Ericsson pre-empts MWC 2015 with seven product mega launch

Giant telecoms vendor Ericsson just couldn’t wait until Mobile World Congress 2015 to reveal not one but seven product launches. The broad theme of these launches concerned how to help telcos to adapt to digital market realities.

The first launch is entitled Digital Telco Transformation and seeks to combine Ericsson’s BSS/OSS software with consulting and systems integration services. A digital telco is apparently one that provides a consistent user experience across all channels and can offer near real-time service delivery.

Paolo Colella, Vice President and Head of Consulting and Systems Integration at Ericsson, said: “Many operators are aware of the pressing need to transform themselves into digital telcos, but few are aware of the steps required to get there,” said Paolo Colella, Head of Consulting and Systems Integration at Ericsson. “Only a holistic approach that reinvents the telco operating model can ensure operators avoid major business model disruptions and realize their digital telco vision.”

To gauge how successful they are being in their digital transformation a telco might consider the next launch: Ericsson Expert Analytics 15.0. This is an analytics tool that seeks to track customer satisfaction and automatically implement measures to improve it. This is assisted by a proprietary index that appears designed to help improve the all-important Net Promoter Score.

“By pre-integrating analytics with our broad OSS and BSS portfolio, we are enabling operators to automate a wide variety of use cases, driven by analytics insights,” said Elisabetta Romano, Head of OSS and Service Enablement at Ericsson.

A similar concept is tackled by a new Ericsson service called App Experience Optimization, that seeks to go beyond standard KPIs and work out how to improve the overall user experience for app users, with the help of Ericsson network design experts.

“With our more than 5,000 Network Design and Optimization experts and the insights we gather from countless customer projects, this new service offering will bring efficiency and competitive advantages to our customers,” said Staffan Pehrson, Vice President of Network Rollout, Support & Optimization at Ericsson.

Moving onto actual kit, the company considers the launch of the Ericsson Radio System to be its biggest base station launch since the RBS 6000 series back in 2008. It seems to be an all-round upgrade with an emphasis on flexibility and ease of installation, while its improved energy efficiency promises a 20% TCO saving. There is also an upgraded baseband unit – the Baseband 2016.

“Our experienced R&D team slashed the size and weight in half across the product line only after we secured performance,” said Arun Bansal, Head of Business Unit Radio at Ericsson. “Ericsson Radio System’s multi-standard, multi-band, multi-layer architecture with integrated backhaul provides an ideal platform for operators to support their business today and on the road to 2020, laying the foundation for 5G.”

Sticking with the future-proofed hardware theme Ericsson also launched the Router 6000 series to upgrade its backhaul offering. Many of the new features seem to be designed to anticipate developments such as IoT, SDN and 5G.

“The Ericsson Router 6000 series is a game changer since it responds directly to operators’ challenges of dramatic increase in the number of connected devices and the video explosion driving the demand for traffic scale and higher quality of experience,” said Anders Lindblad, Head of Business Unit Cloud and IP at Ericsson.

Of course Ericsson recommends you combine a number of its new products into ‘complete solutions’ and is even launching some new Networks Software – called 15B – to make sure it all works well together and to facilitate NFV.

“We are delivering system software releases in coherent software packages, synchronized and tested across nodes in networks, end to end, to maximize performance and efficiency,” said Håkan Djuphammar, Head of Technology, Business Unit Cloud & IP at Ericsson. “In between these releases we can deliver separate software releases with dedicated functionality, thanks to our agile development and release methodology.”

Lastly Ericsson addressed its Media Delivery Network, which seems to be a content delivery system designed to acknowledge exponential growth on video streamed over mobile networks and to help operators participate more fully in the media business.

“With video already representing 45% of all traffic in mobile networks, and our prediction that traffic will increase eight-fold overall by 2020, network operators need a transformative media delivery solution that allows them to turn this costly demand on their networks into sustainable business growth,” said Ove Anebygd, Head of Solution Area Media at Ericsson.

“This launch represents the first big-picture solution of its kind, tackling core industry challenges and allowing operators to bring their added value to the media delivery value chain and enable the global shift to IP delivered video.”