Alternatives for reliable and quality telecommunication network design

In today's highly competitive telecommunication market, customers expect and demand reliable and high-quality service. In order to please customers, new telecommunication systems and networks which support a wide range of voice, data and video services are being designed with extremely high reliability/availability requirements, but usually without much consideration of cost. These super-reliable systems are generally very complex and therefore extremely expensive to develop, build, and operate. Increased costs are going to be reflected in the price of the services the system is offering, and the reliability benefits may be overshadowed by the fact that the procurement and operations of the system may be too costly; customers will be drawn to competitors with less expensive network solutions and more affordable services. This paper discusses alternative approaches to the system design from the point of view of future costs. We will illustrate that the system can be improved not only by increasing reliability of subsystems, but also by effectively utilizing system operations support. The operations support alternatives may be less expensive than reliability improvements and, in addition, may provide many strategic marketing advantages. In the telecommunication industry, a high-quality service requirement usually translates into a high-quality network. Network support is defined, and customers' expectations are discussed. In an example, based on the concept of distributed switching systems, we show how the selection of the maintenance/repair operation policy may influence the cost of the system operations and reduce the hardware costs involved.