The biggest challenge facing Mobile Operators today is that of keeping their business alive – Faced with a combination of aggressive price erosion, increasing data demand and rising infrastructure costs – It is easy to see that they could cross the break even point for profitability and get into serious financial difficulties. While network infrastructure costs for voice are relatively straightforward to calculate, the cost of providing incremental network infrastructure to support mobile data is a lot more complex.  

Many factors come into play here, including the technologies, vendors and configuration of the existing network, geographic & daily variations in demand & mobility profiles and the Operators target QOS for the delivery of different services.  This problem is only exacerbated by dynamic hardware and software costs for RAN and Core Networks, which vary by vendor; and the associated ROI for different vendor products; whose estimated life is becoming ever shorter as technology innovation accelerates.  

From a revenue perspective, many Operators have been forced into offering ‘flat rate, all-you-can-eat’ voice and/or data plans, which mean that revenue remains flat as demand and network related CAPEX and OPEX skyrockets. To manage their profitability and associated business risks it is vitally important for Mobile Operators to understand the correlation between marketing led sales initiatives, the actual uptake and demand for new services and associated pricing options for planning and configuring the network. Without this they may well be unprofitable and ultimately be forced to merge with competitors or even go out of business altogether! 

Traditional methods for (voice service) network planning have relied on forecasts of product and service uptake that are prepared by marketing groups.  Historically, these forecasts have been fairly accurate, based on statistical models that have evolved and improved over time – For mobile broadband data applications however there is little if any statistical data from which to work, so accurate forecasting becomes a lot more difficult and involves a lot more risk.  

For this reason it is vitally important for network planners to adopt a more sophisticated planning process that is closely tied into mobile broadband marketing initiatives. In addition, the combined marketing and planning groups need to leverage more real world demand information to efficiently design, plan and implement the evolving network, so that end-to-end capacity is kept in lockstep with emerging demand, while ongoing investment is kept as lean as possible. Only in this can way can Mobile Operators be assured of predictable and sustainable profits.