Network optimisation helps CSPs stave off the capacity crunch

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Data growth and expected M2M traffic means that CSPs are doomed to run out of capacity eventually – unless they build more. However, there remains a lot to be achieved through effective network optimisation, writes Jonny Evans.

Communications service providers (CSPs) have great expectations that network optimisation will help them cut costs and boost agility, they know customers need more than connectivity, they demand speed, security and reliability, particularly for cloud services.

“Optimisation addresses the gap, providing incremental benefit regardless of the infrastructure or technology deployed,” says Mark Davis, the senior director of product marketing at Citrix.

And optimisation is catching the attention of enterprises and CSPs alike.“I’m having more and more conversations with heads of IT who are scratching their heads because they want to ensure fully optimised network performance and data security across their business, but don’t want to get in the way of user’s enthusiasm for cloud-based services,” says Dominic List, the chairman of Aurora365.

John Brooks, the vice president of product management at Subex agrees: “A mature programme in optimisation will inform the CSP, in near real-time, where capacity is at risk, when capacity will be at risk, where capacity re-groom and re-home opportunities exist, and even provide analytics to planning to help appropriately budget for the right assets in the right places at the right time.”

With CSPs challenged by data traffic growth of 50%, according to Citrix, it’s clear they need not only to add new capacity but to maximise utilisation of capacity that already exists. “High performance and resiliency are key to ensuring happy customers and increased profitability,” says Ivor King, the senior network engineering manager at Colt. “As a CSP you need to be constantly analysing your network data to get the best performance out of the network infrastructure.”

In addition to the growth in standard data traffic the looming wave of M2M uptake poses fresh challenges and “could have a dramatic impact on how and when we perform network optimisation. Only then will we start to see self-optimising networks truly take control,” notes Kevin Challen, the business development manager of Cyient.

Citrix sees this as “optimisation of the mobile data network to ensure the best subscriber experience of mobile data services while improving the network’s efficiency in delivering those services,” Davis adds. “There is no single best practice as different CSPs have different technical and business objectives.”

After all, while some CSPs want to deliver better user experiences others make a conscious trade-off between image quality and data volume.

The complexity of addressing such varied objectives including device, traffic and logical service layer consumption, “has led to an entirely new domain of asset management, which has lifted network optimisation and utilisation to an entirely new level of efficiency,” adds Brooks.

King warns that: “Every CSP needs to ensure their networks are fully optimised so they are not missing out on opportunities, but at the same they must bear in mind the costs associated with the process.” After all, optimisation costs may in some cases outweigh the potential revenue gains it creates.

The good news is that an array of optimisation techniques exist, for example: video caching, bandwidth shaping and image compression; transcoding, download and streaming policy controls and more.

Stephen Bowker, the vice president of technology and strategy for TEOCO regards the following as the most helpful tools for network optimisation.

Geolocation to tune and optimise coverage and capacity where required.

  • Multi-technology, multi-vendor, multi-domain processing to provide accurate customer experience insights.
  • Real-time processing capabilities and a highly scalable architecture to process massive volumes of data.
  • Flexible architecture to support new approaches and emerging methods such as network functions virtualisation (NFV).

Matt Goldberg, the vice president of strategic solutions at SevOne urges that companies gather all the data they can, from performance metrics to traffic flows across public and private infrastructures to provide actionable, real-time insights. “This is done by creating daily baselines against billions of performance metrics, for all service components – hardware and software – to troubleshoot outages, forecast future needs and optimise current network performance.”

Making use of all available data “down to the subscriber and device level” provides “a much richer view of network performance and let them optimise the network where it is most needed,” says Petrit Nahi, the vice president of product management at Newfield Wireless.

Of course, the sheer quantity of this data makes it “difficult to identify real network performance issues against the background noise,” warns Mark Slinger, the head of product at Sysmech. Intelligent analysis and automation – big data analytics – may help CSPs quickly identify high priority network performance issues for “rapid resolution and maximised utilisation of resources,” he says. Of course, the network itself remains the ultimate fence – no matter how much optimisation CSPs apply they will probably run out of capacity eventually, unless they build more.

“There will be a limit to optimisation, but this is a long way off for most CSPs,” says Slinger.

The challenge of managing complex multi-technology and multi-vendor network environments is further complicated by the need to manage numerous sites and multiple cell sizes, including macro, pico, metro, residential and enterprise femto. “To this [complexity] we have to add changing customer behaviours and the introduction of new technologies, devices and applications. So, network optimisation still has and will continue to have an important role to play,” says Vicent Soler Ruiz, the executive vice president for Astellia Spain.

Automated systems may facilitate better navigation of such complexity. “Intelligent automation is still in its early stages, and has huge potential across network operations, network optimisation and customer care,” says Slinger.

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