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| The rapidly expanding mobile telephony market is driven by both commercial and consumer demand for a wide variety of services among both developed and emerging markets. Service as well as Application availability has emerged in just over 15 years to challenge the traditional fixed line and cable communication networks for ubiquity and customer usability. Infrastructural shelf-lives have been challenged by growth in new technologies such as GSM, CDMA, GPRS, EDGE and UMTS which have given rise to the creation of parallel networks and the need for convergence.
Unlike other industries where networks serve to enable the transfer of valuable information in the coordination of businesses processes the Telco network is essential to its core competence. One could say that 'the Telco is the network' and a higher industry standard of performance and throughput is essential. Given that the future of 'Mobile' is 'ubiquitous high speed connectivity' the importance of reliable infrastructure is growing all the more acute among Telecom's executives. |
Innovation - Application Availability
3G infrastructures are enabling vast opportunities for application, content and service availability which in turn drives competitive advantage among Telecoms. Services turn the mobile station into both an entertainment as well as productivity-enhancement tool for both business and private consumers. Services can include: 3D interactive gaming, digital TV, video on demand, CD quality sound as well as constant connectivity to customers, suppliers, internal processes, etc. The development of these applications pushes the Telco's further toward infrastructure rebuilds and enhancements.
Market Growth
Demand for mobile services is global. The Financial Times reported in July 2006 that mobile phone sales in India had risen by 100% in the previous 2 years bringing the number of users in India to over 100 million making it the World's fifth nation to have over 100 million mobile subscribers. In 2006 other nations to cross the benchmark were Russia in February with 130m users, Japan in January with 141m users, the US in January with 170m users and China which at the time of writing this has a reported 374m users.
While businesses still tend to be cautious over security in mobile platforms, the versatility and new productivity gains achieved with cellular technologies is unprecedented and dramatically enhances worker efficiency among multiple sectors. Examples include: local government municipalities such as police, public transport maintenance as well as the insurance and IT sectors as well as in sales and technical support fields.
Demand for mobile connectivity and services forces providers to invest in capacity. Whether the need is to increase geographical coverage through the addition of base stations and radio networks or to increase the availability of services and content delivery, the net result is to force the service provider to enhance their networks with more bandwidth and greater reliability. This in turn drives the need for network monitoring and distributed tap solutions that cut costs, improve response times and enable widespread network visibility.
Technology Convergence - Mergers and Acquisitions
Like any other enterprise, Mobile Telecoms find Mergers &Acquisitions to be another cause of network and technology convergence. M&A activity in this space is a global phenomenon. The larger Telcos tend to operate across multiple regions while individual regions suffer significant saturation. As Telco's invest heavily in hardware and emerging technologies their profitability often fall short creating acquisition opportunities for the larger carriers wanting additional subscribers and market share.
The effect on the network is often a partial redesign and reimplementation of standardized equipment to ensure constant connectivity and reliability. This in turn affects the monitoring solutions adopted.
How VSS monitoring delivers secure and passive monitoring
Competition
The battle among mobile telecoms for signed-up users is fierce. Competing over network coverage, new services, phone types and minutes-plans is widespread in every international market.
Telecommunications carriers operate massive global networks that require huge amounts of expensive hardware. If the concentration of carriers leads to fewer companies operating fewer distinct networks, there'll be less need for equipment.
Issues
The gulf between Reality and where they need to be
1. inadequate systems and scope of change
2. change implementation costs
3. time to implement if time (to comply) is an issue - maybe associated penalties
4. Intl / regional management structure may not enable easy change implementation
The UMTS transport network is required to handle high data traffic. A number of factors were considered when selecting a transport protocol: bandwidth efficiency, quality of service, standardization stability, speech delay sensitivity and the permitted maximum number of concurrent users. In the UMTS network, ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) is defined for the connection between UTRAN and the core network and may also be used within the core network. In addition to the IMT-2000 frame many new standards will be integrated as part of the next generation mobile systems. Bluetooth and other close range communication protocols and several different operating systems will be used in mobiles. Internet will come to mobiles with WAP, i-mode and XML protocols. 3G development has helped to start the standardization and development of large family of technologies.
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As Mobile Telecoms open their infrastructure to IP networks and the entire world outside the modern communications phenomenon becomes as susceptible to security threats and performance challenges as any other traditional network. The need for monitoring and inline threat detection is as vital to the security and performance of the network as it is to the perceived quality and competitive advantage of the Telco organization.
While malicious malware propagates the radio network and vulnerabilities in the core weaken performance, the requirement for IDS and Analyzer solutions are extensive and continually growing as technologies evolve. The use of VSS monitoring's Distributed Aggregator Taps which leverage a scalable bank of monitoring servers over multiple networks of different speed and type creates vast performance advantages as well as ROI and cost-benefit awakenings throughout the Telco industry.
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The above diagram shows how a mobile network infrastructure can be monitored to achieve deployment and operating cost reductions as well as immediate response times to troubleshooting and security incidents.
Mobile network operators have been accustomed to proprietary systems and closed networks. With the deployment of GPRS and UMTS networks, they are now confronted by an unfamiliar world of open systems and vast open networks, where anyone with a PC or mobile device has easy access to the hardware, software, and knowledge needed to compromise security and disrupt communications.
In order to monitor effectively and ensure security as well as comply with relevant regulations mobile carriers are implementing network taps to support failsafe and simultaneous monitoring of IDS and analyzer tools.
Network Taps & Distributed Solutions
Considering the extent to which new 3G systems in the Telco environment need to be failsafe and secure from outside threat the choice of network tap over any other data collection method is of critical importance. As 3G analyzers are expensive and the need to capture data from multiple locations is extensive, the only real cost effective solution is a distributed tap that centralizes the monitoring servers. This further supports the simultaneous deployment of monitoring tools.
VSS monitoring's distributed data collection tools are changing the architecture of network monitoring. The deployment of these tools enables inline monitoring as well as capture of all available data from span ports throughout the core and distribution networks. This enables a distributed data collection systems that centralizes the monitoring servers creating widespread network visibility while reducing the cost of those server deployments. Analyzers, IDS and Forensics tools are especially expensive when deployed in the distributed architecture suggested by those vendors. These costs are experienced through hardware, software licenses and annual maintenance of each. The VSS monitoring distributed taps enable the convergence and simultaneous usage of these tools while radically reducing their costs.
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