The mobile money revolution

04 January 2011

Keith Dyer speaks to Monitise’s Chief Commercial Officer, Lee Cameron, about the development of mobile money services in 2011.

Keith Dyer:
Lee, our reader research for this issue has strongly identified mobile payments as “one to watch” for 2011. As a major player in the mobile payments industry, where do you think NFC stands at the moment?

Lee Cameron:
NFC has certainly been an interesting topic to follow. I think one way of placing it in context is to grasp that we have now entered a second, more market-focussed, stage of development.

A Mobile Marriage Made in Heaven: Capacity Meets Intelligence

01 September 2010

Ronen Guri, director of business development, mobile backhaul, RAD, tells Keith Dyer that operators need to add sophisticated traffic management, performance monitoring and timing over packet technologies to their packet switched backhaul networks to enhance their end-to-end mobile SLAs.

Keith Dyer:
Ronen, what changes have you seen recently in the way your operator customers are addressing their backhaul requirements?

Ronen Guri:
Well if you were to go back a bit, clearly we would have seen mobile backhaul on a TDM/SDH infrastructure using T1/E1 interfaces. But then, as we all know, came 3G and the move to HSPA, which brought with it a change in the volumes and types of data traffic.

Assuring Ethernet services in mobile backhaul

01 September 2010

The introduction of IP/Ethernet solutions into mobile backhaul networks gives operators not only new opportunities but also new challenges as they need to validate and assess the performance and the quality of their services. Vikas Arora, CTO of EXFO, tells Keith Dyer how using the right test and service assurance solutions will be crucial to the success of operators’ backhaul migration strategies.

Mobile Europe: Vikas, what are the overall priorities of your customers, the network operators and backhaul network providers, as they consider migrating their legacy mobile backhaul infrastructure to IP/Ethernet?

Vikas Arora: The key thing is cost reduction. Currently backhaul is predominantly carried over T1/E1 lines and that represents the single largest area of OPEX spending operators have within their networks. We tend to hear a fairly constant number from operators — that somewhere around 25-30% of their overall OPEX goes into the network operations, with backhaul forming a significant part of that.

Assurance in a service-orientated world

01 September 2010

Operators are moving to LTE and Ethernet backhaul in an effort to reduce their cost per bit, and overall opex costs, but they face challenges to be able to monitor and assure services in the new environment. Jay Stewart, Director Ethernet Service Assurance, JDSU, tells Keith Dyer how they can meet those challenges.

Keith Dyer:
Can you outline what the issues are with service assurance in Ethernet, and how that applies to mobile backhaul?

Jay Stewart:
The pressure to succeed at backhaul has never been greater for service providers – the surge of mobile data traffic and associated cost of its transport has created a number of significant business challenges.