Enhanced mobile services in Asia are moving at breakneck speed, and this is due to the rollout of LTE. For example, all three South Korean mobile operators have advanced their service offerings and are at the early stages of offering Voice over LTE (VoLTE). In fact, over the past few months LG Uplus, South Korea’s smallest mobile provider unveiled its own LTE-A Network, which claims to offer “around twice the speed possible through regular LTE.”
All of this activity, coupled with Asia’s mobile consumers who are becoming more tech-savvy and sophisticated, means that there need to be a more intense focus on network speed, quality and the end-user experience. All of these items are critical to success as more advanced services, such as VoLTE, are offered.
This can be accomplished by ensuring that the actual end-to-end performance of the network is working properly, deliver significant network performance information and accomplish these tasks across multi-vendor and multi-technology networks. This is critical as mobile operators seek complete visibility, and information, about the performance of their networks.
As network operators level the playing field by rolling out LTE services, they look to differentiate themselves. Network performance is one way that can deliver upon the business needs and ensure customer satisfaction.
Asian mobile operators can often find that their carrier Ethernet and MPLS equipment is often lacking the performance assurance features that enable them to gain an end-to-end view of services across the network. End-to-end network performance linked to highly sensitive radio parameters -- such as packet loss, jitter, delay variation and throughput -- are critical elements to the success of the LTE user experience.
Presently, many operators guarantee, or assure, performance simply by over-dimensioning. Typically, a Tier-1 carrier might ensure that its backhaul links will not run at over 60% utilization. As business models change and operators look to increased LTE deployment, and network sharing scenarios, this over-dimensioning has to change as it will become economically unsustainable.