TELLABS GROWTH DRIVERS

By Dr. Vikram Saksena, Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President

When a giant technology wave comes along, it disrupts everything in its wake. For innovators, it presents the opportunity to seize the moment and ride the new wave forward.

Just as mainframe computers shaped the 1960s and PCs changed the 1980s, smartphones and tablets will transform the decades ahead.

In 2011 alone, analysts expect consumers worldwide to buy more than 50 million tablets and almost 400 million smartphones. At the same time, mobile operators are advancing their networks to newer generations of technology, from 2G and 3G to LTE (long-term evolution) and 4G, which will deliver broadband speeds that are better suited to smartphones and tablets. Taken together, these changes present a huge challenge to our customers.

How will service providers deliver the smart mobile Internet? Simply extrapolating the traditional Internet will prove insufficient. That's because the traditional Internet is delivered through "dumb pipes" that cannot:

• Scale up to handle many more devices than people. We expect more than 22 billion wireless devices to connect through worldwide mobile networks by 2020, partly due to the rise of machine-to-machine communications. Not only smartphones and tablets, but book readers, cars and other devices will connect to wireless networks.
• Control millions of user sessions and be aware of what users are doing with multiple applications — such as video, gaming, peer-to-peer applications and more.
• Adapt to the dynamism of radio networks. In light of spectrum scarcity, networks must be agile enough to adapt to changing conditions, as users traverse multiple cell sites and networks.
• Assure a high-quality user experience by making networks user-aware, session-aware and application-aware. It's challenging to deliver mobile video with high quality. To deliver a rich user experience, networks need to manage network policies and integrate user sessions intelligently.
• Enable intelligent personalization, so you get what you want, as you want it, anytime, anywhere. Intelligent personalization delights users, and it can transform mobile operators' business models by generating new revenue from application providers and advertisers.

Tomorrow's networks will require more intelligence than yesterday's technology can deliver. Why? Technologists view communication networks in 7 layers, and the traditional Internet operates only through Layer 3 (the network layer). While separate blades can be added to Layer 3 routers, in practice that slows down processing, taxes performance and degrades users' experiences. Yesterday's vehicles just can't get you to tomorrow.

Tomorrow's networks need a whole new architecture to power the mobile Internet, based on purpose-built platforms with integrated intelligence up to Layer 7 (the applications layer). We're creating those next-generation platforms today, and we plan to deliver them to customers soon.

The smart mobile Internet will deliver users higher-quality experiences with smart personalization. It will enable mobile operators to generate revenue not only from users, but also from applications providers, content providers and advertisers. This two-sided revenue model holds the power to transform our customers' business.