Christian
Laruelle is our Guest Blogger
for the week, he is the Sales Director Southern EMEA at
Sybase 365. Today he shares his views on “the impact of IPX and LTE on mobile operators
in Africa”.
One of
the key points on the 2012 global mobile agenda is LTE. Only a handful of
African Mobile operators have started
to lay the foundations for the deployment of the Long Term Evolution
technology.
What
does the future hold for LTE on the African continent?
Contrary
to 2G and 3G mobile networks which are built around a mix of technologies, LTE
assumes a full IP network architecture both in the core network and on the
radio network. An independent IPX market survey sponsored by Sybase 365 and
published last year August, demonstrated that Mobile Operators see IPX as being
essential for the deployment of LTE Services.
Over 85
Mobile Operators around the world are using Sybase’s IPX platform for
interconnection of IP-native services like mobile data roaming over GRX, international
MMS, and BlackBerry® Connectivity.
But
making the strategic change from the established circuit-switched technology to
IP-based technology for
traditional
mobile services isn’t all that obvious. After all, these services are usually
running quite well on the legacy platforms so despite the promise of increased
efficiencies and more transparency, the attitude seems to be: if it ain’t broke,
don’t try to fix it.
Should
the African market start to embrace the advantages offered by this new interconnect
strategy for mobile operators?
If so, what are the dependencies?
MPLS
reach: Despite the many investments so far, the major MPLS providers are
rolling out more and more
coverage
across Africa, but it still not exhaustive. This situation prevents many mobile
operators to even consider the possibility of managing different services on
single IP-based network connectivity like IPX. One of the main benefits of IPX,
cost efficiency, is therefore available only to a limited number of countries
in Africa. With the delivery of 5 main undersea cables rolled out in the last
four years and two more planned, Africa will have increased coverage of MPLS across
the continent, reduced latency and cost effective connectivity for all IP based
services.
IPX
connectivity to Africa is increasing as sea cable connectivity is completed to
a greater number of countries each year.
This means that more and more countries are able to benefit from IPX
connectivity over a diversely connected MPLS network each year.
Market
priorities: Across Europe, North America and Asia,
mobile operators are looking at ways to enhance
performance
and security of the essential mobile operator services. At the same time while
achieving cost savings on the connectivity part they are aiming at improving
and rationalizing the management of said services. In Africa the focus is still
on those single mobile services which are essential to the continent’s economic
growth (i.e. Blackberry services, roaming services, messaging, mobile payments,
etc.). IPX connectivity will allow African mobile operators to optimize the
management of different interconnection services in the same fashion as it is
now happening in Asia and Europe
With the
enormous growth of smartphone adoption (especially
since the introduction of the inexpensive Huawei IDEOS phones by several
operators), the data traffic generated by those mobile devices will grow
substantially as users increasingly turn to smartphones for internet
connectivity. Predicting this mobile data usage and capacity planning remains a
challenge in the predominantly pre-paid African subscriber base. The demands on
the capacity are largely dependent on variable top-up times and disposable
income available to the users.
LTE: Unlike the western world, only very few African operators have 4G
networks today; yet LTE could represent the solution to the problem of
household broadband penetration which still sits at about 3-4% and contributes
to the economic development by creating new jobs and interconnection with the
rest of the world. The African governments through the African Union have
announced their broadband initiative is to reach 50% penetration by 2018.
With
more people buying devices requiring mobile Internet, Africa cannot deny a
degree of dependency on mobile
broadband.
As LTE needs excellent IPX connectivity to run optimally, Sybase 365 will play
an important role for African mobile operators.
In
Africa, Sybase 365 has been serving more than 90 operators in 43 countries for
over 8 years
In the
past 18 months, several African operators (small and large) have turned to
Sybase 365 for secure, efficient and cost effective connectivity solutions on
GRX, MMX and Blackberry services and many others are showing excitement and
interest about the possibility of addressing different service needs such as
IPX Voice and Roaming signaling. Sybase 365 is helping them to solve the
connectivity problem and therefore to access new revenue streams from their end
users.
With the
Smartphone as a catalyst to increased data traffic, African mobile operators
will need to organize themselves to deal with this. If too much capacity is
planned for, this could be a serious issue on the bottom line of the operators’
P&L and on the other hand, the quality of service could be impacted in case
of not enough capacity.
Sybase’s
IPX services enables African operators to both increase the quality and
resilience of their connectivity today, while also making them ready for future
LTE services tomorrow. IPX provides one connection that is able to deliver the
various service levels required for roaming data and blackberry connectivity
through signaling and voice today. IPX also enables operators to cope with
peaks in data traffic and plan upgrades in connectivity more efficiently.
Sybase 365 IPX will make you ready for the LTE future today while
delivering real benefits and cost savings to 2G and 3G services.
Sybase 365 will also be attending West and Central Africa Com taking place 13-14th June at the King Fahd Palace - Soleil De Dakar in Senegal. For more information, please visit our website: www.comworldseries.com/wcafrica
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