Infrastructure technology isn't in the limelight like it was a few years back. Operators' pain points are transformation, rapid new services deployment and future business models. How is NSN engaging customers in these areas?
Because of our intimate understanding of our customers' businesses and strategy, we can advise them on the best course of action in building their infrastructure and give the greatest return on investment. And increasingly, our customers want to lean on our expertise in providing their subscribers with a special customer experience that will increase loyalty, transform their businesses, reduce time to market, and explore innovative business models that provide new sources of revenue and profitability.
Our Business Solutions assets give us a critical competitive advantage. In subscriber database management we have 80 customers in 46 countries and more than one billion subscribers. In NGN voice solutions we have 260 references for mobile softswitching. Our combination of business, telco, IT know-how and assets allows our customers to provide their end-users with the unique individual communications experience they are demanding.
Mobile broadband has been a wake-up call for operators. How are operators dealing wih the resulting network congestion and growing capex requirements?
We predict that by 2015, annual mobile data traffic will reach 23 exabytes - equivalent to 6.3 billion people each downloading a digital book every day. Pure capacity is just one issue, however, as the unique properties of mobility, such as intermittent connectivity and shifting location, coupled with the increasing use of smart devices, require mobile broadband networks to be far more intelligent in their handling of traffic growth.
To that end, we have built into our networks an industry standard that allows an operator to reduce unprofitable, congestion-causing signaling by three times while increasing smart device battery life. Our radio network controllers support three to 63 times more smartphones than our competitors. The Flexi Network Gateway, part of our evolved packet core portfolio, leads the industry in subscriber sessions, data throughput, intelligence service support and signaling.
We are advising customers to consider more efficient energy solutions, since base station sites consume 80% to 90% of the energy in a mobile network.
As mentioned previously, network sharing is another solution for service providers to consider, especially in hotspots, where they must add new radio resources. For rural areas with spare capacity, operators can consider pooling their network resources through network sharing.