With the holiday season fast approaching, mobile operators are again expecting to experience massive network congestion due to high text messaging and voice traffic—something that can be avoided if their networks were more “intelligent.”
Remus Tan, director for sales and marketing for Asia Pacific at mobile network solutions provider Tellabs, said the number of mobile users and their usage volume would continue to spike in the coming years.
Users, however, were also increasing their use of nonoperator-driven applications such as Skype, increasing the danger of operators becoming merely “dumb pipe” providers.
Network congestion as a result of huge usage volume would also take its toll on mobile operators, he said, if they would choose not to make improvements in their networks to make these “intelligent.”
“If operators choose not to do anything today, doomsday will come for them. They will see the end of their profits,” he said in a recent briefing. “Operators need to innovate to boost profit. They need to make their networks intelligent to avoid the end-of-profit scenario.”
According to a recent study conducted by research firm STL Partners and commissioned by Tellabs, telecom operators have the potential to generate as much as 13.3 percent in cash returns if they would take the “full service telco 2.0 pipe” approach.
This approach, the study stated, entailed the building of intelligent networks and the deployment of smart services that enhanced customer experience and encouraged the use of operator-driven content.
An intelligent network, Tan said, was efficient and free from congestion.
“But most mobile networks today are not efficient, not intelligent, not flexible. What we do is help operators get rid of network congestion. Our solutions recognize where the congestion is and allow operators to address this,” he said.
Here in the Philippines, Tellabs country manager Dion Asencio said mobile operators needed to make their networks more efficient so they could address the congestion problem.