Telecom’s typical three-to-five year research and development (R&D) cycle will no longer suffice in an LTE led world.
The “always-on” nature of LTE-enabled devices will require that networks support millions of subscribers and devices, and concurrent sessions, and thousands of Diameter signaling messages per second. As such, vendors’ R&D cycles around LTE technology, Diameter signaling and related charging, billing, and user authentication and authorization should hover around 18 to 24 months.
A key component of this is for vendors to interoperate among each others product sets and updates. Otherwise, operators will struggle to roll out new LTE tariff options at the pace the digital economy demands - and, frankly, at a pace that ensures sustainability on the supplier side of the equation. In addition, they will lack the network equipment to scale at the pace of LTE growth.
Right now, interoperability remains a major concern. As the TM Forum said in its Policy Everywhere: Acting on Network Intelligence report, “Leading the list [of policy implementation barriers], not surprisingly, are issues around integration. Policy control is anything but a standalone capability, and its strength comes from its potential position as the bridge between the BSS and OSS and the network, sourcing information from a variety of places and directing a way forward at tremendous scale.
“To play this role it must integrate with a variety of systems, databases, network elements and sometimes even devices. Since most service providers’ network and systems infrastructure is a collection of multi-vendor, both legacy and new and sometimes highly customized elements, and business and network data integrity is often found wanting, integration is bound to be a huge challenge.”
Today, the industry is often skirting real R&D efforts with “band-aids” such as adding incremental features to existing products - like Diameter routing functions in Mobility Management Entities (MMEs), or creating proprietary interfaces between policy and charging systems in lieu of standards-based interfaces. However, these strategies will ultimately prove impractical as the network traffic will grow enough to make them cost-prohibitive. For example, adding enough mobile packet core capacity to handle Diameter signaling will become impossible, and the large majority of operators will need to scale policy and charging systems at separate rates, limiting the capabilities of proprietary interfaces.