I have been watching with interest the progression of RAN sharing agreements and wish Ericsson every success on the recent award of a four-year managed services contract for the operation and maintenance of the Hutchinson 3 and T-Mobile consolidated 3G Network in the UK.

In the near-term this will undoubtedly deliver significant cost savings for the parent companies, by reducing the number of base stations and lease costs for the associated sites. In the longer term however, I expect they will face some real challenges in terms of market differential and real commercial benefits.

Since the two companies are using the same RAN infrastructure it will be more difficult for them to compete on the coverage, quality of service and speed of their networks. When combined with a lower cost base, this has the potential to drive increased pricing competition between them. In the long run this could result in revenue erosion for both companies, with the potential to offset or even exceed the original cost benefits.

Another issue is that increasing demand for mobile broadband services, coupled with increased competition on price, could lead to capacity and quality of service conflicts between the parent companies. If one Operator has a new marketing initiative that creates a significant increase in demand on the shared RAN for instance, the capacity and/or quality of service for customers of the second Operator could suffer.

To offset this challenge the shared RAN engineering process needs to be extremely agile in terms of providing the ability to rapidly assess and respond to each Operators capacity and performance requirements, while safeguarding the other party and protecting the confidentially of each.

While some of these RAN capacity and performance issues may be relatively straightforward to manage, others are a lot more complex. The service usage and mobility profile of subscribers for example can have a significant impact on CPU occupancy and related RNC capacity. In several instances we have observed the erosion of RNC capacity by as much as 60%, based on the difference between the generic service profile used during the initial purchase of equipment and that experienced in the field.

In a shared RAN this means that variances in each Operators service profile have the potential to downgrade the overall RAN capacity as well as creating the potential for one Operators customers to directly impact the capacity that is available to the other!

To overcome these challenges it is even more critical for shared RAN Operators to overhaul their traditional planning processes than it is for ‘stand-alone’ Operators – Otherwise there is a significant risk of the challenges outweighing the benefits, particularly when it comes to maximizing the ability to compete.