Industry drivers causing rapid change in IT infrastructure

Innovation - New Communication Technologies
The emergence of new cellular communication technologies, in rapid succession, is fueling unprecedented growth in the communications and mobile technology sectors.  Higher data transfer speeds fuel application availability which drives user demand and forces changes in infrastructure among competing Telecoms. 

Changes in IT infrastructure relate to the following technology developments:
GSM - Considering that the first specification for 'Global System for Mobile communications' was created in 1990 and has spread, by 2006, to over 1 billion users in 200 countries, its acceptance and performance as a high quality voice communications platform is rarely disputed.  The portability of GSM with over 600 carriers supporting the technology makes it the predominant industry architecture.
GPRS – General Packet Radio Service is the step beyond GSM to enable data services allowing the use of email and basic web surfing with a transfer speed at approximately 35Kbps. 
EDGE - Enhanced Data rate for GSM Evolution is as it states a further enhancement of the GSM infrastructure to enable data communication at speeds ranging from 75 to 135kbps.
UMTS – The leading 3G technology today is the Universal Mobile Telecommunication System.  With speeds ranging from 220 to 330kbps, the technology enables Video on Demand, digital TV as well as constant 'go-anywhere' connectivity to the intranet for the business user.
HSDPA – The 'High Speed Downlink Packet Access' is an emerging technology that will bring GSM to the level of broadband.  Ranging from 400 to 700kbps this 3.5G technology offers such opportunity to society that Telco's will eventually face another infrastructure change bringing the world of mobile telephony to indispensable levels. 

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. 

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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.  Without

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.