Walking around MWC in Barcelona to gather information and spot trends can be overwhelming, like shopping for jewellery with over 93,000 of your closest friends. Nevertheless, the shopping trip yields treasures for those who go with purpose and a plan.
Analysys Mason’s team of analysts fanned out to speak to key industry players and seek out the latest news and updates on:
- Mobile broadband networks: LTE-A, 5G, carrier Wi-Fi, small cells
- Consumer and next-generation mobile services: wearables, VoLTE, Wi-Fi calling, Facebook’s and Google’s mobile service strategies
- M2M/IoT: low-power, wide-area, or LPWA networks
- Software-based systems: OSS/BSS, analytics, M2M/IoT support) and virtual networking.
An overview of our analysis and its implications are welcomed to access our webcast at http://www.analysysmason.com/Research/Content/Webinars/MWC-webinar-Mar2015/.
Industry embraces virtualisation
There was evidence at MWC of the communication industry’s embrace of virtualisation technology and operations practices pioneered in IT networks. Although commercial deployments at scale remain scarce, vendor and communications service provider (CSP) announcements and demonstrations clearly showed the progress made from the previous year.
Two particularly noteworthy CSP announcements were Telefónica’s selection of HP’s OpenNFV platform and system integration services to build the UNICA virtualisation infrastructure platform announced last year at MWC, and AT&T’s report of progress since MWC 2014: The launch and subsequent expansion of its “Network on Demand” SDN-enabled enterprise Ethernet services; the deployment of a virtualised mobile packet core to support MVNO and connected car services; the convergence of eight platforms for digitised voice onto one, the Universal Services Platform; and the movement of about 40% of its IT applications onto virtualised infrastructure, the AT&T Integrated Cloud). In addition, Telefónica noted it had deployed virtual CPE to 20,000 fixed broadband subscribers in Brazil, which gives it a big enough test bed to quantify results in terms of lower costs and new service velocity and stickiness.
Other notable NFV-related CSP service announcements, all based on Cisco Systems technology and targeted at small and medium businesses, included Deutsche Telekom’s launch of cloud-based VPN services in Croatia, Hungary and Slovakia; Telstra’s expansion of self-service cloud-based services; and Telecom Italia’s rollout of cloud-managed wireless and other services.
Big data analytics continues to dominate thinking
Analytics was a second area that showed great advancement. In fact, big data analytics dominates the thinking on how to solve many new challenges and take advantage of new opportunities, both customer- and network facing. On the network side, we saw signs that CSPs are starting to use analytics to automate actions, not just provide recommendations. Network and customer analytics will increasingly be coupled to enhance customer experience. CSPs— some faster than others— are slowly moving to closed loop, more connected and flexible analytics platforms, as illustrated by the figure.
CSPs increasingly seek innovative new software solutions to help them evolve to become digital service providers (DSPs). As the do so, we are finding them to be open to non-traditional vendors of billing systems, analytics platforms, virtual network functions and related control/orchestration products and other enablers. Unique innovations may come in silos, but CSPs and vendors will work to integrate them more rapidly than ever into well connected platforms.
Writteny by: Dana Cooperson, research director, Network-Focused Software Research, Analysys Mason
Dana Cooperson is the research director for Analysys Mason’s network-focused software research programmes. Her area of expertise is intelligent fixed and mobile network infrastructure. The key network infrastructure trends Dana focuses on include the integration of communications and IT assets and the drive towards software-controlled, virtual networking.
