LTE North America 2012 Highlights

LTE North America

13-15 November 2012 Dallas

www.alanquayle.com/blog

© 2012 Alan Quayle Business and Service Development

Structure • Managing Interference and Handover Between Macro and Small Cells, Ahmad Armand, Ph.D., Staff

Vice President, CTO Office

o Review of some of the Heterogeneous Network deployment challenges

• Creating an Appropriate WiFi Offload Framework to Address Capacity Shortfalls and Ensure

Seamless Connectivity, Ahmed Bencheikh, VP, Wireless Engineering & Technology Development,

Time Warner Cable Inc.

o Review of TWC’s role in providing small cell WiFi coverage over their access network

• Rating Engine (3G/4G): Creating Winning Offers for MVNO Subscribers, Antonio Mendoza

o The MVNO Summit that ran in parallel felt much more customer focused, and LATAM appears to have lots of

opportunities across all customer segments compared to the US where the focus is the unbanked customers the

incumbents do not want to target

• LTE Roaming Bands

o Given the LTE band diversity, 800MHz and 2600MHz are likely to emerge as the ‘international’ roaming bands for

North American (mainly US) handsets

• 4k Video is here!

o Sony shows how video will continue to gobble up capacity

• Humanity and MVNOs: The Importance of Money Money. David Glickman, Ultra Mobile

o I remain circumspect on the scope of most operators attempted to move beyond simply being a payment option for

mobile content stores their customers use, but Ultra Mobile shows how to deliver a much more compelling and

customer relevant offer using technology that works today – that is no mention of NFC

Structure

• Does LTE Itself Necessarily Create Increased Revenue? Creating a

Tangible Business Case, Gennady Sirota, VP MITG, Cisco Systems

o I include this to highlight the misconceptions out there as the marketing echo-

chamber encourages weak or incorrect ideas to be repeated

• A few slides on the Diameter signaling mess – have the standards bodies

got it wrong?

o On chatty devices and the video explosion - go and talk to the fixed ISPs

they’ve been dealing with this for much longer

• Improving customer experience using rich communication services,

Solyman Ashrafi, Vice President, Product Management

o I include this to highlight the challenge RCS is facing, with the lack of focus on

the real-world customer adoption issues

A theme for the conference was Heterogeneous Networks and a focus on RAN issues. This was definitely a more engineering focused conference. It reminded

me of when I first joined BT 20 years ago and we would waste millions on solving problems the suppliers were solving.

A Heterogeneous Network includes a range of antenna powers and technologies like Distributed Antenna Systems as well as WiFi. For most of us

we already use HetNets: WiFi when we can, and 3G/LTE when we can not.

HetNets have a handover problem as the small cell is generally operating within the macrocell. My view is operators should offer a cheaper WiFi-like service, move around and it stops

working, only if you subscribe to the premium service do you always connect to the Macro cell and it works while you move around. Only when we’re driving in a car would be notice.

HetNets have a number of challenges but are being pushed by several vendors, while many operators look on with some concern on the cost/complexity –

especially as customers happily use HetNets today with no operator intervention. Another challenge is the backhaul to all these small cells – it gets very expensive!

HetNets have some way to go in achieving full mobility. Its impact on the customer may but quite small – so its really an operator issue. Which given the

cost/complexity is delaying many operators or limiting the application to solving capital city hot-spot issues, where cost / brand impact can cover the cost.

Interesting opportunity for MSOs to use all the active powered nodes in their access network to also power WiFi nodes.

MSOs tend not to compete with each other, only with Telcos – which are the target customer base for this small cell offer, so there are some commercial issues here.

Note these are all requirements to replicate the experience most customers have today in wherever WiFi connectivity is available and they have access to it, the device simply connects no questions asked, at home, at school, in the office, at friends, at the coffee shop or airport lounge.

This is what I thought was interesting in using all their power and access infrastructure to support WiFi small cells throughout a neighborhood. Its only a partial solution though, it doesn’t replace the WAN mobile network as its coverage is limited by the location of their

cable plant, but does show that out door WiFi availability is likely to grow.

The MVNO summit that ran in parallel felt much more customer focused and as a mobile customer I felt much more in-tune with the issues being discussed.

These points are critical, the race to the bottom is short lived as MVNOs live on a knife-edge margin so customer focus is critical to their survival.

The offer needs to adapt and not screw me as I make changes, like triple charging within a month for a change between 2 data plans! The difference between the MVNO Summit and LTE NA was quite stark. One focused on technology, the

other on the customer.

Good graphic on where the roaming bands are likely to exist for North American LTE phones, though even this is a simplification of the LTE band situation.

As Sony pointed out the resolution of video is only going to increase, so even as compression technology improves the capacity will continue to grow.

I felt this presentation really captured the frustration many customers have in the US market.

Devices and Plans – that’s it…

This is so true!

US Telecom Regulation is very weak, LLU (Local Loop Unbundling) was made unworkable, and most MVNOs mop up what the big guys do not want.

This is a simply yet powerful offer – a mobile and a linked debit card – no wishful thinking about NFC – simple and practical

Great practical example of it’s the offer not the technology

I’m picking on this presentation, there were a number I could have chosen that repeat misconceptions in the “marketing echo-chamber”

This confuses 2 things: the customer has paid the operator for internet access which mean the operator is legally obliged to provide it; the operator is free to provide additional

services, they did in the past, but failed to keep up with the rate of innovation. This is a great situation for operators they can charge $20 per month for 200MB from the demand

generated by services they do not provide. The above positioning should be stopped its selfish, self-serving and wrong.

Don’t get me started on the use of the term Monetization, or the 2 sided-model (B2B2C), or the lack of quantification… its marketing BS at its worst.

OTT providers are not going to pay for access that’s what their CDN provider does, and customers have paid their service provider for internet access. The OTT apps adapt to the

capacity available and are generally offered best effort. As a regular Skype user that service works much better than my AT&T voice service. So I’m not going to pay extra for Skype to make it ‘Telco grade’ as ‘Telco-grade’ is sub OTT-grade in my experience. There are many opportunities but look to existing partners and enterprise customers first, rather than this

ill-thought through situation.

Location – its free on the 1 B Apple and Android devices Roaming – that’s why I use WiFi wherever I go as roaming fees are a rip-off

Presence – I’m always connected to the network unless I’m on a plane, its availability that matters and we have communication escalation, IM/SMS to ask if its OK to talk.

QoS matters more for enterprise than B2B2C as they’re running their business on the network Operators can not keep up with the rate of innovation on content and applications.

This is simply weak ,contrived, wishful thinking – there should be quality filters on slideware!

Did the standards guys mess up in selecting Diameter? Should the mobile guys have talked to the fixed ISPs to understand how they coped with all the chatty data

hungry devices on their networks?!?

Why do we have this Diameter mess, shouldn’t standards have avoided this, isn’t this their role? Do we need a redesign to stop all the device chatter going into the

core of the network?

I was surprised on the circumspection around RCS in the US, and for those promoting RCS a lack of knowledge about the competitive environment.

This is wrong, for example Skype delivers a quite nice integrated experience across all these categories, and for Viber, Tango, Whatsapp I simply do not need an integrated experience, each has its purpose.

Operators need to use the services their customers are using to realize the miscnceptions.

Joyn still has zero consumer awareness and is simply a confusing brand – customers expect operator communication services to interwork, you don’t need a

brand for that.

Look at all those codecs! RCS is designed by committee in an era when you only need a team of 5 people. We’re killing our industry by not adapting to the new

development paradigm.

It’s a me-too, but that’s OK as long as it interoperates from day one and had a great UI/UE.

In an era where services win / loose on UI, OTTs are running rings around such an OLD UI

Yawn!

The obsession with presence shows its telecom engineers at play – look at how people use the tools – they escalate to an IM chat or a call, the message, “can we chat?” removes the need

for all this contrived availability controls – which most people will never use.

Yawn, Apple’s been doing this for quite some time…

Its just a laggard me-too, yet the go to market is critical. It must work across all operators in a country, it must not be promoted until all operators are doing it,

and we must obsess on the UI. Most device manufacturers do not care about the RCS UI is way down their priorities. Telcos are not focused on the complete user experience, rather hoping a good enough UI and some interop will be enough – it

will not!

A Few Final Thoughts

• Enterprise – really what’s changed with 4G is mobile network is now adequate for corporate

applications

o With 3G is was OK but congestion made if a real pain to work outside of real fixed broadband

o And enterprise customers will pay for QoS, not an OTT video provider running on the economy of free

that’s already paid its CDN provider.

• Mobile guys need to talk to the fixed guys – do not right off their architecture because its not

mobile

o Offer data connectivity that homes to a base station not roams, many times I loose connection anyway

so data roaming feels more like data tethering anyway

o Diameter signaling mess – chatty devices are NOT new talk to the fixed guys

• RCS, we’re not tackling the real issues rather focused on the geeky engineering stuff which should

be left to 5 good people not rooms full of standards people

o Obsessing about the complete user experience not just what’s on the device but how that first come

across it and drop the messy Joyn logo it adds no value just confuses

• The big mistake is for the operator is to pay for their employees’ mobile services, if the people at

the conference had to pay their own bills they would have a much different view on the what

consumers really think.

o When I explain the frustration on being triple billed for data people look at me blankly – if they’d

experienced it and then say couldn’t afford to pay for a meal out that weekend they would have a much

better appreciation of what consumers are facing and the relevancy risk operators are facing.