Imagine the future of telecommunications: a future in which services are tailored to each subscriber's own unique requirements; a future where subscribers get the type of content they want on their mobile devices; a future where subscribers are provided with pro-active assistance as soon as - or even before - problems are even encountered in their daily usage. All while operators can optimize and allocate bandwidth to the most used applications or to the higher-paying VIP users in real-time. This would be a future where communication would be a flexible and lively experience for all. This looks like a dream quite far from today's reality of mobile telecommunications.
There are some questions that rise from this scenario: could this future not just be hypothetical; but reality? What kind of technology would networks rely on to achieve this and what would be its requirements? For now, only some have an idea; yet the buzz on the subject continues to grow.
Talking about the challenges
Mobile services are undergoing a period of unprecedented change. The current offering that includes not only voice service but also text-messaging and email, video streaming and ring-tones. Ultimately, the integration of all these services presents serious challenges to service quality. Today's operators face different challenges that prevent them from crossing this NextGen gap:
- First, as service offerings constantly change, subscribers likewise become more and more volatile by often switching carriers to take advantage of the latest features, handset, etc. A key issue that operators have to focus on in order to retain subscribers is a subscriber's overall satisfaction. This satisfaction can come from either dealing with the operator when a problem arises or it can also come from having excellent experiences with the different services offered by the carrier. Some examples include: streaming a movie, browsing a news site using WAP, downloading new ringtones, sending a picture or video to a friend, or getting traffic directions. This concept is often named "Quality of Experience" (QoE), which for subscribers, is often low and tends to be the primary reason for subscribers' churn.
- The second main challenge lies in preventing the loss of revenues from subscribers not using content-based, charged services. This can happen for many reasons. For example, if a subscriber cannot send MMS because of a provisioning problem, or if a subscriber can not receive MMS because of wrong MMSC settings in the phone, or even if the subscriber thinks that WAP does not provide interesting service. All of these issues all have a deep impact on the subscribers' Quality of Experience and until recently were impossible to pinpoint due to the lack of a reliable subscriber centric measurement method.
- Lastly, once subscribers are retained and able to use the carrier's services, the ultimate challenge is to integrate new management applications and new content to truly operate the network as a production asset and create new sources of revenues. These applications will be the framework of the NextGen mobile networks, but without knowing precisely what runs in the network, without having any information about the subscribers, the context and the content, it is almost impossible to deploy such applications.
To face these challenges, a new technology has recently emerged: the Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology applied to mobile data networks. DPI is the culmination of a number of innovations throughout the years.
