| When the world's largest mobile operator decides on a new approach to its network, the planning alone can take years. The first task was to find a vendor who could handle such a complex job. The deployment in the mobile industry of mobile softswitch technology has received a boost over the last two to three years from the world's largest single national mobile operator, China Mobile. The company, which has well over a quarter of a billion customers in its home market, has successfully migrated its transit and local networks to work with mobile softswitch technology, using equipment supplied by Huawei. No other mobile operator in the world has a customer base in a single country as large as that of China Mobile, nor anything like its growth rate. In the first two months of 2007 the company added 9,764,000 customers to its base – a number which is far in excess of most other mobile operators' total customer base. And this rate of growth looks set to continue. The Chinese economy is expanding rapidly, providing an ever greater proportion of its population with the necessary wealth to afford a mobile phone. Indeed, mobile telephony will be the only means to make a voice call in many rural parts of China where there is no fixed network. China Mobile's rollout plans mean that 98 percent of the population will be within range of its cellular network by later this year. But such rapid growth presents enormous challenges, commercial as well as technical. An increasing number of its customers want not just voice calls but also value –added and multimedia services, which pose a different set of challenges for the operator. China Mobile has had to decide how to cope with simultaneous expansion on an unparalleled scale as well as providing its customers with access to new services. Its solution has been to migrate away from traditional TDM technology in its network and towards IP and mobile softswitch technology. The combined softswitch and IP approach is the only one which allows the level of scalability and new service provision required by China Mobile. Even in 2002, China Mobile had the world's largest GSM network, both in terms of capacity and number of users. But the company realised that it had to develop a strategy that would allow migration to 3G as well as enabling its rapid growth in GSM subscriber numbers to continue at the same pace. Over a period of 18 months, the company worked out how to manage the transition to a softswitch network that can handle both 2G and 3G on a single network. The company was not just moving enormous amounts of traffic, but also had to plan for unprecedented traffic growth in the future. IP-based technology was identified as the only serious contender to support such scalability demands. China Mobile then spent a full year proving the commercial feasibility of its new network and in 2004 decided to migrate its 2G transit traffic to an IP-based backbone network controlled by Huawei mobile softswitches. The existing transit network, covering all of China's 31 provinces, had grown up piecemeal and developed an extremely complex topology, with the result that planning for future growth as well as maintaining a robust recovery strategy was proving difficult. The new approach required a simplified, meshed network that would support both growing traffic demand as well as ensuring secure links for callers. China Mobile's new transit network was fully implemented by October 2004 and six months later, after the successful operation of the IP network had been proved, the operator faced having to decide how to manage its local networks. The company was faced with the choice of whether to continue with its TDM-based local networks, which were having trouble coping with changing demand, or expand its use of mobile softswitch technology. The company decided that a migration of local networks to IP would be the best way of ensuring long-term protection of its investments and ensuring a level of performance that would satisfy its expanding customer base. "From working with China Mobile we understood it took this decision for three basic reasons", says Mr. Zhang Xinyu, director of core network marketing at Huawei. "First, they saw softswitch technology as the only way to maintain adequate performance while supporting rapid growth. Second, they badly needed to simplify their huge network. Third, they wanted to be ready to offer 3G services to all customers and realised that softswitch technology was the only way to do that." "China Mobile faces a very aggressive market and the company realised that it needed to be in a position in the future where it could provide customers with multimedia as well as telephony and offer them convergence services, so that it could compete with the fixed line market as well as other mobile companies." "They realised that it may seem risky to back newly emerging technologies such as softswitch which is a recent development in the mobile world, but they have to be prepared to meet customer demand for VoIP and other new services. Softswitch is a competitive and commercially successful way of doing that." The first stage of this new phase of the migration project required a total of 16 big Huawei mobile softswitches and 32 of the vendor's media gateways. More than 1,600 2G mobile and gateway service centres from a wide range of equipment suppliers - Ericsson, Nokia, Siemens, Alcatel and Nortel - connected to the softswitch network for handling long-haul voice calls. Through its deployment China Mobile proved the feasibility of migrating even the world's largest mobile network to IP as its growth rate over recent months has proved. And now that it has made the successful migration from TDM to IP, it is in a position to start offering a much wider range of new services to its customers. A significant reason for China Mobile's success has been its ability to innovate and to appeal to market segments overlooked by others. It already carries over a billion text messages a day and this traffic is expected to increase dramatically. New subscribers from the countryside might adopt text messaging and other valueadded services as enthusiastically as their urban counterparts. The company is attracting as customers many small farmers from China's remoter rural provinces. Indeed it is estimated that about half of the 26 million new customers who signed up in the first half of 2006 are rural subscribers. While they may currently each generate less revenue than city-dwellers, these rural users are not technically backward and many are keen to use valueadded services offered by China Mobile. The kind of services that have been developed for the countryside are more work-related rather than the music, ringtones or other content popular elsewhere. Typical applications include delivering crop price data and weather forecasts to users' handsets. Such applications will likely ensure that demand for the operator's service continues to grow among rural users while also ensuring a steady growth of traffic that will keep its new networks busy. |
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