Received via e-mail from J. Gerry Purdy, VP & Chief Analyst of Frost & Sullivan.
Networks Within Networks
March 2008
I recently had a briefing with an interesting wireless start-up: Strata8 Networks. I was introduced to the company via Tom Body, a friend who’s on the Board of the company. This company is the first of what I expect to be a number of companies that are developing what I call ‘networks within networks.’ This will become another new exciting growth area for wireless. Here’s why.
Imagine for a minute that you’re building a nationwide wireless network. You put up cell towers in each major metropolitan area. The population you cover grows. You put up more cell towers in less populated areas. Eventually, you cover most of the United States with service for 250 to 300 million people. The number of people having cell phones grows as well with ‘penetration’ approaching 70%. (It’s over 100% in some areas where people have more than one cell phone.)
Now imagine what happens when a cell phone becomes very pervasive and very convenient: many calls are made to people who are not very far away. In fact, in an office setting, most of the people using cell phones today are calling fellow employees in the same building or enterprise campus. In essence, more costly cell phone services have replaced the traditional, low-cost office phone. While there may be a phone sitting on the desk, most people just use their cell phones to make all of their calls because it’s so convenient. But most of us have walk outside or go next to a window in order to make a call inside a building.
In this situation, it doesn’t make any sense to use the wireless operators’ entire back end infrastructure to support making a call to a person who might be just a few feet away. Instead, it would be more efficient if you could intercept the call with a local network that would then route it to the person nearby, thus saving time and money. Such a local network would also provide for good coverage throughout the entire organization.
FedEx went through this same discovery: many packages they picked up in a major city high-rise office building were being set to another floor in the same building or to a location very close by. Instead of sending the package to Memphis on an airplane, FedEx now re-routes local packages directly to save both time and money.
There are a number of ways in which the call could be intercepted and routed locally. One way would be to use dual mode cell phones that include Wi-Fi and have the local signal be a VoIP call (much like what’s done with Wi-Fi based phones operating on an enterprise PBX). The Unwired Mobile Access (UMA) standard is developing around this capability. But this takes dual mode handsets which are not yet widely manufactured, but will be in a few years, and uses unlicensed 802.11x spectrum. Another way to intercept and route local calls is to use a local cellular network that operates on the same frequency as the cellular provider, but has a much stronger signal and logic to intercept and re-route the call on the local network.
It’s pretty easy to see that a company could build a ‘network within a network’ using a ‘Pico cell’ inside the enterprise campus in which they would allow users (typically in company setting) to use their cell phones inside the office environment. There would be great reception. Calls to other employees would stay within the enterprise. Calls would be on one common wireless network. This requires all employees to use a common wireless operator but, eventually, these services may support multiple operators’ networks. Costs would be reduced.
Every enterprise is seeing telecommunications costs rise as employees make more of their business calls using their cell phones instead of the landline phone. The ‘network within network’ enables elimination of per minute pricing for calls made within the local network. The same benefits would accrue to data when employees wanted to receive email or get data off an enterprise server. An additional benefit is that these calls and data while on standard cell phones will remain within the enterprise firewall, leading to greater enterprise security, call routing control, and real time call detail reporting and analysis.
Strata8 has just announced their first enterprise network that will provide ‘network within a network’ services. Their first wireless operator partner is Sprint. And their services will only operate today in the 16 US markets in which Strata8 has licensed spectrum, but that’s good enough for companies located entirely in one of these markets or with offices in these specific 16 regions.
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Eventually, Strata8 – and other vendors that will surely announce similar ‘network within network’ services – will support enterprises with multiple office locations using the Internet connect calls between offices. This allows employees to continue to make calls or download email just like they normally would. The ‘network within network’ (Net-in-Net) service does all the heavy lifting to manage the traffic, and saves the company money along the way.
Someday, we’ll have multiple networks within networks across the entire US. It’s all about intelligent communications. We commend Strata8 Networks for leading the way in this exciting new arena of wireless communications.
Written by:
J. Gerry Purdy, Ph.D.
VP & Chief Analyst
Mobile & Wireless
Frost & Sullivan
Keywords: Gerry Purdy, Mobile & Wireless, Networks Within Networks, Frost & Sullivan
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