Connectivity has become a defining feature of the modern economy and one of the significant trends of the 21st century. Globally and across the region, governments, businesses, and consumers are using digital technologies more than ever before. This is leading to massive spikes in the amount of data being generated and shared over telecom networks. The reality is that mobile networks, in particular, have become an indispensable basic resource in our modern society and an integral component of all sectors and industries operations and services. This has become all the more apparent in the last year as more people have worked, learned, shopped, and shared their lives online.
The ICT industry is advancing towards intelligent connectivity. Networks are going beyond people-to-people communications to enable communications between people and things and among things themselves. Going forward, networks will serve autonomous systems that operate on their own within human-defined rules. Networks will have to deliver more than simple connectivity. Network metrics will shift from quality of service to quality of experience.
Network reliability has been paramount in the industry from the start, but telecommunications has changed more since the onset of the 21st century than it did through the entirety of the 20th. Information technology and the ability to connect and communicate is a fundamental part of how our society operates. In today’s digital ecosystem, telecommunication has become the foundation for businesses, governments, communities, and families to connect and share information seamlessly. Companies are now relying on telecommunications to foster operational efficiency and stimulate steady growth. Accessing the internet at all hours of the day is a crucial facet of delivering high-quality customer service.
While we are increasingly dependent on mobile networks nowadays, a network incident’s impact becomes even more severe. Recently, several network incidents have occurred in the telecom industry, causing large-scale service interruption of mobile networks and disturbing the industry.
In November 2020, for instance, there was a large outage of Ooredoo’s networks in Qatar. As a result, lots of users across the country failed to make calls and access the Internet. According to industry analysis, the terminal users could not attach to the network during the fault period, and the mobile phone showed no signal. It is suspected that a fault caused the network breakdown on the core network, making mobile users fail to register with the network. The fault was only rectified several days afterward.
In the same month, the network of Vodacom in South Africa was also interrupted. Twice, in fact. Mobile services were affected to various extents in multiple cities such as Cape Town, Durban, and others. The operator has not disclosed the cause of the fault and only described the accident as “an issue,” which again could have resulted from the core network’s outage.
Further afield, Vodafone’s network in Germany also experienced a large-scale failure towards the end of 2020. As a result, more than 100,000 mobile phone users in Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Cologne, Frankfurt, and other cities failed to make calls and access the Internet. According to Vodafone’s feedback, the fault was caused by the breakdown of the control equipment deployed in Munich, Frankfurt, and Berlin. Considering the large area and the large number of users affected by the fault, it can be concluded that most probably the outage happened in the core network.
In recent generations of mobile broadband, the core network was the brain of mobile communications networks. However, in the 5G era, the core network is responsible for scheduling and managing all network resources and is also an enabling platform for industry digitalization. In the 5G era, mobile communications networks will carry even more essential services. Mobile communications networks will be applied to key fields such as power, finance, government, smart manufacturing, autonomous driving, and telemedicine. Once a large-scale core network fault occurs, mobile phone users’ service will be interrupted, and industrial applications will be affected. This could bring extraordinary losses to the economy and even national security.
The GSMA website now shows that approximately 106 5G networks have been put into commercial use worldwide. 5G is coming at an unimaginable speed, with global operators accelerating 5G construction. In particular, Gulf countries have taken the lead in the commercial deployment of 5G networks in recent years. This poses higher requirements for mobile network reliability, especially in the era of all-cloud transformation. For example, this means having core networks with robustness in signaling storm, cloud-native architecture, and Cross-DC level redundancy for 99.999% telco-grade reliability to ensure the stable operation of mobile networks in the future.
In the 5G era, telecom operators will likely assume greater social responsibilities in this regard. More attention will need to be paid to the construction and operation of the 5G infrastructure. Operators have, of course, always been obliged to review the reliability of their mobile networks. Like those mentioned in late 2020, some network incidents can be meaningful in that they help expose network issues before they become major crises and provide a reminder to other regional and global operators of just critical network reliability will be in the year ahead.
