VanillaPlus 4G. Can OSS/BSS rise to the LTE challenge?

Can OSS/BSS rise to the LTE challenge?

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VanillaPlus Insight February/March 2014

CONTENTS 22

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TALKING HEADS Lyn Cantor, the president of Tektronix Communications, tells VanillaPlus how the global CSP market is adapting to LTE deployment and explains how the opportunity to extract real value from the big data that CSPs generate is, at last, becoming real

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4G ANALYST REPORT Our specially commissioned analyst report, authored by Clare McCarthy, the practice leader of telco operations and IT at analyst firm Ovum

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EXPERT OPINION Edoardo Rizzi says it’s time for customer experience assurance to address the pain caused by the mobile broadband explosion

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OSS/BSS FOR 4G CSPs need to decide which area to improve on first, writes Nick Booth

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EXPERT OPINION Shannon Bell says policy control becomes mandatory as CSPs move to LTE

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ROAMING AND CHARGING LTE presents new complexities when it comes to roaming.

Jonny Evans reports.

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EXPERT OPINION Petter Järtby advocates an integrated approach to policy and charging

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ANALYSIS Chris Nicoll reports on Analysys Mason’s global LTE forecasts

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VoLTE SERVICE ASSURANCE George Malim assesses whether VoLTE will provide a real step up in quality for users

TALKING HEADS

Lyn Cantor

38 OSS/BSS FOR 4G

42 LTE ROAMING AND CHARGING

47 VOLTE ASSURANCE

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TA L K I N G H E A D S

Data and video-hungry users on LTE networks will feed CSPs’ appetite for increased ARPU and enable investment in data analytics yn Cantor is the president of Tektronix Communications, which he rejoined in 2011 from Visual Network Systems (VNS) where he was senior vice president and general manager. Prior to his term with VNS, Cantor served as vice president of worldwide sales, service and marketing at Tektronix Communications. Over the course of his 27year career, of which 14 years have been with Tektronix Communications, Cantor has held various vice president positions in Americas sales, global channels, product management and marketing, in addition to having general manager responsibility. Here he tells VanillaPlus how the global CSP market is adapting to LTE deployment and explains how the opportunity to extract real value from the big data that CSPs generate is, at last, becoming real thanks to the tools and technologies that are now being deployed

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VanillaPlus: What were the main themes and market drivers that characterised CSP focus in 2013?

Lyn Cantor: I saw more of a mixed bag of themes and drivers in 2013 than in previous years. There have been a lot of differences with respect to LTE deployments. The pace of deployment and the market dynamics in the US have been pretty high so that has had a positive effect on the spending on and the speed of deployment of other technologies that surround or are adjacent to LTE in that market.

In the US we have seen aggressive spending which contrasts sharply with what we are seeing in Europe where the user demand and the regulatory environment has not driven the same uptake for LTE or a robust data services network. European appetite for LTE is starting to turn up a bit but ARPU remains much higher in the US. People are much more willing to spend – mostly on video services – and that market has not ignited yet in Europe.

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VP: If the Europeans are being cautious and waiting for demand to crystalise and the US has already initiated LTE, how did Asia develop in 2013?

LC: In Asia we see a hybrid of both dynamics depending on which country you’re in. Some markets, such as Japan, Australia and Singapore, have really accelerated their spending and are very active markets. However, Asia is composed of very different national markets each of which are moving at their own pace.

Overall, I’d characterise 2013 as a mixed environment in which we won new customers and brought the vast majority of our 3G customers over to LTE. VP: How did you respond to these contrasting rates of LTE market development?

LC: We followed the customers and the spending and put our resources to work, cutting our teeth on the next one to two phases of the challenges CSPs operators are facing. By working with CSPs like AT&T,

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In Europe we did see more spending on 3G and CSPs dipping their toes in the water on LTE but operators are being thoughtful about their timing and deployments. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of

momentum for CSPs looking to achieve first mover advantage.

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Verizon and T-Mobile in the US, we’ve gained great experience. The scale and pace of their deployments have been so great that we’ve not only been able to deploy LTE networks but other technology such as voice over LTE (VoLTE) and Diameter signaling.

Lyn Cantor: We’ve dealt with the early deployments of our LTE solutions and handled the scale of the largest CSP roll-outs

The great thing for us is that we’ve dealt with the early deployments of our solutions and handled the scale of the largest CSP roll-outs. That has hardened our experience and products which will serve us well as roll-out continues.

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We believe we have the most robust solutions to serve and deploy for 3G and 4G customers.

The systems have integrated workflow linking customer care through the multiple technologies within the network. We’re really well prepared for the market’s timing as Europe and Asia come on line.

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TA L K I N G H E A D S

We will see walls around roaming coming down but that creates substantial challenges

VP: This isn’t a voice or data world anymore. It’s a unified world of voice, video and data served to customers in a quality aware way. How has this landscape changed since the deployment of 3G? LC: When I think about the deployment of networks, CSPs were trying to get capacity on the ground to manage voice, video and data. The first dynamic has been the rapid deployment of LTE networks. The second is that with Diameter signaling the capability is there in those networks to handle the immense scale and the requirements for flexibility.

Operators are now trying to move subscribers over to LTE-based handsets so they can tune down their older networks and get older handsets out of the market. That will ultimately free up 2G and 3G spectrum but not for many years. The immediate gain is moving to the all-IP, Diameter based environment that LTE offers.

The main areas of customer demand we see are in video. It’s a big driver in terms of conversational and streaming video and there’s a lot of work going on to create value. We have made inorganic investments in this area.

The radio access network continues to be a hotspot area and a big challenge. We’re beginning to be able to see subscribers as closely as you can and I see Tektronix Communications’ job being to help CSPs see the things they can’t today.

VP: How will your acquisition of Newfield Wireless help you maximise these opportunities?

LC: We acquired Newfield Wireless for three main reasons. The first is that we now get geo-analytical content, much more precise location based intelligence that identifies within 100 metres what services the customers are using and when they move. The second is the analytics platform which we can make use of. Finally, for us the value proposition is in end-to-end assurance.

All through CSP engineering and customer care groups, the data we collect is almost as much in demand as our troubleshooting capability. The data content growth has been explosive and our acquisition of Newfield Wireless provides a new and powerful layer of intelligence to augment our existing analytics business and create what we believe is the most comprehensive service offering in this area VP: What will be the most dominant market drivers in 2014?

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LC: Without a doubt they will be video, the radio access network, data enablement and VoLTE in 2014.

VP: What challenges do you see CSPs needing to overcome to address those drivers in 2014?

LC: Let’s start with a point of view about economics.

We look at markets that have high ARPU and we see CSPs in those that are able to sell services and keep that ARPU up. These CSPs are much more interested in investing in quality of service and data enablement so we are going to move into a new paradigm in 2014 or 2015 when legislation around spectrum and tariffing will be higher.

The challenge is that if CSPs can’t make the business case, if they can’t find a way to manage change and they can’t find a way to reduce the cost [of providing capacity] we will see some markets continue to lag.

The dynamic of the global tug of war will continue between leading markets and lagging markets.

We will see walls around roaming coming down but that creates substantial challenges because those lagging will be a long way behind those that are leading and the roaming experience will therefore be inconsistent.

VP: Where do you believe CSPs will see greatest return from analytics and big data in 2014 and beyond?

LC: CSPs now have the demand for data enablement.

Data from OSS and tools around the subscriber are in such high demand but the tools have got to be able to work around big data and analytics in such a way that they enable CSPs to gain insights.

I think we’re seeing the technology and the tools being deployed cost effectively and that’s being achieved because a platform is being provided that enables a variety of use cases, almost on-demand. That means CSPs can find more ways to improve quality of service and find more ways to unlock potential upsell. We see a lot of CSPs moving in this direction.

VP: What do operators need to do to take advantage of the opportunities that exist?

LC: It really comes down to process improvement and standardisation. CSPs tend to be organised in very siloed ways, with multiple tool vendors and multiple infrastructure vendors. The ability to pull data down from these different environments is a real challenge.

To get the data and organise it in a way they can make sense of it certainly remains the challenge.

Our tools and our value proposition is a hand in glove strategy that enables us with the vantage points to see all subscriber behaviour. Being able to see all data is not a difficult challenge and as CSPs do that we will be able to get much better insights and unlock the full potential of their data for CSPs.

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The author, Clare McCarthy, is practice leader of telco operations and IT at Ovum

Introduction

TE promises much in the data-driven mobile broadband world, however it is important to remember that, without the ability to activate, monitor and charge for the services running on the network, the LTE network cannot be monetised. While these supporting systems will be impacted by a change in the network, it is not LTE itself that is driving the change, more the services that CSPs want to offer using LTE. The digital lifestyle, which requires streamed video and real-time access to a range of online applications, provides much of the momentum, as well as CSPs’ needs to manage the performance of their network and IT infrastructure, and the impact the infrastructure has on customer experience

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Key messages •

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OSS and BSS will be impacted by the characteristics of the next generation high speed mobile broadband services which CSPs want to offer, rather than the LTE technology alone.

As LTE network design and roll-outs occur, the OSS will need to be transformed to accommodate and facilitate network planning and design of new cell sites and backhaul transmission which encompasses support for IP configurations and quality of service for enhanced service delivery for streamed video.

The OSS solution has to map LTE network elements onto services and provide ongoing service quality information, so that even if no faults have been reported, it identifies degradation in service.

The first months of a customer’s contract with a CSP are critical to determining customer loyalty and churn. As customers upgrade or migrate to LTE, CSPs must ensure they map across an existing customer’s profile and retain the context.

Mobile CSPs are using network infrastructure sharing as a way forward to roll-out LTE. In addition, M&A activities, and linking sub brands or new brands – for example Orange, T-Mobile and Everything Everywhere in the UK – adds to the complexity of the OSS and BSS migration challenge.

Traditional BSS systems were built to deal with

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voice and simple data, so the BSS systems for LTE need to accommodate the characteristics of the new services, and the associated network signaling traffic, as well as the competitive and ecosystem dynamics that make tariff innovation and new business models critical to their future commercial success.

The LTE Evolved Packet Core (EPC) includes a policy charging and control (PCC) architecture so many aspects of charging, rating and policy management will be addressed with this evolution.

THE LTE NETWORK UPGRADE Market drivers The traffic carried on CSPs’ networks is increasingly rich, with voice being supplanted by data services such as streaming audio and video. On some networks, video now accounts for as much as 60% of total traffic, and interactive services like online games will be important to attract certain market sectors. This increased data traffic comes from a variety of end devices such as user-generated content from smartphones, TVs, tablets, and laptops and via multiple channels – including social media, web chat, email, and voice calls. In addition, the frequency of these interactions is accelerating as is the need for real-time management and control.

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Source: Ovum

Figure 1: LTE connections by region, 2013–18

Existing mobile networks are unable to handle this traffic growth, so CSPs are looking to all-IP networks such as Long Term Evolution (LTE) to provide the required bandwidth for these data hungry devices and applications. LTE promises CSPs: • Faster speeds – LTE deployments are reaching up to 100Mbps with LTE Advanced theoretically expected to reach up to 1Gbps • Lower latency – LTE is driving latency down to the point that makes it possible for VoIP and interactive online video games to become a reality • Faster time to market for enhanced services • Better spectrum efficiency • Fewer nodes in the core network, and • Reduced capital and operational expenditure There is a compelling list of savings offered by the functional elements on the core and access network. However, it is planning, delivery and migrating services to the new network, the more complex multimedia and converged services that LTE supports, as well as the more complex billing, processes and business model that will provide the challenge to existing platforms. The operational support systems (OSS) and business support systems (BSS) solutions need to be designed for IP networks to support LTE planning, roll-out and maturity.

In terms of service design, service delivery and service support, the LTE infrastructure will require highly resilient networks, higher quality transmission, and faster responses to requests for additions and changes. CSPs need to be mindful of the impact on their OSS and BSS, not just from the technical perspective, but from a customer experience perspective too.

There are many over the top (OTT) alternatives for customers today, so if the CSP’s service doesn’t work, there will be a free app available to replace it. Delivering the new service without outages, and ensuring the onboarding process is accurate will be critical for the first months in the customer relationship. If these aspects fail, customers will respond negatively and churn, adversely impacting the CSP’s reputation, market sentiment and share price.

CSPs’ network and technology agenda focuses on LTE for future-proofing LTE uptake will continue to grow rapidly to 2018 to meet the demand for high-speed broadband services. Compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for LTE connections between 2013 and 2018 will be 47%, representing 1.27 billion new mobile connections globally. It is worth noting that HSPA will grow by

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15% (CAGR) during the forecast period, increasing by 1.4 billion connections. Combined, LTE and HSPA will account for 51% of all global connections in 2018. This means that the services and billing models available to LTE customers will also have to be available over HSPA, otherwise it creates an overly complicated service in which a user’s bill could depend on what network they were attached to – not exactly a seamless customer experience.

Asia-Pacific and North America are driving LTE adoption Asia-Pacific is by far the largest region for LTE subscribers in 2013 and will continue to be so throughout the forecast period.

Together with North America, which is the second-largest region for LTE connections, these markets accounted for 85% of total LTE subscribers in 2013. However, as other regions begin to deploy LTE networks, this will change over the forecast period. By 2018, Asia-Pacific and North America will collectively account for 74% of global LTE subscribers, with Eastern and Western Europe collectively accounting for 18%. The remaining 7% will be split across the emerging market regions of South & Central America, the Middle East, and Africa. The highest LTE growth will come from Africa, which will grow at 75% CAGR between 2013 and 2018. Figure 1 shows LTE's forecast growth by region.

Network sharing evolves from a strategic choice to an economic necessity One interesting and significant aspect of the LTE business case discussion is how many CSPs have shared LTE network build outs. Until now, sharing has been reactive and only undertaken once costs become unsustainable, but the network was built independently. With LTE we’ve seen sharing adopted from the outset. A key example is in Sweden where Telenor and Tele2 built on their 3G sharing deal to build a joint LTE network from day one. Open-access LTE networks have also been considered, but these have encountered commercial and political issues.

Network sharing creates the same kind of challenges generated

by M&A activities – running networks and supporting systems in parallel during the migration period, then integration and removing duplication and costs. However, one of the advantages of introducing LTE is the personalised services, pricing and tariff structures it lends itself to. Clearly sharing too much negates the possibility of such differentiation. Once a homogenous network infrastructure is in place, it falls to the IT systems and platforms to deliver the personalisation and innovation of services and tariffs.

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Source: Ovum

Figure 2: Services CSPs expect VoLTE to enable

Voice over LTE VoLTE can pave the way for new voice services, such as simultaneous voice and video, and enhance existing services, such as video chat. However, these services will have to compete with free offerings from OTT players. In this context, it will be difficult for CSPs to monetise VoLTE value-added services (VASs), and may become a hygiene factor in order to compete with OTT players. Figure 2 highlights some of the service options for VoLTE. However, there are significant barriers to VoLTE adoption. The LTE specifications are data-centric so don’t include support for voice. CSPs have tended to use Circuit-switched Fallback (CSFB) to deliver voice to LTE customers, which means dropping back to 3G or 2G for voice calls. This creates a call set-up delay, which can be very noticeable to the customer, and also means that the legacy network has to be maintained just to do voice, when the more spectrally efficient LTE would be a far more logical use of that same spectrum in the perfect world.

Other service parity issues, including support for emergency calls and in-call handover between LTE and legacy infrastructure, are slowing down VoLTE implementations.

In addition, the relationship between VoLTE and new charging models for voice is not straightforward. VoLTE in itself neither facilitates nor requires a new kind of charging model. It is designed to support all of the recording, charging, and billing mechanisms that apply in traditional telephony. CSPs can choose to implement a different set of billing principles including “unlimited voice”, but they can do this independently of LTE.

Integrating a new business model With the digital lifestyle becoming the de facto lifestyle in many mature markets, multiple digital platforms will be running on top of LTE and other next generation networks. This brings in new operating and business models, as it encompasses other service providers, including over the top (OTT) providers. CSPs need to work with and support new business partners in terms of service assurance and charging, for example, in order to monetise all possible avenues of revenue generation. CSPs also need to be able to manage concurrent event-based workflows rather than just predefined waterfall decisions making or linear workflows.

Integrating the business processes across these new value chains while keeping the cost of delivery down will require that end-to-end service level agreements at an application rather than network level will be increasingly important. It will fall to OSS to assure those SLAs.

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Many business cases for new network technologies such as LTE, SDN and NFV rest not so much on lower upfront capex, but on lower opex and faster time to market. Lower opex comes with simplified and automated systems for product and process develop and management, and all of this is delivered by the OSS/BSS systems.

THE IMPACT ON OSS Traditionally, OSS platforms were focused on the technical control of services, however as IP-based networks need endto-end control of networks, services and the customer experience, along with personalisation of service and customer experience, OSS systems need to be far more commercially focused. And as CSP networks become more software driven, the OSS will need to interface with self organising networks (SON). In terms of the impact of LTE on OSS platforms, there are three domains and process areas of focus.

• Network planning and design including capacity planning, resource design, configuration and deployment of cell sites and backhaul, and inventory.

• Service assurance to manage the new services reactively, and proactively with big data analytics.

• Activation and provisioning for configuring customer profiles and activating new services.

Network planning and design LTE promises high-speed mobile broadband data. Faster data rates, more efficient spectrum usage and spectrum capacity will make online games and video-on-demand on the move possible, as the performance of these services will begin to meet customer expectations.

At one level the LTE network roll-out should be a relatively low cost affair. It promises to deliver a relatively more cost effective infrastructure – IP offers cheaper transport technology, a simplified backhaul network, and network control. Many current base station designs accommodate 2G, 3G and 4G radio modules on a common platform, so rather than installing additional and/or duplicating equipment from different suppliers, a LTE module can be installed in an existing cell site to make it LTE capable.

The radio planning tools and business processes for 2G and 3G will support LTE and so can be used to determine the location of a new cell site and any capacity upgrades. Although LTE gives CSPs the tools to personalise (quality of) service and applications, not all the controls are currently in place within the RAN.

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LTE and the growth in data consumption will change the traditional mobile network architecture. In the voice era, the network goal was coverage. In the data era, it will be about coverage and capacity. Capacity will force CSPs, over time, to increase the number of network endpoints they will need to support. Network capacity needs will be met with an increase of macro and small – micro and pico – cells.

System design The systems architecture for LTE differs from its 2G and 3G predecessors, as it simplifies and automates operation management – for example self-configuration, self-healing, and automatic settings, for the parameters in the radio access to allow better traffic management. This includes Self Organising Network (SON) capability and that means manual – network and service – assurance processes can be removed. The automated processes will identify and execute the planned changes for every new, upgraded and migrated piece of equipment. Automation will also allow standard business rules to be applied for example to the transmission design activities.

Capacity planning

The unified inventory should hold the master data for all network design changes and be able to overwrite temporary workarounds. Automation here is critical for order fulfillment in the BSS. Additionally centralised product and service catalogues will allow CSPs to launch multiple LTE plans for various service bundles or VoIP, they will also be able to personalise the services and experience levels around it, and do so quickly.

Service assurance Fault management solutions in traditional OSS tools are able to detect hardware problems that affect the network elements.

However they do not indicate which services have been impacted. A probe based system can monitor a service and its quality, but if there is service degradation, it cannot communicate with the network elements.

Network and capacity planning are still required. LTE capacity planning is required so that long and short term trends in usage are tracked, identified and resolved. This leads to a more efficient allocation of investment as the capacity need is anticipated and dimensioned properly rather than in response to event-based shortages.

Intelligent alarms will need creating based on events generated by the LTE network elements. These alarms will need centralised storage but, to ensure that the CSPs can quickly identify the root cause of the issue, the alarms will need to be directly associated with the new elements introduced as a result of the LTE network upgrade.

Changes within the radio planning processes can be supported by the existing platforms, however the CSP will need to develop new algorithms and rules to account for the new spectrum frequencies and limits of LTE technology. The end game is to automate operational processes should to ensure timely network management.

A transformed and integrated OSS solution should map network elements onto services, and provide ongoing service quality information, so that even if no faults have been reported, it identifies on-going degradation, and importantly, it acts on this information. This kind of predictive problem solving is key to managing customer expectations. So for example, if a customer is streaming a film over LTE and the viewing quality diminishes, the CSP can acknowledge that to the customer and proactively push them an acknowledgement, to stop the customer contacting customer service, or offer compensation.

Backhaul The supporting backhaul network needs transmission bandwidth of several hundred Mbit/s – ten times more than the previous 3G BTS – to support the enormous data capacity that LTE is capable of driving. It will also need support more BTS, including pico- and micro-cells, if higher frequency spectrum is used. If the CSP increases LTE cell capacity, it will have to coordinate it with backhaul capacity and ensure that both are closely linked with the radio planning process.

Unified inventory All the physical information about network infrastructure,

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including backhaul transmission should be held in a single network inventory, which should be regularly synchronised with the network management systems to identify discrepancies, preferably through automated systems and process.

Within the trouble-to-resolution process, changes relate to monitoring and managing the quality and appropriate policies.

Some processes exist within the core IP network; however the scale of the access network will require different methods to support the volume of connections to be monitored. Managing the migration and the coexistence of LTE alongside legacy networks is critical. Consequently fault reporting, design and measurement tools for the LTE access network will also need to:

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cover the extension of IP from the core to the access network, support the increasing number and variety of devices, as well as the different brands, device models and versions, and provide predictive service assurance across a full suite of services.

In addition, a single, central view of the customer and a single data model with also help with service activation and monitoring at an individual level.

Activation and provisioning LTE will allow bundled services to be provisioned and activated, but that does mean order orchestration and order flows will become more challenging. Enhanced service inventory will be required to manage more structured product and service catalogues.

CSPs must ensure that all the devices it intends to support on its LTE network have been tested. Device and application certification and testing gives the CSP greater control of the potential impacts their introduction will have on traffic loads and signalling.

LTE service parameters need to be added to the HLR, and from the HLR, the CSP can provision its new LTE subscribers. Over time, the HLR will be upgraded or replaced by a home subscriber server (HSS) to operate in an IMS environment and a wider range of subscriber parameters. The HSS holds and manages profiles on subscribers and devices; it holds authentication and authorisation of the bearer and access point, to manage QoS for LTE and IMS. In terms of the customer profiles, enhanced features will be required to allow for dynamic changes to customer profiles, and for policy management to enforce personalised quality of service levels. The CSP must ensure it maps across an existing customer’s profile and retains the context. Getting this process wrong causes customer backlash. When EE launched its LTE service in the UK it was hit with bad press. Customers found that as they were upgraded to EE’s LTE network, their 3G accounts on the Orange and T-Mobile brands were closed, but the new details were not transferred across to a new EE branded account, leaving some customers without any kind of service for up to seven days. Clearly this had as much to do with integrating siloed systems across networks as with introducing LTE, but as more CSPs share infrastructure, it is a factor for consideration.

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IMPACT ON BSS As previously noted, it is the services that CSPs want to offer using LTE that is going to drive change. Traditional BSS systems were built to deal with voice and simple data, so the characteristics of services that can be delivered by high speed broadband mobile data, and the associated network signaling traffic, will force changes in the BSS. The current market drivers see increased traffic volumes not only as a result of more devices attaching to networks, but because more people will view online and transact more frequently and will run multiple, concurrent (data) sessions from a single or multiple devices. Additionally, the majority of transactions are moving from long to short durations, with personalised rather than standardised features, services and tariff profiles. In terms of the impact of LTE on BSS platforms.

Figure 3 outlines some of the key considerations for LTE ready BSS solutions. There are three domains and process areas to focus on: • Billing and revenue management • Charging, rating and policy management, and • Partner management and settlement.

Billing and revenue management High speed mobile broadband requires converged pre- and postpaid billing with a real-time and online capability. As highlighted above, billing in the LTE world has to accommodate the type of content, duration of usage, authenticate the user, and enforce charging parameters. The volume of customer data records (CDRs) that will need processing will be huge, so the BSS will need to be highly flexible in order to process these volumes as well as the various pricing models associated with each user such as subscription-, application-, tiered- or usagebased).

In the LTE world, services and products can come and go quicker than legacy BSS can get them online. However if an OTT provider can launch and upgrade an app through an app store on a quarterly, monthly, weekly or daily basis, CSPs need to drive down their own concept to launch processes.

Registering and retiring products has to become a faster process, and CSPs need to be able to make the most of opportunities as they present themselves, and this has implications for other parts of the BSS solutions too.

Order fulfillment and orchestration, another BSS component, needs accurate network inventory data in the OSS to draw on.

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Source: Ovum

Figure 3. Key consideration for impact of LTE on BSS systems

In addition to the inventory of network elements, all products and services need to be held and maintained in a similar manner. The centralised product and service catalogues allow reuse of predefined products and services to design additional propositions and personalised offers. CSPs can launch multiple LTE plans for various service bundles and personalise the experience levels around it, and do so quickly.

All new offers need to be contained in a single, converged, realtime bill to the customer, but with multiple payment options, service and support channels, and encompassing a wider ecosystem. Importantly the information shown in the bill, has to mean something to the customer – charges per Mbps or Gbps are unclear and only generate inbound queries to contact centres. While part of the responsibility falls to the sales and onboarding stages in the customer lifecycle, customers need to understand the impact of what they consume. Unlimited data is less common in the LTE world, and even if it is used, there are generally exceptions and limits. Billing and revenue management help customers track their usage, and generate alerts as customers approach predefined thresholds set by the customer.

As CSPs work to deliver a greater number of services with enhanced functionality, they must pay equal attention to the customer support structure. While all customer support channels are impacted and important, it is the online selfservice channels where some of the greatest gains can be made in terms of cost savings and improved customers experience. Managing the customer, and by implication, the revenue, can be one of the more complex aspects to integrate, as it requires real-time activity in terms of responses and notifications, as well as synchronising the app on a variety of interfaces.

Some vendors are choosing to offer a pre-integrated LTE revenue and customer management platform, comprising converged billing, care and online charging along with evolved packet core components such as PCRF, DSC and triple A.

Charging, rating and policy management For the new pricing models of the IP and LTE world, charging, rating and policy have to be real-time, and integrated with the network elements via standardised Diameter interfaces for authentication, authorisation and accounting. IP-based pricing models enable personalised plans that support CSPs’ loyalty and marketing programmes, as well as the shared family plans.

Where plans are shared there will be a combination of pre- and

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postpaid accounts with bolts-on for social networking, gaming and video downloads, as well as personalised and parental control for the plan. Also to ensure that data usage does not exceed any pre-agreed thresholds, CSPs can use policy charging and rules function (PCRF) to ensure fair usage, but the charging and billing systems need to be fast and accurate.

Policy and charging is an area where work on standards is already taking place. The policy and charging control (PCC) function in the LTE network enhances 3GPP capabilities to deliver dynamic control of policy and charging on a per subscriber and per IP flow basis. The LTE Evolved Packet Core (EPC) includes a PCC architecture that supports detailed QoS and allows application servers control quality and charging requirements dynamically for the services delivered, including roaming. The LTE PCC functions include: • policy and charging rules function (PCRF).

• policy and charging enforcement function (PCEF), which enforces PCRF rules, measures usage, and supports charging.

• online charging system (OCS), which manages the account status in terms of duration, volume, chargeable events.

• off-line charging system (OFCS), which generates the a record of the customer’s charges to pass on to the billing systems.

Partner management and settlement The nature of the services that CSPs intend to deliver over LTE includes a broad ecosystem of partners and application developer, and the BSS has to support and manage the partner environment.

So not only does the CSP need to keep track of the rapid turnover in its own products, service and applications, it has to do the same for third party service providers too. The CSP should: • test third party apps work in its LTE network and ensure that it doesn’t degrade network and service performance in anyway.

• determine how it will handle incoming customer queries about the app – does it triage, offer full support, or pass it straight through to the third party on a freephone or premium number; whether the app will be linked to any self-service portal.

• charge and bill the customer for the service, if appropriate, on behalf of the third party, and attribute revenue split. This mean a complex web of physical and logical connections and dependencies need to be closely managed by the BSS and OSS.

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Source: Ovum

Figure 4. Mapping the network centric capabilities to operational process capabilities

Industry standards

CONCLUSION

The move to open and/or industry standards can mitigate some of the OSS and BSS transformation risks associated with next generation network upgrades. The large installed legacy base means that changes will take time, and new customer-centric operating and business models need accommodating. If we look to the technical or network centric capabilities of OSS and BSS (as defined by the ISO OSI Telecommunications Network Management), it encompasses five management domains we have explored here. These in turn map on to five operational processes areas as identified by the TM Forum Frameworx integrated business architecture, see Figure 4.

The OSS and BSS are business critical systems that assure LTE network capacity, service quality, and enforce charging parameters for the high speed mobile broadband services.

Ensuring real-time service delivery and a seamless customer experience requires agility and flexibility and greater levels of automation.

Frameworx provides the blueprint for a service oriented approach for rationalising operational IT, processes and systems required for the LTE and digital environment. It includes the common reference models, language, process architecture, and a frame work for service oriented support tools and standard interfaces. This means changes to the OSS and BSS can become simple and flexible enough to support the burgeoning demands of LTE as well as other IP technologies.

The TM Forum Frameworx includes the Business Process Framework (eTOM), the Information Framework (SID), the Application Framework (TAM) and the Integration Framework for architecture and standard interfaces.

The LTE business cases, along with that for SDN and NFV for example, are predicated on lower opex – simplified and automated systems for product develop and management, and faster time to market. These capabilities and abilities reside in CSPs OSS/BSS systems.

In the future, OSS and BSS will need to be more closely with integrated customer management systems and business intelligence tools to meet the challenges and exploit the opportunities of the on-demand of the digital lifestyle.

About Ovum Ovum provides clients with independent and objective analysis that enables them to make better business and technology decisions. Its research draws upon over 400,000 interviews each year with business and technology, telecoms and sourcing decision-makers, giving Ovum and its clients unparalleled insight, not only into business requirements but also the technology that organisations must support. Ovum is an Informa business. www.ovum.com

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Company summary JDSU provides communications test, measurement, monitoring and optical products and solutions for CSPs. Through its network and service enable business segment, the company is reinventing itself from being a provider of testing instruments to providing software solutions that enhance CSPs’ visibility across the entire mobile technology lifecycle, and throughout the network stack, including service and application performance. JDSU has strengthened its position as a provider of real-time intelligence through acquisitions. These include Agilent’s Network Solutions Test business for service assurance; Arieso, for RAN geo-location visibility, and its most recent acquisitions of Network Instruments for application-aware network visibility, and Trendium for 4G/LTE customer experience assurance and real-time network, service and customer intelligence.

JDSU is headquartered in Milpitas, California, USA and employs about 4,900 employees. The company also provides services such as consulting, maintenance, training and managed services that address the customer’s needs. Its customer base includes CSPs, NEPs and government bodies.

OSS/BSS credentials for LTE JDSU’s OSS portfolio enables CSPs to gain a deeper visibility of the network through testing, troubleshooting, performance management and service level agreement monitoring for advanced mobile technologies like LTE. These capabilities are achieved by collecting, correlating, mediating and calculating data from multiple data sources and by using a reporting engine which analyses the data to provide actionable insights to applications from JDSU and third party analytics providers. JDSU’s offerings include: • •

Network Enablement Solutions JDSU’s testing portfolio which determines the integrity and the interoperability of the networks elements. These products include JDSU’s RF Test, Network Protocol Test, and Backhaul and Fibre Optic Test tools.

Service Enablement Solutions deliver real-time intelligence and ensure service quality and customer experience. They are embedded network systems which include data access agents and applications that collect and analyse data across the entire network to reveal the true customer experience which is so important for the high speed mobile data worlds of LTE. Products include JDSU’s real-time intelligence platform, customer experience assurance applications for mobile voice and data, small cell assurance solutions, and geolocation solutions for 2G, 3G and LTE Radio access technologies.

Key differentiation JDSU has a full set of OSS solutions covering the 2G, 3G and LTE and the migrations between technologies. It has a broad portfolio of network, service and customer intelligence solutions that covers performance monitoring from handset to the core network and from the physical layer to application layer. These solutions have the ability to collect and mediate data from its own data sources and that of third parties and openly feed the data to any OSS system with unique real-time insight. This maximises CSPs’ OSS investment and reduces costs associated with managing multiple OSS platforms. The acquisition of Trendium delivers a unique solution for assuring the quality of complex 4G/LTE services like VoLTE, while Arieso’s geolocation data for all subscriber calls, allows CSPs to optimise network planning and resource allocation.

Competitive pressures JDSU could face competitive pressures from companies with broader OSS and customer portfolios. Other companies that provide assurance and customer care capabilities built into their portfolio could threaten JDSU’s propositions. In addition, JDSU is dependent on a few customers for a significant portion of its revenue. A reduction in demand from these customers could affect the company’s revenues.

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Company summary Established in 1982, Amdocs specialises in software and IT services for CSPs. Its core products sit within OSS/BSS, CRM and network-control domains and services wrap around these products. The company has strengthened its OSS/BSS portfolio through acquisitions such as Bridgewater Systems, Actix, Celcite, Nortel’s Clarify CRM system and Cramer Systems' OSS solution.

Headquartered in Chesterfield, MO, United States, Amdocs employs over 20,500 employees. Its customer base includes the top 10 largest mobile operators, and a number of major cable and satellite providers, such as AT&T, China Mobile, Telefónica and Vodafone.

OSS/BSS credentials for LTE Amdocs has mapped its OSS/BSS capabilities into the key phases of a CSP’s LTE lifecycle – plan, build, launch, monetise and management of LTE networks. Key solutions include: •

•

•

•

•

Amdocs Inventory and Discovery: includes Amdocs Resource Manager (ARM) that creates a record of network assets and the interdependencies between network elements in the denser LTE network. With information held on network elements updated using the Amdocs data manager, CSPs can make real-time assessment of their current resources as they rollout networks such as LTE. Amdocs LTE Network Planning and Build optimiser: uses templates within its network and capacity planning tools to support rapid rollout out of LTE network resources. By creating capacity thresholds using these tools, CSPs can avoid the occurrence of bottlenecks during network rollouts.

Amdocs Small Cell solution: This solution provides a catalogue driven planning, engineering and design approach to support fast and efficient rollout of LTE small cells. The solution uses a unique “Design once, deploy many times” approach to re-use standard network designs to support project plans.

Amdocs BSS Pack: This is an LTE-ready offer that includes Amdocs Revenue Management solutions for real-time convergent charging, billing, mediation, policy management and partner management. Amdocs’ Proactive care offering enables an agile approach to customer service and support delivery.

Multichannel Self-service: This solution enables CSPs to create self-care capabilities such as checking billing and usage, and deliver the personalised support services to consumers that will be required in the LTE world.

Key differentiation Supporting its CSPs in improving customer experience is central to Amdocs’ messaging, which is extended through acquisitions like Actix which enhance its network optimisation capabilities. Amdocs’ integrated billing and policy management with the CRM provides a 360 degree customer view, and its BSS portfolio enables bundled services from OTT providers and its traditional services.

Competitive pressures Amdocs is actively focused on the winning more deals with the top tier CSPs which puts the company in competition with other companies looking to target the same market. The company’s solutions could attract the lower tiered CSPs given their need to compete with the incumbents. The integration of capabilities from its newly acquired assets such as Actix should be undertaken swiftly, so that Amdocs has minimal distraction as it focuses on opportunities in this space.

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Company profile Tektronix Communications portfolio includes offerings for service assurance and monitoring, and network intelligence and test solutions along with professional services offering support a range of architectures and applications such as LTE, HSPA, 3G, IMS, mobile broadband, VoIP, video and triple play.

Headquartered in Plano, Texas Tektronix Communications is part of the Danaher Group. It has 1,400 employees worldwide with development centres in China, Italy, Ireland, Germany and the US.

OSS credentials The Tektronix Communications portfolio includes: • • • • •

Customer care solutions: Proactive customer care lets a CSP notify its customers with solutions so they don't have to call customer care in the first place. It facilitates CSPs to become proactive rather than reactive.

AAA/Policy/Services: Validates and assures all aspects of CSPs’ services offering. Analyses underlying policies and charging transactions with real-time visibility, correlation and alarms needed for a reliable services infrastructure.

Media Assurance: This provides a deep dive into media service offerings so that CSPs can provide customers with the highest possible quality of experience.

Radio Access: The RAN solutions extend out to the cell site, extracting valuable data, to ensure that CSPs can troubleshoot, optimise, and plan ahead.

Core Network: The core network applications help reduce outages, speed up time to resolution, and improve network quality – all managed by one system.

In addition, Tektronix Communications also provides a strong professional services offering that covers technical consulting, business consulting, application services, managed services, training and telecoms certification.

Key differentiators Tektronix Communications’ end-to-end portfolio covers all dimensions of the CSP: operations, engineering and planning, customer care and business. The portfolio gives CSPs the end-to-end visibility and insight to provide the highest levels of LTE performance.

The data enablement solutions and services allow CSPs to use big data to drive a variety of efficiency and monetisation use cases across a variety of departments.

Competitive pressures The competition among OSS/BSS providers is becoming stiff as the marketplace becomes more crowded with look-alike products.

Many IT and network vendors are making investments to understand the customer experience at the network level, so Tektronix Communications will have to make continuous investments in R&D and partnering efforts to stay ahead of the game. Also, Tektronix Communications’ ability to drive overall mobile operator OSS/BSS transformation projects can prove limited due to its lack of BSS portfolio.

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Company summary Headquartered in Bangalore, India, Wipro provides CSPs with a full range of outsourcing services, covering software and IT systems and platforms, network services, business process operations, and consulting. In its fiscal year 2013, Wipro’s revenue reached US$6.9bn, and its global media and telecoms (GMT) vertical accounted for 14% of revenues.

The company employs 145,000 staff and has over 900 customers in 61 countries. It faces competition from some of the largest suppliers in the telecoms vertical including NEPs such as Ericsson, NSN, and more frequently Accenture, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Tech Mahindra, as well as HP and IBM.

OSS/BSS credentials for LTE Wipro’s flagship offer in the OSS/BSS space is its RAPIDS framework (Rapid Application Integration & Deployment Solution), which provides CSPs with an integrated suite of best-in-class OSS/BSS systems.

RAPIDS is a deployable framework with business process library, an end to end integration framework, with an LTE specific business use-cases and application stack. The stack is largely built around Oracle applications, plus additional applications.

RAPIDS is one part of a full suite of platforms that support the delivery of network services that can also be used for LTE, the portfolio includes: • • • • •

Wipro Rapids is a suite of OSS/BSS systems built to support customer service transformation and product innovation.

Wipro Accelerate comprises systems, processes, and operations to improve the launch of pre-paid services.

Wipro ServiceNXT is Wipro's integrated managed services offering designed to achieve IT resilience and cost efficiencies.

Wipro's customer experience management framework and customer-agent solution enables the measurement, visualisation, and optimisation of a customer's network experience.

Wipro Small Cells and Converged Core platform enables the development of LTE Evolved Packet Core systems for public safety, defence, enterprises and rural markets.

Key differentiation One of the aspects that makes LTE so appealing to CSPs is the types of services that they can offer to customers. The richness of data and depth of content that can be offered by a broad ecosystem of partners and application developers provides an appealing and addictive bundle of services and content to customers. However, the CSP has to be able to use this content to design and deliver differentiated services, and then charge and bill for the services and attribute the revenue split across partners. This means a complex web of physical and logical connections and dependencies need to be closely managed by the BSS and OSS so that the CSP can monetise the opportunities. Wipro has designed an end-to-end solution that optimises LTE network and IT infrastructure with monetisation in mind.

Competitive pressures Wipro faces competition from NEPs, ITS players and systems integrators competing in the telecom vertical. However it has long standing partnerships with Amdocs and Oracle, who have extensive OSS and BSS portfolios, and Wipro’s pre-integrated RAPIDS stack has had particular appeal with greenfield mobile operators and Tier 2 and 3 CSPs in emerging markets for 2G and 3G rollouts. They should be well placed to do the same with LTE.

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The new paradigm of Customer Experience Assurance for 4G/LTE CSPs: It’s time for a new assurance paradigm that drives substantial increases in customer satisfaction and addresses the pain caused by the mobile broadband explosion, writes Edoardo Rizzi

T The author, Edoardo Rizzi, is vice president and general manager of Mobile Assurance and Analytics at JDSU

he era of LTE is here, and after many years of investing in customer experience management (CEM) initiatives, communications service providers (CSPs) still lack the means and systematic approach to drive meaningful improvements in customer experience. The complexity, cost, and footprint of current assurance solutions is growing exponentially alongside the amount of traffic, resulting in solutions that can’t scale, technically or financially, to address the mobile broadband explosion. This compromises CEM solutions that rely on underlying assurance systems. There is also a wide misperception in the industry that CEM and customer experience assurance (CEA) are one and the same. They are not.

What is CEA — and how is it new?

We define CEA as a combination of the process, actions, and effort used to ensure that users of communications services receive a consistently good and increasingly better experience according to their unique expectations. Achieving that level of assurance will create loyal customers who are willing to advocate for their provider and are unlikely to churn to the competition or worse, become detractors.

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Current solutions for assurance and CEM are combinations of a data collection solution and a socalled CEM application. Typically, two separate vendors deliver the combined solution, or one vendor patches together a data collection solution and a CEM application. The end result is a fragmented solution that does not scale and fails to meet stakeholders’ requirements and the need for true CEA data.

Vendors are also struggling to deliver assurance solutions that provide data integrity and scalability for data collection solutions. Contextual real-time data is necessary in order to support network and service assurance in an all-IP, heterogeneous network. CSPs must proactively identify and resolve, in real-time, the biggest issues impacting the largest number of subscribers and the most valuable customers, all before customer satisfaction is impacted. Existing solutions that were designed to provide reactive troubleshooting in response to a customer complaint or network alarm do not provide true CEA capabilities.

In addition, the perceived value in terms of accuracy, thoroughness, and causality of the CEM application is overshadowed by the deficiencies of the data collection system itself. Service providers around the world have tried to address the issue of CEA in a way that has resulted in a data collection scalability problem arising from the use of:

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CEA is a term not yet widely applied with respect to how CSPs manage their network performance and service assurance activities to ensure subscriber satisfaction. Traditionally, network performance and service assurance have been managed independently using separate systems. In addition, CEM solutions usually depend on underlying network performance

and service assurance systems for data.

• Obsolete techniques for network and service

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assurance in order to produce the data needed by the CEM applications that sit on top • So-called CEM applications that were created and tailored to underlying data collection platforms and therefore, by design, continue to inherently impose requirements that prevent those platforms from innovating Current solutions for assurance carry the perception of having the ability to be 100% correct and derive 100% exact conclusions. However, the network is growing faster than solutions can scale, resulting in incomplete coverage and unreliable access to the desired assurance data and information that feeds a CEM solution. This leaves service providers in a position where none of the collected information is statistically relevant and meaningful, and compromises their ability to systematically improve customer satisfaction or leverage assurance systems for reliable CEM data.

To solve these problems, one has to address assurance in a fundamentally different manner.

The effectiveness of an assurance solution should not be measured by the degree of causality in the data it produces or the number of detailed call or session records generated. Instead, it should be measured by the degree to which the generated customer experience data, along with the issues that are made visible, can be correlated to an actual underlying network, service, or other problem in a statistically relevant way. When this is true, one can conclude that customers are indeed being negatively impacted and it is, therefore, worth spending time and money to solve underlying problems.

The big data opportunity A direct benefit of the new CEA paradigm is a data collection solution capable of enabling the service provider to capture the big data opportunity in a statistically-relevant, cost-efficient, scalable, and realtime manner.

LTE, SDN, and SON technologies make assets more usable, efficient, and scalable, and put service providers in a position to innovate faster and at a much lower cost.

The effectiveness of an assurance solution should be measured by the degree to which the generated customer experience data, along with the issues that are made visible, can be correlated to an actual underlying network, service, or other problem in a statistically relevant way

The solution: A new CEA paradigm In today’s environment, seeing the network and services with the eyes of the customer can only be achieved if network and service assurance applications are initially designed with the customer in mind. Applications must address the constraints of CSPs with respect to cost, footprint, and scalability.

CEA must integrate previously separate network and service assurance activities. The reality is that network, service and CEA are one and the same.

Additionally, the evolution to dynamic networks, services, and performance requires CEA solutions that deliver a significant improvement to the concept of real-time, measured on the order of seconds and not minutes. Furthermore, CEA solutions must scale to address the magnitude of the mobile broadband wave so that the solution cost, complexity, and footprint are decoupled from the mobile broadband traffic growth curve both in terms of the speed of growth and absolute figures – all while increasing customer satisfaction.

Last, but not least, next-generation solutions for data collection and CEA must be designed in a way that they can be virtualised both in terms of their data collection capabilities and the data mediation and correlation platform. This will enable CSPs to fully execute and capitalise on their cloud and virtualisation strategies.

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In this environment, real-time context awareness becomes key for the purpose of effective asset optimisation and monetisation of big data. The ability to see and understand the present situation becomes paramount in order to detect key events as they happen, and to uncover correlations between events that are only visible or valuable during a finite time span.

Embracing change To embrace CEA and the value it offers, one has to let go of obsolete practices. As L. Gordon Crovitz said in a recent Wall Street Journal article in reference to big data, “society will need to shed some of its obsessions for causality in exchange for simple correlation: not knowing why but only what.” In other words, it’s less about explaining the science behind the observed data, it’s about quickly identifying patterns and events that are statistically and significantly relevant. This is what the new CEA paradigm lets CSPs achieve, effectively and efficiently.

For CSPs to address both the challenges and opportunities driven by 4G/LTE and the mobile broadband explosion, a fundamentally different “customer-centric” approach to assurance is inevitable. The sooner the new CEA paradigm is embraced, the sooner real improvements in customer satisfaction – and profitability – can be realized.

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OSS/BSS FOR 4G

LTE is a mixture of evolution, revolution and devolution LTE promises improvements on so many levels – but communications service providers (CSPs) need help deciding which level to start improving first, writes Nick Booth here are so many differences involved in the shift from 3G to 4G that some might question whether Long Term Evolution (LTE) violates the Trades Descriptions Act. It seems more like a revolutionary technology, which calls for a complete overhaul on every aspect from BSS to backhaul, say experts.

T Freddie Kavanagh: OSS/BSS tools in at the start of LTE

Uri Gurevitz: CSPs are relying on Excel spreadsheets

While CSPs seek a better understanding of the subscriber experience as they roll out LTE, the focus is on managing the customer experience, says Kavanagh.

So 4G business and operational systems must create full network visibility and help CSPs in the endless pursuit of higher speeds and improved network quality.

“The alternative is to hire more skilled customer care reps, but this is a more expensive option,” says Kavanagh. Ultimately, the right BSS/OSS strategy and customer experience tools could help mobile operators create conditions where the subscribers look after themselves.

Until the bigger players start snapping up their smaller rivals, be prepared for hetnet conditions, says Tara Van Unen, JDSU’s marketing manager.

Get used to more complexity. Before you can create the quality of service your subscribers you will have to deal with equipment from many vendors and create common signals and data planes, predicts Van Unen.

Many CSPs are struggling with 4G capable devices that get stuck on the 3G layer of the network. The 4G network is oblivious to these occurrences, which will obviously affect the 4G customer experience.

“There are no 4G customers, only customers who have paid for the right to experience the promise of 4G services, who are of course actually being served by a combination of the 4G, 3G and possibly even the 2G networks,” says Van Unen.

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The rollout of 4G has been very different to 3G or GPRS, says Freddie Kavanagh, vice president of applications solutions at Tektronix Communications. In previous generations of rollout the budgets for monitoring came after the investment on network equipment and rollouts was complete.

This time, CSPs are buying their business and operational support tools while they are testing their LTE rollouts, and then continuing to use them as their networks go live.

The differences in the underlying transport service are pretty revolutionary too, says Nan Chen, co-founder of Cenx. The backhaul changes from Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) to carrier ethernet transport services in 4G networks. While TDM cannot be oversubscribed, ethernet can - and trying to force fit the former’s OSS to the latter network type will end in failure. “Today’s OSS were built with an underlying assumption that the network is relatively homogenous,” says Chen. But LTE, like any disruptive technology, takes us into the inevitable heterogeneity of a new and immature market.

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CSPs should beware of the re-positioned legacy OSS/BSS solutions on the market, as they won’t scale to support new networks cost effectively.

The diversity of vendor technology in the network will also create challenges for CSPs as they plan capacity and coverage. The good news is that the two disciplines are now completely separate, which simplifies things a little, but capacity planning has got more complex. The 4G CSP needs to understand the exact location of the small portion of users consuming all the data and place small cell resources close to those areas.

Many CSPs should consider 4G from a pure monetisation perspective, says Jonjie Sena, vice president of marketing at Aircom International.

“There isn’t enough money in all the world to create a 4G network that gives everything that’s possible to everybody,” says Sena, “so measure the business impact, not the bits and bytes. By that I mean measure the effect of an event on the value you give to customers. You have to prioritise that.”

A good discipline, for anyone who wants to use operational tools to manage 4G networks, is to remember the mistakes of previous customer tools like CRM, says Redknee's CTO, James DeMarco. “We have to use [OSS/BSS] tools to shield the complexity of what’s going on underneath from the subscribers,” he says. The end user doesn’t care how their film is VanillaPlus

delivered, they just want to see it, he says.

In some ways, LTE is creating a devolution, reports Uri Gurevitz, the director of portfolio marketing at Amdocs. The automated planning of networks has been replaced by manual systems. “Most CSPs need a system for planning LTE networks but few have an automated planning tool for the roll out of services.

They use Excel in many cases,” says Gurevitiz.

Chen, of CENX, confirms that Excel spreadsheets have become the OSS tool of choice as many CSPs make do in the management of their cell sites, addressing and topology in their 4G network.

There are complex choices ahead for CSPs, as they have a legacy of old networks and backhaul systems – such as 2G, 3G and Wi-Fi – and a new system that has to be overlaid. But that’s no excuse for going backwards.

Nan Chen: CSPs are trying to make do with what they’ve got

James DeMarco: OSS/BSS tools shield the complexity

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LTE and VoLTE are driving next generation policy control As CSPs move to offer voice over their LTE networks policy control becomes mandatory. Here, Shannon Bell explains why ith over 200 commercial long-term evolution (LTE) deployments globally, communications service providers (CSPs) are now looking at how to drive additional revenue from service offerings on their LTE networks, and voice is the next application that is making the move to LTE. Policy control is a mandatory component in delivering voice over LTE (VoLTE) services. And with the introduction of VoLTE, comes a new set of requirements for policy control solutions.

W The author, Shannon Bell, is director of marketing and business development for Data Experience at Amdocs

The implications of LTE and VoLTE are driving a new set of requirements for policy that will enable greater flexibility and service agility for CSPs. This is shown in Figure 1.

VoLTE for policy control With VoLTE, voice is now one component of an all-IP offering, whereas voice was previously the main service, and data and messaging services were the add-ons. With voice services now sharing the pipe with other data services like web browsing, video and social media, having the ability to manage the speed, quality and volume is critical to providing a differentiated experience for the subscriber.

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As CSPs start to roll out VoLTE services, it is critical that they be able to offer not just a service that is comparable with existing voice offerings, but one that is differentiated and adds value to the customer’s service offering. And the offering must deliver monetisation benefits for the CSP. If we consider how VoLTE will be monetised, there are a number of options, including: • Bundled offers – Premium voice with data services • Time and volume offers – Charging per minute/second/byte • Location-based offers – Differentiating voice charging based on congestion hotspots versus geography • Tiered services – Quality of experience based on different packages and plans • Dynamic offers – Real-time value offerings promoted on a dynamic basis • Roaming offers – Tailored offerings based on partnerships In each of these cases, policy plays a key role in supporting the monetisation of VoLTE services.

Through tiered service offerings, policy control defines and manages the tiers and quality of service associated with each tiered plan. In the case of dynamic offerings, policy enables the promotion of real-time value offerings on a dynamic basis. With location-based services, policy can use the location information to differentiate the offering based on

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These high quality, and in some cases high definition (HD), voice services will differentiate VoLTE from other over-the-top (OTT) applications and offer telco-grade service quality. It’s also possible to support premium offers with higher quality of service (QoS) and integrate voice with IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) applications,

including Rich Communication Services (RCS).

Monetisation of VoLTE

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congestion hotspots or geography. These are just a few examples of how policy can be used to drive monetisation of VoLTE.

Bundled data and VoLTE services If we consider a bundled service offering, our subscriber could have a silver tier data package that offers best effort QoS and also provides VoLTE services. When the subscriber surfs the internet and Facebook, they receive best effort QoS. When they make a voice call, their CSP sets up a dedicated bearer for the voice call and they are given guaranteed QoS to offer that “parity plus” experience with their traditional voice services. When the VoLTE call is completed, the dedicated bearer is disabled and the subscriber is provided with best effort QoS.

“If we consider a bundled service offering, our subscriber could have a silver tier data package that offers best effort QoS and also provides VoLTE services”

Figure 1: Implications of VoLTE

Towards enriched communications In the VoLTE context, policy gives CSPs the ability to deliver superior multi-media experiences and provide guaranteed quality voice/video/rich communication services.

If we consider VoLTE as a first step towards enriched communications, we can envisage a future of service offerings where policy is an enabler of quality of service, and quality of experience truly becomes the differentiator. It can drive voice offerings, messaging, video and group communications, reachability and add-on services, and more; delivering a fully integrated LTE experience for not just voice, but all communications enabled by policy control, as seen in Figure 2.

Figure 2: VoLTE as a step towards enriched communications

Deploying VoLTE With virtualised deployment options, CSPs can upgrade policy to meet the requirements for VoLTE and the enriched communication environment, as part of their transition to a fully virtualised network environment. CSPs can deploy a virtualised LTE network and provide regional or enterprise specific variations of VoLTE services to meet the needs of multiple customer segments and geographies.

Virtualisation offers the flexibility not only to support VoLTE as an extension to LTE services, but to tailor the offering according to network demands, the corresponding performance and scalability needs, as well as quality of service requirements to deliver a truly differentiated experience.

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ROAMING AND CHARGING

LTE roaming challenges present CSPs with new opportunities The shift to bundling voice within a user's data allowance inevitably creates new challenges for the OSS/BSS systems used by CSPs. The transition is intensifying with the move to LTE, the model for which demands good service delivery along with accurate charging and roaming provision – there are also new opportunities for CSPs to exploit, writes Jonny Evans

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or CSPs regulation and international agreements regarding roaming create additional challenges. In the European Union, CSPs are required to have billing systems that can handle a customer using a service while abroad. Such systems need to be able to identify and authorise that service use while also warning customers of any additional charges in order to avoid bill shock. This must be achieved in conjunction with the third-party network providing coverage to that customer at that time, and CSPs must achieve all this in realtime – while preserving any existing service level agreements.

"The BSS needs to cope with these interactions between domestic and international networks all the time,” says Tony Jackson, the product manager for Singleview at CSG International. “Charging needs to be the same, so long as the customer requirement comes back to the home BSS, the home BSS is responsible for the customer report, spending and account details, for example."

Mediation between the different BSS systems used across the combined infrastructure is the solution

LTE deployments aren't yet global, but the industry recognises that with voice becoming data, its future depends on services provision and the provision of new products. For example: • AT&T charges a premium price for 4G data bundles, but lets customers share the bandwidth between devices.

• Vodafone in the UK offers free access to Spotify with some accounts.

For CSPs, new service provision is a step toward mitigating revenues lost through bundling voice calls within data deals. Bundled service provision is attractive to customers because they don't waste money trawling around to buy services from multiple providers. The challenge is that: "Accurate billing and charging is going to become even more important in the near future," explains Robin Kent, director of European operations at Adax.

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Gordon Rawling: CSPs must think from the outside in

most CSPs are coming round to in order to answer these complex challenges. "CSPs are also turning increasingly to managed services, such as the cloud-based managed services offered by IPX providers," notes Mikael Schachne, the vice president of global data at BICS.

This drive for accuracy is confounded by a change in business structure. "Legacy systems associated account payment with an entity, a phone, rather than a person there was no personalisation. These legacy systems can't cope with such shared deals [as offered by AT&T]," says Jackson.

For Timo Ahomäki, the chief technology officer at Tecnotree: "One of the biggest challenges for incumbent operators will be to figure out how to handle convergence,” he says. “Typically, prepaid and post-paid, data and voice are operated on different systems."

This means that as CSPs migrate to service-based deals they must identify ways by which to seamlessly integrate their back office systems. "The focus in terms of BSS should be to move away from tightly integrated monoliths to more loosely coupled suites, allowing mix-and-match service creation," Ahomäki adds.

There's a new opportunity here for CSPs: "I think CSPs are trying to think on this from the outside in," says Gordon Rawling, the senior director of marketing at Oracle Communications. "They are thinking far more about the service experience they want to deliver and less from a cost basis."

Some CSPs may soon begin offering cut-price roaming deals to customers on competing networks in order to exploit existing partnerships and infrastructure.

LTE poses an additional challenge: As CSPs move

to include voice calls within data allowances, they must also manage the transition between 4G and 3G infrastructure. No CSP yet offers complete 4G coverage, meaning those voice calls can skip between 4G and 3G networks as a customer travels – this means that call may invoke multiple 4G and 3G service sessions. BSS systems must be capable of identifying those concurrent sessions that represent a single call in order to deliver accurate data metering.

Once again the industry appears to be moving to managed service solutions, identifying those that can cooperate with their existing OSS/BSS while also enabling the granular, real-time insights their evolving business demands now and in the future.

Managed services aren't always perfect. Some CSPs are already paying such service providers on a per use basis, "so a recurrent Facebook ping may not cost the customer much [under LTE data deals] but could cost the CSP," explains Jackson. What are service providers doing about this? "We are seeing a strategy of moving data demands away from those legacy platforms," he adds.

Rawling warns the focus for the CSP transition towards service provision rather than old business models should not be the technical challenges, but the opportunity: "Where can you drive new revenue and deepen customer relationships?” he asks.

“We need to think from the outside in; to consider how we are architecting our systems for a heterogeneous world at low implementation costs."

Timo Ahomäki: Handling convergence challenges CSPs

Robin Kent: Accurate billing and charging becomes more important

Integrated policy and charging delivers improved agility – and revenue generation As CSPs close in on the goal of making their operations more agile, the integration of policy and charging presents a key step in their transformational journeys, with accelerated time-tomarket for new services as a clear benefit, writes Petter Järtby

T The author, Petter Järtby, is head of business support systems at Ericsson

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Although the most immediately apparent goal is timeto-market, CSPs are increasingly looking at aspects of system performance that increase revenue. In the past the focus would have been more on opex reduction with an additional interesting new revenue generation.

Now, the balance between the two is equalising.

CSPs are still looking to gain efficiencies but there is a heightened recognition that to compete effectively they need the revenue generation aspects to be enabled as well.

Perhaps the most important enabler of fast time-tomarket lies in having a flexible, agile environment borne on the concept of a single integrated stack for all services – fixed, mobile, consumer and business.

Service agility spans a range of business processes: from service definition to order negotiation and fulfilment − to policy, charging, billing and assurance − and extending into service delivery. Clearly integration of charging and policy is not the end of that journey towards the agile CSP. There is growing interdependence between the two, so it makes sense

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www.ericsson.com

he agile operator must be agile in all aspects: network agility, service agility and customer agility. Shortened time-to-market is the primary measure of service agility as it presents great financial benefit to CSPs. By being the first to bring a wide range of innovative new services to market, especially those that use third party assets, they strategically differentiate themselves, which allows them to retain existing customers and attract new ones.

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for CSPs to integrate them and create a streamlined relationship.

We have seen that CSPs often prioritise charging and policy integration, making the gains that are detailed above, and then move on their programmes to encompass product management, order management and customer care – creating that unified database versus having siloes to be handled individually, can create delays and greater operational costs.

In Ericsson’s deployments, customer CSPs have seen time-tomarket for new service introduction reduce from five or six months to one month. That achieves the benefits described above but it also enables the complex service propositions that CSPs are impelled to offer – for example, those that involve new business relationships to support digital and M2M services in a host of industry verticals.

As the market develops further and a range of business models emerge, often relying on partners and over the top (OTT) players, the policy and charging models become more complex. We’ve seen relationships such as Singtel with WhatsApp or Telia with Spotify emerge and this is now no longer a one-way model. As a result, having the charging and policy flexibility is really important to the direct delivery of these services. The two or even threesided business models have more players involved and in these relationships it is even more important for the CSP and each partner to provide what has been promised.

CSPs need the capability to set policy for individual users and individual services and need policy functionality that is more capable. In the LTE environment that will become even more important as policy is applied to the flatter, all-IP network resource of LTE. With the accelerated roll-out of LTE, the ability to guarantee a certain quality of service for a specific user or service is enhanced significantly by integrated policy and charging. This can enable CSPs to achieve real differentiation which has not been possible in the 3G environment. Importantly the architecture used for LTE in policy and charging, enforcement and other areas can additionally be used for 2G, 3G and Wi-Fi services. As a result, CSPs will be enabled to

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bundle and package together offerings that rely on multiple technologies.

This is a big shift for CSPs. Typically their back office organisations have reflected the architecture they had but now the challenge is not only to integrate best of breed of technologies but to adjust their organisations to make full use of integrated policy and charging. CSPs are looking to move away from their siloed architectures and create a single stack for each functional area.

Ericsson’s concept is to have a centralised product and service catalogue to drive the CSP’s business processes and, with its acquisition of catalogue specialist Conceptwave last year it sees the potential to drive catalogue functionality into the service creation environment.

The advantage of the catalogue based approach is that once the components have been established and proven in one service type, they can be re-used for multiple related services. The building block approach thereby enables quick assembly of subcomponents to build out a new end-to-end service. Ericsson also applies the concept of true ‘componentisation’ that uses parameters in the specification of components. Parameters such as unit rate, discount percentages, discount and threshold limits can be established as parameters and defined in the rules set.

Essentially, those can be identified in charging and policy and simply referred to in the catalogue as a particular parameter.

Then the catalogue is called upon in real-time during fulfilment to provide the proper rule sets. Since the central catalogue defines the parameter, the CSP doesn’t need a policy or charging expert to enable the proposition.

The end game is the lean, lithe, agile CSP with a back office composed end-to-end of integrated systems that are driven from a centralised product and service catalogue. The industry is already underway on that journey. Early adoption of integrated policy and charging is a critical step on that path that can deliver real, measurable efficiency and revenue advantages to operators.

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A N A LY S I S

LTE to be deployed worldwide by 2018 LTE is out of the experimental stage and is being deployed worldwide. CSPs in all markets are in the process of implementing LTE, but the emergence of the APAC and LATAM regions is set to challenge European and North American CSPs’ early lead, reports Chris Nicoll, the head of Analysys Mason's Network Technologies and Enterprise and M2M research practices.

T

he first LTE deployments occurred in Finland and Sweden, and the world’s largest LTE network is in the USA, but emerging Asia Pacific and Latin America have the highest number of planned LTE networks, according to Analysys Mason’s Wireless networks tracker (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Operational and planned LTE networks by region, July, 2013 [Source: Analysys Mason, 2014]

Planned

60

Operational

20

40

24

20

32

12

41

10

18

24

28

21

14

14

7

8

14

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Developed AsiaPacific

Central and Eastern Europe

Latin America

North America

Emerging AsiaPacific

Western Europe

0

India, Malaysia and Vietnam are the leaders in the emerging Asia Pacific region for the number of LTE networks planned

Our research indicates that 59 LTE network trials were in progress as of 31 July 2013. This figure includes cases where a CSP has multiple trials underway, but might not eventually deploy operational networks.

However, we can reasonably expect – with more than 80% probability – that most of these trials will result in commercial deployment within the next two years.

20

35

30

Middle East and North Africa

50

Sub-Saharan Africa

Numbers of networks

70

Emerging market countries are also taking advantage of LTE technology. India, Malaysia and Vietnam are the leaders in the emerging Asia Pacific region for the number of LTE networks planned. CSPs in India, Malaysia and Nepal are also planning to launch TDLTE networks. We expect several CSPs to deploy FD/TD-LTE networks in order to take advantage of their paired and unpaired spectrum. Ten dual-technology LTE networks are already in commercial operation.

Adoption of the Asia–Pacific Telecommunity Band Plan (APT700) in Brazil, Chile, Columbia and Mexico provides CSPs and users in the Latin America region with access to the worldwide LTE700 ecosystem, which offers a broad choice of equipment and terminals. The large number of frequencies that LTE supports has generated concern among industry players, but in practice CSPs often need to support fewer than seven in order to provide a wide range of services for their users.

The largest number of LTE network trials is in Central and Eastern Europe (26), emerging Asia Pacific (24) and Western Europe (20). Trials in the first two regions are being driven by adoption of the technology among regional CSPs, such as Bharti Airtel and Reliance Infotel. Infrastructure vendors such as Ericsson, Huawei, Nokia Solutions and Networks (NSN), Samsung and ZTE are demonstrating the required network upgrade and transition options, including LTE overlay and single-RAN solutions.

Strong support for LTE in Asia Pacific and Latin America will start to offset the early influence that European and North American CSPs – some of which have a two or three year head start on deploying the technology – have had on the device and network vendors. We expect a more-balanced global LTE market to emerge by 2018, in which markets such as Brazil, India and Russia will each account for 5% of LTE connections worldwide.

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V O LT E S E R V I C E A S S U R A N C E

Can CSPs control the VoLTE experience and profit from it?

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Voice in the LTE environment will neither be as bad as best effort VoIP nor – at least initially – as good as the high definition voice we’ve been promised, writes George Malim

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V O LT E S E R V I C E A S S U R A N C E

hen it comes to voice over LTE, the first step is to debunk the myth that VoLTE, because it will run over an allIP network, is somehow going to provide the same poor experience as voice over IP over the best effort internet. It is true that LTE is an all-IP architecture and it’s also true that OTT providers like Skype will offer VoIP services over LTE networks but those won’t be VoLTE services.

W Mark Windle: Operators can apply a very special grade of service

Ray Adensamer: The experience will go from crystal clear to nothing

The difference between VoIP delivered over LTE and VoLTE is that the mobile operator owns the network, owns the IP Mulitmedia Subsystem and can apply policy control to a VoLTE call to control and prioritise it.

“People are familiar with relatively reliable mobile voice,” says Ray Adensamer, the senior manager of product marketing at Radisys. “It’s [thought of] as reliable because you get a ring tone but you also get poor cell coverage. The voice quality of a 3G cell can be quite poor in terms of fidelity, with VoLTE, you’ll notice an improvement.”

Mark Windle, the head of marketing at OpenCloud, agrees: “The network operator is in control of the quality of service and I’m not sure they would want to provide that to VoIP providers,” he says. “They can apply a very special grade of service to the connection between the handset and the base station to guarantee bandwidth over the radio interface” Early VoLTE adopters such as SK Telecom in South Korea have already started marketing VoLTE as a benefit because it will provide greater call quality than 2G or 3G voice. To an extent, that’s true because the architectures of IMS have been thought through to give operators the necessary ability to control VoLTE calls. However, there is one aspect of VoLTE that presents a clear potential for the perception that the quality will be lower than earlier mobile voice technologies; it either works well or it doesn’t work at all.

“With LTE, the network will be binary,” adds Adensamer. “The experience will go from crystal clear to nothing. I’m quite bullish, though. I believe the experiences I hear from early adopters that it’s a superior experience.”

However, there are a significant number of challenges to VoLTE deployment. Obvious barriers include network roll-out delays and constrained

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device availability but there are further challenges to surmount because of the fragmented spectrum being assigned to LTE networks in different countries and regions as well as different versions of LTE itself. That will make roaming hard to develop and, as a consequence, roaming VoLTE is likely to fall back to 2G and 3G for some time to come.

Even so, those barriers are surmountable and, while roll-out will be slow it will happen and the benefits to operators will be substantial. “There are opportunities of nice integrations with rich communication services and hybrid voice and video,” says Adensamer. “The biggest benefit is that once you’ve moved voice from 3G to 4G you have all that 3G spectrum and can re-use to fuel 4G spectrum needs. The business case for VoLTE isn’t the millions [of operational savings] on IMS, it’s the billions on spectrum. This will be a big year for VoLTE.” Windle sees the opportunity for operators to move on from the standard voice calling of the last century. “Is it about replicating the 3G experience or do CSPs want to take the opportunity to start competing again?” he asks. “Is the user experience going to stay plain old telephony with very little innovation or is the opportunity in the move to all-IP networks?”

Justin Paul, the head of marketing for the OSS division at Amdocs, doesn’t see the basic voice business changing much with VoLTE. “Do we see it enabling CSPs to upsell or reversing the trend in voice revenues – no, not for basic voice,” he says.

“It becomes a commodity but there are opportunities around high definition voice and sponsored services.”

“The real driver is spectrum refarming,” he adds.

“The quality of voice may well be lower in the first instance because people will move from LTE to 3G to 2G and probably every time you hand over there’s a risk a call will be dropped because you tend to hand over on the edge of the performance envelope.”

Even though the routine quality is likely to be greater in the VoLTE era, the journey towards it will therefore be a bumpy road as quality degrades where different technologies meet. In this light, VoLTE looks very much a case of one step back to take two steps forward and perhaps there is more in it for CSPs than for users.

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