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Cell phone service providers and Internet service providers are expanding their subscriber base at a robust growth rate. Consequently, the growth of mobile network is taking place at a very rapid pace with 9 mn plus subscribers being added every month. If they were not been able to provide a minimum decent quality in all their services, they wouldn't have reached where they are now. But can they afford to be complacent on the existing quality of services in a market that is increasingly becoming quality conscious, especially when service providers are gearing up for 3G and WiMax services soon, and handset manufacturers are planning to manufacture cost-effective high-end devices for the Indian market? No. It will certainly be a death knell for them, if they do not focus on improving the quality of service to international standards.

Meet QoS
Trai has been monitoring the level of congestion at the Point of Interconnection (PoI) between various SPs on a monthly basis to ensure seamless interconnection between them. The benchmark notified by Trai in the QoS regulation of July 2005 for this parameter is <0.5%, which means out of 200 calls between two operators only one call should face congestion problem. But when we see the current level of congestion, call drops, lack of voice clarity, etc, service providers have to go miles to reach this benchmark. The monitoring report reveals that in a number of areas, the degree of congestion between the operators is alarming, as the level of congestion between the networks of different operators is far more than this benchmark in a number of cities.

The recent spat between the two statutory authorities in the telecom sector, Trai and TDSAT, on inaction against erring mobile operators over network congestion, is yet another reminder to all of us that required QoS needs to be ensured at all cost. But, when compared to the QoS enjoyed by subscribers in developed telecom market like the US, Japan, and South Korea, Indian service providers have long way to go. Spending on test and measurement by service providers are meager. T&M solution providers are offering cost effective solutions for testing services offered by operators.

Worthy Investment
SPs, ISPs, and other telecom equipment users in India are not spending the right amount of money for improving quality of services compared to developed telecom markets. Increased competition is likely to force the players to spend sufficient amount on QoS. Year 2009 is going to change the whole dynamics of service providers. Subscribers have the choice for any services they need. This will automatically push SPs and ISPs to invest on the right solution that is scalable. But only those who have invested proactively will steal the show.

In the US, service providers have the same number of customers as in India but they buy the testers before the network is deployed and test the network thoroughly and periodically, and they spend approximately $4 bn, whereas in India SPs are spending a mere $120 mn. Number portability and more competition from new operators will prompt existing operators to improve the service, which will ultimately increase the demand for testers.

The crisis is a wake up call for operators, and an opportunity for T&M solutions providers. Nowadays, it is expected that enterprises will increasingly use data intensive applications like videoconferencing for cutting travel costs. This certainly increases business opportunity for T&M players. Increasing network complexity due to multiple networks or technologies from service providers and applications traversing from one end to another end of the customer network necessitates complex management solutions for operators. Increasing deployment of disparate traffic like data and time-sensitive applications like VoIP, videoconferencing, etc, also warrants complex management solutions. There is definitely increasing need, stated or unstated, for T&M solutions, and therefore increasing business opportunities for vendors as well.

There is a strong drive in the telecom industry to reduce cost of operations and T&M solutions come as the most convenient tool to achieve it. Therefore, if more and more enterprises transition toward usage of new and advanced telecommunications services, it would be the driver for the SPs and ISPs to position their offer. Network infrastructure, per se, and services offered remain the same. For example, to offer video- conferencing services, the network should support these services. Now with more and more enterprises starting to use them, they might strike SLAs with operators for the same.

Technology Trends
This is obviously a very wide area and vendors are likely to focus on the two market segments of manufacturing and service testing. In manufacturing there is a trend to reduce test time, but nowadays companies try to limit testing to the absolute minimum. It means that in manufacturing very often only non-call mode measurements are performed, as it allows manufacturers to both tune/calibrate phones, and do a verification of the tuning. There are still manufacturers who require a final test with a call setup at the end of the process.

Experts panel

Alamuri Sitaramaiah, GM, Sales, Fluke Networks, India HS Bhaskar, country manager, Spirent Communications India John William, head, operations, Comtek Solutions India Sunil Grover, vice president, AIMIL V Mahadevan, country manager, sales, Agilent Technologies, India

In service testing the trend is for concentration of service centers, which means that these big 'service factories' have many smaller satellite centers that are collecting defective phones for these big centers to repair. The test requirements are obviously different for the satellite centers as they usually would require very simple test equipment, like 2201. These are also cheaper test equipments. Whereas the service factories need throughput, perform calibration, etc, requiring testers like a 3100 or 4400.

The telecom industry has been seeing large ticket investments in two broad areas-migration to 3G cellular networks and IP-based data networks (broadband, WiMax, MPLS VPN, Metro Ethernet). When it comes to data networks, core to the T&M deployment is monitoring and troubleshooting the network performance as well as successful delivery of applications over the network. The network may vary in the technologies deployed in the access and core network, but all customers invariably need performance in clearly demonstrated SLAs.

In the IP domain, telecom T&M trends will closely follow what customers are looking for-how to make it faster, cheaper, and better. Solutions have to be efficient and cost-effective in monitoring and improving application delivery, improve reliability, and effect faster resolution of problems faced on converged networks that carry disparate traffic like data and real-time applications like VoIP. The demand for mobile testers and broadband testers is increasing for testing 3G networks and IPTV. As the network expansion is happening very much in India there will be demand for mobile and IPTV testers.

When we see the future trends, testing will really become more chip specific in manufacturing. For instance, you will have to test a Qualcomm chipset that is different than an Infineon or TI chipset. On the other hand there will be new standards that will have to be tested. India is currently introducing WCDMA, the US is talking about LTE and China wants to introduce TD-SCDMA. But these trends will be shaped up in the years to come.

Choose the Right Way
While spending the right amount of money on T&M solutions to meet QoS benchmarks set by Trai, operators should carefully choose the right T&M solutions for their requirement. Though it is tough to pinpoint the criteria they should consider, and this really depends on the applications, some parameters like testing speed and measurement accuracy are a fundamental consideration.

The more meaningful consideration today is the QoE (Quality of Experience) which is the user experience of a particular network service. The operators should look toward solutions where QoS and QoE are measured together. This is one of the major criteria to choose a product. Besides these, the fundamentals of choosing a test and measurement vendor and its items still remains the same.

The upgradation and modularity of measurement platform, ease-of-use, automated test scripts, one button test, robust design, application, calibration and repair support are some of the major criteria to choose the product and vendor. Company's core competence, profile and its competency in India should never be discounted in the choice.

Operators should focus on SLAs that demonstrate conclusively the QoS agreed upon with the customer. Hence, solutions should help service providers monitor baseline trend and QoS, and troubleshoot by segmenting the problem. It has to help arriving at the root cause of the problems in as little time as possible.

Data networks across wireline and wireless networks are vulnerable to unknown and unexpected challenges. This will immediately affect data throughput which is connected to direct/indirect revenue. Henceforth, service providers have to ensure that any hardware/software going into their network is tested rigorously. This includes negative and white-box testing. They have to use QoS testers to test the speech quality, call drop, call lost, and call connectivity for international customers when they come to India, and SMS delays and errors.

Operators also have to consider if they get a complete solution or they need to invest in SW development, whether they need to put different solutions together to a system, and whether the company offering the solution is working in this market segment for a long time. Obviously getting solutions from a single supplier saves integration time, and is more beneficial.

Network management solutions for operators should cover two broad strategies. First, a set of tools that allow network engineers or managers to react to problems experienced on the network by users, and resolve them. Second, a set of tools that allow proactive monitoring of IT infrastructure and that covers availability, usage and response time issues on the IT infrastructure. Companies should stay proactive to validate what goes in their network and choose solutions accordingly.

The following should be considered while choosing a T&M partner: vendors' focus and competency; their commitment toward the market; vendors' local capability like sales, support, repair and calibration; vendors' product offerings, support and warranty; and product's interoperability and scalability.

Challenges
At present companies probably underestimate the value of having proper working phones in their networks. For example, satellite service centers. If these are not performing tests, it could easily happen that perfectly working phones get into the repair cycle, which would cost a lot of money. So it is better to do some testing upfront to avoid having working phones in the repair cycle. The biggest challenge for operators is to make a valid business case, and justify investments on T&M solutions.

Ability in correlating customer satisfaction/service improvement to tool capabilities and attributing improved revenues is the need of the hour as it can help prioritize investments into right T&M tools.

To address the challenges that operators face in choosing a T&M vendor, it is worth noting the challenges that they face in their operations.

• Expensive data services: A major problem for operators is that wireless data services are expensive to deliver and complex to manage, particularly for scale of operations like in India.
• Mobile alliances: Preferred roaming partners threatening operators' valuable international roaming business.
• Perception of QoS vs reality: Satisfactory customer experience is important while measuring QoS.
• Non-traditional branded competitors like Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, ESPN, Skype, etc, are becoming a threat.
• Mobile number portability: Whenever it is implemented in India, it will allow the customer to change operators without change of number, and they expect user churn due to QoS issues, which will force operators to give increased focus to T&M solutions.
• Competition with DTH: Wireline operators offering triple-play services have to compete with DTH and cable operators, and should provide better user QoE.

Therefore, the challenges that ISP or SP have in choosing a T&M vendor is the choice of a variety of test support in the products, and the technology support for the product. Considering this, operators are taking the mixed approach as their measurement solutions buildup. One group does the basic installation and testing, and another group does the detailed troubleshooting in the network, and testers are procured accordingly. Anticipating the need for the number of testers; training engineers to use these testers; and using these testers to their fullest capability are some of the challenges that operators face nowadays. And, operators have to invest proactively and should have the highest level of in-house advanced TAC. This is where very few operators excel and many stay behind.

Highly scalable networks to support such a huge density of subscribers pose a major challenges in meeting the QoS and QoE requirements. The real challenge is to have the network that meets the OoS and QoE under all the loading conditions of a network. This kind of requirement needs self healing optical network with extremely high grade of services. Besides this, maintaining such transport network in the developing country environs of dig-outs for new infrastructure like roads is a challenge.

Road Ahead
Improved customer service as a means of product differentiation and thereby customer satisfaction, retention, and lowering operational costs are the basic drivers. In the telecom space, India has been witnessing a rapid growth of investments in T&M over the last couple of years. Telecom growth in the country is mainly driven by increasing subscriber-base in the GSM/GPRS market, DSL Internet growth, operators gearing toward 3G, WiMax and triple-play services, and R&D investments in new emerging technologies including 3G, WiMax, and LTE.

With service providers looking forward to bring next generation technologies to present day, it will be an exciting year for T&M players to bank on providing innovative solutions. Lots of initiatives like Bharti Airtel launching an IPTV solution, the government opening up 3G spectrum, and WiMax being deployed effectively are being taken. This means that all of us will need more bandwidth. The overall data bandwidth requirement ratio between big corporates to a common man is changing and QoS is taking center stage. In India, traditionally, any change in technology has been extremely beneficial. In rapidly changing technologies, it is extremely critical for service providers to have right partnerships with next generation technology companies.

In 2008, before the economic meltdown started, the big driver for growth in T&M for telecom were from strong investments in manufacturing, deployment and new technologies (design and R&D).

One of the key growth drivers in 2009-10 will be the wireless boom and digital convergence on mobile. All services like Internet banking, stock trading, Web surfing, and videoconferencing are moving toward the mobile networks. These services can be picked up by the user if proven for reliability and QoS. This is what drives the growth in the telecom market. This requirement is a big reason to have the measurement solutions in place to baseline these technologies for user requirements.

The stated requirements for operators puts tremendous pressure on equipment manufacturers to provide full capabilities and upgrades to the value added services in their equipments. NEMs have to put sizable earnings into their R&D and manufacturing to meet these quality requirements. Operators and NEMs are not spending money on testers and are using low cost manpower to get the work done, which results in poor mobile speech quality and other problems.

As the network expansion is going on and becoming more complex the tester demand will also grow. In India, we can clearly expect the auctioning of WCDMA. In general, each new technology gives an opportunity to grow.

Most operators in India are transitioning from the circuit switched core to the flexible, scalable and resilient core based on IP protocols. To enable this core, the operators are building the LAB environment for the POC testing of the devices. The aim is to deploy rigorously tested high availability (toward 99.99999%) solutions. No wonder most of the operators are talking about moving toward IMS access technology in the near future.

Kannan K
kannan@cybermedia.co.in

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