Haiti's woes continue

I was listening to the BBC's Digital Planet podcast this week and an argument between local ISPs and NGOs in following the Haiti earthquake caught my attention. Following the earthquake, the NGOs came in and setup their own communications networks to assist in the relief effort under the assumption that the existing infrastructure was destroyed. However, it turns out that this wasn't necessarily the case and there has been some cases reported where survivors trapped under rumble were able to use their mobile phones to send messages to the outside world. By setting up ad-hoc networks, the NGOs inadvertently have been causing disruption to the existing networks that either remained operational or have since been restored which is the cause of the current dispute.

This incident outlines the need for network planning with current radio technology. As I've mentioned before the air interface is a hostile environment and unless deployed infrastructure is done in a co-ordinated manner then operational problems are inevitable. Its only to be expected that the Haiti ISPs would get upset about problems incurred due to the NGOs networks because network outages equates to zero revenues.

Of course if the networks deployed in Haiti were capable of self-organising then they would be able to adapt to the changed operational environment by re-configuring themselves so that they could continue to perform optimally as the networks are being restored. Even if the ad-hoc network technology was able to self-organise, this would still be problematic for the networks deployed by the established network operators as these networks would have been planned in the traditional way.

This episode is a timely reminder that even if LTE promises full SON capability, deployment of LTE will still require some replanning of 2G and 3G networks to support at least inter-RAT handover for as long as operators require these network technologies to co-exist. Expect this to be the case for quite some time yet as operators seek to maximise their return of investment in their 2G/3G networks.

Webinars
Last week I attended a webiner called Generating New Revenue Streams While Improving Differentiation and Efficiency by Nokia Siemems Networks. Subscriber experience will be the number one business goal for service providers in 2012 according to a study carried out by NSN. This described the various solutions NSN have to achieve just that.