Nokia’s mobile division is no long with us physically, as it was acquired by Microsoft not long ago and is now known as Microsoft Devices. Don’t feel sad though, as Nokia is now back to its roots of networking industry.
On last Friday, Nokia came by to show a lucky bunch what they have up their sleeves for the world to enjoy – and indeed they have 4 new things to show, first being VoLTE with SRVCC, Liquid Applications, CEM, and NFV & OSS for cloud.
Before we begin, here’s are the full names of those acronyms. And don’t worry, we’ll go through some explanations on what each of them really means. Also, note that there will be a bunch of jargon up ahead.
- LTE – Long Term Evolution; also known as 4G
- LA – Liquid Applications
- VoLTE – Voice over LTE
- SRVCC – single radio voice call continuity
- CEM – Customer Experience Management
- CEI – Customer Experiment Index
- NFV – Network Functions Virtualization
- OSS – Operations Support System
- API – application programming interface
- VM – virtual machine
So let us now begin telling the story of what each of them really does.
Liquid Applications
The name itself doesn’t really mean much at all. What it basically this Liquid Applications means is that there will be a server at the base station.
The hardware itself is modular, as the picture is shown above. As what Nokia has explained, this piece of hardware acts no differently than a USB flash drive – just plug and play.
By using Nokia’s proprietary hardware and software, developers will have to use the APIs that Nokia has provided to make use of the added server. This will actually move the server closer to you – in terms of telecommunications of course.
In conventional telecommunications, how your phones load up the webpage of… let’s say Facebook, is by a long process. What Nokia has is to have the Facebook server loaded up into the base station, and by that your phone loads up Facebook by first contacting the base station, then gets everything from there and straight away sends back to your phone. Pretty neat!
As you can see, the download speed is of course the largest impact here for using Liquid Applications. Imagine streaming 1080p video in real time with these speed! The possibilities with this is just too wide.
On a side note, this is what a base station resembles, if you’re wondering.
VoLTE with SRVCC
I’m pretty sure all of us here reading this have used some sort of VoIP service before – be it Skype, Google Hangouts, LINE, Ventrillo, or anything else. I’m also sure that everyone here made a phone call before with their mobile phones (that’s obvious). VoLTE is by combining both of these together into one – that is by making phone calls or video calls through LTE.
Why LTE? The reasons are simple – clear, crisp voice quality and also high-resolution video calls.
The second part that comes into play is SRVCC. This is important as LTE coverage isn’t really that great yet and will drop your calls rather often. SRVCC is here to save the day by instead of dropping LTE calls entirely, it’ll drop your LTE call to 3G instead. Surely it affects the voice and video call quality, but at least you won’t get entirely chopped off.
CEM Umbrella
If you’ve heard of the news where all three major telcos in Malaysia – DiGi, Celcom and Maxis – got a fined by MCMC over the poor quality they’re providing to the users. One of the biggest reason why this happen is because the telcos simply didn’t have enough information or time to pinpoint the problems faced by the users.
Nokia know what was the problem. The telcos in Malaysia couldn’t pinpoint what’s the problem, and Nokia has created an entire ecosystem that can dig the information to the core – including some other additional information.
Imagine a system where the telcos can track which area in particular has a lot of people, but with low signal reception. That happens a lot where you do have HSPA (3.5G) connectivity – as you can see on the “H” signal bar – but you just can’t load anything, not even Google. With that problem at hand, the CEM can confirm this problem through their CEI.
Such detection methods enable telcos to avoid the possibility of getting fined by MCMC. This also applies for other countries too, as it does what the name suggests – to improve customer experience.
Obviously I’m hoping Malaysian telco giants would implement this too, I’m sick and tired of dead zones everywhere.
OSS
Here’s a scenario – you have multiple servers up and running, but the one connected to your network got into a blackout. Then, you’re screwed.
Here’s what Nokia has for you – decoupling networks and form something like a grid system across to all other servers. With that, you can even shut down some of the servers during times of low demand – like at night where everyone is sleeping, so that you can even reduce operation cost of servers. Once shutting down some of the servers, the utilization of those servers that are still online are higher – which means less waste of resources too.
Another thing they have is to provide NFV through VM. The hardware for servers these days are insanely top-tiered, with 8 cores and 16 cores available for purchase, but most of these performance aren’t really utilized at all. Nokia however makes use of this through VM.
A scenario is during New Year’s Eve where everyone is camping on their phones to wait till for the clock to go past 11:59:59 pm, with fingers hovering above the “send” button. During that time, everything is the most intense and the usage of telco services have a sudden spike.
Telcos have anticipated this, that’s for sure, but how do they cope with this demand? Nokia says, use VM to improve capacity. Server farms are there, so just use all of the computing power available.
This service is however not used in Malaysia yet.
So, you’ve gotten a look at what Nokia is now doing in the industry. They’re still making great stuff, and we can only anticipate the future where we get to enjoy all of the magic. The Nokia mobile phone division as we know it, is physically no more, but they’re still with us in our memories as great devices that we once used. We can expect much more from their Telco technologies.
Like our Facebook Page here at NasiLemakTech.com for more news and in-depth reviews! Also, join our Facebook Group for insightful information and memes!
Subscribe to our YouTube channel too!
