Sprint recently announced a multiyear expansion of an agreement with NetCracker Technology to use NetCracker’s operating support solutions platform to support the carrier’s Spark network initiative.
Sprint has been using NetCracker’s Resource Inventory, Order Management, and Discovery and Reconciliation solutions to support its rapidly expanding LTE network. The new agreement extended that OSS support to the carrier’s enhanced LTE efforts that will see it throw additional spectrum resources at its network to provide higher data speed and capacity. Sprint said it expects the NetCracker platform to support “greater operational efficiencies, reduce time to market for new services” and accelerate the rollout of Spark services.
As part of the announcement, John Dye, director of application development at Sprint, provided additional insight into how Sprint expects the NetCracker deal to enhance its service offerings; the impact the new agreement will have on future service assurance and customer experience management plans; how important software advances have become in managing ever-increasing network and support systems; and the carrier’s view on network function virtualization.
RCR Wireless News: How does Sprint plan to use the NetCracker OSS suite to support Spark services?
John Dye: Sprint will use the NetCracker OSS suite to support centralized inventory of the Spark Network, engineering and access provisioning functions, network discovery and reconciliation, and support to new service activation.
RCRWN: What is different between the implementation of the suite from previous work Sprint has done with NetCracker on its non-Spark network (LTE/CDMA)?
Dye: We will be extending the level of supported technologies and driving more centralization of services into the NetCracker-based application.
RCRWN: What impact has the move to all-IP with LTE and Spark had on Sprint’s OSS services?
Dye: We have expanded many TDM-based processes and applications to include IP/Ethernet capabilities that will allow for efficiency in engineering, capacity management, service assurance and customer experience management. Network buildout and deployment tools have to be in sync with the changes to work flow activities to ensure timeliness and ability to drive deployment. Performance management applications have to account for the new technologies and correlated algorithms developed to ensure performance on the new networks is realized and can be reacted upon to ensure the best customer experience in wireless. We are continuously evaluating OSS applications and the associated roadmaps to define opportunities for rationalization that will reduce overhead and complexity for users while moving us forward towards a new target state supporting an enhanced network.
RCRWN: What sort of new services does Sprint expect to be able to roll out based on the NetCracker OSS suite?
Dye: Sprint will capitalize on the embedded base of NetCracker features to drive deployment of the Spark network and services. New technology deployments and innovation will be deployed to support customer experience and growth. Utilization of these new technologies, such as 8T8R, multichannel carrier aggregation, multilayer multiple-input, multiple-output and other LTE-Advanced capabilities will provide our customers significantly better call quality and faster data speeds.
RCRWN: How important are advances in software solutions becoming for Sprint?
Dye: Advances in software solutions are key to Sprint’s ability to manage the new network technologies in a seamless manner, providing an agile environment to rapidly deploy and evolve services to our customers. Automation is key to our ability to manage the complexity of new network technology and to provide actionable intelligence to the user base vs. large volumes of data that require manual analysis. Our ability to evolve software solutions concurrent with network deployments reduces operating expense costs and maximizes the effectiveness of our capital expense investments.
RCRWN: What sort of service assurance benefits does Sprint expect to garner from the NetCracker deployment? How has the service assurance market changed for Sprint with the move to all IP?
Dye: The ability to maintain a current view of the network via a centralized inventory ensures a real-time view of configurations is provided across all systems. This will be enhanced via the continued use and advances we will implement with NetCracker. We drive higher levels of data integrity and consistency into the service assurance systems and processes; automating diagnostics and building more efficiency into all aspects of the processes. Moving to an all-IP structure requires greater automation to derive customer-specific service measurements and diagnostics. The ability to separate discreet events from the IP stream adds complexity vs. a circuit-based environment. Automation and new tools are required to decipher discreet service data from the mass of IP traffic and relating that data to events and customer experience adds a new dimension to the service assurance function. Finding a single tool is often not feasible in a large, multivendor network, so extraction layers are often needed to correlate and present data in the various forms necessary.
RCRWN: How do these new software initiatives play in Sprint’s view on network virtualization?
Dye: By evolving our core systems with the future evolution of the network in mind we will be able to introduce virtualization faster, better, and cheaper once these technologies have been sufficiently proven. Virtualization requires new approaches to managing the traditional stack of services and can be an enabler for reduced operating costs while building out a more reactive and extensible network through the dynamic allocation of capacity that is available in a virtualized environment. The role of a CMDB has to evolve with the virtualized environment and new ways of “virtual categorization” of the network elements, transactions, and analytics must evolve. To do this we will have to drive a rationalized view of the network that can account for the mix of virtual and standalone components based on the operational state at any point in time. Network virtualization must be sufficiently evolved to support operational integrity and to integrate with the core functions of service assurance and performance management in order to maintain the service levels for our customers.
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