Headquartered in North Carolina, CommScope is a provider of infrastructure solutions for wireless, business enterprise, residential broadband and carrier wireline networks with approximately 3,000 patents and patent applications worldwide.

The Emerging Trends

The number of worldwide Internet users is forecasted to reach 2.7 billion by 2015 with more than half using mobile devices for access. This has surged the continuous demand of wireless data. Our wireless operator customers continue to focus on evolving their networks to support greater and greater amounts of data traffic. New mobile devices continue to push networks to deliver higher bandwidth, lower latency content along with high quality unified communications. Operators are challenged to deliver more bandwidth to meet the accelerating demand, but to do so cost and energy efficiently.

The rapid adoption of mobile technology inside the workplace is also quickly altering the enterprise IT landscape. CommScope recently released results from the seventh edition of its tri-annual Global Enterprise Survey, in which m ore than 1,100 IT professionals from 63 nations participated. The survey found that Enterprise mobility tied with cloud services as the most anticipated game-changers, with 44 percent of surveyed participants seeing the widespread use of mobile technology as having a major impact. The lines separating the wireless and IT worlds are blurring; in fact, you could say there are no lines anymore — just directions.

The Deployment ChallengeS

Technology is getting more complex and what were once separate areas — like IT and wireless — are merging. One of the primary deployment challenges is finding skilled people who know how to design, equip, install and maintain a network. CommScope helps with this need by linking customers to highly skilled expertise and support resources who are part of its PartnerPRO Network. CommScope's PartnerPRO Network is one of the world's most comprehensive networks of certified partners supporting cable television, business enterprise, wireline and wireless customers. CommScope partners are closely aligned with us in selecting, supplying and/or implementing world-class communications solutions for cable plants, data centers, wireless systems and other networks.

Specific to the wireless industry are deployment challenges related to site acquisition and network complexity. Network operators are finding it harder and harder to acquire areas for cell sites due to limited space, crowded urban settings, municipality restrictions, and zoning issues. One way that CommScope assists in site acquisition is with our Metro Cell Concealment Solutions family, which conceals key RF path equipment in a visually unobtrusive structure that more easily meets zoning restrictions in urban and suburban areas.

Technologies Changing the Telecom World

User demands and competition rather than technology obsolesces will continue to be the primary drivers for wireless network evolution. As new devices with new functionality arrive, networks must increase their capabilities, which span from greater bandwidth to greater cell density to new technologies. The evolution to new technologies is ongoing in all the markets we serve.

Users desire ubiquitous high-speed internet access anywhere, anytime. Providing that access cost effectively is a challenge that will be met via the deployment of multiple technologies in concert. Sector splitting is one such technology. Augmenting the macro cell network with small cells and distributed antenna systems (DAS) is another. Adding new, more efficient directional antennas is yet another aspect. The relative importance of each of these will vary with the situation, but if done in an optimal fashion, the impact will be dramatic transformational improvement in network capacity.

Major Pain Points

Our customers experience pain points related to the continued evolution of network technology and the need to evolve their networks to stay ahead of data demands. This evolution today involves 3G/4G wireless, 10GBASE-T Ethernet, broadband optical networks and more. CommScope helps customers manage technology evolution with new solutions and its PartnerPRO Network. CommScope can help simplify network design and deployment while supplying reliable technology solutions.

In wireless, spectrum and capacity will continue to be the major issues. Unfortunately we cannot do much about spectrum — it is a finite resource. But CommScope can help operators increase their spectral efficiency to get more out of their spectrum. We will continue to devise solutions that increase network capacity. The data consumption boom from mobile devices does not appear to be slowing down anytime soon. Operators will remain in need of capacity solutions to meet this demand for the foreseeable future.

Keeping the Team Ahead

Our direct investment in R&D has exceeded $1 billion over the last decade. But we find that technology is advancing at such a rapid pace in so many different areas that even with this investment it is difficult to stay abreast of it all. Our engineers and scientists work very closely with our business experts to understand our customers' key pain points. We then gather the relevant publically available information and work closely with our suppliers to figure out how to collectively advance the state of the art in the most relevant areas. We find that partnering with suppliers to understand and leverage their capabilities are a very effective way for us to come up with creative solutions cost effectively.

Our vision for CommScope is that customers will engage us first, trusting us to solve their communication challenges, optimize their business and achieve success. The Office of the CTO contributes to this vision by anticipating technology evolution in the industries we serve and developing solutions that ease our customers' pain points. (As told to Anamika Sahu)