Since the first commercial LTE services were rolled out in 2010/11, carriers and mobile communications providers have steadily expanded their coverage areas by focussing on providing new high-speed mobile broadband services in the consumer markets.
While global LTE availability remains patchy – including variants in the underlying technologies that fall between 3G and true LTE in some regions – coverage is now reported at around 75% in most developed countries and closer to 100% in the world’s major cities.
Driven by the recent growth in LTE/4G-enabled mobile devices and end-user lifestyle applications, many national carriers, particularly in Europe, have also been motivated to accelerate their investment in LTE as a cost-effective way of meeting their statutory obligations under the EU Single Digital Market framework, which includes delivering a minimum 30Mbs broadband service across the whole of the EU by 2020.
Designed to support economic growth of EU member states through the wider adoption of a digital economy, the framework also includes a number of individual targets aimed at encouraging businesses to adopt an e-commerce strategy to boost online sales and cross-border business activity.
For businesses of any size, this puts even greater dependence on their communications service provider (CSP) to provide reliable and innovative web and cloud access services, as well secure inter-branch communications. For CSPs, the wider availability of LTE has meant that they can now also start to offer business customers a range of high-speed broadband services based on integrated fixed-line and mobile access technologies that can deliver the full range of their customers’ availability and performance requirements.
The availability of the latest advanced router technology, capable of combining fixed line and mobile access technologies, delivers the additional piece of the jigsaw needed by CSPs to leverage LTE, together with xDSL (and even satellite connectivity), to provide enhanced SLAs for service continuity using an integrated, multi-path WAN architecture for business customers.
Combined with a range of network visibility, traffic management and application performance optimisation tools, service providers can use such hybrid-access technology to offer customers intelligence-based, granular control of network resources, enabling application prioritisation together with back-up and off-load capability during peak traffic periods.
This can benefit both the customer and the service provider. For customers, the increased reliability and consistent application performance needed to maintain high productivity and QoS can be measured in the real-term impact on the bottom line, while for CSPs the return on investment comes from extending the life of their existing infrastructure and helping to roll out new, enhanced revenue-generating services in alignment with customer growth strategies – a win-win situation for both.
