New ways are needed to address the issues of spectrum availability, shortage of licenses, tougher competition in the telecom sector and global financial pressure. A wholesale network-sharing model based on cooperation with a third party could unlock added value for operators, stimulating competition and overall market growth.
As the Networked Society takes shape, providing the right user experience is a top priority for operators. Bandwidth-hungry applications common on smartphones, tablets and other connected devices are driving figures for data traffic sky high. The opportunity for operators arises from people, business and society depending on their devices, mobile broadband access and high-performance networks. Heterogeneous networks, commonly known as hetnets, are efforts to improve and densify existing mobile broadband infrastructure together with added small cells are important when meeting ever-increasing user expectations.
Businesses of all sizes can make immediate gains in efficiency and reduce their environmental impact by employing visual communication services. However, these services have not yet broken into the mass market, which presents operators with a strategically important opportunity. With their economies of scale, operators can offer enterprise customers a combination of low price, good service and high quality that other market players cannot match.
Everyone from content providers, to users, to operators can benefit from the network-enabled cloud and cloud service delivery. The current over-the-top model for cloud service delivery has some serious deficiencies – users, operators and content providers have their own priorities in terms of cost, efficiency, quality of experience (QoE) and as such want different things from the network-enabled cloud. With their network assets and existing relationships with users, operators are uniquely positioned to understand users’ needs for cloud services and meet those needs effectively.
Backhaul plays a critical role in mobile broadband, and is rising in importance on account of the introduction of heterogeneous networks, known as hetnets. Deploying vast numbers of small cells to complement improved and densified macrocell layers will require a range of highly scalable, flexible mobile backhaul solutions that support superior user experience.
Growth presents many opportunities for operators, where the challenge is to maintain excellent user experience – a task that is becoming highly complex, time-consuming and, ultimately, costly. The techniques and features of self-organizing networks deployed in nodes and management systems can address this complexity, freeing up operators to focus on their business objectives.
The GSMA IR.92 voice-over-LTE and GSMA IR.94 IMS conversational video specifications are the preferred industry choices for mass-market voice and video calling services over LTE, satisfying user expectations and providing the most advantageous solutions for operators. With the industry aligned telecom solution, operators can now start commercial deployments of a telecom-grade, globally interoperable solution for voice and video calling over LTE – even before LTE is fully deployed.
In the widening universe of communication services, contextual awareness will be increasingly important. Operator offerings and future communication solutions will need to be flexible enough to adapt to various contexts and operators will need to provide platforms for communication solutions, rather than individual communication services.
By significantly raising the quality of voice communication with more natural sound and improved intelligibility, HD voice will play a key role in ensuring that voice continues to offer value for operators and users of both fixed and mobile networks.
A decade ago wireless technology was dominated by mobile telephony. Today, there are around 5.8 billion mobile subscriptions. In the US market, for example, LTE networks cover more than 50 percent of the population and this figure is rapidly increasing. LTE enables an ever-widening range of services, enhanced QoS, efficient use of resources and flexible spectrum utilization. All of this in turn creates a wealth of new business opportunities, leading to tougher competition among service providers and application builders. Applications using highly accurate wireless-device positioning are constantly being developed and enhanced. This increases user expectations, which consequently creates demand for smarter services.
