Wifi Revolution

VPIsystems (www.vpisystems.com) provides integrated capacity and network planning software and services for the global telecommunications industry. VPIsystems' OnePlan is an integrated software-based network planning system. It enables communications service providers of any size, systems integrators and manufacturers to design, plan and implement their transition to a next-gen IP-based network.

 

Mark Mortensen, Senior Vice President, Marketing at VPISystems, says, “We’re network planners. Our software helps you to plan your network. When planning a network, you don’t want to spend so much money that your CFO is going to get mad, and you don’t want to spend not enough money so the marketing campaign doesn’t work and the marketing people get mad. And of course, either way the stockholders get angry too. It’s a pretty sophisticated matter to determine what an optimal network configuration should be, what equipment you should have, and so forth.

 

“We don’t ‘hand-hold’ too much,” says Mortensen. “But then a company might work with somebody such as SAP, where we would be part of an overall solution, and of course they are capable of doing a lot of handholding with their whole network lifecycle management procedures and all of their work to also achieve just-in-time inventories delivered. But we become the engine, if you will, as to what it is you will need and exactly when.

 

“British Telecom, as you know, is building their 21st Century network,” says Mortensen, “and we’re basically the design engine behind their dimensioning and planning for that network. Telstra has a different approach. Instead of building a whole new network, they’re adding on to their current network and we’re the design engine, if you will, that tells them how to build out their current network to have all of these new services without spending too much money.

 

“Also, we’ve been increasingly working with the wireless side,” says Mortensen, “as capacity in the network is becoming more of an issue. WiFi (News - Alert) is a very important aspect of this.”

 

Mortensen elaborates: “It’s interesting to see things like T-Mobile (News - Alert) with its HotSpot @Home, and AT&T with its iPhone which also works with WiFi hotspots. They’re different services, and they have different underlying marketing propositions, but allow me to place these in context here. There are three things I see happening in the mobile industry that have a great deal to do with capacity issues. First, we’re finding that people of course have gone from using their mobile phones – or cellular phones as we like to call them in the U.S. – as things that we would use when we’re not home, to using them exclusively, as our ‘main lines’ of communication. The mobile phone is the phone we now use all the time. That’s even my situation. I normally won’t even give you my office phone number anymore, and I’ve noticed that a lot of other business people are doing that too. My phone number is my mobile number.

 

“Now, doing this leads to an interesting problem,” says Mortensen. “I need good service not only when I’m driving on Route 95, but also when I’m sitting at home on the side of a mountain in New Hampshire – and it’s the ‘wrong’ side of the mountain, and I get some pretty bad wireless phone service there. Now that I have my mobile as my main line, I want that good service. So does everybody else who rely almost exclusively on wireless. That leaves companies such as T-Mobile in a situation. They have pretty good coverage, but not the best. How can users get excellent coverage everywhere? One way to do that, of course, is to do what T-Mobile is doing, with their HotSpot @Home. Their phone is a dual mode phone with WiFi on it for voice. One can now also call upon thousands of WiFi locations for connections to the phone network, in coffee shops, hotels, airports, and so on.

 

“Now, from a capacity standpoint,” says Mortensen, “this means that T-Mobile doesn’t have to spend extra money to increase the number of connection points and ensure that I have good service in my house. My WiFi network and Internet connection can now do that. It’s not only a great service for me, but it’s a great service for them as pure extra capacity, ‘filling in’ the capacity for voice that they otherwise wouldn’t have, necessitating the construction of new towers, such as one on the other side of my mountain.

 

“So the first trend we see is the migration of people from wireline to wireless,” says Mortensen. “The second thing we see is the big move from voice to voice-plus-email and Internet surfing. Now everybody wants to get email on their phone too. That’s driving these carriers now to do a couple of things. First of all it’s driving them to the data and IP infrastructure which is otherwise known as 3G. It used to be that data was such a small, tiny little piece of network usage, that it wasn’t a consideration. Now, however, that data traffic volumes are going up, it’s pushing them towards the IP infrastructure.

 

“The third piece of the story is moving from that little device in my hand that I used to consider a communicator,” says Mortensen, “to something that is now going to entertain me too. That’s helping to drive what we’re starting to see now, which is a huge ‘mobile video build-out’. We find that the carriers are preparing now or are already engaged in a massive build-out on top of the existing infrastructure.

 

“They need to worry about the radio capacity,” says Mortensen, “so they’re engaged in 3G and the long-term evolution of their networks in order to get the RF capacity up at the cell tower. What they then have to do is match that capacity with what the network is behind that cell tower. That wasn’t a big deal in the past. In the old days you’d take a cell tower and throw and E1 or a T1 line there for the backhaul, or you’d go to the wireline provider in the area and just lease it from them. It was not big deal. The only question used to be ‘Should I use a single T1 or two of them to each cell tower?’ Now however video services are proliferating on the network, such as Verizon’s VCAST service. Verizon had to roughly quadruple their capacity back there in the network to handle their video download service. Each video, while downloading, takes about half of a T1 line. It doesn’t occupy it for long, but taken in total, they chew up bandwidth capacity tremendously.

 

“There’s a general industry understanding now that as these carriers are going into their video build-out,” says Mortensen, “they’re going to have to increase the capacity of their backhaul from the towers to the switch and also their switching capacity, ranging from a factor of five to a factor of eight. Now instead of one or two T1s, the question is whether to install somewhere between 10 and 16 of them. Installing that requires serious money. Since they generally lease their lines, their OpEx spending will rise from about 20 percent of their total revenue to about half. So they actually have a serious problem. That’s why there’s been a lot of discussion lately about ‘wireless backhaul’ as they call it, and all of the different technologies – the Ethernet people, IP, point-to-point microwave, and optical fiber people have been devising various schemes to try to cut the cost of this backhaul.

 

“The industry is starting to think that even a five-to-eight-times capacity increase is not going to be enough to handle future demands made by video and multimedia in general,” says Mortensen. “Carriers are finding out, for example, that the iPhones are subject to incredible usage with regard to data traffic.

 

“In any case, the other use for WiFi is in things such as iPhones,” says Mortensen. “Using WiFi with an AT&T iPhone (News - Alert) is obvious. AT&T’s EDGE network is slow. In order to persuade the consumers to at least halfway happy with the iPhone, they added the ability to connect up to the WiFi hotspots so you can download your email and surf the Internet. Interestingly enough, they don’t offer that service yet to provide voice phone calls over WiFi the way T-Mobile does. But we’ll see what happens later on.

 

“In all of these cases, it’s interesting what they’re doing with WiFi,” says Mortensen. “They’re filling-in some of their deficiencies using WiFi. In the case of T-Mobile the deficiency is one of finding a good available signal in the home. In the case of AT&T and the iPhone, they’re filling in for the slow speeds of their current EDGE data network.

 

“This ‘filling-in’ business using WiFi is interesting and many people are probably asking themselves whether this is going to be a long-term trend or whether it’s just to fill-in right now,” says Mortensen. “I believe it will be a long-term trend, especially considering the fact that users keep doing large video downloads. My daughter is starting to do video sharing among her friends. She even sends real-time video streams from concerts for a few seconds. In the future, her friends will be at home, using WiFi to view it. And of course bandwidth usage is going to keep going up tremendously for these networks. CapEx and OpEx spending will continue to rise in response to the use of video on both wireless and wireline networks.

 

“Of course, anytime any carrier or provider builds out a network, that’s good news for us,” says Mortensen, “since they have to do a lot of planning. Since we work with the network planning part of it, we also work with companies such as AIRCOM International (www.aircominternational.com) out of the U.K. who does a really good job regarding RF. [Note: AIRCOM is know for its abilities in the area of cellular network planning and optimisation. They offer complete solutions including software, consultancy services, competence development services and contracting services. They provide expertise in network technology and strategy, radio planning and optimization, performance engineering; and core, access and transmission planning.] They can do a good job of planning the RF part, and we can match the rest of the network to the projected demand.”

 

 

“I see two dimension to WiMAX dimensions,” says Mortensen. “There’s the fixed part and the roaming part. People have been talking about WiMAX as a potential LTE [Long Term Evolution] or a 4G infrastructure for data. That may happen. It’s not a bad technology. What I think will be more interesting in the short-term, though, is WiMAX used in point-to-point work. For example, we’re dealing with several wireless carriers, and when they first went into an area to cover it, they built really big towers which output a lot of power. Later on, they built shorter towers that were not so environmentally conspicuous. These shorter towers output less power and covered smaller cell areas. The carriers also ‘powered-down’, if you will some of the larger towers.

 

“Now, these same carriers are discovering that, as WiMAX is introduced, it would be a really interesting way to do backhaul of traffic back to their switch,” says Mortensen. “They simply string a big optical pipe to the few big towers in the area, and run WiMAX off of that to connect to the little towers. So now your phone service will goe to a little tower, then the signal is sent from the little tower to the big one via WiMAX, then the big tower connects to a big optical fiber pipe that runs back to the rest of the network. That scenario is looking like a very interesting use of the technology, and it doesn’t have the complicating feature of requiring all of the ‘handoff’ issues to be solved, which makes mobile telephony so difficult and expensive. WiMAX could also be used to do backhaul for WiFi meshes. In any case, WiMAX as a fixed point-to-point technology will be far more popular earlier than will mobile WiMAX.

 

As networks become larger, varied and more dynamic, network operators will doubtless further call upon the software and expertise of companies such as VPIsystems.

 

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