As mobile networks evolve to deliver the broadband mobile Internet, Mobile Service Providers face fierce challenges of retaining and growing their margins in an arena of ruthless competition, flat rate tariffs and massive investment in new network technologies. To make this problem worse, margins are being further impacted by the erosion of network capacity associated with hidden bottlenecks beyond the air interface.  These unforeseen challenges can increase 3G deployment costs by as much as 30% while simultaneously having a significant negative impact on revenues. The true cost of supporting mobile IP demand across multiple technology systems with complex radio protocols is far higher than initially expected, due to dynamic processing bottlenecks that occur at various core network elements including RNC, SGSN/PDSN and switching/gateway components. 

The interplay between these bottlenecks and the bandwidth provisioned in the access network make optimizing for cost and performance in 3G and 2G/3G hybrid networks a real challenge.  As demand for mobile data services accelerates the bandwidth requirements at the base station level will skyrocket – But geographic demand by time of day for different IP applications will vary enormously. So the traditional approach for planning access bandwidth based on fairly high level assumptions such as population density will not be adequate.  There are no historic statistics for IP demand so the only way to dimension the network is to monitor demand in real time and plan accordingly. The problem with this is that there is a relationship between access demand, bottlenecks in the core and cost.  As IP demand increases, this problem will only get worse and optimizing the end-to-end network to keep costs to a minimum, while ensuring that sufficient capacity is available where and when it is needed, becomes a mission critical aspect of the mobile carriers business. 

The team at Cerion is very excited by these challenges because we have developed ground-breaking solutions for overcoming them, using all of the things that I have talked about in my previous blogs.

Leveraging the artificial intelligence embedded our solutions Network Designers are able to pro-actively overcome the real time challenges associated with mobile network bandwidth management, associated bottlenecks and redundancy requirements. Using these techniques mobile carriers can make more money and save more money – Reducing system costs by up to one third, while at the same time removing localized bottlenecks that impact the end user and erode revenues.