LTE set to take off

Tech & Business Trends 2015

By Amit Marwah

It would not to be wrong if we say that 2014 has been a year of technological advancements in the country. We expect further evolution of these technologies in 2015.

Customers across the world expect their experience of mobile broadband to be smooth, continuous and rapid. Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology is the most efficient mobile broadband technology for providing an excellent user experience. Although 3G will be the main vehicle of mobile data in India for next year-and-a-half, the country will see advancement of LTE meaningfully in 2015.

LTE offers the highest data rates and shortest latency times. In 2015, LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) will mark the evolution of LTE to even higher user data rates and more network capacity. One of the key features of LTE-A is Carrier Aggregation.

An LTE-Advanced carrier aggregation network can be likened to a multi-lane highway, where adding more lanes allows more cars to travel from A to B. Aggregating frequency carriers allows faster data transmission to an individual user. LTE-A is evolving with a current focus on including the use of unlicensed spectrum and the optimization of mobile broadband networks for the Internet of Things.

LTE-Advanced networks can deliver data to mobile devices at rates most people have never experienced. You may call this a paradigm shift, but as a company our objective is to ensure that LTE-Advanced is faster everywhere.

Another trend expected is the evolution of managed services to “end user service management” and “predictive operations.” Service operations and management is the industry’s most comprehensive solution for delivering excellent mobile broadband service experiences. Service operations and management solution combine customer insights with operations to close the gap between network and service experience.

Moreover, as the demand from customers and consumers is ever-increasing, we expect ‘Predictive Operations’ to grow which helps operators meet the increasing demand for excellent service quality. Predictive operation forecasts degradations in mobile networks up to 48 hours before they affect subscribers and takes appropriate action to prevent degradation of the service. Nokia is the first vendor to introduce predictive operations service in telecom industry.

Growth of automation and customer user analytics is another trend we foresee. iSON which can organize smooth function automatically in a multi-vendor network environment can bring configuration times down from man-months to man-hours and reduce call set-up times which will make a huge difference in speed and quality in 2015. Additionally, Customer Experience Management (CEM) will play a key role in the coming year. CEM gives operators a view of their customers and customer experience, enabling the entire operator organization to take focused action to resolve issues. This will help improve retention and boost revenues through increased data usage.

As traffic continues to grow, mobile broadband operators keep seeking opportunities to provide smooth networks. This requires new network capacity. At the same time, the capacity to provide a great network experience and implement new services quickly is extremely important to drive up revenue.

Telco cloud has the potential to help operators address all these opportunities. We expect Telco cloud systems to grow in 2015, along with SDN cloud offering. Nokia and Juniper Networks teamed up mid this year to extend their SDN and NFV technologies to mobile operators.

In a nutshell, 2015 will see all these technologies progress further and we expect customers and consumers to be far more demanding of the entire ecosystem – whether its quality of network, quality of service and quality of experience.

(The author Amit Marwah is Chief Technology Officer, India Region, Nokia Networks)