Last week the FCC officially announced its decision to create a national broadband policy. 
While it’s a great idea in theory, not everyone is cheering quite yet. According to a recent article in Telephony, service providers are expressing concern about the time, money and resources they may have to invest up front, not to mention how to make these new services more attractive to customers once the technology has been implemented. I think unless a proper strategy is put in place, the project could become a recipe for waste.
The Washington Post reports that the government has included $7.2 billion in stimulus funds for broadband development, mostly geared toward rural areas, but the same article states that many Americans deem computers “unaffordable” and Internet content as “not relevant to their lives.” Unless the government and providers can work together to change mindsets, this could mean millions of dollars tied up in unused infrastructure. And what good is “broadband for everyone,” if not everyone is taking advantage of it?
The FCC’s target for the national policy is February 2010 and over the next 60 days the public will be able to submit comments to the agency, then reply comments will be open for another 30 days. Hopefully we can come together as a nation of users, legislators and providers to come up with an effective strategy. In the meantime, I can only hope FCC Chairman Michael J. Copps is evaluating network planning strategies to determine the most cost-effective and useful way to deliver on this promise. Maybe that means “broadband for some?”
Earlier this week AT&T announced plans to add 3,000 jobs in 2009, investing $17 - $18 billion this year, with two-thirds of those funds dedicated to expanding wireless and broadband networks.
The focus of this expansion comes as no surprise. Between President Obama’s recent $8 billion broadband pledge and the ever increasing demand for 3G services (can you say iPhone?), AT&T has focused their resources in what they can only hope will be industry sweet spots during the economic downturn.
So what will $18 billion buy you? AT&T will use the funds to expand the 3G network to 20 new markets while adding more than 2,100 cell sites across the United States and using additional spectrum on the 850MHz band, nearly doubling its total 3G network capacity.
Before sinking billions of dollars into the build out, however, AT&T (and its funding organizations) will need to ensure that such a massive expenditure is effectively and efficiently planned for maximum coverage, revenue and network sustainability. Sure it’s great to spend money and we all support job creation, but as the recession continues, it becomes more important than ever for carriers to anticipate demand and design their networks to be lean and mean as they meet that demand.
I just learned that one of my favorite publications, RCR Wireless, has ceased all operations. One of the tragedies of this economy is that good companies and publications are failing. So long, RCR. We’ll miss your fantastic coverage of “all things wireless!”
Telephony has a nice recap of Ciena’s earnings report yesterday. In speaking about Ciena’s revenue drop and the continued decline of carrier capital expenditures, CEO Gary Smith said something that really piqued my interest. Though carriers set their annual budgets last Fall, they have apparently moved to making spending decisions “on a monthly basis.” That is, though budgets are set, carriers have begun reviewing them and their business needs on a monthly basis before spending the appropriated money.
As the carrier spending decision cycle contracts, many other processes - including network planning - must also speed up to enable the best spending decisions. Traditionally, network planning has been done every six, twelve and twenty-four months but this is no longer sufficient. To support the new spending decision process, carriers need to conduct master network planning at least every month, if not every two weeks. Only if network planning is running at the same pace as carrier spending decisions will carriers have the real-time information they need to determine what to spend when to effectively and efficiently support the market adoption of their next generation services.
In this week’s Telephony e-newsletter, Carol Wilson examines the threat vs. opportunity of Internet video. Her analysis is short and sweet, but right on the money - growing consumer demand for high-bandwidth services like on-demand Internet video presents an enormous opportunity for carriers to generate new revenue, but only provided they can support its delivery. This is a huge “but” for some and, as Carol points out, bandwidth caps and metering of services aren’t necessarily the answers to the problem.
Carol wraps up her piece by noting the future opportunity carriers have “to earn a permanent place in the entertainment business, provided they don’t frustrate their consumer audience in the process.” She’s absolutely right and the carriers who we will be reading about in the future as having emerged victorious are those who read her story today and thought, “Let’s start planning now. We’re going to dominate that market.”
While the holy grail of network planning is certainly a just-in-time model, it’s equally important that carriers know what opportunities are coming down the line and what they can and should be doing today to make sure their networks can handle whatever is thrown at them tomorrow.
This week Telephony wrote about some new figures Analysys Mason released on the cost of 4G, bringing in one of the firm’s analysts to weigh in on it. The data concludes that an LTE network can deliver data 3 times as cheaply as some of today’s HSPA networks but Terry Norman, the analyst quoted, so wisely points out that at the rate consumer demand is continuing to climb, even a three-fold increase might not be enough to suffice.
Of particular interest to me, however, was that Terry said the purpose of this study was to give operators a planning tool on which to base their future networks; essentially, he’s suggesting carriers use trending. While this approach is sufficient in theory, it’s been my and my colleagues’ experience that relying only on manual, trend-based planning is time-consuming, costly and prone to human error. Moreover, carrier planning cycles are continually shrinking, moving toward the network planning holy grail of “just-in-time” planning, and carriers are increasingly looking only months ahead to anticipate network demands, knowing how much can and will change over the course of a year.
While the information Terry and his colleagues presented can certainly be interesting and helpful to some areas of carriers’ operations, I can’t help but argue that a real planning tool is necessary today to design the networks of tomorrow and help carriers keep up with ever-changing demands and execute successful new service introductions in the meantime.
In this month’s issue of Telephony, Kevin Fitchard explores a topic that is near and dear to my heart - flat network architectures. The article examines how many carriers are moving toward this structure as a way to more efficiently process the deluge of data that needs to flow through their networks, for the simple reason (even if the technological explanation isn’t so simple) that having a flat architecture reduces the number of “hops” on the network for data, increasing speeds and reducing both network latency and bottlenecks.
I’ve been a proponent of flat networks for quite some time, and thoroughly enjoyed (and agreed with) Kevin’s analysis of why this design is better, as well as the real data he presented from Nokia Siemens - ROI like that is enough to have anyone jumping on the flat bandwagon! But he did raise an interesting point about carriers who are already undergoing network transformations without planning to flatten their architectures. What are they to do? I’ll be interested to see if they choose to take the opportunity, as he suggests starting from scratch, and if LTE really becomes their turning point.
One thing Kevin didn’t explore that I would have liked to read (perhaps a follow-up story?) is an answer to the question, “now what?” For both carriers looking to flatten their existing networks and those who are looking to build from the ground up, how can they do so without crippling their networks in the process and to really get the most benefit from the transformation? Surely using proper network planning in advance of the roll-out and conducting what-if analysis will be critical (those would be some interesting ROI numbers to see, too), but what else can carriers be doing in these penny-pinching times to ensure they and their networks are prepared for whatever the future throws at them?
Record numbers of people descended on the nation’s capital yesterday to witness history, but despite preparations by some of the nation’s largest wireless carriers, networks didn’t seem up to the task of handling all of the visitors and the network traffic they brought with them.
AT&T spent $4 million to increase network capacity in Washington, D.C., and competitor Spring Nextel Corp. also supplemented its network by adding portable cell phone towers. But despite the added network capacity, customer demand was just too high. Verizon Wireless experienced three to five times normal call volume that day, while T-Mobile experienced ten times normal call volume, and people were sending text messages and photos en masse, as well as downloading streaming video. The result? Jammed networks and dropped calls reported around the city throughout the day — Despite pleas from carriers strapped for network capacity.
It seems that despite the last minute effort to supplement their networks, nothing can take the place of proper planning for carriers.
The International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) kicked off yesterday, but even the biggest and flashiest consumer technology show of the year isn’t immune to the economic meltdown happening around us. Attendance is down this year, for both exhibitors and attendees, and the promise of new products at the show hasn’t bolstered performance predictions for tech companies. While scanning for news from Las Vegas, I was particularly struck by the predictions for the wireless industry’s year ahead.
Some analysts are projecting as much as negative 10% growth overall in the mobile industry in 2009, and while smartphone sales are expected to be up, it won’t be enough to save companies looking at major losses. So how do carriers react, especially those in the middle of expansive and costly network transformations? And where can they cut costs enough to help them survive into 2010?
Now more than ever just in time network planning is critical for carriers. With such sudden economic downturns, the ability to respond to network and business demands as they happen can mean the difference between rolling out a network efficiently and becoming a cautionary tale for competitors. Optimizing next-gen networks is one of the greatest opportunities operators have for significant cost savings. All of this being said, I hope that proper planning will help save the wireless industry in 2009.
Just shy of a year ago, I blogged about a massive undersea cable cut that crippled 
connectivity across much of Egypt and India, thought to be caused by a ship’s anchor. I thought for sure this not-so-natural disaster and its devastating results on communications in this part of the world would be a wake-up call to carriers everywhere that they need to focus on disaster planning in 2008.
As we enter the final days of this year, however, it seems everyone didn’t heed the warning. The same line has been damaged again and, while Egypt has been able to restore most of its communications by re-routing services according to the BBC UK, India’s national newspaper reports that Internet services in the country remain severely affected. No one seems to be able to give a firm date for the line’s expected fix.
Bravo to Egypt for learning from its mistakes and clearly planning ahead for the “what if” of a recurrence, but I can’t help but wonder what happened with India’s planning. Considering how critical Internet access is to India and its emerging tech industry, you would think that the country - or at least its tech companies - would have immediately put a plan in place to ensure last January’s connectivity loss didn’t happen again. Perhaps the plan is still being implemented. At least I hope so. Connectivity has become such a critical service to businesses and governments that disaster planning and business continuity cannot be left to chance.
