Wireless networks struggling to cope with smartphone & data boom

Stuart Corner
Monday, 03 August 2009 06:03

Business IT - Technology

Wireless network operators surprised by the rapid update of wireless broadband services and smartphones are struggling to upgrade networks to enable them to meet these new demands and are having to rethink their network evolution strategies.

According to Brendan Leitch, director, service provider marketing, for Juniper Networks in Asia Pacific, the surge in broadband data traffic and in smartphones are having two distinct, and compounding effects. "Smartphones represent a monumental shift for the wireless industry. With smartphones, the handset has gone from being a carrier or vendor-controlled device to an open IP based computing platform in the hands of people," he said.

He explained that the network resources to cater for something like a BlackBerry were radically different from and much less than those needed for something like the iPhone. "The Blackberry is only email the traffic is compressed, and it is only one session per user. It is very operator friendly. The iPhone on the other hand is an open computing platform on which you can put applications like Google Maps that can open up 300 sessions through Internet.

"That transition is causing incredibly fast changes in wireless operators' networks and business models...They are finding themselves in the data business but not the way they planned to be in the data business. They had planned for IP backhaul but not on the scale they are experiencing."

Leitch said that the initial pain point for operators was usually at the firewalls used to route customer traffic into the Internet while protecting their networks from the dangers of the Internet. "They will go from starting to sell the iPhone to being in an absolute panic three weeks later and then to having a complete new firewall system in place eight weeks later."

This however is not the biggest problem facing operators, according to Leitch. "The upgrade to security is not overly capex intensive," he said, and can be installed relatively quickly. However when it comes to upgrading backhaul networks to handle the increase in data traffic, carriers, Leitch said that operators were having to take a long view and often bypass what would otherwise have been smaller and more intermediate upgrades. "They are not getting approvals to spend lots of money on backhaul in the old ways. They have to find new ways of doing things and be much more forward thinking than in the past."

He said the plans by NTT DoCoMo in Japan and Verizon Wireless in the US to be early adopters of LTE had as much, if not more, to do with its overall network architecture as with the increased access speed and spectral efficiency of the air interface.

"The LTE architecture is the first to allow non-hierarchical IP traffic. All the others specify that all traffic is backhauled to a centralised control point and sent back out. LTE lets traffic route between base stations. It can reduce by an order of magnitude the capacity that has to be built into networks."