Talking to the people at the cutting edge of mobile broadband planning, it is quite clear that the rapid changes in end-user demand coupled with mobility related impacts are making it increasingly difficult to plan and optimize network capacity using traditional approaches. 

The rapid changes in demand for different broadband applications at a sector-level causes rapid changes in site capacity requirements, as well as backhaul bandwidth and RNC / SGSN/ switch capacity requirements – To avoid performance issues and network bottlenecks, all of these system elements need to be proactively upgraded as demand materializes. 

The trouble with the traditional approach to capacity planning is that it has typically been highly silo-based, with different groups having responsibility for site-level, capacity, backhaul, RNC, SGSN capacity and so on – These planning steps also typically run serially, making it very time consuming and because  there are lots of planning dependencies between each step – Very inefficient. 

In order to effectively plan capacity for mobile broadband, Operators need to do away with this silo-based approach and move quickly to adopt an integrated end-to-end approach to planning across all system elements. 

By using tools to automate the entire end-to-end process, the planning dependencies between each step can be streamlined – With fully integrated scenario analysis and the final solution being arrived at far faster, with better precision and with lower risk. 

This not only helps address the challenges of rapidly changing end-user demand, but also addresses the need to model and understand the impact of new marketing initiatives, which I have talked about previously on these pages.