Expect to see wireless broadband offerings getting smarter

Stuart Corner
Friday, 11 December 2009 09:35

Business IT - Technology

If Australia follows overseas trends mobile operators could soon start offering wireless broadband services with quality of service differentiators.

To date wireless broadband plans are being sold on the basis of price and data quotas with coverage differences between networks as the main differentiator however as coverage gap narrows and demand grows, other means of differentiation are likely to appear.

According to Kursten Leins, strategic marketing manager for multimedia at Ericsson Australia, in some markets overseas operators are starting to introduce different bandwidth plans on HSPA networks such as one, five or eight megabits per second and instead of simply charging users by the kilobyte for above quota data are introducing throttling and giving user the option to buy additional data blocks.

However he said that if operators were to offer specific bandwidths rather than simply letting people use the network to the limits imposed by it and their modem, they would need some means of giving priority to such users.

"There are many points in the network where you could apply those priorities," he said, and suggested that operators' ability to give priority to certain users could be extended so that users could sign up to plans offering a certain amount of data per day at high bandwidth, after which it would drop back to a lower rate.

In Australia, whilst Telstra still has the best coverage Vodafone and Optus have narrowed the gap considerably in recent months and Leins suggested that, with coverage becoming less of a differentiator, operators would have to start introducing QoS differentiators, if not in the short term, then certainly when their networks are upgraded to LTE.

The ability to do so is already available in the technology. The 3GPP Release 8 specification, the latest version of the standard for 3G networks released in March, contains provisions that enable operators to provide considerable QoS service differentiation, from the network side, in contrast to earlier releases which gave only the terminal a role in determining QoS of the service.

By using techniques such as deep packet inspection operators will be able to map specific applications, such as VoIP, to specific QoS classes - a total of nine are available each with a different set of QoS parameter such as guaranteed or non-guaranteed bit rate, priority, packet delay, and packet-error-loss rate.

According to Hannes Ekström, an, Ericsson engineer specialising in QoS, in a paper published in the IEEE Communications Magazine February 2009, "The combination of...network-initiated QoS control and class-based mapping of services, provides access network operators and service operators with a set of tools to enable service and subscriber differentiation. These tools are becoming increasingly important as operators are moving from a single to a multi-service offering at the same time as both the number of mobile broadband subscribers and the traffic volume per subscriber is increasing rapidly."