The Telecommunication Development Bureau of
the International Telecommunication Union (ITU‑BDT) is developing partnerships with
the vendors of professional network planning tools to support its missions promoting
best-practice planning techniques in developing countries. A co-operative agreement has been negotiated with ITU‑BDT that will add the STEM business-case modelling
software to a roster of network planning tools to be used for training purposes
and to be presented during official ITU‑BDT workshops, seminars and training courses.
ITU experts also plan to model high-level business cases for 3G mobile and next-generation
networks (NGN) to help the governments and newly-formed regulators of developing
nations assess the market potential of their nascent telecoms sectors.
Commercial quality tool for telecoms business planning
Latest ITU policy for network planning is to enter into practical partnerships with
specialist software vendors. ITU-BDT has surveyed the market for planning tools
over the last 2–3 years, and it is still continuing to do so, in order to
enter into partnerships with companies that have tools of commercial quality readily
available. In this context, thorough documentation and interoperability with other
platforms are just as important as a tool’s ability to generate insightful results.
STEM is a tool designed specifically for business planning across multiple technologies.
The primary objective of the collaborative agreement is to promote the application
of a standardised modelling process with state-of-the-art procedures for techno-economical
evaluation of business case studies in telecoms, such as evolution of 2G to 3G.
Business-case showcases based on STEM have been a regular feature of ITU-BDT technical
missions around the world for several years now, and the agreement aims to promote
wider participation in ITU-BDT events and missions by Analysys and the owner companies
of other network planning tools.
As a direct example of this partnership in action, Robin Bailey recently presented
a STEM methodology for evaluating NGN migration strategies to an ITU regional seminar
on fixed–mobile convergence and new network architectures for the Middle East and
North Africa (MENA) region held on 21–24 November 2005 in Tunis.
A full list of software partners will be available on the ITU-BDT Web site in due
course.
Influencing policy with leading-edge business logic
Under the agreement, we will make the STEM tool available to ITU experts in
order for them to model high-level business cases on a non-commercial basis and
in the public domain for governments, administrations and regulators. Such models
will be designed to help evaluate the economic potential of a given developing nation
and to establish general tariff levels.
One recent case examined the business potential of mobile 3G solutions for a medium-sized
developing country in the Middle East. Oscar Gonzalez Soto applied the migration
model from 2G to 3G for the different country geo-scenarios of urban, suburban and
rural types. By projecting and analysing key factors such as new services, bandwidth
requirements, quality level, network deployment, revenues, investments and financial
needs, a set of recommendations was produced to ensure business feasibility in the
context of the country.
We may publish run-time copies of such models for distribution to the ITU’s
members and other prospective STEM users, in order to facilitate in-country review
and validation of concepts. However, such models would omit detailed segmentation
of services and resources, to avoid the misleading impression that such a reference
case could be directly applied to model a real operator’s specific business issues.
ITU-BDT aims to develop locally benchmarked reference models. The underlying objective
is to stimulate interest in the development of commercial studies applied to specific
country, sub-regional, or technological issues by specially trained operator personnel
and/or professional services agencies.
Through this process, it is hoped that policy makers and investors in developing
nations will take a greater interest in network economics, and to this end, we
will define procedures to make licences of the STEM tool available at preferential
rates to clients from ‘developing countries’ as defined by the UN.