Mobile Operator Connectivity

Sun Oct 10 19:38:54 UTC 2010

On Sun, Oct 10, 2010 at 10:42 AM, Joel Jaeggli <joelja at bogus.com> wrote:
> On 10/9/10 5:08 PM, Ryan Finnesey wrote:
>> I have been working on a similar project and I am finding it very hard
>> to get the mobile operators to understand why we want as little latency
>> as possible and they are not very open to people peering with their
>> "wireless" backbone.
>
> Possibly because the way that they tunnel GTP to the GGSN and the
> locations of GGSN devices relative to the handsets served preclude as
> little latency as possible.
>

Yes.  Some mobile providers are more heavily aggregated than others.

I have been pushing for decreasing the architectural latency in the
mobile architecture with IPv6

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GlRgaFriYU#t=29m45

But there are a lot of roadblocks, some more technical than others.

Also, the wireless providers generally don't have a point of presence
in the peering NAPs.   I have run this business case a few times for
my company and it generally is a financial wash, and therefore not
worth the effort to deploy and support additional transport and nodes
at the peering locations.  It's simpler and cheaper to just punt the
Internet traffic out of the wireless networks as soon as possible to
an ISP, and those ISP frequently own the fiber transport as well.
But, like anything, you can always ask your B2B account manager for a
special setup.  There are special setups that i know for corporate
customers.

>> I hope this will change with more and more
>> eyeballs going wireless.
>
> LTE provides an opportunity to move the bottleneck.
>

LTE provides some latency benefits on the wireless interface, but the
actual packet core architecture is very similar to GSM / UMTS.

For those concerned about latency, the key is working with the
wireless operator to find where the mobility aggregation points are
and how they are connected to the Internet.  More advanced
applications at large scale can justify direct peering, but i don't
imagine that achieves much real latency benefits over just being
properly coordinated with the locations and ISPs.

Cameron
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