIM’s systems and Amdocs is a partner in this project,” said Luigi Longarini, IT director of TIM Brasil. “We expect to achieve accelerated growth, cost reduction and further improvements in our customers’ experience."

Telefónica UK deploys ariesoGEO Telefónica UK, which operates under the O2 brand, has worked with Arieso, a provider of customer centric, location aware network performance solutions, to enable rapid response to dynamic network conditions, and ensure a positive experience for both existing customers and those visiting the UK for the Olympic Games. Using Arieso’s location-aware technology, ariesoGEO, O2 has greater visibility of its network, including a precise geographic understanding of the voice and data demand within the busy regions.

Richard Owens, O2’s regional manager for mobile access in London, said; “Key to providing this level of service during the event will be the speed and agility with which we will be able to react to changing demands on the network. ariesoGEO enables us to monitor the network in near real-time, where possible react immediately, and then ensure an improved service across the remainder of the event.”

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Nazir Patel, group CFO at MTN, said: “We were looking for a partner to

collaborate with us long term, to address our revenue fortification requirements. Subex was selected for this deployment after a highly competitive bidding process”.

Sudeesh Yezhuvath: Address the total revenue chain

Sudeesh Yezhuvath, chief operating officer of Subex, added: “We are pleased to have been chosen by MTN to deploy our ROC fraud management and ROC revenue assurance solutions.

We won the contract because of our thought leadership and our unique ability to address the total revenue chain through the bouquet of our ROC offerings. We are seeing more of our customers opting for multiple Subex ROC solutions, which is a testament to the depth and quality of our ROC portfolio.”

Indosat chooses Redknee for Indonesian interconnect Redknee has launched what it claims to be world’s largest commercial interconnect system at Indosat in Asia Pacific. Indosat delivers fixed and wireless services to more than 53 million subscribers via its GSM and CDMA networks.

meeting a short deployment deadline.

The proven performance of Redknee’s solution also means that we are assured that our investment in Redknee will meet Indosat’s growing scalability needs today and in the future.”

Redknee’s deployment at Indosat – processing more than 800 million CDRs per day – is the largest singleinstance commercial interconnect implementation in the world. As it continues to increase its market share, Indosat expects that Redknee’s solution will grow to support more than one billion CDRs per day by the end of 2012.

Lucas Skoczkowski, Redknee’s CEO, added:“We are extremely pleased to announce the successful implementation of the world’s largest commercial interconnect system. This deployment reiterates the value that Redknee’s combined performance, scalability and cost of ownership delivers to CSPs across the world. At Redknee, we continue to invest in developing cloud-based and onpremise monetisation solutions to enable service providers to increase revenues, improve the customer experience and grow profitability.”

Budi Irawan, Indosat’s head of IT architecture and strategy, said: “Redknee was selected for its low cost of ownership and its commitment to

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Welcome to our regular Jobs column, brought to you by Identify Networks, Sponsors of People News

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Syniverse appoints Alfred de Cárdenas COO, Prasad to head Americas sales

We all wish that we could earn a little more and I hope that the following suggestions regarding salary negotiation may prove useful to those of you who are considering a new job or looking to negotiate a salary increase.

Know what you want Break your expectations into three categories – Money, benefits and hygiene factors and jot Jason Bandy down your expectation against each and prioritise them. Talk them through with family and agree what’s vital and what might be a nice to have.

Research Understand the overall state of the industry in which you are applying. Check on the company's profitability and its market position. Try to find out the urgency to fill the particular vacancy.

Superior information will give you an edge during the salary negotiation.

Delay the salary negotiations Hold back on talking about compensation until the employer has confirmed that they would like to offer you the role. Simply say something like: "I am keen on this role and your organisation but I'd like to hold off on salary discussions until we are both sure that I’m right for this job".

Patience Take your time, think about things carefully – You will be spending 8-10 hours a day in this new job so a 24 hour wait is worth it. Be reasonable, and always keep the negotiation friendly, open and try to make it easy for everyone. This must not become a battle of wills because you may end up with the employer changing their mind simply because of the bad feeling they got from you during negotiation.

Appear to be flexible As with any negotiation, your goal is to create a win-win situation. Seek to understand what the employer hopes for from you, understand exactly why they want you and learn what package limitations they have and why. Ask about the salary bands, the review process, the bonus structure, the decision making process and how they have come up with the salary package they have offered. Company policy may dictate certain limits, so work with the employer to understand what’s possible and what’s not. Do not be frightened to explore whether an increase is possible and if not what is preventing this.

If you would like any further advice, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Jason Bandy, Director, identify Group Ltd jason.bandy@identifynetworks.com Mobile: +44 (0) 750 001 3084 Tel: +44 (0) 845 370 2900 www.identifynetworks.com

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Alfred de Cárdenas

Alfred de Cárdenas has been appointed chief operating officer of Syniverse, an expansion of his previous role as president of global sales and customer support, to include responsibility for the company’s lines of business. The company also appointed Mahesh Prasad as president of sales for the Americas.

“Alfred's leadership of our sales and customer relationship management has played a key role in the growth of our company during the past four years,” said Jeff Gordon, president and CEO of Syniverse. “His appointment is a natural progression that better aligns the organisation with our strategic direction, keeping customers as our top priority.”

In his expanded role, de Cárdenas is responsible for leading the direction of Syniverse’s roaming, messaging and network lines of business while continuing to head the company’s global sales and customer support organisation.

“Syniverse is continually evolving to better serve the mobile ecosystem in an era of unprecedented demand for mobile,” de Cárdenas said. “Mahesh Prasad’s deep mobile operator experience, mobile expertise and keen customer focus will serve our customers well as he leads the Americas.”

Prasad brings more than 20 years of telecoms expertise, most recently serving as the president and chief marketing officer of Reliance Communications in India, where he was responsible for the marketing of voice, data and content services. Prior to Reliance, Prasad worked in the United States with leading CSPs such as Nextel, Verizon (Bell Atlantic) and MCI WorldCom.

Stewart Bloom joins Aspect Software as CEO Aspect Software, which provides customer contact, enterprise workforce optimisation and Microsoft platform solutions, has appointed Stewart Bloom as chief executive.

Jim Foy will remain in the full time role of executive chairman of Aspect’s Board of Directors.

Bloom brings more than 28 years of experience in enterprise software and professional services to Aspect, most recently as CEO of Escalate Retail. From his work leading one of the largest multi-channel retail software and service providers, he has been immersed in the convergence of information and technology with a focus on delivering reinvented customer experiences.

“Aspect is an asset-rich organisation at a time when enterprise businesses are rethinking how they compete through differentiated customer experiences,” said Bloom.

“This is a pivotal time for the company to capitalise on its technologies, strategic investments and industry relationships in order to successfully prepare and position ourselves for sustained market growth and investor returns in the years ahead.”

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VanillaPlus Hot List: August/September 2012 The Hot List below shows the companies informing us of recent contract wins or product deployments.

If your contract is not listed here email the details to us now marked "Hot List" <editorial@vanillaplus.com> Vendor(s)

Client, Country

Product / Service (Duration & Value)

Acision Agama Technologies Aito Technologies Alcatel-Lucent Alcatel-Lucent Amdocs

Mobilis, Algeria TDC, Denmark Omantel, Oman Etisalat, Nigeria Belgacom, Belgium TIM Brasil, Brazil

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Apigee Arieso

Telefónica Digital, global Telefónica, UK

Assia

China Telecom Jiangsu, China Hutchison 3G, Austria Globe Telecom, Philippines Trader Media Group, UK Bharti Airtel, 20 countries

Enhanced messaging system including personalised SMS forwarding and auto-reply Agama DTV Monitoring deployed for CSP's Microsoft Mediaroom-based IPTV service Deployment of Aito Customer Experience Analytics (CEA) system to provide insight into customer usage Alcatel-Lucent Optism system deployed to support permission- and preference-based mobile marketing Dynamic Services Controller deployed to provide PCRF for 3G and 4G networks Five-year managed services agreement covering OSS and BSS including order-to-cash system at new residential fibre broadband service Apigee API platform chosen as partner for Telefónica Digital API Deployment of ariesoGEO network monitoring and performance system to ensure positive experiences for customers and visitors to 2012 Olympic Games DSL Expresse software tools deployed for dynamic spectrum management of DSL networks Deployment of end-to-end mobile broadband network monitoring and optimisation system New phase of Clarity OSS deployment to address network discovery, alarms, performance and provisioning capabilities CSG Singleview selected for convergent customer management, charging and billing HP Aggregation Platform for SaaS to provide basis for CSP's Cloud Enablement Platform for hosted IaaS and SaaS Junos Pulse Mobile Security Suite deployed for smartphone anti-virus, back-up and parental control

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Astellia Clarity CSG International HP Juniper Networks Mavenir Mavenir

Telefónica Digital, pan-Europe Metro PCS, USA HI3G, Sweden

NetCracker Technology Suddenlink Communications, USA Neural Technologies Zain, Bahrain Neural Technologies Zain, Jordan Neural Technologies OpenCloud Openet Oracle Redknee Subex

Safaricom, Kenya Polkomtel, Orange and T-Mobile, Poland Telus, Canada Etisalat, Nigeria Indosat, Indonesia MTN, 14 countries

Syniverse

Vodafone, India

Tribold

Teracom Group, Sweden and Denmark Key

Awarded

mOne Convergence Platform deployed to support VoLTE service Circuit Switched Fallback system deployed to enable voice and SMS to be delivered to LTE handsets via 3G if necessary Converged BSS solutions to support US Multiple Services Operator (MSO) with 1.4 million customers in seven states Minotaur fraud management system deployed including neural predictive analysis Fourth Zain property rolls-out Minotaur fraud management system following Kuwait, Iraq and Bahrain deployments Minotaur fraud management systems deployed to support M-PESA mobile money transfer service Rhino Service Delivery Platform deployed to provide open service layer and enhance CSPs' ability to compete with OTT providers Openet Policy Manager selected to enhance subscriber experience and be ready for LTE CSP goes live with Oracle Communications Data Model to enable faster analysis of diverse data Interconnect system deployed to process more than one billion CDRs by year-end 2012 Five-year deal to deploy its Revenue Operations Centre fraud management and revenue assurance at 14 group properties CSP's messaging hub will route international SMS into India and align with mobile number portability requirements Deployment of Tribold Enterprise Product Management and Configure, Price, Quote to support Boxer pay-TV service

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IaaS = Infrastructure as a service PCRF = Policy Charging and Rules Function PaaS = Platform as a service VoLTE = Voice over LTE

Telus chooses Openet for policy management Telus has selected Openet Policy Manager to offer an enhanced subscriber experience with the flexibility to gain a competitive advantage in the Canadian wireless market.

“Despite a challenging timeline for implementation, the maturity of Openet’s product and the company’s experienced team made it possible for us to deploy an LTE ready, strategic policy platform, quickly and efficiently,” said Ibrahim Gedeon, chief technology officer at Telus. “Today’s policy management solutions need to be flexible and easy to configure, and Openet Policy Manager meets those

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demands. The product provides a bestin-class PCRF (Policy Charging and Rules Function) solution that is the driving force behind our ability to offer a better experience to our customers.”

As the policy landscape continues to evolve, operators are looking to rely on policy management solutions that have a strong focus on and aptitude for improving user experiences and creating new revenue streams. Openet Policy Manager enables Telus to drive revenue through an improved subscriber experience and a customer first focus. The Openet PCRF introduces additional intelligence into the CSP’s mobile networks. The solution provides

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a foundation to improve subscriber roaming experiences through real-time updates, and enables Telus to enrich its identity-oriented services.

“With Policy Manager, Telus is prepared to keep up with the ever-changing PCRF demands,” said Chris Hoover, vice president of marketing at Openet. “The platform not only puts the tools in place to allow the company to shape a new subscriber experience, but at the same time drive incremental revenue from the initial deployment. We look forward to continue working with Telus and deploying additional use cases that support its commitment to putting customers first.”

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Inefficiency is inexcusable – customer data transforms CSP performance engineering Shirin Dehghan is chief executive and founder of Arieso, the provider of customer centric, location aware network management solutions for mobile network operators. She established the company in 2002, having worked within Vodafone Group as a technical expert for the company’s UMTS license auction team. That experience meant she foresaw – perhaps too early – the massive data consumption uptake the market is experiencing and started the company to meet CSPs’ needs for efficient insight into their users’ consumption. Here, she tells VanillaPlus how CSPs can make efficient use of the data their users generate, optimise network performance and improve end-user experience.

VanillaPlus: Why did you establish Arieso ten years ago? What need did you plan to address?

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Shirin Dehghan: I started the company to focus on the then new 3G and the huge predicted growth in mobile broadband consumption. I based the decision on my experience at Vodafone where I was part of the team preparing for the UK’s 3G auctions, which gave me direct insight into the challenges that this new technology would pose.

It was clear that it would generate masses of data that would need to continue to run over the same technical infrastructure, so I saw the need to plan for the impact that this was going to have on the

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We think CSPs have been basing their decisions on poor data and that data has been costly to gather

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network and, ultimately, customer experience.

The first five years promised huge data traffic growth, although that took longer than I had envisaged to emerge into the market.

We started developing the products in 2002 but really this whole thing started in 2008 with the launch of the iPhone. Everyone knows the history and the really explosive growth and demand we have seen since that happened. Today, the highest data consumers are iPhone 4S users and the whole focus for CSPs now is around which subscribers are hogging the bandwidth. One per cent of subscribers now generate 50% of mobile data so the challenge for CSPs is in understanding where these subscribers are and efficiently managing the network in those hightraffic areas.

The capacity crunch that I predicted ten years ago finally happened. We’d spent the intervening time developing the solutions to this problem and we’re now solving the same problem across five continents. The market is coming to us.

VP: To what extent is the shortage of capacity a result of operators' getting it wrong when it comes to network planning and optimisation?

SD: Traditionally, CSPs have been basing their network planning and optimisation on incomplete information. The light bulb moment comes when they recognise the source of data they are using is out-dated. For example, drive testing, with network centric data and key performance indicators, compromises the operators decision making when they deploy assets as the likelihood is that the network will have evolved since that data was collected and those KPIs developed.

It is really important to understand where the data hoggers are and which of them represent the hotspots of bandwidth consumption on the network because, if the hoggers are at the edge, they are causing far more damage. We estimated last year that the whole industry wasted $500 million in opex through poor siting of base stations.

A significant part of the reason for that is the incomplete nature of drive testing. Very few users consume bandwidth in the same way as drive testing. For instance, most people don’t download video while they are driving; they are indoors and traditional drive testing methods cannot monitor the network to this level of inbuilding granularity.

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SD: We think CSPs have been basing their decisions on poor data and that data has been costly to gather. The performance improvements achieved from conducting greater amounts of traditional testing wouldn’t justify the opex expense involved, because the cost of the equipment and processes used is so high. CSPs face increased demand on their networks and they have to address that efficiently. Many CSPs still don’t get it – they need new network performance engineering solutions.

That is only going to become more apparent as operators start to roll-out small cells to meet their users’ needs. You need a multitude of different solutions in this area because of the amount of capex involved. Small cells are of big interest as a way to offload data traffic but you can’t place them anywhere and they are not totally inexpensive. LTE is exactly the same. Now you have masses and masses of data rate but the more you give users in terms of throughput, the more they want. CSPs are starting to look at selforganising networks (SON), which will require far richer and more real-time inputs than traditional network-centric solutions can deliver.

Small cells, heterogeneous networks and LTE are ways to add more capacity than 3G is capable of delivering but what becomes important is that CSPs have to manage their network across 2G, 3G and 4G as a single network. There are a number of strategies needed to solve these problems.

VP: Have we reached a point where operators understand the scale of the problem or is there still an attitude that if the network's operating, there's nothing to worry about?

SD: The pressure on network teams is definitely intensifying. They shouldn’t think that just having LTE is going to save the day. At a time where there are calls for greater returns to investors you can’t have inefficiency, it’s inexcusable.

There is now recognition of the issue. I believe it is now one of the top three things that CEOs worry about in every CSP I’ve spoken to . They want to know what they can use to have leaner network teams, and what they can do to have one network operation across all generations of network – 2G, 3G and 4G together. The issue is that CSPs now don’t have the solutions to address those.

VP: Does simply throwing money at the problem make it go away? If so, how will operators find the money especially when access to capital is constrained and they are faced with new network roll out expenditure with LTE?

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VP: Where did they start going wrong and how are they fixing the issues they face now?

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SD: The solution is staring us in the face – the subscribers themselves. The subscribers understand their experience of the network and how much they use the network over time. No amount of drive testing or probes will provide that granularity. Every device in the network is providing vast amounts of data back from the end user which basically gives the CSP a very rich source of data that is specific to every single subscriber about when, where and how much bandwidth they are using.

This should be at the heart of every CSP’s business decision. We think this is so critical because being efficient about the capital a CSP deploys is a core issue. If a CSP doesn’t put capacity in the right place it has been inefficient, so you have to have an intelligent interface. Old-fashioned approaches are incomplete and they’re not going to give you the whole picture, they’re old school and they’re out of date.

Understanding how the customer demands capacity from the network is absolutely critical.

You can use that in real-time for marketing, for assuring the customer experience and to gain a deeper understanding of corporate customers, for example.

We were the first to realize this and we’ve worked on this for a very long time. This is a problem that is not unique to particular operators and geographies; it’s everywhere. In developing countries even more focus is required because fixed data infrastructure isn’t there so users have to use mobile. We see a lot of opportunity in those markets.

VP: What business cases can be constructed in support of systems such as Arieso's?

SD: We’ve dealt with many established tier one CSPs, and CSPs that have grown to become tier ones. You have to prove your worth.

We helped mobile operators to sweat their assets – we’ve improved key performance indicators by 20% without adding hardware. We add value through creating efficiency. We make use of the engineering team’s time and cut drive test costs. You don’t need to do it because every device is doing it for you.

Finally, we present a 20 times return on capital invested in small cells. The business case is obvious.

"Understanding how the customer demands capacity from the network is absolutely critical".

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How to manage a family of pricing, revenue assurance, fraud and network policy

Shared data plans for families and affinity groups are at the front line of mobile competition. Verizon Wireless was the first large CSP to announce a shared data plan, but no sooner did Verizon reveals its plans, but arch rival, AT&T, said it would quickly follow suit with a similar programme. Here, Amit Daniel examines how CSPs can support all the strands of family plans effectively.

The stakes couldn‘t be higher. Mobile CSPs that can successfully lure families and affinity groups to their shared data plans will achieve new levels of customer lock-in. In turn, that capability will enable them to aggressively cherry-pick a competitor’s base. Yet as simple as the concept of shared data plans is, they are incredibly hard to revenue assure.

Mediating the needs of different family members is a

You can look at shared data plans in two ways.

On the one hand, it’s a fresh, greenfield opportunity that could rake in rich profits. But the flip side is also true: if shared data services are priced wrongly and targeted at the wrong subscribers, you could lose a ton of loyal customers in a hurry.

challenge all of its own

All of which points to the absolute necessity of having a great analytic tool behind you. Frankly, earlier generations of pricing analytics tools are of limited usefulness in this new area. Normally, when you create new price plans, you analyse the behaviour of typical users and determine how the proposed price plan is likely to affect current subscribers. But shared data plans introduce a new wrinkle. Tracking individual usage is not enough. You also need to analyse family usage as a whole.

And that causes the number of factors and

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variables to juggle to greatly expand. If you offer the plan to more members of the family, will it encourage more data usage or not? The short and long term effects of these new shared data family plans are completely unknown. Will the whole family move? Will the people most attracted to these plans be the family members using iPads or iPhones? Other vital analytics checkpoints are around comparing the current plan to previous data plans — and also looking at price plans of competitors.

Having a carefully thought out rollout strategy is also key. Which customers should you encourage to move to shared data plans? And how should you treat valuable customers who are already on lucrative individual plans? Clearly, many scenarios need to be tested to ensure that revenue is maximised during the transition — and beyond.

Ensuring customer satisfaction through pricing plan adjustments Mediating the needs of different family members is a challenge all of its own. Let’s say the children like to download HD movies. Well, a single HD movie consumes about three gigabytes of data.

And if the family has only budgeted for ten gigabytes a month, will the parents be satisfied to reserve one gigabyte for themselves and

keeping accurate track of bandwidth consumed.

The shift to shared data plans will require constant monitoring of family usage, and in North America, where the vast majority of the mobile business is postpaid, the effect will be to make postpaid billing shops much more online and real-time.

Opportunities for fraudsters

allocate the remaining nine gigs to their kids?

Probably not. And what happens when the service gets maxed out?

These issues are all brand new challenges, but the current thinking is that parents need to control their family’s bandwidth usage and the budgets of family members. And that data budgeting might extend to certain types of usage. For instance, parents could allocate a certain percentage to movies versus email versus web surfing.

Though some form of plan management software will clearly emerge, a bigger issue is the operator’s ability to suggest appropriate plans as a family’s understanding of its usage evolves or the family tries to staying in a budget. If you see that most of your data is movies, analytics can suggest, say, a plan that takes advantage of less costly late night downloads.

Network policy control This subject of maximising family usage brings up the issue of network policy control – the rules an operator sets for controlling the bandwidth a family uses each month. Normally there are two policy options widely used when a data allowance is fully consumed, either: throttle bandwidth down which reduces the quality of the user experience or; charge a fee for an additional data allowance.

A key component in network policy control — and a brand new monitoring point for revenue assurance and fraud professionals — is the Policy Control and Rules Function or PCRF system. It boils down to one simple fact: users can get very upset when you play around with their bandwidth. If you cut a family’s service in error, you’ve got four angry customers to answer to, not just one. You could lose that family’s business forever. And if they’re really upset, they even tell their entire social network about their experience. This is precisely why you, as an operator, need to be constantly checking the PCRF, ensuring it is operating correctly, and

One last area of concern is fraud. A big window we feel fraudsters will try to exploit is the difference between the price offered for one device versus another. Normally tablets are banned from doing regular calls and SMS activities, yet certain models permit it and others can be hacked to permit it.

Amit Daniel: Shared data plans will require constant monitoring

As currently conceived, Verizon’s Share Everything service includes a price gap between tablets and smartphones within the shared data plan.

Smartphones cost $40 a month and tablets cost only $10. No doubt, a key factor in that price differential is the fact that tablets are often used where free Wi-Fi service is available. Smartphones, meanwhile, are more likely used in the town and in moving vehicles where you need to access the relatively more expensive 3G radio network.

Households might be tempted to commit small fraudulent activities such as taking advantage of this price disparity by fooling the operator into thinking a smartphone is a tablet. Tampering with the SIM card or other device interface could accomplish this objective so it’s important for operators to be aware of these tricks. Using the Verizon Share Everything Plan as an example, if a family has three smartphones masked as tablets, the equivalent lost revenue could be $70 per month and over a $800 a year.

One solution is to constantly monitor the type of equipment the SIM card is being used in and base the subscription on the equipment ID, not just a SIM card. Another solution is to verify that every SIM card sold to a tablet is associated with a data plan only in the CSP’s network, and to base the pricing on the SIM capabilities and not the type of device.

To win in this emerging assurance area, you must first offer the right price plans to the right subscribers – and be able to quickly adapt to what competitors are offering. You must take steps to stop insider and equipment swapping fraud. Finally you must wrap tight business controls around policy-driven bandwidth throttling that are bound to anger subscribers if they are not implemented correctly.

The author, Amit Daniel is executive vice president of marketing and business development at cVidya.

Households might be tempted to commit small fraudulent activities such as taking advantage of this price disparity by fooling the operator into thinking a smartphone is a tablet

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THE BILLING EXPERIENCE

Transform users’ experience of billing CSPs have always used the bill as a consistent means of communicating with customers but for many it creates huge inward calls as users make enquiries about the accuracy of their bills. Here, Cullen Davidson argues that bills must be easy to understand, clear and accurate – only then will the billing experience become good and present CSPs the opportunity to do more with the monthly bill.

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While the benefits of the digital world – convenience for consumers and cost savings

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for service providers – are definitely welcomed, it’s interesting to look at the flip side of how this change in interaction is impacting customer relationships and placing increased pressure on each and every touch point.

The bill has always been a consistent means of communicating with customers but with this shift in how customers are engaging with their providers, for many, it has become the only touch point. It’s the link between the value that you promise and what you actually deliver. It can build enormous trust or in a matter of an instant, tear it down. Yes, the bill

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Cullen Davidson: The bill needs to be accurate, on time and easy to understand

How often do service providers interact with their customers? If they’re providing the agreed upon service at the agreed upon price, the chances are, the interaction is limited. For many consumers, the scenario of walking into a bricks and mortar store and actually having a conversation with a service rep has become foreign. You can buy a phone, establish service and activate a device while never engaging with an actual person. You can search for services and change your rate plan with a few simple clicks.

needs to be accurate. It needs to be on time.

It needs to be easy to understand. Some would argue that it even needs to look pretty.

But is there a more strategic opportunity related to the monthly bill?

For many CSPs, billing enquires account for more than 50% – at some it's as high as 80% – of their customer inquiries. Is this because customers don’t understand their bill? Or that they’re confused by the charges for a recently added service? Or that they’re amazed by how 5MB of data usage translates into cost?

It’s all of the above Billing is never viewed as an easy task but regardless of what’s happening behind the scenes, translating the information that appears on a bill into a way that’s meaningful to customers is a must. Rest assured that this doesn’t require an extensive integration project and the consolidation of billing systems; it means pulling all of the data into a single source to deliver an enhanced billing experience. Consolidation of the data is the first step; applying analytics to help customers understand their bill, save them time, and build their trust with their provider is the next step.

As a company, if you only have twelve times a year to engage with your customer, you better make it count. Thinking back ten or fifteen years ago, the paper bill was paramount when it came to customer communications.

Product teams stood in line to make their case to the marketing team, hoping to earn the marquee placement on the next month’s bill. For those who succeeded, they anxiously awaited to see the uptake rates. For those who didn’t, they waited for the next month to pitch their product as the next big offering. It was a fairly basic decision process – determine which product had the most uptake potential and promote it on the bill – to every customer. Some basic segmentation was put into play but if you and I had the same income, were both careerists, had a good payment history and subscribed to two of the same services, there’s a good chance we received the same communication. So as we look forward to today, has the process really changed?

CSPs have all of the data to move beyond

generic product promotions to engage customers in a relevant, more personalised manner. Instead of product teams lining up for marketing to determine the best product to highlight, operators need to shift to a more customer-centric approach and determine the best communication for each customer at the right time. What this means is that for some customers in the right context the best communication may be the new product offer while for others it may be education regarding their existing service or a change in plan recommendation based on usage.

The bill is an opportunity to create a relevant dialogue with customers to not only help increase revenues, but also drive long-term loyalty. For example, if a customer who has signed up for a new data plan in the past three months but has shown low usage, the bill can be used to educate them on data services that they will find valuable. Or if a customer is trending to exceed their covered voice services within the next three months, the bill can be utilised to provide them with personalised usage and trending information. In many cases, the bill can be used as a preemptive strike, eliminating the need for customers to call due to bill shock, and potentially churn, because the value they realize doesn’t align with the charges incurred.

As a company, if you only have twelve times a year to engage with your customer, you better make it count

With telecoms products and services becoming a commodity, customer experience has become the key differentiator for many providers. Whether you use online billing or receive a paper bill, are a consumer with one account or an enterprise with a thousand, are a new customer or tenured, you depend on your service provider to provide you with a consistent, accurate view each and every month. Now if your service provider goes one step further and proactively provides relevant and personalised information, the bill can have an even bigger impact on customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Instead of viewing the bill as a necessary evil in terms of volumes handled and accuracy rates achieved, operators need to embrace the bill as a valuable touch point – one with which they can build ongoing trust and value.

The author, Cullen Davidson is director of product management at Globys.

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OPERATOR CASE STUDY

CSPs should build an assembly line for enterprise products When CenturyLink wanted to streamline its new product introduction capability it deployed an enterprise product management system from Tribold.

CenturyLink, the US CSP, decided to transform its business from delivering highly bespoke services to its enterprise customers into a product assembly line, with products conceived and planned according to market opportunity and industry advances, and then introduced into the network in a clean and orderly way.

“CenturyLink sees products not just converged from within the telecoms industry, but we also see them coming from outside the traditional telecoms space – cloud services being a perfect example,” says Donald Toland, director of programme operations at CenturyLink. “In years past, the cloud was viewed as an IT service, however now it’s seen as an extension of our hosting operations.”

CenturyLink wanted to provide the ability to model products, understand them and talk to customers about their requirements before investing in any manufacturing costs. Once implemented, product managers wanted to be able to update and manage the products and their attributes. These processes were a problem companywide and were in dire need of improvement.

“We were looking at an evolution on the same scale as manufacturing several decades ago when the industry transformed from designing with a pencil to full blown CAD modeling,” says Toland. “We wanted to model product, but hadn’t the tools to do so.”

Product implementation CenturyLink, like most other service providers, tended to productise in silos in the way the technologies evolved and productisation would hide the disjointed way the services were provided. Rather than presenting a catalogue of defined and configured products, CenturyLink offered their enterprise customers a range of services tailored to meet their individual requirements. This resulted in each customer having a unique configuration of services, pricing set by the market or by sales managers external to the product management process and a constant requirement to align data between order capture, contract negotiation, fulfillment, billing and CRM. CenturyLink realized it needed a Product Information Management (PIM) solution that would consistently federate its network and software services into a common platform and optimise service delivery.

“The business requirement was loud and clear,” adds Toland. “Our efforts now needed to focus on connecting the business with IT to deliver the best possible PIM solution.”

Eric Hudson, principal business architect at CenturyLink, explains: “CenturyLink’s product lifecycle was far too slow and our product design IT-driven and based on ordering and billing system capabilities,” he said. “We knew what we wanted to do, it just took too long to implement.

It was clear that our products would only ever be as good as the definitions in the OSS/BSS, put simply: if we can’t define and deploy a product then it’s only an idea.”

CenturyLink took full advantage of the TM Forum Catalyst programme – a collaborative approach to solving critical industry challenges. By including business partners, which now included Tribold, CenturyLink prototyped and demonstrated its proposed solutions as a TM Forum Catalyst. This process not only demonstrated feasibility, but also confirmed compatibility of the solution across CenturyLink’s business partners. CenturyLink then selected Tribold’s EPM (enterprise product management) software which has resulted in a 4% revenue increase, a 5% cost reduction, a 25% improvement in product deployment cycle time and a decrease in unique provisioning and assurance job steps.

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GridWeek 2012 2-4 October, 2012

Ovum Big Data & Analytics Forum 16-17 October, 2012

Washington DC, USA Organiser: Clasma Events www.gridweek.com

London, UK Organiser: Ovum bigdataforum.ovumevents.com

Futurecom 8-11 October, 2012 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Organiser: Futurecom www.futurecom.com.br/2012/en/

Broadband World Forum 16-18 October, 2012 Amsterdam, The Netherlands Organiser: Informa www.broadbandworldforum.com

Comarch User Group 2012 9-10 October, 2012 Berlin, Germany Organiser: Comarch www.comarch.com

The Mobile Show 17-18 October, 2012 London, UK Organiser: Terrapinn www.terrapinn.com/2012/mobile-showeurope/index.stm

MobileCon 9-11 October, 2012 Sand Diego, USA Organiser: CTIA www.mobilecon2012.com

Gridcomms 22 October, 2012 London, UK Organiser: smartenergyIP www.gridcomms.com

4G World 29 October - 1 November, 2012 Chicago, USA Organiser: UBM TechWeb www.4gworld.com

AfricaCom 13-15 November, 2012 Cape Town, South Africa Organiser: Informa africa.comworldseries.com

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CLOCKING OFF!

Audition your customers before you allow them in Sometimes the technology industry tries to be too clever and shuns the simple low tech solutions. Nick Booth vents his frustration The scope and ambition of conferencing systems never fails to amaze me. A recent demo of a Tandberg meeting room system was stunning.

Still videoconferencing has never caught on and I can't help thinking that a low-tech solution might be just as effective at bringing people together.

For example, if you come back from your lunch break with a bag of chips, people will descend on you from all points of the company. You can assemble entire teams using this principle.

Commercialising it would be fairly easy for someone experienced in monetising new concepts.

The onset of 4G should provide more opportunity for the industry to over-complicate things as it offers so many options. It should be interesting to see the effect of 4G on the mobile CSPs. I wonder how quickly all that extra capacity will be swallowed up as people take the opportunity to exploit all the possibilities of an IP network.

Still, what can you do? As we have seen elsewhere in this issue, CSPs haven't quite got the systems in place to fine-tune their networks in response to big data insights. In the meantime though, there are other alternatives to help them juggle supply and demand.

If CSPs wanted to really simplify the gathering of customer insights, why don't they just ask them?

Nobody at the CSP I use ever asks me what I think of their service, or how. Not until I ask for my PAC code when my contract is up for renewal. That's the moment when, for a brief moment, I become a VIP customer, whereas normally I'm a Not Very Important Customer. If any CSP wants insights into what subscribers think of a service and how they use it, they should walk down the corridor and speak to the people in the customer retention unit. They know where all the bodies are buried. If you take them a big of chips I bet they'd tell you everything.

All the big data systems the CSPs are attempting to build or buy are designed to help juggle the demands of subscribers with the supply of capacity. They seek to manage demand by spotting the capacity hoggers, such as the man

downloading a film, and enticing them with offers to do this another time. This involves creating an entirely new system and rationalising all the various silos of information together. Then finding a box with enough processing oomph to handle all the billions of real time calculations.

Why not come at the supply-demand equation from reverse angle? In a parallel universe (the sales department) Demand Generation systems are all the rage. These systems, from the likes of Eloqua, DemandGen and Marketo, are used to rationalise the new customers and grade them.

The idea being that the best prospects are identified first, and these juiciest leads are fed to the sales team. The sales army marches on its stomach but for years road warriors have been fed an endless supply of duff leads, leading them to drive down blind alleys and talk to time wasters. Surely this principle, of auditing the customers, before you engage them, could be used by the CSPs. So under my scheme, before you accept customers into your subscriber base, they have to fill out a form describing their intentions.

When will they download content, where and what type. This will enable the CSP to map out its usage patterns before they actually happen.

There's a marketing advantage too, as auditing the customers before they join will create an air of exclusivity. Anyone who desperately craves this sort of celebrity status is already declaring to you their capacity for manipulation. This is a gift for the marketing manager, who will inherit a customer base of proven gullibility. By threatening the subscribers with potential rejection, you will only make them try harder to please you.

The author, Nick Booth, is a contributor to VanillaPlus and a technology journalist.

The onset of 4G should provide more opportunity for the industry to overcomplicate things as it offers so many options

Once they are into your exclusive guest list, you'll probably have them for life.

Reverse psychology marketing like this is probably the perfect low-tech alternative to the complicated challenge of big data and customer analysis. It has to be worth a try. Which CSP will be bold enough to pioneer it?

VANILLAPLUS AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2012

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TEST & MEASUREMENT AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2012 D R I V I N G

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TALKING HEADS

JDSU's Doug Fantuzzi says CSPs need to collect intelligence – not just raw data

END-TO-END MONITORING Why monitoring in isolation isn't enough any more ▼

DANGER! HIGH 'VOLTEAGE' The voice over LTE testing challenge

COMMENT CSPs learn to look inwards as well as outwards

Website

DRIVING PROFITS FOR COMMUNICATION SERVICE PROVIDERS www.vanillaplus.com

COMMENT

CONTENTS

CSPs look inwards as well as outwards Test and measurement used to be self-contained within the CSP. More accurately, it was a network operations function and exclusively confined to that discipline. After all, who else needed to know the network was up and performing as expected?

Provided network operations could gain visibility into indicators such as throughput everything was rosy in the CSP garden. Alerts would point to problems that could then be fixed with some but minimised disruption to users. Hopefully they wouldn’t notice.

However, the complexity of the test, measurement and monitoring task has greatly increased partly because it now needs to take into account multiple network types within the CSP and also because it needs to address on-net and off-net factors such as mobile device performance, problems in third parties’ systems and a user that has a greater willingness to complain and a greater choice to leave if they’re not satisfied.

George Malim, Editor: VanillaPlus

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Introduction and contents

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Talking Heads

Doug Fantuzzi, vice president of JDSU’s Communications Test and Measurement, explains how CSP attitudes to test, measurement and monitoring are changing

S7 End-to-end monitoring George Malim explores why no technology can remain an island anymore

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LTE preparation

CSPs need to eliminate guesswork from their LTE backhaul networks

S10 Danger! High VoLTEage Paul Beaver explores the demands support VoLTE places on CSPs Supplement Cover:

For that reason, CSPs are now looking to monitor and manage the entire end-to-end experience. This is no longer solely a network operations discipline. Alarms may now trigger a marketing response, feed into partner relationship management and also customer experience management.

The widening in scope of the remit of test and measurement has made it vastly more complex and that is costly to address. Fortunately, that situation also means that investments in these technologies are now applicable to far more than just network operations departments. That means a clear return on investment case can be constructed even though the costs are potentially greater than old fashioned network-centric techniques.

One of the greatest challenges for CSPs is in making the cultural shift to allow this to happen. They have many millions of Euros tied up in old-fashioned network management systems. There’s not necessarily anything wrong with those apart from the fact they only address one problem in isolation – the network.

The industry is starting to make the shift into the new era but it is a difficult and lengthy journey.

Enjoy the supplement George Malim, editor, VanillaPlus

JDSU innovates and markets diverse technologies that enhance the way people experience the world every day. We enable fast, high-quality communications, secure financial transactions, reliable consumer electronics, green energy, differentiated brands and a host of other solutions. We provide these solutions through three business segments: Communications Test and Measurement, Communications and Commercial Optical Products, and Advanced Optical Technologies. To learn more about JDSU, please visit www.jdsu.com and www.jdsu.tv and follow us on JDSU Perspectives, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

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CSPs need to collect intelligence – not just data – from test and measurement systems Doug Fantuzzi is a vice president in JDSU's Communications Test and Measurement business segment. He has served in various leadership positions in the communications industry in areas of next-generation operational support systems, IMS and service assurance. His role at JDSU includes using JDSU's IPTV and mobile assurance portfolio to support 4G/LTE deployments, expanding platforms for wireless and converged assurance, as well as driving the recently announced JDSU PacketPortal solution. Here, he discusses how attitudes to test, measurement and monitoring are changing within CSPs. VanillaPlus: What do you see as the main factors driving the test and measurement sector?

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Doug Fantuzzi: There has been much talk over the past few years about the unprecedented growth in data traffic and what that means for consumers. However, the full scale of this revolution really hits home when you take a closer look at the stats. Just a few years ago, mobile apps weren’t part of the collective consciousness – today, users download 792 mobile apps each second. The popularity of

social media has undoubtedly been a key driver for this uptake; Facebook hosts 1,627 mobile status updates per second while Twitter boasts over 13 million mobile users. Smartphones equipped to process high-quality content have added vast amounts of video, music, and highresolution images to what’s being carried over mobile networks; 29 million mobile users streamed music in 2011, while Instagram reported a colossal 1,900% increase in the number of photos posted in a single year.

Video content now accounts for 52% of all mobile data traffic.

For network operators, the pace of this growth is both exciting and unnerving. The opportunity for innovation is huge, but succeeding in a new world of massive bandwidth demand and delivering consistently strong service involves substantial challenges. At the same time, network operators are under constant pressure to reduce costs, maximise profits, guarantee quality of service, increase customer satisfaction and support new and real-time applications. To do this, operators need complete visibility into the network to develop effective network strategies.

VP: You talk about network and service enablement. Can you explain this?

DF: The industry is at a crossroads. Network and service enablement is about meeting the challenges around big data, over the top (OTT) services, and service personalisation. A network itself can be a key differentiator, letting providers create services from the intelligence in that network so it becomes self-aware and selfhealing. And, providers need new business models to adjust to the changing consumer landscape.

VP: Everyone is talking big data. How does JDSU address this industry issue?

For network operators, the pace of this

Operators can now deploy data collectors across the entire network, connected via a unique cloud approach. This ensures maximum security, autodiscovery, and management with a massively scalable solution, delivering unprecedented reach and visibility. The PacketPortal datacollection technology can not only be embedded in microprobes, which slot into network elements as standard small form factor pluggables (SFPs), it can also enable instruments and customerpremises and end-user devices. Your entire network, and the devices that connect to it, can all share intelligence through PacketPortal.

growth is both exciting and unnerving

In addition, because PacketPortal is an open platform, you can not only empower existing applications – you can also enable and extend new business models and new revenue streams.

PacketPortal intelligence can be shared with all of your business, monitoring, and management applications.

This open platform has allowed JDSU to develop PacketPortal Connect, the ecosystem of application developers, system integrators and equipment manufacturers who can deliver value added solutions based on PacketPortal. As part of Connect, the application developer community

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DF: The idea of big data revolves around three key axes: volume, velocity, and variety – and these need to drive value. JDSU is introducing solutions that address big data head-on with solutions such as PacketPortal, which we announced in February this year. We recognised that to get real intelligence from the network, you need to remove the blindspots in the network – blindspots where, at best, you get a partial view of what is going on. To see what the consumer is truly experiencing means getting as close to the customer as possible in terms of intelligence gathering. This is not just looking at key performance indicators, but getting a real, personalised view of content and the customer experience. This lets the provider address data volume because you can now gather real, personalised intelligence right across the network, as close to the consumer as possible.

And, this intelligence is available to any application, it doesn’t matter what the service is.

What’s crucially important is that you get the intelligence in real-time, on-demand.

DF: PacketPortal is a breakthrough solution for this communications industry problem. By decoupling data collection and filtering from management and analysis, we can dramatically reduce the cost, footprint, energy consumption, and complexity of information collection.

VP: How does your PacketPortal solution achieve this?

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facilitates new solutions, ideas, concepts, applications and business models to be shared and exchanged promoting exciting new solutions for service providers and their customers.

There is an obvious need for complete network visibility into the applications that customers are running on their devices, as well as the varying bandwidth flows and demands placed on the network from individual users and businesses. To manage a networkâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s performance, operators need reports on bandwidth in real-time. What all this really amounts to is a need for greater intelligence.

With greater visibility comes the intelligence to improve troubleshooting, create new products, and enhance the customer experience. To acquire this intelligence, you have to be able to collect the data at the edge, where 80% of service issues occur. Data should be compiled in real time through a cloud-based approach to intelligent collection and network management.

This can help to achieve cost savings. Better intelligence optimises performance and improves troubleshooting time. A technician at a central location can quickly locate and fix problems without deploying field technicians, saving opex.

It also achieves improved customer experience.

By reducing service issues and offering customers services more tailored to their needs, network providers can also reduce customer churn.

In addition, revenue opportunities can be addressed. By unlocking network intelligence, service providers can create new billing strategies based on customer usage models, new marketing campaigns based on content and customer data, and cost effectively offer managed services that previously required expensive hardware deployments.

Finally, users can get on-demand access to the customer experience. Combining this type of packet access with a multi-user, multi-probe access platform allows users to view any customer, service, or quality of experience ondemand, leading to quick diagnoses and faster problem solving.

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VP: How will the next 12 months look for the test and measurement industry?

DF: There will be 50 billion internet-connected devices by 2020 and total internet traffic growth is set to more than quadruple by 2014. By any standards, these are lofty predictions. However, with the smartphone and tablet phenomena gaining ground and the wider industry buzzing about the potential of machine-to-machine communications, all evidence points to the fact that the current unprecedented growth occurring in the telecoms industry is set to continue.

We need to move from thinking about subscribers to thinking about customers â&#x20AC;&#x201C; to fully connect the customer experience. What services will help them, what services do they use, what over the top (OTT) applications are being provided? For network operators, the opportunity to deliver and monetise new services is huge, but there are a number of barriers to overcome to achieve full network visibility and convert network data into real, actionable intelligence.

To achieve these next generation network services, packet acquisition must be costeffectively embedded in optical components throughout the network, and a cloud-based, software application platform is essential in order to access and manage critical network data. With a greater level of intelligence about traffic and applications running over a network, operators can create new classes of services, opening up new revenue potential and profit streams.

Preparing the networks for an influx of 50 billion internet-connected smartphones, tablets, computers and appliances is no small task.

Rolling this out while keeping customer service at an optimum level is even more of a challenge.

However, the technology now exists to provide operators with the greater level of network intelligence needed to cost-effectively manage these massive networks and applications, ensuring that customers receive an excellent standard of quality of experience and service, even during the earliest stages of implementation.

For further information visit: www.jdsu.com/go/packetportal

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END-TO-END

MONITORING

No technology is an island so CSPs must monitor end-to-end The picture of a user's experience that traditional approaches to test and measurement provide can no longer view parts of the network in isolation.

Services and applications are delivered across multiple networks and devices and CSPs, therefore, need to monitor the complete session. George Malim explores the challenges CSPs used to rely on test and measurement to make sure their operations were performing as expected. Measurement of throughput and availability delivered the indicators they needed to know the network was working within the performance parameters they set.

Those systems were good but they only went so far and provided only insight into a limited range of indicators across a single network.

However, bringing these disparate systems and technologies together so the goal of an

Richard Stone: We see bizarre application behaviour

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Now though, it's no good having a system that purely monitors the performance of the 3G radio access network, when the user's experience might be delivered over LTE, GPRS fibre backhaul and even Wi-Fi as well as UMTS. What's needed is a complete end-toend picture of the session, download or interaction across multiple bearers.

For instance, CSPs have seen traditional test and measurement approaches trigger an alarm within a 2G network because it is becoming congested. Those systems have worked and alerted the CSP to the problem but on investigation it turns out there’s nothing wrong with the 2G network – except it is buckling under the strain of users failing over onto it because of an issue within the 3G network. CSPs in that scenario have wasted time investigating the 2G network for a problem that doesn’t exist, whereas an integrated, endto-end approach to monitoring would have directed them immediately to the root cause of the problem within the 3G network.

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END-TO-END

MONITORING

Stone points integrated, end-to-end monitoring system is out that end-to-

achieved, is easier said than done. Both technical and cultural changes are required.

end monitoring “It always strikes me as really strange that there are CSPs out there that still think if you

isn’t just an look at one little bit of the chain you can additional cost monitor the whole experience,” says Richard that CSPs will have to bear

Neil Coleman: Workforces under extra strain

Stone, senior solutions manager at Compuware. “The chain is complex and involves devices, the network provider and an over-the-top provider (OTT). If you want to look at the experience, you have got to do everything because we see bizarre behaviour of applications and content moving across CSPs’ networks. The days of having a probebased system across the network are gone you can’t rely on that alone anymore.”

Neil Coleman, director of marketing at Actix, says the challenge isn’t just about deploying different technology, it’s about putting in place a new process: “There are a couple of adjustments we're seeing. Firstly at a people level engineers are expected to understand and be able to fix issues on multiple technologies. This is putting strain on an already overstretched workforce,” he says. “At a monitoring level – there is a lot of legacy [technology] out there. CSPs are looking to phase out point monitoring solutions that are single technology focused. For example, a recent operator we were talking to had more than 50 point tools to help them monitor and fix the network. They were desperate to cut through the noise the only way they could do this was to run a tools consolidation exercise starting with our multi-technology monitoring and optimisation platform and working out which ones they could get rid of.”

Steve Bowker, chief technology officer of Aircom, says that correlation and aggregation of all the disparate monitoring data is the core challenge – and one that is becoming more difficult to address. “It’s quite easy to get an end-to-end picture of network performance,” he says. “For example, if the data circuit

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VANILLAPLUS TEST & MEASUREMENT AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2012

throughput is x and the response time is y, you have a fairly clear idea but, when you have a problem, you need to drill down into that information to address it. That will be across multiple network types so the picture becomes a lot more complex – the biggest problem is bringing together the data and making it useful.”

Stone points out that end-to-end monitoring isn’t just an additional cost that CSPs will have to bear. They can realize significant operational savings from the insights it provides. “In the testing on UK networks that we have done, we’ve found that every popular service suffers from what we call wasted data,” he says. “That’s data sent across the network in response to user requests. On average 8 to 10% of the data going across wireless networks is wasted data. For example, a user might log in to Facebook, check what their friends are doing, update their status and exit. One device doing that could consume 30 to 40% more data than another doing exactly the same thing.

Monitoring therefore has to be done in the same way that a user experiences [a service].”

Those kinds of statistics have helped get the message across. “CSPs have understood it, or at least are starting to,” adds Stone. “The problem is they have millions invested in network management tools that enable them to say all the lights are green so everything is OK. You can understand that because they feel they are taking care of their part of the business but more and more they’re asking why, if all the lights are green, everyone isn’t satisfied.”

That demonstrates that CSPs recognise the value of end-to-end monitoring. “We’re seeing customer experience related activity happening again because it is really valuable information and CSPs are putting a lot more value against it,” adds Bowker. “Planning teams see the problem clearly.”

EXPERT OPINION:

Preparing Your Infrastructure for LTE As mobile networks continue to grow, so do the needs of mobile users. Mobile technologies such as LTE are in direct response to the incredible growth of mobile data, by enabling networks to handle a growing number of mobile devices with higher bandwidth and more differentiated services. The wide-scale deployment of LTE that will occur over the next 3 to 5 years is creating challenges for carriers and operators, specifically, that of quickly and efficiently enabling Ethernet and IP services in their mobile backhaul network.

These networks are also facing continual stress as a result of the exponential increase in bandwidth demand and in LTE growth. Plus, carriers and operators have to improve their operational efficiency, reduce their OPEX and CAPEX pressure to maximize revenues as well as ensure customer satisfaction.

To support this growth, carriers and operators have started transitioning the mobile backhaul towards packet-based technologies such as Ethernet. The purpose of this is to provide enhanced services to the end users. However, upgrading the backhaul network is a daunting task, considering the impact on the transition on the users, the higher likelihood of failures and errors and the sheer amount of work that has to be performed with the number of towers already in service or to be added. For this reason, their technicians need tools to help them understand the new mobile backhaul network architecture and eliminate guesswork.

EXFO created Ethernet One to be an integrated, centralized network turn-up and monitoring tool which supports effectively the deployment, maintenance and growth of LTE networks. This solution consists of an ecosystem of devices which seamlessly interact to provide powerful, integrated and efficient network testing, assurance and troubleshooting. Ethernet One relies on a powerful and versatile centralized unit, the BV-3100 and enables seamless interaction with field-portable tools and leverages existing network elements implementing standards-based network troubleshooting tools. It combines existing tools specifically developed for the Ethernet market with a new Brix Verifier, the BV-3100, which takes testing at a centralized location to the next level.

In fact, Ethernet One enables simultaneous turnup tests as well as the parallel monitoring of thousands of endpoints whether at cell sites or business service locations. It is also powerful enough to monitor back into the core, providing complete visibility. Moreover, turn-up tests can be automated to reduce activation time and significantly reduce human intervention. In short, when you add the verifier to multiple places in the network, it scales to hundreds of thousands of endpoints and simultaneous tests. Having both turn-up and monitoring capabilities within

the same platform is a benefit for mobile operators, enabling these entities to stretch their CAPEX investment, and for technical staff, who benefit from a single powerful solution for all their needs while enhancing team efficiency.

In terms of team

The key benefit of Ethernet One is that it helps untangle challenges by addressing issues related to team efficiency, cost-effectiveness and customer value.

optimise service

In terms of team efficiency, the idea is to optimize service deployment, while coping with fewer resources. This is achieved by simplifying OSS integration and eliminating human error through first-time-right test results and service delivery. Efficiency is also achieved by reducing turn-up testing time with industry standard Y.1564, by continuously monitoring SLA performance and by providing automated troubleshooting.

while coping with

efficiency, the idea is to

deployment,

fewer resources.

With respect to cost-effectiveness, Ethernet One implements standards-based methods. It also leverages existing investments by being able to evolve with the carriersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; needs and operatorsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; hardware. Plus, it ensures effective resourcesharing through multi-user, multi-instance and simultaneous testing and monitoring.

Finally, in terms of customer value, the objective is to ensure on-time delivery. Ethernet One will predict and proactively diagnose issues, thus reducing downtime and increasing customer satisfaction. Thanks to flexible configurations and options that match CAPEX constraints, this multi-service monitoring platform offers high scalability and better performance.

Claudio Mazzuca, Vice-President of EXFO's Service Assurance Division

For all the reasons above, wireless carriers and operators need a centralized solution that can provide total network visibility at every layer, from transport to advanced services, which will make it easier to isolate and diagnose faults as well as direct troubleshooting efforts, thereby reducing the mean time to repair (MTTR). This is exactly what EXFOâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Ethernet One provides.

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Danger!

High VoLTEage – how lab testing can mitigate the OTT threat LTE presents a challenge to CSPs because it doesn’t support voice at this stage. Voiceover-LTE is coming but the technology is still in the trial phase and the testing burden is substantial. Here, Paul Beaver explores the demands supporting VoLTE places on CSPs.

Paul Beaver: VoLTE must provide a top quality service

Global LTE deployments are continuing to accelerate and the technology is gaining more market recognition. However, LTE currently possesses a key limitation that the industry is actively looking to resolve – the issue of voice. As it stands, LTE networks can only support data and are incapable of handling voice calls. From a consumer’s perspective, this could be viewed as a rather remarkable omission, considering that traditionally, the key role of mobile CSPs was to provide voice services. As a result, they could be left vulnerable to being superseded by OTT providers, such as Skype, in the mobile voice market.

The industry is increasingly determined to develop a solution to allow voice calls to be made over LTE networks. Voice over LTE (VoLTE) technology will also enable CSPs to pioneer new business models, reinstating them as the primary purveyors of premium voice services.

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effort Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service, such as Skype, will not be sufficient. VoLTE must provide a top quality service, or risk gaining a negative perception amongst consumers. Upon VoLTE’s introduction, network signalling levels will naturally escalate and this will put networks under increased strain. CSPs will need to prepare for this, and build this scenario into their programme of testing.

VoLTE’s ultimate success will be determined by its proficiency in delivering top quality voice services across an all-IP network, on the latest LTE devices. However, cooperation within the mobile industry is a necessity if VoLTE is to emerge as a viable commercial possibility.

VoLTE trials are currently being undertaken; with device manufacturers, chipset vendors and operators all testing VoLTE solutions in the laboratory. VoLTE is still in a state of technological infancy; and this has resulted in a diverse range of mobile CSP interpretations in regard to how VoLTE should be integrated with networks and devices. These unique requirements mean that here can be no one size fits all VoLTE solution for CSPs. They will instead have to test a diverse range of variable conditions; all of which could potentially impact on their ability to deploy and uphold VoLTE.

A rigorous testing programme will be a decisive factor in determining the success of VoLTE’s introduction – particularly in consideration of the variety of implementations taking place. This could be a costly and labour intensive process. By using lab-based testing, handset manufacturers, chipset vendors and mobile CSPs can utilise a simulated network environment to test both component interoperability and audio quality. By adopting this method of testing, CSPs no longer rely on live network testing and expensive, time consuming device field trials. Meticulous VoLTE testing can be performed more easily and at a reduced cost. Lab based testing can help to ensure that VoLTE works as expected and in turn, will maintain mobile CSPs as the leading service providers in the mobile voice market.

Mobile subscribers will continue to expect top quality voice services on their mobile, and a best

The author, Paul Beaver, is products director at wireless device testing company, Anite.

VANILLAPLUS TEST & MEASUREMENT AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2012

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