RAN sharing reduces costs, but increases performance hazards
Mobile operators are seeking to reduce their costs by sharing their resources among more users and uses. This increases the intensity of their asset utilization and lowers the average cost per unit of value created. Indeed, every aspect of modern networking can be seen through the lens of intensified sharing of resources, such as packet data replacing dedicated circuits, or virtualization replacing dedicated compute resources.
The latest trend is to share complete radio access networks (RANs), which are the most costly part of the mobile network. They comprise the cell sites and towers, base stations and transmission equipment. These have expensive site acquisition, capital and operational power and maintenance needs. These infrastructure assets with long depreciation periods are put into a joint holding company, and shared with competitors. This eliminates duplicate spending which has little competitive differentiation.
The challenge of RAN sharing is to maintain an equivalent service to the end users, despite the existence of increased competition for a shared resource. There are new performance hazards introduced, which operators struggle to get to grips with.
Ask yourself these questions
- Is the system stable under heavy or rapidly changing load?
- Is the service working for one sharer but not for another?
- Is it proving difficult to remedy the customer experience problems because you and your partners cannot make decisions on how to resolve the problems?
- Are the performance problems having a detrimental effect on the partnership?
Network performance science gives you predictable performance
We can help the sharing partners and joint entity to measure, audit and isolate the problem source. We can distinguish between performance problems due to the load behaviour of one sharing partner versus that of the joint entity structure. We can also separate out network technical configuration issues or faults from joint sharing issues.
Find out more
To find an answer to these questions and how network performance science will assure you remain well informed please see the RAN sharing performance hazard management brochure or get in touch.
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