EMOBILE: the mobile broadband revolutionist - Huawei

equire broad geographic coverage. We believe that building
a Tera-Scale bearer network will become a competitive
requirement for leading global operators.
With extremely high extendibility, Huawei IPTime
Solution has the capability of 80T as Router Cluster System,
which will reach even higher with the development of 100G
interface technologies. Its adoption of unified control plane
enables seamless interactions between the IP layer and the
optical layer. Such architecture can offer higher transport
efficiency, increasing return on investment and enhancing
operators’ core competitiveness in the era of broadband.
New voice business models
Current mobile network operators receive 70% of their
revenue from voice services, a market category that is
being pressured by a continual decrease in ARPU. There is
a natural shift in focus towards the more attractive revenue
from data services, but this overlooks a critical element of
user preference. Voice represents the most natural, efficient
and convenient way of acquiring information that suits all
scenarios and surroundings. How to capitalize on this and
how to leverage voice as a new channel for communication
and information acquisition, such as with the web, has
turned into one of the most-debated and most difficult
technical propositions. It is our belief that there is huge
market potential to tap in voice.
New business models are the answers to this need. A
good illustration would be the “Best Tone” service offered
by China Telecom. An industry-leading innovation and
a fast growing service, Best Tone has become a significant
driver for the operator’s voice revenue growth.
Value creation in broadband
While Moore’s Law will help decrease the cost, size and
power of the equipment required to handle the massive
increases in broadband data traffic, it can not keep up
with the projected growth. The growth of the required
equipment will result in significant increases in both capital
and operational expenses, which can not be recovered
from the revenue of passing basic data traffic. To tackle this
challenge, operators will need intelligent traffic management
to enhance bandwidth utilization, coupled with traffic-based
user behavior analysis to generate additional revenue streams
through targeted advertising or other new models.
Content and media services
To d a y t h e n e t w o r k i s t r a n s i t i o n i n g f r o m a
communications vehicle into an infrastructure that sustains
all elements of society. This will lead to a new trillion-
USD market for businesses who provide their services
over the Internet. As the new potential is unfolding,
leading operators are all looking to transforming to add
content and media services, on top of their traditional
pipe offerings. The content and media arenas require new
capabilities, skills and levels of user interaction that will
challenge traditional operators. The service experience,
development methodology and business model are
dramatically different and community-based interactions
are emerging as the fundamental trait of future services.
User-driven and user generated content will be the
prevailing theme and a large number of personalized
offerings will enter the market based on the long tail
theory. These offerings will be nurtured by the changing
character of the network, where sharp declines in the cost
of services will make it possible for “niche offerings” to
win. Take publishing for example: traditionally the cost
of a book could be recovered only if multiple thousands
of copies were sold. With new network capabilities,
the digital world increases competition, resulting in
an ecosystem characterized by radical cost reductions,
sometimes to zero, making on-line books profitable even
with a small volume.
Virtual computing
The ability to deliver high-speed data connections
anywhere allows the world of computing to shift from
“buying products” (computers, storage and software) to
“buying services” (IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS). This obviously is
disruptive to conventional software and hardware vendors,
but it also is disruptive to telecom operators because it
provides an opportunity to re-think the boundaries of
their networks. The network “cloud” can now include not
only physical data centers, but also the virtualization of
service capabilities that can be delivered along with dial
tone to improve users’ lives. If we compare network traffic
to rivers in the digital world, then data centers will be the
future “reservoirs”. These new-generation data centers will
require revolutionary shifts technologically, providing the
capacity for massive data processing at a low cost.
Even in areas where economies are experiencing a slump,
the telecom industry is still able to maintain and even
accelerate its growth. Successful societies are going to require
greater connectivity, placing the social responsibility of
bridging the digital gap on the telecom industry. During the
last ten years, an information world has taken shape. Over
the next few years, the universal spread of high-speed, lowcost,
anywhere connectivity will be the driving force for the
telecom industry’s development.
In this process, innovation and transformation is an
everlasting topic. Working together, we will create a truly
connected world where people can have equal access to
communications.
Editor: Joy Zhou zhouhj@huawei.com
FEB 2009 / Win-Win
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