Mobile Operators: Manage and Protect Mobile Subscribers, Infrastructure and Services

As a mobile operator, you face the challenge of managing a dramatic rise in mobile data traffic. This explosion in volume is fueled by subscribers’ usage of ever-popular mobile devices such as smartphones, as well as PCs with air cards for Web 2.0 applications like steaming audio, video and other social media. In response, your company is undoubtedly making major investments in 3G and 4G technologies to optimize and transform once voice-centric networks into data-centric networks. But are these investments sufficient to meet your critical business objectives such as increasing market share, reducing customer churn and increasing average revenue per user (ARPU)?

As mobile broadband continues to rise in popularity and usage, so too does the potential for malicious activity or crippling threats to your mobile network, services and subscribers. Attackers see mobile devices and networks as new fertile ground for compromise and attacks. Threats such as “overbilling” attacks and Internet-sourced DDoS attacks that target infrastructure including SGSNs, GGSNs, DNS or even firewalls are becoming common—threatening the availability of your mobile services and the profitability of your business.

Today’s mobile operators can rely on industry leaders such as Arbor Networks to help manage and protect their mobile subscribers, infrastructure and services.

Mobile Subscriber Visibility and Management  With the Arbor eSeries solution, mobile operators gain a broadband service optimization solution that provides deep visibility into which subscribers are using which applications—when and for how long. This insight enables operators to control and manage their services, price them more accurately, market them more effectively and deliver high-quality services to all subscribers.

User to IP address assignment Application/Subscriber Database Analysis and Reporting

Mobile Infrastructure & Service Protection  As mobile broadband networks become more like fixed broadband networks, mobile operators will undoubtedly experience the same threats to their mobile subscribers and infrastructure as fixed broadband operators. For example, internet-sourced DDoS attacks that target specific mobile infrastructure (i.e. SGSN, GGSN, DNS etc) are starting to become more common. And it’s only a matter of time when mobile operators will plagued with compromised / infected mobile broadband subscribers that threaten and impact their mobile infrastructure and services.

Unfortunately many mobile operators are unsuccessfully relying upon traditional security devices such as firewalls to stop these threats. Fortunately Arbor’s Peakflow SP and Peakflow SP Threat Management System (TMS) is a comprehensive threat detection, mitigation and reporting solution that can be deployed on the Gi/SGi interfaces of the GGSN/PGW or in Mobile Data Centers allowing mobile operators to protect their mobile infrastructure and services from threats.

Backbone, Peering/Transit Edge Visibility and Optimization You’ve invested heavily into the access, backhaul and core of your mobile network. But do you know what impact your mobile traffic is having on your converged IP backbone? Are you losing profitability via non-optimized peering and transit relationships? By leveraging IP flow data (i.e Netflow, sFlow etc.) embedded in network backbone and peering/transit edge routers Peakflow SP enables mobile operators to gain cost effective visibility into where your mobile network traffic is going to and coming from - ultimately allowing you to increase network performance, subscriber quality of experience and ARPU.