Friday, April 4, 2008

Ensuring the Success of 2.5G and 3G Service Delivery

The market for services 2.5 G and 3G is taking shape as mobile providers offer customers, which include capabilities for Internet browsing, instant messaging, multimedia downloads and online shopping. These services promise to generate significant incremental revenue for providers, as customers embrace the new generation of mobile experience. It will be important to other beneficiaries of the market - including content providers and online merchants - who see the rich and mobile users as a major goal.
To ensure the success of their services 2.5 G and 3G, however, mobile service providers have to deal with the three major risk factors. First, of course, have to ensure that the services they offer are those who want buyers. Only through understanding of the wishes and needs of providers can offer a portfolio of services that will generate the necessary power rates to be profitable. Secondly, they must design services to appeal to users despite small screens, slower access speeds and limited functions of the keyboard. These design skills are essential for optimizing the user experience and market acceptance.
Third, providers must ensure the reliability of these services. It is one thing to tolerate a temporary outage in a service pack or free. It is another thing to lose access to or experience chronically sub-par performance with a service that is paying. So it is absolutely critical for mobile providers to validate the performance of their services 2.5 G and 3G roll before it was to customers. Application failures are something mobile customers are unlikely to be very forgiving about. In fact, too many failures too early in the game permanently in May turn out to customers of these services making money-dooming the market before it has a chance to take hold.
The Guarantee Service Level Challenge
Ensuring service levels for the services of 2.5 G and 3G presents special problems. Multimedia applications, for example, are particularly bandwidth-hungry and are easily prone to session breakdowns due to network congestion. In addition, these applications often use multiple session, data and signaling protocols. These complex dependencies often, it is difficult to maintain service levels and understand the issues that may compromise the end-user experience.
In fact, are often suppliers of the new mobile services in production, without fully understanding how those services will really be experienced by customers under real conditions. This is because the services are often tested in laboratory environments that do not adequately reflect the bandwidth limitations, the distance driven latencies, and capacity contention that exist in the production environment. This is unfortunate, because it exposes providers to the considerable risk that applications will not perform in production and in the laboratory.
By Similarly, the inability to adequately assess the performance of applications prior to their deployment can make itself a success risky proposal. After all, an application that works perfectly with several hundred simultaneous users may not survive the onslaught of tens of thousands. So, without the proper preparation, providers can find themselves unable to cope with the very success that was expected!
The Solution: Development Network-Aware
One solution to this problem is to make the real-world conditions of the production network design for a review of all applications from the earliest stages of design. In other words, to ensure service quality in the real world AFTER deployment, it is essential to reveal the potential performance problems with the behavior of an application in the real world before deployment.
This can only be done, however, if developers have some practical means of modeling those conditions in the laboratory. Ideally, such a modeling environment will be able to replicate conditions in the production network - including limited bandwidth, the number of distribution of end-users, etc. If this modeling environment is then connected to the current infrastructure server that will support the draft applications, the behavior of those applications in the real world can be observed and analyzed in detail. A variety of " " what-if scenarios can be generated and observed to determine their impact on service levels: the loss of a portion of the network, an exceptional peak in the use of services, an upturn in other types of network traffic, etc. Later.
In addition to accurately reproduce existing and projected real-world conditions of the network, an effective modeling environment should also lend itself to collaboration between application development teams and managers of the network infrastructure. By sharing a platform for modeling, these two groups can reach a consensus on issues that may affect service levels - as well as the best remedy for this issue - rather than bogged down in conflicts and accusations. A multi-purpose modeling environment also ensures that any investment in modeling technology can be fully leveraged throughout the lifecycle of applications, including change management, capacity planning and projection CapEx.
Ensure Risk-Free Wireless Deployment
No provider can afford to have their first wireless efforts tarnished with chronic poor performance. And no one wants to relinquish their hard-earned early adopter customer to the competition because of the failures of service. Mobile Service Providers who want to win and maintain market value in wireless services, therefore, we must make every effort to ensure the reliability and performance of their offerings. And for that reason, it is critical that they embrace modeling technologies that are as advanced and sophisticated as next generation networks.
To more information, visit http://www.shunra.com. Shunra empowers business organizations and technology vendors to eliminate the risks associated with the deployment of complex, distributed, applications and services. The Shunra Virtual Enterprise (Shunra VE) solution provides accurate, highly granular insight into how the network applications (www.shunra.com) operate, and scale to perform remote end users. It creates an exact replica of the production network environment, safely allowing users to develop, test and experiment with applications and infrastructure in a lab environment before deployment in production.



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