Keynote speakers on the first day of LTE World Summit 2015 said it is imperative the telecoms industry simplifies the LTE network, to accommodate future data growth and emerging services.

At the Signalling Focus Day, speakers from Oracle, NetNumber and Sonus talked about simplification and the pressure facing operators. Pieter Veenstra from NetNumber discussed the need to consolidate the control plane.

“Complexity is your enemy,” he said. “We’re looking at a paradigm shift towards a centralised signalling and routing model, where applications can be added on request. Operators need to radically simplify the network core, and that’s what we’re working on.”

Veenstra then highlighted the importance of orchestration to future network services.

“It’s not just in the network itself, it’s also in the OSS and BSS,” he said. “When different functions are in different parts of the network and data centres; and when they’re combined into one platform, the OSS and BSS needs to be simplified because of the orchestration process.

“We’re looking at all of this, NFV included, to help manage VoLTE as well as the Internet of Things and M2M. Additional authentication elements are required to expand services to non-LTE accesses to support VoWi, M2M and IoT.”

Jason Emery from Oracle spoke about how cloud has matured, and how NFV will give operators the ability to roll out new services with rapid speed.

“The real benefit comes when you get to automate and orchestrate things,” he said. “It’s not even so much about the tech, it’s about business orchestration – the ability to deploy new business services so quickly, and that’s where I think operators will really benefit.”

Bill Welch from Sonus, meanwhile, highlighted how much pressure operators are under from the media to ensure constant connection, and that NFV will help.

“There’s ever increasing LTE growth, and driving diameter growth with policy and mobility,” he said. “VoLTE and video broadcast are the big new use-cases, but we have to maintain legacy – we’re still seeing growth in 2G and 3G in some markets.

“Let’s not forget, it’s real media worthy when there’s an outage or a signalling storm, so there are some significant operator challenges in this space right now.”