A Happy New Year to all and may it be a successful and profitable one for all of us!

Talking of profits I would like to stress once again how imperative it is for Mobile Operators to adopt a Network Planning process that provides improved visibility of the correlation between Network Capacity, Total Cost of Ownership and Performance.

This week I spent time discussing this topic with several Mobile Operators in Europe and all were agreed on the need to do this from an End-to-End Network perspective, which addresses the impact that RAN Network design and configuration can have on Core Network capacity.

Without an integrated and automated process for doing this Mobile Operators run risks on all fronts – Of Network costs spiraling out of control, having inadequate capacity to serve their customers or degraded network performance, which can churn customers off the network and erode revenues.

The root cause of this problem is Mobile Broadband User Profiles, which are more dynamic and have a higher impact on the various packet switched network elements than in their circuit switched equivalents – In packet switched networks User Profiles can dramatically degrade RNC capacity with associated knock-on effects on both the capacity and Performance of Core.

This is not a new problem and used to happen in circuit switched networks where switch/MSC capacity was also affected by the traffic profile of the users connected to it – But in Mobile Broadband networks a combination of increased signaling intensity, 2G/3G network overlay complexity and IP application demand dynamics have heightened the problem significantly. So much so in fact that it is now imperative for Mobile Operators to understand what is happening in near real-time,  in terms of End-User Demand and Mobility – And tie this into rapid what-if network modeling that enables them to interpret and respond to the stark trade-offs between Network Capacity, Cost and Performance.

Having balanced these tradeoffs to achieve a very precise assessment of network costs Network Planning teams can then feed this information back to Marketing to maximize profitability (and revenues) – Helping to sustain shareholder confidence and  competitive advantage.