The need for network planning to keep up with today’s budget planning

Telephony has a nice recap of Ciena’s earnings report yesterday.  In speaking about Ciena’s revenue drop and the continued decline of carrier capital expenditures, CEO Gary Smith said something that really piqued my interest.  Though carriers set their annual budgets last Fall, they have apparently moved to making spending decisions “on a monthly basis.”  That is, though budgets are set, carriers have begun reviewing them and their business needs on a monthly basis before spending the appropriated money.

As the carrier spending decision cycle contracts, many other processes - including network planning - must also speed up to enable the best spending decisions.  Traditionally, network planning has been done every six, twelve and twenty-four months but this is no longer sufficient.  To support the new spending decision process, carriers need to conduct master network planning at least every month, if not every two weeks.  Only if network planning is running at the same pace as carrier spending decisions will carriers have the real-time information they need to determine what to spend when to effectively and efficiently support the market adoption of their next generation services.