Wireless carriers tout move toward a more open network

In a significant switch from their past positions, wireless carriers have started touting the openness of their networks as a key asset. At last week’s CTIA Wireless show in Las Vegas, representatives from Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint Nextel all made certain to talk about how their networks are increasingly more open to third-party devices and applications, whether through joining the Android-promoting Open Handset Alliance or holding open source development conferences for third-party developers.

Kyle Malady, Verizon Wireless’ vice president of network technology development, spoke with Network World staff writer Brad Reed about what’s behind his company’s move toward making its network more open than in the past, and also about the future of the company’s investment in Long Term Evolution as its 4G wireless technology .

Network World: What’s behind Verizon’s recent embrace of more open-access standards, particularly the Open Development Initiative?

Kyle Malady: If you look at our historical business model, we’re traditionally providing full end-to-end service to customers, and because of that we like to test everything. If you look at the stack, right from the chip set up to the user interface, we like to know what’s going on because if a customer calls in and has a problem, we’d like to be able to respond to that.

But we’ve also seen the proliferation of new devices, and we’d like to give nontraditional developers the opportunity to build things and bring them onto the network. It ties in well to our LTE decision and the idea that consumer electronics are going to be tethered to a network, and we wanted to drive innovation, and that was our thinking.

How much did the debate over network neutrality factor into your decision making?

I don’t think network neutrality played into our decision to do this. It’s really just about how do we set up a segment so we can drive innovation by others that doesn’t necessarily have to be driven by us. In this new model, you’ll bring your device to us, and if it passes the network requirements that we have, if you go to a third-party lab and do some testing, then it can connect to our network.

As someone who works in network technology development, how will this embrace of more open standards affect your job? Will Verizon Wireless have to make any changes to its wireless architecture to accommodate more open standards?

Initially, it’s going to be more about business processes than network architecture. It’s things as fundamental as how does somebody get the specs so they know how to design their device, it’s things like if you have a question about something network-related, how do we support you? But as for changes to the network itself, there won’t be so many. If you meet our standards and if you pass our tests, then you’re good to go.

Looking forward, we’ve heard a lot about WiMAX at the CTIA Wireless convention, but can you tell me a bit about Verizon’s commitment to LTE as a 4G technology, and why did you choose to invest in that instead of other standards such as WiMAX?

We’ve been looking at WiMAX, we’ve been looking at LTE, we’ve been looking at Ultra-Mobile Broadband (UMB) and all of that Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) stuff over the past few years. In the end analysis, we just felt that LTE gave us the majority of the benefits we were looking for. We think there’s going to be a good world market for LTE and we’re going to help drive that.

What are some of the benefits you’re looking for that you think LTE will provide?

What we’re looking for is a technology that’s OFDM-based. On the business side, we think it’ll be good scope and scale, we think manufacturers will build a lot of devices, and we think it’s a technology that can be implemented into consumer electronics. I would imagine that we’ll start seeing prototype LTE devices next year, and by 2010 you might start seeing commercial stuff.

There has been a lot of talk during CTIA Wireless about how carriers are going to have to upgrade their mobile backhaul capacity in order to meet the demands of 3G and 4G technology. What is Verizon doing right now to upgrade its backhaul to support these next-generation networks?

Obviously, we’re thinking it’s going to drive up a lot of demand for bandwidth on the network, so we’re going to be looking at adding more capacity to the core backhaul network as required, using high-capacity facilities for that such as OC-192s (10Gbps). We’re also looking at the edge from the cell site into the switches and datacenters, and looking at what technologies we can bring there… It’s always something that needs to be engineered and looked at.

Network World is an InfoWorld affiliate.