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Fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) is one of the most important trends taking place in the telecommunications industry today. This is because it promises to unify streaming media, multimedia, legacy public switched telephone network (PSTN), IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) and Web services onto a common network infrastructure. The resulting network environment will offer all players the opportunity for rapid and inexpensive application enrollment across a common IP infrastructure.
While all players benefit from FMC, end users are the ultimate beneficiaries. This is because FMC promises to provide end users with access to voice, video and data services from any location, at any time, using any mobile or wireline device and any available access method or network. With that said, the only way service providers and content providers will be able to fulfill FMC’s promise is to replace the vertical silos of their legacy architectures that have comprised their networks and supported their services to date.
The challenges facing service providers as they replace their legacy silo architectures can be overcome using open service delivery architectures and by defining a unified policy and identity management layer on top of the IP transport layer. This is made possible by creating and implementing open, standardsbased interfaces between those layers.
BUILDING NEXT-GEN FMC NETWORKS
Service providers must meet several requirements with their next-generation FMC networks. Ensuring high service quality and subscriber quality of experience (QoE) will require intelligent admission control, while session quality of service (QoS) and efficient network utilization will require real-time bandwidth management. In addition, dynamic bandwidth adjustment will be necessary to enable policy-based dynamic traffic engineering, including the ability to create and resize multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) label switched paths (LSPs) in response to subscriber and application requests. These same features form the core of the policy and resource admission control subsystem that play a major role in Juniper’s strategy for building next-generation FMC-based networks. The same features are under definition by leading standards bodies including 3GPP, ETSI TISPAN and PacketCable 2.0.
Juniper delivers infrastructure solutions that enable three key elements that service providers require of the FMC environment:
Service Velocity
- inserting new services in days rather than years.
Network Monetization
- providing service providers with the network intelligence and identity management they need to be part of new emerging revenue sharing models.
Operational Efficiency
- using a common operating system and carrier-grade reliable equipment.
Service providers require all of the above in order to increase their profitability in an environment in which transport and access technologies and devices are expected to continue to rapidly evolve for the foreseeable future.
Historically, the old networking model had a hierarchy with well- defined roles between four players: content providers, handset providers, service providers and customers. While these players and many more will continue to exist and interact in the next-generation, user-driven, converged world, the revenue sharing between them is going to be much less distinct as FMC evolves.
To remain part of the revenue chain as next-gen services evolve, service providers must offer differentiated value that helps to ensure an enhanced and assured end-user experience. To that end, network intelligence will play a key role in helping service providers continue to have a relevant role in the delivery of next-gen services. This is because the leap from 3G to next-generation networks is one from hierarchical hybrid networks to open and distributed all-IP networks.
This new model moves away from the legacy operator-controlled and operator-specific environments towards neutral, dynamic and flexible environments in which users are able to exercise more and more control over their services. To enable this type of environment, service providers must equip their networks with the necessary intelligence that enables them to control identity management and security while designing unified policy management.
As service providers meet the above requirements, their efforts will spawn ubiquitous broadband services that take only days or weeks to develop. These services will be launched into social networks and open Web 2.0 or IMS environments. This in turn will enable service providers to increase average revenue per user (ARPU), customer stickiness and service velocity.
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