At Mobile World Congress, Operators Go on the Offensive

At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in early March, I had the opportunity to meet with leading mobile operators from several countries, small and large, and the focus of each discussion was remarkably consistent – how can mobile operators cost-effectively monetize the growing traffic on their networks?

This was music to my ears, because Cisco had many of the answers they sought.

We had over 900 customer meetings in Barcelona, and I personally heard from many service providers that we are solving their real business problems and that they see great value in Cisco’s broad architectural solution.

The fact is, Cisco had seen the mobile Internet explosion forming years ago. With the mobile Internet predicted to grow 13-fold between 2012 and 2017 by the addition of billions of connections between people, devices and objects, we accurately predicted the business opportunities and challenges facing mobile service providers today.

And so last month, Cisco introduced several major innovations to enable service providers to more effectively monetize those connections. These Cisco technologies enable service providers to deliver new, better and more personalized connected experiences and to gain more intelligence about those networked connections that they can utilize to deliver new revenue-generating services.

Many of the new business opportunities presented by the growing connectivity of people, data, processes, information and devices (the ‘Internet of Everything’) center on analyzing and monetizing “data in motion,” which basically consists of real-time and near real-time data generated by mobile and fixed connections between people, things and processes.

To help ensure service providers accommodate exploding network traffic and profit from it, Cisco recently introduced innovative mobile solutions in three key areas: software, access and infrastructure.

Intelligent Software via Cisco Quantum

To better enable service providers to analyze and monetize the data in motion in their networks, Cisco last month introduced Cisco® Quantum™. The result of the integration of more than $1.5 billion in recent acquisitions with in-house innovation, Cisco Quantum delivers unparalleled mobile network intelligence and is a component of Cisco’s ONE programmable networking approach, which is a key building block for the delivery of new network services and is fundamental to Cisco’s cloud, core networking, and data center strategies. The Quantum suite includes:

Cisco Quantum Network Abstraction Suite: provides a real-time network abstraction layer for network data collection, aggregation and orchestration to augment available information in all network decision processes.
Cisco Quantum Policy Suite: offers a next-generation policy management solution that enables service providers to scale, control, monetize and personalize any service on any type of network through a flexible, interactive architecture that supports application-centric policy capabilities.
Cisco Quantum Analytics Suite: provides business and network analytics capabilities that enable both historical and real-time predictive policy decisions. It includes dashboards for data visualization and programmable interfaces to create system alerts in conjunction with policy.
Cisco Quantum RAN Optimization Suite – Service provider mobile investment is shifting away from macrocell-only networks to heterogeneous networks (e.g., macro and small cells such as Wi-Fi, 3G, or LTE). The size and complexity of these networks necessitates self-optimizing networks and a transition to live and automatic optimization in the radio access portion of the network. This Quantum suite addresses this pressing need, allowing service providers to effectively manage their networks, with major network investment savings for both operating and capital expenditures.

Mobile World Congress confirmed this strategy, as global service providers, including Vodafone Netherlands, recognized the importance of using Cisco’s intelligent network to deliver new experiences and expand revenue opportunities.

Two other service providers announced that they are using “Cisco smarts” to offer new types of services: Cricket, a U.S. mobile operator selling downloadable songs with its Muve Music service, and Shaw Communications, a Canadian cable operator offering its subscribers mobile service via Cisco Wi-Fi hotspots.