After 3G and 4G, its the time for the NGNs

Bangalore: The telecom industry is currently experiencing a period of unprecedented change. The rapidly expanding range of telecommunication services is causing consumers and companies to adjust their expectations at the same time forcing operators to respond with an ever-increasing urgency to develop strategies to give a stiff competition to their competitors, build new revenue streams, improve margins, reduce churn and capture new subscribers into previously untapped markets.The demand for powerful new communications and to enhance customer service has paved its way to new technological change as 3G LTE and 4G wirelesses. At the same time, Next Generation Networks (NGNs) represent a fundamental paradigm shift in the wireline and wireless core networks from circuit switching to packet switching.

Next generation network is a key architectural evolution in telecommunication core and access networks. The general idea behind the NGN is that one network transports all information and services (voice, data, and all sorts of media such as video) by encapsulating these into packets, like it is on the Internet. NGNs are commonly built around the Internet Protocol, and therefore the term "all-IP" is also sometimes used to describe the transformation toward NGN. NGN can also be operated on a multi-vendor environment.The NGN is able to support highly customizable services that are easily and rapidly created as well as deployed economically throughout the network. In this respect, the NGN technology provides a single solution for various network types integration, and of all communication technologies it embraces (fixed, mobile, wireless), and addresses the problems in providing service “ubiquity” and “seamlessness” connectivity, besides dealing with issues such as, zero service disruption for moving, roaming, handover users and Quality of Service (QoS) guarantee among different technology networks with diverse QoS.Next generation networks have finally been identified as network with the following common characteristics: convergence of various data communication types over the IP, i.e. data, multimedia, voice, video; fixed, wireless and mobile network convergence; access to a common set of services that can be provided over multiple access network types (ADSL, UTRAN, WiFi, WiMAX, etc) with features like user handover and roaming capabilities; IP-based core transport networks; possibility for using any terminal type (PC, PDA, mobile telephone, set-top boxes, etc).