Networks and Service Platforms

Our main purpose is to make the enabler for new services from networks and platforms, guaranteeing their successful implementation and ensuring their high-quality operation.

Telefónica I+D develops short-medium term activities that add a differential advantage to Telefónica over its competitors in one of its more important assets: Networks and Services platforms. To achieve this, we collaborate with Telefónica Group in key business initiatives, and we strengthen medium-long term innovation in the areas that can offer more benefits for the Group.

Current networks operate under certain constraints that must be taken into account for the successful deployment of new services. These require more and more bandwidth, both in the downstream and the upstream, and a lower latency. At the same time, users expect a better quality of service and require using same services regardless of location the network or the terminal used.

In order to successfully overcome these challenges, the activities carried out by Telefónica I+D focus on the following areas:

• Mobile Access: We conduct research into new techniques to improve spectrum usage and to optimize capacity, coverage and network deployment and operation. We also explore the possibilities offered by sensor networks and their integration in operator networks.
• Fixed Access: We develop network architectures and analyze new technologies that can be applied on both copper and fibre access, aimed at achieving better coverage, higher broadband and improved efficiency. This will result in new service enablers.
• Network core: Fixed mobile convergence means using a single core network that supports the increasingly greater volume of traffic resulting from legacy and new services. We are conducting research into new mechanisms that will make it possible to add more intelligence to core networks and increase their efficiency and capacity.
• Security: We collaborate with the Telefónica Group in the definition and development of security architectures and requirements for broadband networks and new services. As the technological reference for security within the Group, we head innovation initiatives of remarkable importance, such as the development and coordination of the CENIT project "Segur@: Security and Trust in the Information Society".
• Quality of Experience: Latency, bandwidth, network coverage and terminal capacity all have a direct impact on the quality of service perceived by the user. We carry out research into new network and traffic models to be able to predict the quality that new services will offer before they are deployed. Research also covers platforms used to monitor the quality received by the users.
• Service platforms: These provide the capacities that will allow the deployment of services that differentiate the Group from its competitors. We are currently working on the "Ambient Intelligence Platform" and on platform architectures that adapt to each person through enablers such as ubiquity, pro-activity, intelligence, sensitivity and "natural" visual, auditory, tactile interactions, etc. We are also researching into platforms that will allow for exporting network capabilities to be used by new services, and in the different initiatives to allow third parties using these capabilities.
• The strategic value of some platforms is worth highlighting, such as: the Broadband Platform, used by Telefónica Deutschland, O2 Germany, and South America (Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Peru), and which provides more than 4 million ADSL accesses; the Comprehensive Service Provision System (CSPS), a platform that is used by the mobile prepaid system in Latin America; and the Multiservice Platform (PMS, used by Telefónica España for more than 20 million calls every day).
• Home Services Architecture: the growing complexity of home networks requires developing new models and paradigms to manage them in order to avoid a significant increase in the operating expenses (OpEx). We are currently working on new architectures that will remotely set up and manage the service scenarios in the home of the future so that they are provided with end-to-end quality. These involve a set of tools, platforms, configurations and technologies designed to efficiently provide services with differentiated quality.

Related projects

• Software Defined Radio