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1. Ingredients of “The Good Service” in Wireless Communications (Disponible en
Español)
Posted by jormarguo on Apr 30, 2012 5:36:45 PM
The concept of a good service in telecommunications sometimes can get shortsighted if it only
considers the way the end user perceives service, of course, if you cannot provide a service
good enough so most of the users are satisfied, then is over. But in order to provide a service
with the tag “good” in it, from my humble opinion, one cannot be one sighted, the concept
should include, in a comprehensive way, several dimensions within the society, and so, the
term Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) may come to the mind as the frame in which such a
service should be bounded, I agree, CSR polices are enabling service providers to achieve the
goal of long term sustainability with responsibility and social conscience inside a holistic
approach, social challenges like bridging the digital divide, protection of the environment and
enriching society are often included in these policies; but, is it enough? I’m a passionate person,
and I consider that if you cannot find that thrust inside of you driving every effort you make to
complete a task, then something is definitely missing, and I think industry lacks passion to
deliver a good service.
Are We Missing Something Important?
I do not intend to disregard industry efforts in several aspects like adopting green policies and
the like, but I cannot help thinking that business exploitation models predominates in the
world, where focus on O&M, planning for growth, insipid customer service and huge
commercial structures overlook aspects like, innovation, constant search for improvement,
scout for talent, among others. I know it’s a business, that’s the reality, and to continue doing
business industry is slowly driving its boat towards long term sustainability, the factor that can
make that boat to navigate quickly is PASSION, whether for a career, for the country, or just for
the people. As a member of the industry, I must start the change from the inside, why not
remembering how I felt when I graduated as an engineer many years ago.
Ingredients of a Telecommunications Service of Excellence
Image courtesy of Paola Buelvas (papolareina@yahoo.es)

2. Wireless communications services extend to many aspects of our lives and promises of future
developments only seems to enforce this opinion. So the challenge of a good service is always
growing bigger but should always comprise the following five ingredients; Environmental
conscience; the adoption of green policies is gaining importance worldwide, the next step in
this direction is to measure the positive adoption impact and extend the influence of such
policies. Reliability for social responsibility: Wireless technology has integrated so well into our
lives that several mission critical and emergency systems depend on them, how to provide a
service that even under catastrophic events still works is one key challenge. Dynamic Security;
new trends and usage patterns as well as the need to integrate new services expose the
network to both familiar and never seen before threats. Cross layer Quality; several catchy
terms have been used to designate specifically aspects of the quality, its importance is
undeniable and must be considered as a wholes as well. Willing to give back to the community;
this last ingredient will allow the service provider to gain more than subscribers in its execution,
since it will create that sense of loyalty and gratefulness in the community, the service provider
has several dimensions to choose from in order to give back, ranging from generation of
employment to involvement in country productivity growth, but in my opinion where the major
positive impact can be exerted is promoting education, whether in poor communities or as
means of future human talent investment. Every ingredient is composed of complicated and
diverse technical challenges that should be addressed having in mind the long term existence of
the service and its legacy, next I’ll briefly address the first four ingredients.
Environmental Conscience
Several green initiatives are being put on place globally and recently more and more
international groups, professional associations and standardization bodies are promoting and
constructing polices related, and service providers are starting to adopt those initiatives, the
problem is that active involvement is scarce. Action implementing organizational green models
that allow them to assess the impact that every step of the service life cycle has on the
environment is a display of real commitment; after which application of counter action
measures against green house emissions must be taken. One important move SP should make
is the request of green certifications issued by independent organizations on devices and
telecom equipment. A clear statement in service provider objectives for environmental
conservation must be made, and above all, efforts towards the fulfillment of those objectives
must be put into action. Regulation and law making decisions in the matter must be a synergic
effort of all the actors of the industry in a country. From the technical point of view one of the
main trends in green polices is the minimization of power consumption, especially in the ratio
access network where several studies have shown that most of the power is consumed, but it
also has been demonstrated that resources also have long idle times and it can be proved that
power network consumption is independent of traffic load. Several challenges must be
addressed; like moving the investigation from spectrum efficiency towards energy efficiency or
even better a conjunction of the two, other aspect is the design of energy efficient MIMO
schemes and cross layer interference coordination in heterogeneous networks for power
conservation.

3. Reliability for Social Responsibility
During catastrophic events, it is expected that mission critical services maintain an acceptable
level of accessibility to assist victims and perform rescue tasks, but even in regular service
operation the reliability is a key factor, so self configuration and healing technologies must be
considered, traffic balancing techniques and user centric polices most be included in the check
list of a resilient radio access network. In the core network an important concept has been
developed where the core is considered as a massive pool of resources instead of a one to one
association towards the access network, in such architecture radio network access functional
entities do not depend on one core functional entity but the core dynamically responds to
requirements in the event of failures or high traffic demand. Additionally the construction of a
reliability plan must be an important step towards the delivery of “The good” service, such plan
must specify the critical geographic areas that cannot be left without coverage in case of
failure, the most evident obstacles or threats must be indentified and countermeasures must
be considered ahead, even the personnel chosen to provide network management in such
situations must be carefully chosen. The importance of agreements between incumbent actors
of the industry in a country becomes evident and must be encouraged by governments in favor
of the wellbeing of the community.
Dynamic Security
Most of the service providers approach the security matter with secrecy and often in a limited
environment, but the applications running on top of the network and usage patterns demand
for security policies that transcends to every layer of the network, when all the layers of the
network are included in the policy, that makes it dynamic and alive. It’s clear that domain
segmentation is necessary in order to implement security schemes but general rules must be
global in the network, must not be tied to utilities or equipment brands and must reach the
user. An informed user will make better decisions when using the network if he understands
the threats he is exposed to; at the other side of the spectrum is the application, long ago the
carrier was able to ignore what was running on top of the network but now it’s a totally
different story. The security polices cannot be something that comes down onto the network,
every area must actively participate in its development, since behavior of the security breaches
can be different at different layers of the network. Planning a scheme that stands growth and
technological evolution is ideal but challenging, so strategic alliances with manufacturers and
key security players in the industry can make the difference. Finally, most of the time the
wireless channel is considered more vulnerable to attacks, but recent research has proven that
the fast decorrelation nature of the wireless channel can enrich security schemes with features
like channel based authentication and secrecy.
Cross layer quality
Quality in wireless networks is being widely discussed, and its undeniable that represents a
differentiating factor for the service provider, the real challenge is to consider a quality cross
layer model that can be dynamically adaptable and aware of the context. In order for the model

4. to be cross layer it should be considered from the radio access network to upper layers, access
control algorithms working tightly with resource reservation schemes and both coordinated by
an efficient bandwidth reservation algorithm that in time feeds the QoS provision at the packet
level is an option. Also good quality models feed from several tools including business
intelligence and monitoring, and the most important factor is, that these models consider the
user expectations of the service along with the constant evolution of the same and its
continuous improvement.
More wireless cellular topics in my twitter account @jomaguo.
For more discussion on everything mobile, be sure to visit us here:
http://communities.cisco.com/community/solutions/sp/mobility