Bell Mobility keen on Alcatel Lucent’s 9900 Wireless Network Guardian

Bell Mobility Inc. is now better able to analyze usage trends on its wireless network. The company is using Alcatel-Lucent's 9900 Wireless Network Guardian (ALU 9900 WNG), a device that allows carriers to see how different types of traffic affect their networks. Tony McCarthy, director of wireless technology networks at Bell Mobility, says the company is using the technology on its packet switch data network. "The 9900 enables us to see a number of connections, the duration, the number of bytes, and the type of applications," he tells Report on Wireless. The result of three years research at Bell Labs, the device is unique in that it addresses some of the challenges specific to wireless IP networks, among them the fact that certain types of traffic, like seemingly innocuous emails and instant messages, can hog up to 1,000 times as much air time as file downloads. "A megabyte of file transfer in a single session will take up a lot less airtime than a megabyte of emails," says Mike Schabel, general manager for Alcatel-Lucent Ventures, a new business unit focused on the ALU 9900 WNG. "A thousand emails may not be huge, but the time spent on the RF channel, or at the base station, has an effect. This is less about size than time. These little transactions use up time on the common channel for data transfer. Signalling capabilities represent a finite resource, and emails can eat that up." Although the device doesn't allow for deep packet inspection, relying instead on behavioural analysis, and as of yet it is not built to integrate with pricing schemes, the 9900 promises to give carriers like Bell better visibility on the data side. "This new product addresses the fact that IP applications impact the network differently," says Schabel. "The important thing to understand is that a wireless IP network is massively different than an IP network without wires." Bell's McCarthy says that although the product is generally available from Alcatel-Lucent, the market is still evolving and pricing has not been fixed, though he acknowledges that this is a high-end, six figure product. As it stands, Bell is still in the trial phase which began at the end of 2007. "Initially we were addressing security in EvDO-3G," says McCarthy. "We see a lot of the same applications on broadband, and a lot of the same behaviour. Security is still a big part of the appeal, but now we see how the 9900 can help us as a tool for dealing with capacity dimension issues." For Alcatel-Lucent, this product segment is seen as a significant opportunity, and one that will grow, perhaps even to the enterprise space. At present, however, the market is clearly on the carrier side. "We have it in one of our major markets in Canada right now," says McCarthy. "The product has two components, a 9900 Detector that does identification and analysis, which sits in front of the PDSN, and a central component, the 9900 Central that does the actual reporting." For Bell, it's clear that the 9900 is ideally suited to support network management and pricing. "Certain applications have short bursts of data transfer, but will cost more because of the large file transfer. The 9900 will help us understand how we should be pricing our services, and for it to be automated. In the past, we had done this through manual studies, but this is real-time," says McCarthy. And, as of yet, there is nothing on the market quite like it. Cisco Systems Inc., for example, has its Home Agent for identifying IP addresses on mobile networks, but at present they don't understand all the signalling and protocols. The relevance of the 9900 will only increase as more and more applications go mobile. It's likely other vendors will be inclined to come up with similar products, but for now Alcatel-Lucent is the first mover on the vendor side. "Soon every mobile device will have its own IP address, and with VPN users taking designated channels, carriers need visibility," says Schabel. "You don't want to roll the dice with multi-million dollar networks." It seems Bell Mobility agrees.

Bell Mobility keen on Alcatel Lucent’s 9900 Wireless Network Guardian

News | April 22, 2008

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