Happy Holidays

Source: Belgacom

Winning the PON wars

Ovum-RHK believes 2007 will become the break-out year for ITU-GPON. The market research company has always argued that the PON market will develop along the following lines:

• IEEE EPON (or GE-PON) deployments largely relegated to the Far East
• ITU-GPON deployments confined to EMEA and North America
  

However, Ovum-RHK now believes GPON is gaining ground in the Far East, following recent discussions with operators there. The operators claim GPON pricing is becoming more competitive, and they are keen to use its greater bandwidth. It also offers better support for legacy multi-services and video.

Accordingly, EPON could become confined to Japan only while GPON becomes adopted elsewhere in Asia. That would make the Far East the largest market for GPON.

Meanwhile, in Europe DT is working on deploying GPON to the curb and offering VDSL2 to end users, BT is looking at an amplified version of GPON, and FT has announced it is deploying PON. Meanwhile, North American operators, large and small, are looking at GPON.

The upshot: Ovum-RHK believes GPON will ultimately win.

But an informed source in the EPON camp believes the technology is far from being brushed aside. "China Telecom (CTC) stated in September that GPON is at least two years behind EPON and has almost no chance of interoperability," says the source. "CTC's EPON interoperability testing is already underway."

EPON chip technology now matches GPON's 2.5 Gbps, and because it is Ethernet based, EPON has a 10 Gbps roadmap. "It [the roadmap] is definitely on the horizon" at the IEEE and with certain EPON chip companies. KDDI for one has announced it will use 2.5 Gbps EPON. In turn, cable operators are also embracing EPON, with deployments existing in Japan and the US.

Comments?

Things to watch out for in 2007

There are many developments to watch out for in 2007. Here are some thoughts:

1. It is a year of decisions for operators regarding mobile TV. Operators are moving from the trialing stage to mass deployment and 2007 is decision time. Operators may want to adopt DVB-H but a lack of spectrum in certain European countries will likely force their hand to chose alternative broadcast technologies: waiting for spectrum is not an option. And will 3G operators adopt TDtv, thereby exploiting spectrum they have already [handsomely] paid for and keep more of the mobile TV proposition in-house.
   
2. 40Gbit/s: The coming year will see 40G go beyond very short link spans (up to 2km) to 80km and even longer as part of dense WDM transmissions. It will also become clearer whether there will be a future higher speed SONET/SDH interface or whether 40Gbit/s is the end of the line. But first more clarity is needed regarding high speed Ethernet (100G+).
   
3. Is IMS shaping up as carriers hope and does it represent a disruptive technology that will shake up the industry's value chain? NGN intends to take a closer look at IMS as well as competitive approaches come the New Year.
4. GPON vs. EPON: Will 2007 be the year when GPON starts to gain the upper hand or will EPON, with its increasing maturity and lower costs, be adopted because it does the job now?
   

A happy and fruitful year to you.

Q: What 2007-trends-to-watch-for would you highlight?

FT Tx - France Telecom details phase II

"We chose fiber to the home because a lot of services need 100 megabits per second and more. At present fiber seems like a dream but five years ago no one heard of DSL (digital subscriber line). Now if people don't have it, it's a drama."

France Telecom Chief Executive Didier Lombard

France Telecom has revealed more details of its fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) rollout. It is using GPON technology and plans to have between 150 000 and 200 000 subsribers by year end 2008. The service will offer users 100Mbit/s symmetrical access data rates.

France Telecom has become Europe's incumbent trail blazer with regard to PON deployment. This is due to the fierce competition in France, with the Iliad group undertaking its own FTTx rollout which it plans to open to other service providers. But to put France Telecom's subscriber targets in perspective, Japan is connecting some 300 000 FTTx users a month.

40G - any which way but serial

Juniper Networks has announced a 40 Gbit/s interface card for its core T-Series routers based on 10 Gbit/s optics. Using four XFP transceivers, the interface card delivers a 40 Gbit/s link over four wavelengths, each at 10 Gbps, using either four fibres or a single fibre with an added optical multiplexer.

The XFP modules support link distances up to 80km, ideal for connecting POPs. The latest interface card complements Juniper's existing 40G serial interface card announced a year ago.

For Juniper, the card makes sense as it takes advantage of the relatively low cost of 10 Gbit/s optics, a high volume and vibrant segment. For operators, they gain a cost effective way of upgrading their equipment to 40Gbit/s without having to worry about the performance of the existing fibre plant. Optical signal degradation caused by effects such as polarisation mode dispersion can be an issue at 40Gbit/s.

This is the second announcement involving Juniper and muxed 10Gbit/s signals in recent weeks. In November Juniper was one of nine companies that founded the x40 MSA that will deliver a 40Git/s signal over four 10Gbit/s wavelengths using a XENPAK optical module.


Will 4x10G interface cards such as Juniper's spur the market for 40G or will they hinder the total available market for 40G serial and hence impede the 40G market opportunity?

Optical building block shipments top 10k

JDS Uniphase's announcement that it has shipped over 10,000 reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexers (ROADMs) marks the increasing use of agile networking at the network's optical layer. But Europe is lagging when it comes to using such devices.

"European carriers are somewhat behind," Sinclair Vass, JDSU's director of EMEA for optical communications, told NGN. "There are some trials by European carriers but no hard deployments."

One reason why European carriers have yet to adopt ROADMs is that metro rings are generally too small to warrant them. Bandwidth requirements are growing but still not enough for carriers to embrace ROADMs. But Vass expect deployments to start in 2007.

ROADMs deliver several benefits to the network. They reduce the need by carriers to plan traffic patterns, and they reduce provisioning times. The newer ROADM systems also extend performance and support multiple protocols and services efficiently.

There are three main ROADM types: the traditional wavelength blocker which passes or drops light paths (and have degree 2 connectivity), the planar lightwave circuit (PLC) based ROADM that uses optical integration techniques to reduce cost, and which also has degree two connectivity, and the sophisticated wavelength-selective switch which offers a higher degree of connectivity and typically is used to connect metro rings.

The majority of the 10,000 ROADMs shipped by JDSU are wavelength-blocker-based designs, used for long-haul DWDM mainly. But by mid-2007, it will be superseded by the newer PLC and wavelength-selective switch ROADMs.

Meanwhile, certain North American operators are enquiring about miniature ROADMs. These will support fewer wavelengths - typically 4 and maybe 8 - for use at the network edge.

Why is there a need to add or drop wavelengths right at the network edge? It's a question of what the traffic looks like in the network and its predictability, says JDSU. Carriers may say they need such tiny ROADMs but the expectation is that they will be deployed from 2009 at the earliest.

Soundbite: Mobile TV uncertainties

“There is technology uncertainty, spectrum uncertainty, and also business model uncertainty: how should operators charge for the [mobile TV] service, paid for by advertising or a subscription fee?

There is additional complexity of having unicast and broadcast in the mix, with broadcasters and mobile operators potentially becoming competitors.

There are a lot of questions still to be answered with the result that there will be many different models – very much like traditional TV services.”

Ian Cox, analyst and co-founder of TelecomView

Soundbite: How NGNs become legacy

"New networks are born with a simplicity that gives them a natural advantage to serve the changing nature of traffic. To achieve unification and meet new traffic demands, designers, often with different objectives, begin to make changes to expand the base technology, and thereby increase the complexity of the new network. As each change is made, the network begins to be weighed down by its own success. Every design choice removes a degree of freedom, solving an immediate problem but eliminating potential solutions to other problems that lie in the future. Then, once again, the nature of traffic changes, and the entropy of the network makes it brittle and incapable of flexing to meet the new end. The ageing next-generation network is recast as a legacy network, only suited to old traffic types."

G Keith Cambron, president and CEO of AT&T Labs, Inc., who calls such a force of network transformation, network entropy. Source: IEEE Communications magazine, Oct 2006.

NGN expertise for hire

BT is making its next generation network expertise available to other carriers. It has formed a business unit dubbed the 21C Global Venture (21C GV).

The move is a smart one for BT as it can continue to test its learning on different networks to its own. Carriers hiring BT's 21C GV meanwhile can avoid some of the teething problems BT is inevitably encoutering. And like telecom standards, the venture may even bring some uniformity to NGN design if uptake is strong.

The venture's contribution to BT's overall revenues may be marginal but it's a clever idea nonetheless.

Chinese system vendors' sales

Home and international: 2002 to 2005.
Source: Dittberner Associates

Click here for Total Telecom article

Mobile TV: Input sought

I'm about to start researching a technology briefing article on mobile TV. Please comment if you have a mobile TV issue you'd like explored.

BT's Matt Bross on Huawei II

Total Telecom has just published the article on the Chinese vendors, ZTE, UTStarcom and Huawei - Chinese vendors: Route One - and their assault on the European market. Here is an interview with Matt Bross, BT Group's CTO, on his thoughts about Huawei to accompany the article.

Huawei Technologies is providing BT’s 21CN with access and transmission equipment “A copper node and a fibre multi-service access node, and coarse and dense WDM transport equipment,” says Matt Bross, BT Group’s chief technology officer. Huawei itself will not detail the specific platforms.

BT used several metrics to evaluate responses to its 21CN tender. These included a vendor’s ability to drive and sustain innovation, take risk out of project executing, and continuity provide what is needed to transform the network from a narrowband to a broadband one.

None of the some 75 respondents met BT’s end-to-end needs so the carrier focused on the particular domains of core, metro and access. And here Huawei was one of a choice few chosen. “Huawei can help take the risk out of the cost, integration, and the platforms they drive, in the [access and core] domains they play,” says Bross.

He stresses that Huawei was not significantly lower in terms of its pricing: “I don’t have personal knowledge of individual pricing but nor would BT spend a huge amount of time on unit cost as opposed to the cost of ownership across the product’s lifetime.”

Bross also has no doubt that Huawei will emerge as an innovator, and drive in market-leading areas. “You have two choices: either you decide that they will be fast followers due to their engineering and development or that, with their many thousands of young and bright staff, they will begin to innovate,” he says. “Not only do they follow thoroughly through with an answer but there is a ‘Why did you ask that, BT? What are they [BT] thinking that? What is the origin, why is this important?’ They find a response to the question in earnest and why you asked this in essence.”

He also believes that the understanding and experience Huawei in gaining in leading competitive markets, will hold it in good stead when it competes with North American and European vendors that will increasingly bid for contracts in Huawei’s home market.

NGN in spam bother

Apologies for the lack of new posts. Google Blogger disabled any postings on NGN over the last 10 days as it identified the site as a source of spam. Blogger's spam-prevention robots saw something amiss and locked the site but after repeated requests for a review, the site was given a clean bill of health and is up and running again.

It is good to be back.

ECOC: Post-deadline papers and plenary

The European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC 2006) has made available the post-deadline papers and video recordings of the plenary session

• For the post-deadline papers, click here
• For the plenary including France Telecom and Alcatel, click here
• And for NGN's summary of the ECOC exhibition, click here

Mobile as personal assistant and project manager

Information from your handset could enable data analysis techniques to recommend activities and schedule your day.

MIT Media Laboratory has developed a technique that predicts a user's daily behavior and social allegiances based on handset data such as a user's early-morning activities and locations. Technology Review magazine reports that the technique predicted a person's remaining daily activities, associations and locations with 79 percent accuracy, and group affiliations with a 96 percent accuracy, using early-morning location and activity data only.

The research work will now investigate how people influence one another, and in particular, determine the level of satisfaction of people working on projects in groups.

For a paper detailing the work, click here

Soundbite: Search engines 50 years' hence

"In 50 years the scene will be transformed. Instead of typing a few words into a search engine, people will discuss their needs with a digital intermediary, which will offer suggestions and refinements. The result will not be a list of links, but an annotated report (or a simple conversation) that synthesises the important points, with references to the original literature. People won't think of 'search' as a separate category - it will all be part of living."

Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, quoted in New Scientist's 50th anniversary issue where brilliant minds forecast the next 50 years.

Ofcom on next-generation access

UK regulator Ofcom has published a discussion document on next-generation access (NGA) networks. The document looks at a series of questions in relation to future NGA networks, including how Ofcom should best apply regulatory mechanisms as part of its review of telecoms.

For a copy of the document, click here

Q&A with Huawei's UK MD - Part II

NGN interviewed Edward Chen, the UK managing director of Huawei Technologies. This is the second and final part of the interview. For the first part, click here.


NGN: How many staff does Huawei employ in Europe?

EC: To date, we have 26 branch offices across Europe and products deployed in over 28 countries. There is currently around 1,800 staff working for Huawei within Europe.


NGN: Out of the total staff, roughly how many are support engineers and technicians and how many are management?

EC: Some 39% of Huawei’s European staff work within the Technical Services Department and 31% within the Sales Department (including Technical Sales). The remaining 30% of staff work within administration, finance, supply chain, marketing etc. Management functions are integrated into these categories.


NGN: And out of the total staff: roughly how many are local recruits and how many are staff relocated from China?

There are currently over 1,800 staff working for Huawei within Europe, over 60% of which are drawn from local expertise. As it continues to see growth in Europe, Huawei expects to expand its workforce accordingly to meet local demand, and will recruit staff best placed to meet local customer needs in terms of language and local market knowledge.

Across Europe Huawei has an R&D Center in Sweden and an R&D Centre, test bed and customer showcase in Amsterdam. Huawei has plans to build further R&D centers in Europe in the coming years. With Huawei’s local R&D strategy we aim to bring more investment and job opportunities within local markets.


NGN: What main network transitions in Europe offer Huawei the best opportunities for new design wins and why? Possible examples include 1) the upgrade from ATM to IP DSLAMs, 2) IMS, 3) FMC, 4) home gateways etc. But Huawei may look at this question in a different way

EC: Convergence is an ongoing trend in the telecommunications industry and carriers are increasingly looking at vendors that have a comprehensive, end-to-end portfolio of products and solutions. The industry has also moved towards a greater commitment towards open standards, which is a key strength that Huawei offers to its customers.

Huawei believes that IP-based ICT industry integration will create a profound and extensive impact on the future of telecom networks. The key to delivering excellence in service operations lies in the evolution of the existing network to a flexible IP-based multi-service network and the establishment of a win-win broadband value chain.

Huawei sees two key trends emerging in the telecoms industry:

• In the consumer market, operators will go beyond providing traditional services such as voice and broadband access, to offering IPTV, Portal, Payment, and Marketplace services. There will now be a need for operators to cooperate with various partners including media groups, schools, banks, and content providers. The operator will not only serve as a network service provider but also as an integrated service provider. In addition, their business model will change from one that is focused on getting the "share of communication minutes" to one that is focused on getting the "share of total consumer spending".
  

• In the business market, operators will expand the range of services that they provide, from "only service products" to "service solutions", especially in terms of IT services, meaning that operators will now need to understand the customer's business process and offer the right service solution accordingly. The operator will then become not only a product provider but also a solution provider or system integrator. Consequently, their business model will change from one that "offers leased line to businesses" to one that "helps optimize the business process".

The service model that Huawei envisages for the future is one that will provide users with a unified, ubiquitous experience: with the same level of service at home, on the move, at a hotspot, or in the office, and available anytime, anywhere, and via any terminal.

According to Infonetics Huawei holds the No.1 position in global IP-DSLAM market in 2005 (30.0% of ports market share). (Editor note: According to Infonetics' Jeff Heynen, directing analyst for broadband and IPTV, as of 2Q 2006, Huawei is number 1 in IP DSLAM ports shipped, but is second to Alcatel in worldwide IP DSLAM revenue.) The goal of many operators will be to achieve all IP architecture by 2010. Huawei sees the following four key migration directions:

1. Fixed Mobile Convergence
: In the future architecture, only access networks will be different; the rest will remain the same. IMS will serve as the core of FMC and although softswitch and IMS will coexist for a long time, softswitch will ultimately become a part of IMS as AGCF or MGCF. Huawei's IMS has the ability to support fixed and mobile convergence.
2. Unified user database
: Different kinds of user data such as AAA, HSS, HLR, and IPTV will be managed through a unified database. The foundation of FMC can provide a more user-friendly experience, such as featuring one ID, one billing, and one-time authentication. Huawei's SHLR will provide operators with the capability to manage all user data.

3. Unified transport network
: It is inevitable that the packet-oriented transport network will replace the TDM-oriented transport network. Carrier Ethernet, NG-WDM and IP+Optical will become key technologies. With its extensive range of products, Huawei has the ability to provide end-to-end solutions of next-generation transport platform.
4. Unified service platform: Many operators today have several service platforms including IN, portal, SMS, MMS, and IPTV, which requires more complex operation, resulting in high cost, and poor user experience. The integration of service platforms is necessary and SDP will play a key role in the integration process. Huawei's ENIP will also be able to provide a common platform for all kinds of applications.

Huawei is also working with a number of mobile operators for HSPDA network upgrade to support mobile broadband services and was the first vendor to provide a full-performance HSDPA commercial system in December 2005, for the Portuguese mobile operator Optimus. The network became one of the first HSDPA networks that was deployed on a large scale in Europe, and at the same time, the first full-performance HSDPA commercial network in the world.


NGN: What percentage of its income did Huawei invest in R&D in 2005? What will it be in 2006?

EC: Huawei has over 21,000 people (out of a total of 44,000 people worldwide) in its global R&D office, with no less than 10% of revenue invested in R&D e?ach year.

Across Europe Huawei has an R&D Centre in Sweden and an R&D Centre, test bed and customer showcase in Amsterdam. Huawei also works closely in France with Neuf Telecom and in the UK with BT to develop products to meet local market conditions.

Huawei has plans to build further R&D centers in Europe in the coming years. With Huawei’s local R&D strategy we aim to bring more investment and job opportunities within local markets.


NGN: BT’s network upgrade winners were announced in 2005 yet many carriers are considering or undertaking NGN upgrades (KPN, FT, DT). Why has there not been other Huawei design win announcements since?

EC: Huawei is currently in discussion with many operators regarding NGN networks in Europe to both fixed and mobile operators, unfortunately this is company confidential information. Huawei can’t comment on any business that has not been awarded as yet.


NGN: How confident is Huawei that it will be able to repeat its BT success with other European incumbents – and if it is confident, why?

EC: Huawei is in cooperation with all the major operators across Europe and expects to announce further contracts with Tier 1 operators in the near future.

Huawei Technologies focuses on meeting our customers’ needs and challenges; We help customers to overcome market challenges by providing excellent communications network solutions and services and continuously creating maximum value for our customers; We do our best to satisfy the needs of customers and generating potential growth for our customers. We believe that our customers choose to partner with Huawei Technologies for our understanding of their needs and the ability to provide customized solutions in a timely manner; Our high-quality and reliable products and excellent customer service help build a strong trust between Huawei Technologies and our customers.


NGN: Why has Huawei not been able to repeat its BT success with RBOCs in the US, who are also undertaking key network upgrades? Is Europe for some reason an easier market for Huawei than the US?

EC: Compared to our industry peers, we are a relatively young company. Huawei embarked on its international expansion drive in 1996. In 2005, Huawei’s international sales exceeded its domestic sales, accounting for 58% of overall sales. In 1H2006, Huawei’s international markets generated 65% of total sales. This was achieved based on our unwavering commitment to customized innovation and our customer-centric approach. We have won the trust of numerous carriers around the world within a decade and as a result, Huawei’s products and solutions serve 28 of the world’s top 50 operators.

Huawei’s presence in North America only started in 2002, later than other regions such as Europe, which started in 1999. Successful market penetration requires investment of resources over a period of time. This is especially true given Huawei’s early development of technologies compatible with European standards and the many long-term vendor partnerships North American operators have maintained with incumbent players.

Unlike Europe, the North American market is much more fragmented with over 1000 operators. It takes time for customers to really understand what Huawei brings to the table. For example, the contract with BT for the deployment of its multi-service access network (MSAN) and transmission equipment for the BT 21CN network was sealed only after two years of rigorous procurement and authentication process. In the United States, we are concentrating in the optical and wireless markets, and we are encouraged that we have penetrated each of these markets with Huawei solutions that are in commercial use.

In August 2006 Huawei announced that it had signed a 3G agreement with Leap Wireless International, Inc., a leading provider of innovative and value-driven wireless communication services. According to the agreement, Huawei will deploy a CDMA 3G network for Leap to support its Cricket® wireless services in Spokane, WA., Boise, ID., and Reno, NV.

Enhancing DSL: A carrier’s view

Israeli incumbent, Bezeq, joined the recently formed Dynamic Spectrum Management (DSM) Consortium to determine the bandwidth potential it can expect from its access network. “We want to use our copper infrastructure as long as we can,” Aharon Arbiv, R&D manager for Bezeq told NGN.

The DSM consortium is tasked with developing an adaptive spectrum management technology that enhances DSL performance. DSM promises to enhance DSL data rates over a given distance, or extend the distance over which a given data rate can be delivered.

Bezeq is upgrading its DSL access network using ADSL2+ technology. Over half its users are over 1.5km away from the central office. Bezeq is also interested in VDSL technology as it considers video on demand and possibly IPTV services.

The average distance of Bezeq's street cabinets, that will house VDSL equipment, is 500m from the home. This compares to an average distance of 700m in France and 300m in Germany. The closer the cabinet is to the home, the greater the broadband data rates.

ECI Telecom, which is leading the DSM technology initiative, says having the likes of Bezeq and Telefonica involved will provide valuable practical information as it develops a prototype DSM system. “It will help us in terms of what to focus on, the data rate they [the carriers] can achieve and the distances they want,” says Ariel Shuper, director, product management at ECI Telecom (pictured).

"DSM is a technology that will enhance the DSL performance in any of the parameters the telco would like to use," says Shuper. "We anticipate double the performance over short distances - greater than 200m, 50 to 60 percent for distances greater than 700m, or a 20 to 30 percent improvement for distances greater than 1300m. Alternatively, it can enhance the effective range for a given rate: 50Mbit/s from 300m to 500m, and 25Mbit/s from 750m to 1100m."

The DSM work will be completed by early 2009.

Isn’t that too late given that most European carriers will have decided their broadband strategies by then? “If there is market pressure, we will know how to give an adequate response to the carriers,” says Shuper. "We are co-operating with all the leading European telcos and they are following [the work] closely."

For more information of DSM, click here

Chips that change networks

It is rare for an integrated circuit (IC) to change a network but that is what startup BroadLogic aims to do. The company's BL80000 TeraPIX video processor - described as a "head-end on a chip" - seeks to reshape the cable network on both sides of the home.

The chip is claimed to be able to release precious cable bandwidth - up to 450MHz out of a total of 750MHz - by sending analogue TV channels digitally and using the chip to decode them at the home. This means that the 500MHz RF spectrum currently used for the some 80 analogue channels can be collapsed into 50MHz.

This turns cable operator economics on its head. Instead of undergoing the huge cost of expanding their network bandwidth from 750MHz to 1GHz to add new services, suddenly they have a spare 450MHz for new digital services.

The chip also reshapes the network model in the home. Instead of a set-top box, the home-gateway-located chip does the video decoding.

Could one chip undermine the set-top box industry, with all the rich peripherals and services that it continues to be added? Doubtful. Certainly, that is the view of Andrew Schmitt. But the start-up has impressive backers including those knowing a thing or two about cable - Time Warner and Cisco - and they must have thought about these issues.

What other IC examples are changing networks?

100Gigabit Ethernet gets first showing

The first claimed demonstration of 100 Gigabit Ethernet has been announced by a group of companies spanning the telecom industry. Internet2, Level 3 Communications, Infinera, Finisar and the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) all collaborated on the project.

A 100GbE demonstration involves sending a signal via ten 10Gbit/s channels over a 4000km network. The demonstration uses Finisar’s 10Gbit/s optical transceivers and Infinera’s 10x10Gbit/s photonic integrated circuit. Level 3 provided the ten 10Gbit/s channels. The demonstration bonds the 10G channels into one logical one, and ensures packet ordering at the receiver is retained, which is the UCSC's contribution.

This is the second announcement involving Finisar and Infinera recently. The two are also part of the X40 40Gbit/s multi-source agreement group.

Meanwhile, work on the standard for 100Gbit/s Ethernet is still in its infancy. The choice of how it will be implemented, whether 10x10Gbit, 5x20Gbit/s 4x25G channels or even a single 50G link with advanced modulation, has yet to be decided.

Q&A with Huawei's UK MD - Part I

NGN interviewed Edward Chen, the UK managing director of Huawei Technologies. This is the first part of the interview. The second, and final, part will be published in the next few days.


NGN: Can Huawei outline the two or three most significant contract wins it has achieved to date in Europe (in western or central and eastern Europe)? Clearly we are aware of BT's 21CN, but what else?

EC: In addition to Huawei’s involvement in BT 21CN, momentum in the UK has continued with Opal Telecom recently opting for Huawei equipment to build a next generation network to support the delivery of new advanced voice and broadband data services to UK customers.

Other recent successes in Europe highlight Huawei’s continued success in the region over the past 24 months. Huawei was recently selected by Vodafone to build the radio access part of its WCDMA/ HSDPA network in Spain. This deal, coming shortly after an announcement Huawei is building a UMTS network for Vodafone in the Czech Republic, illustrates the growing relationship between Huawei and Vodafone on a global scale.

A growing relationship with Vodafone to provide it with 3G handsets (V710) and HSDPA datacards is also testimony to Huawei’s strong links with UK operators and ability to translate global service framework agreements into local reality.

Huawei has also been expanding its reach elsewhere in Europe, with Combridge Srl choosing Huawei to build its VoIP network in Romania; KPN Netherlands announcing its purchase of Huawei HSDPA datacards to extend the range of mobile services offered to users, and OTE in Greece choosing Huawei to build an IP DSLAM broadband access and broadband bearer metro Ethernet network.


NGN: Can Huawei also say why it deems them the most significant?

EC: Being appointed as a supplier to BT for the BT 21CN project, Huawei is helping develop a key infrastructure that will fuel the UK economy and provide a flexible way for consumers to user new services. Our involvement in this project is therefore highly significant, as we are committed to promoting the development of technology in the UK, enriching the lives of local people.

We are also very proud of the raft of deals signed with Vodafone because it illustrates the growing momentum of the Global Framework Agreement Huawei signed with Vodafone in November 2005 to supply the operator with a range of products and services to meet the needs of local markets around the globe. This demonstrates the ability of our local staff to support customers’ needs at a local level.

The relationships with BT and Vodafone are key – but we are also committed to strengthening its existing relationships with European customers, and also developing relationships with new customers.

Huawei will continue to aggressively expand its European presence and ability to support customers by opening new offices and service centres where there is a market need.


NGN: BT says that Huawei is providing two classes of equipment for BT: A copper multi-service access node (MSAN) and a fibre MSAN, anda set of CWDM and DWDM transport equipment. Can Huawei please identify the exact products it is providing, and can it say a few words regarding the particular merits of each?

EC: BT's 21st Century Network (21CN) is a global IP infrastructure, based upon multi-protocol label switching (MPLS), that carries voice, data and Internet services on a single network. The 21CN offers multiple services across a single network, rather than today's multitude of networks offering specific services. The project is expected to take five years to complete and BT will invest up to £10bn.

Unfortunately due the nature of the agreement that Huawei has in place with BT we are unable to identify the specific products that we are providing to BT for the 21CN project. They are however leading industry products from Huawei's extensive portfolio.


NGN: What does Huawei believe is the main reason for it being chosen for BT’s 21CN?

EC: Huawei already has global implementation experience of leading, mature products and has the technical and commercial flexibility to meet BT’s demands. Huawei believes that its customers choose to partner with Huawei Technologies because of an understanding of their needs and the ability to provide customized solutions in a timely manner.

There are numerous reasons why Huawei is well placed to meet the stringent requirements of customers such as BT. Checks and measures are in place to ensure all customers have regular maintenance and service support, with Huawei listening to customer needs so that issues are pinpointed and addressed before they arise. Huawei delivers industry standard Service Level Agreements and works over and above to ensure the highest level of customer service.

Huawei’s local training programme and training centre ensures all staff, whether new or long-standing, are regularly trained on the product portfolio and new technologies so they can address customer queries effectively.

Movio moves for multi-mode

BT Movio launched its wholesale mobile broadcast entertainment service just over a month ago. Virgin Mobile is the first, and for now exclusive, mobile operator to use BT’s wholesale service, offering its customers mobile TV and digital audio broadcasting (DAB) radio services alongside voice.

Dominic Strowbridge, marketing director of Movio, says no subscriber numbers have been released but Virgin is seeing “good quality” customers, meaning the majority are monthly subscribers rather than prepaid users.

Movio has chosen Chinese vendor ZTE as the first supplier of a dual-mode 3G/ DAB-IP handset. The handset will allow users to receive TV and radio broadcast channels over DAB, while selecting catch-up TV programmes via the 3G network. BT has not said when Virgin’s exclusivity period will end, or whether Virgin will be the first operator to use the ZTE dual-mode handset but Strowbridge does not rule it out. What he did admit was that the handset would be available in 2007.

“We are encouraging handset makers to go down the multi-mode route,” says Strowbridge. By using DAB-IP, BT argues, mobile operators can get in early and re-use their investment. “You can do TV over DAB, over 3G, over DVB-H and in future over WiMAX – and all have IP as the common denominator.”

BT is thus encouraging chip vendors such as Siano Mobile Silicon and Frontier Silicon to support its Movio service alongside DVB-H.

Market research firm, Sound Partners, points out that DAB has limited spectrum available, and it less spectrally efficient than DVB-H. Hence BT needs such multi-mode handsets to give its service an evolutionary path, as well as remain competitive if DVB-H, TDtv or other technologies come along offering much more. There are also economies-of-scale benefits given that DAB-IP is only likely to be adopted in a few markets.

IPR leading telecom players

The November issue of the IEEE Spectrum magazine features a top-ten ranking of the leading patent-generating companies in several industries. The survey work, conducted by 1790 Analytics for the magazine, used several parameters to work out a score for each company in terms of its patent power:

• the number of patents it issued in 2005
  
• the ratio with the number of patents issued in 2004
  
• how often 2005 patents (from the company and others) cites the company's patents from 2000 to 2004
• how general the patent is (is it cited in other fields?)
  
• and patent originality: how many different technologies does the patent builds on.

All the parameters are multiplied to give a total score. In telecom the top five patent power players were:

1. Finisar (issued 113 patents in '05) had a score of 1103
2. Cisco Systems (453) 909
3. Silicon Light Machines (26) 700
4. Motorola (522) 600
5. Nortel Networks (382) 450
   

Micron Technology (total score 3396), IBM (3084) and HP (2756) were the top three patent companies overall. As for universities, MIT was top with a score of 840.

Soundbite: R&D at Huawei

"My candid view of the R&D at Huawei? I think that you have two choices: either you decide that they will be fast followers due to their engineering and development or that with their many thousands of young and bright staff they will begin to innovate.

Not only do they follow thoroughly-through with an answer but there is a ‘Why did you ask that, BT? Why are they [BT] thinking that? What is the origin, why is this important?’ They find a response to the question in earnest and why you asked this in essence.

I - and BT - believe Huawei will begin to innovate and drive in market-leading areas."

Matt Bross, BT Group's Chief Technology Officer, speaking to Total Telecom

Asking the right questions

The IEEE Communications magazine has started a new section entitled Topics in Design and Implementation. The idea is to make sure the magazine has more general practical articles alongside its specialist, technical papers.

In the first series in the September issue, an article by Rajiv Ramaswami of Cisco Systems looks at optical networking technologies over the last two decades and tackles the question which have been adopted and which not, and why.

The Economist published recently a special report of the future of telecoms that addresses the issue of convergence (which it defines in two words: information everywhere). One article asks the interesting question who will benefit most when the different carriers - incumbents, mobile, and cable operators - are all adopting convergence strategies.

Can you suggest an example of an insightful telecom question? NGN would like to compile a list of the best and get them answered.

The art of coding HDTV

I have heard quite a few figures cited for the efficiency of the H.264/MPEG-4 advanced video coding (AVC) standard in encoding high definition TV. What I didn't understand were the issues dictating the progress being made.

Having spoken to video coding specialists Harmonic and Tandberg Television I now have a better idea (see table below for actual coding results). Not surprisingly, the main issues are hardware and the vendors' algorithmic expertise.

With regard algorithms, the AVC standard has many coding techniques but it doesn't say which should be used when. That expertise is built up over time and captured by the vendors in software with each new platform generation.

As for hardware, Harmonic's first generation HD encoder requires that a video frame be split into slices, each processed alone because of bottlenecks in moving the data between processors. Now, with its second generation design, a whole video frame can be processed improving the effectiveness of the compression techniques.

Both Harmonic and Tandberg claim over a 30 percent coding improvement using their latest designs.

Why is this important? Well, a lower bit rate means more channels per broadband link or a greater percentage of households that can be reached with HD services using existing DSL infrastructure. Harmonic also believes there is a further 25 percent improvement to be gained in the coming few years.

For background material on video coding, click here.
For an article on coding, click here

	MPEG-2	AVC
Standard definition TV	2 to 2.5Mbit/s (cable) 4 to 4.5 Mbit/s (Europe)	1.5Mbit/s to 2Mbit/s
High Definition TV	9.5Mbit/s (cable) 13 to 14Mbit/s (Constant bit rate over DSL. Satellite and cable use variable bit rate schemes that allows statistical multiplexing of the channels)	1st generation encoders: 9.1Mbit/s 2nd generation: 6.2Mbit/s (cable) 7.5 to 8Mbit/s (constant bit rate over DSL)

Soundbite: Optical comms

"It is not a question of if Ethernet will take over TDM services - the trend is clear. The more exciting issue is how quickly firms can drive adoption on a wide scale to replace legacy services and take over the mass market."

Brian McCann, chief strategy and marketing officer, ADVA Optical Networking on What's Next for Telecom, one of four executives interviewed by Optics and Laser Europe, Nov issue.

Vendors collaborate to spur 40G

Nine companies have joined forces to create a 40Gbit/s optical transceiver standard. Dubbed the x40 multi-source agreement group, the firms are targeting the interface at telecom and datacom applications, supporting distances up to 10km.

By integrating four 10Gbit/s transmit and four receive channels, multiplexed over a fibre pair, the standard exploits components for the high-volume 10Gbit/s transceiver market to address 40Gbit/s applications.

"This MSA enables 40G. It will spur others to develop the 40G serial products," says Daryl Inniss, vice president of Ovum-RHK's Communication Components research. "As more 40G gets out there, albeit in the form of parallel muxing, the market will demand more 40G."

Equipment vendors supporting the x40 MSA include Infinera and Juniper. Infinera is interested in 40Gbit/s and has already demonstrated in the lab a 40 x 40Gbit/s photonic integrated circuit. However, the current MSA only has a 10km reach. Juniper is interested in the x40 MSA as a high-speed router interface.

Both Juniper's and Cisco's routers already have 40Gbit/s interfaces but these are serial 40G and will not be compatible with the new MSA.

Click here for x40 presentation

IMS plugfest

Some 500 test engineers have just completed a two-week IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) plugfest, hosted by Verizon. Mark Wegleitner, Verizon's senior vice president and CTO said initial feedback suggests significant progress has been made to prove that IMS is the right platform for next-gen networking equipment and networks.

A collective sigh of relief from an industry betting its future on the technology, and front page news if the outcome of the interop tests had been anything else.

Telco - a pioneer in corporate blogging

Global Crossing has received praise for its use of blogging to get its message across and interact with customers and partners. "A pioneer among telecommunications companies in corporate blogging,'' is the assessment of Martin Geddes, chief analyst of STL and author of the Telepocalypse blog.

The Global Crossing site covers key technologies such as VoIP peering, IP video, data and conferencing technologies, broadband and Ethernet access.

3G meets broadband

Further to the recent post on femtocells, see the New Electronics link for a more detailed article (click on the .pdf download).

Convergence back on track

Telecom Italia has confirmed that fixed mobile convergence is back on its agenda. "Telecom Italia] confirms that convergence between fixed telephony, mobile telephony, broadband Internet and media content remains its strategic goal," it said in an official statement, with the text deliberately in bold.

Last month Telecom Italia surprised the industry when it announced that it would separate its fixed-line and mobile phone businesses (See fixed mobile divergence). "Telecom Italia has been knocked back by the national regulator, but that was not sufficient reason to turn the corporate ship one hundred and eighty degrees" was Total Telecom's leader comment at the time.

Now Telecom Italia intends to develop a next-generation access network enabling high-definition TV and public services such as tele-medicine. The network will also be separated from Telecom Italia, according to a model to be jointly developed with the regulator.

According to The Times, Vittorio Merloni, head of Indesit and an advisory member of the Telecom Italia board, was asked if the board had discussed spinning off TIM into a separate company, he replied: “Not even in your dreams.”

Fibre-to-the-CPU

Intel and the University of California, Santa Barbara last month announced an electrically pumped, hybrid laser, an important component that aids integrated silicon photonics. NGN asked Intel some follow-up questions about the possible application of such technology. Here is the response of Sean Koehl, technology strategist at Intel's tera-scale computing research programme.


NGN: Can Intel explain what are the two or three bottlenecks that it already sees coming (even if 5 years off) where such optical interconnect technology will be needed (and where electrical interfaces will no longer do).

SK: Storage Area Networks (SANs) already rely on optical interconnects, with the state of the art currently at 4Gbit/s and increasing. For server rack-to-rack communication in data centers, there is already a mix of optical and electrical interconnects, but this is moving more and more to optical as 10Gbit/s Ethernet becomes prevalent.

Within a server, board-board communications will be an increasing bottleneck and therefore an opportunity for more optical interconnects.

Longer term, as systems enter the tera-scale era (teraflop processors operating on terabytes of data), processor-to-processor and processor-to-memory bandwidth requirements will scale to the point where even the best copper Input/Output (I/O) will have difficulty providing the required bandwidth. This is further out, but it is also the highest volume opportunity for silicon photonics and thus requires significant advantage in the price/performance characteristic for optical I/O.

NGN: The hybrid laser technology looks suited to applications where data rate and distance are issues, but Intel seems to be focused more on high-performance servers with lots of CPU cores and boards. It appears more an issue of interface- and data rate-density rather than data rate and distance.

SK: All three are important benefits of optical: data rate, distance, and density.

1. Data rate: because copper will have difficulty scaling beyond 10Gbit/s, while optical technology already exists at 40Gbit/s
2. Distance: though copper is getting faster, the distance these links can span is beginning to shrink significantly. Within a data center, distance is no issue with optical. This could not only solve existing links, but enable new architectures by providing distance independence.
3. Density: because it is possible to multiplex many 10Gbit/s or 40 Gbit/s channels on a single fiber. Tera-byte bandwidths are straightforward to achieve on a single fiber. This is where fiber has the biggest advantage: aggregate bandwith. Copper requires more and more pins or ports to compete in this respect.
   

NGN: What are the key bottlenecks that will pop up first that need such optical technology? (Is it backplane technology? Is it CPU-to-CPU or CPU-to-memory?). And can Intel add some numbers here - data rates/ interface densities where electrical runs out of steam.

There is no exact number, because the distance and speed for electrical are highly related. You can always push an electrical solution farther, but you pay in power and complexity (by adding additional lines), and cost. This issue is the overall price/performance of the current electrical solution versus the proposed optical one.

However, that said, for chip-chip interconnects, going beyond 20Gbit/s per line looks to be very challenging. We also have leading research on copper based I/O which is showing great results, but above this speed optical will start to look more attractive.

For networking, 100Gbit/s Ethernet looks to be a key speed for optical. Ethernet is expected to continue the “factor of 10” scaling that it has in the past, and at 100Gbit/s speeds any copper solution would be extremely challenging.

A question of standards

The telecom industry has benefited greatly over the years from standards. Carriers can use equipment from several vendors, and with equipment interoperability comes economies of scale and faster adoption. Perhaps the best example of collaboration is the 3GPP/3GPP2, ETSI TISPAN and CableLabs all coming together to support the latest NGN and IMS standards - an industry first.

But despite the collective benefits, politics is never far away. Intellectual property rights of particular companies need to be resolved when a standard is thrashed out. More often than not the standard ends up being more complicated to accommodate the factions. Very rarely the gap can't be bridged and two standards emerge, splintering the market from the start.

There are also regional politics. Europe did particularly well from second generation cellular by making GSM a global standard. Other regions took note and made sure they weren't left behind the next time round. South Korea has been smart in using standards locally early enough to allow it to be adept at addressing markets worldwide. The latest examples of this are WiBRO and WDM-PON.

But what is one to make of China? China has still to issue 3G licenses but it is clear that its own TD-SCDMA standard will play a key role. It is also developing its own mobile-TV standard (does the world, with nearly a dozen mobile-TV standards, really need one more?). China is also considering its own passive optical networking (PON) standard.

China is unique in the size of its home market. And if the percentage of the population that can afford advanced telecom services is still small, it is growing. In turn, developing internal standards ensures Chinese telecom vendors reduce their exposure to foreign-held patents. Internal standards also help them develop the necessary expertise as well as ensure they have a local market where they compete favourably with foreign vendors.

But what is the point of introducing standards if they do not advance the industry? For example, what benefit is there in introducing yet another 3G standard that is several years behind the two existing ones?

TD-SCDMA may yet prove to be a superior 3G standard. But with the momentum and scale of existing 3G standards that is a tall order, especially when no external market has adopted TD-SCDMA. Moreover, Chinese firms such as ZTE are already active 3G handset and networking equipment players. The same is true for PON, where Chinese equipment vendors offer EPON and GPON.

One indicator of China's emergence as a key player on the world's telecom stage will be when its Ministry of Information Industry lets up on scripting local standards across the telecom landscape.

Is China being shrewd with its standards policy given the success of Chinese equipment vendors?

WiMAX’s opportunities: few and far between

Fierce competition from two flanks - fixed-line broadband and cellular - will limit the global deployment of WiMAX. So argues a new study from Sound Partners.

The market research firm has developed a business model based on the same assumptions as the WiMAX Forum as to what is needed to build a network. “We wanted to understand the key sensitivities,” says Alastair Brydon, Sound Partners’ CEO whose WiMAX report is to be published by Analysys. "In reality there are not that many cases [for WiMAX] that offer a good return."

The study looks at deployment scenarios in urban, suburban and rural areas in developed and developing markets. In developed markets, carriers’ digital subscriber line (DSL) deployments of ADSL2+, complemented with fibre-to-the node/VDSL2 to fill in coverage and enhance link speeds, poses a key competitive threat to WiMAX. Moreover, such DSL services are being offered by well-known brand names (Tesco, 3, Sky) as well as incumbents. “It will be really hard for anyone, using any [broadband] technology, to get 10 to 15 percent market share in five years,” says Brydon.

The same applies in rural areas where DSL coverage is being extended to nearly all exchanges. “BT is constantly expanding its service,” he says.

Nor is this solely the case in markets such as the U.K. China plans to use broadband wireless access to provide services where there is no fixed-line infrastructure but not WiMAX. “There are no plans issued by operators in China for the deployment of WiMAX,” Tian Wenguo, senior vice president of company strategy at ZTE, told NGN.

“Cellular is also rocketing,” says Brydon. “Terminals for cellular are dirt cheap as are DSL modems; WiMAX terminals are not.” Someone must pay for them, and if it is the operators it will prove a big expense. “We are not saying WiMAX won’t happen, just it will not be as big a business as some are arguing,” says Brydon.

WiMAX’s prospects would certainly be enhanced if a major mobile operator embraced the standard. But, if anything, cellular operators are looking to DSL to bolster their broadband offerings. Vodafone and O2 are adopting DSL in certain markets though as yet it is not a global decision.

“They are in the decision process now, which is why this is a critical time for WiMAX’s prospects,” says Brydon.

Is there market hype regarding WiMAX's prospects?

Q&A: The future of mobiles - Part II

The second part of the Q&A with Professor Rudy Lauwereins, vice president of Belgium’s Interuniversity Microelectronic Centre (IMEC), on the future of handsets. For the first part of the Q&A, click here

NGN: Fixed mobile convergence (FMC) is a central policy for carriers at present. How does true FMC integration happen? For now the wireless infrastructure upgrade race just seems to be in parallel with the DSL/Fibre fixed network race. Apart from WiMax there doesn't seem to be a convergence path. Is that really a wrong interpretation, and is IMEC seeing signs of FMC as part of future handset designs?

RL: This is difficult for me to answer as we don't work on fixed. But FMC in terms of making calls in the home from a mobile handset via broadband is happening, as are the technology capabilities for FMC [such as dual mode GSM-Wi-Fi handsets]. But most operators aren't happy. Even if a mobile arm is part of the carrier, it is still a separate entity with its own profit and loss. And then there is the prospect of third party VoIP providers taking business.

It's the same story with cognitive radio: operators don't like it. It's ok if the phone picks and choices a standard as long as it's a standard the carrier provides: I offer all and I am in control. That is why they are pushing for the basestation to take the decisions but that doesn't make sense. The decision-making should really be in the terminal and that is what they are scared of.


NGN: Are the fast-moving wireless market trends making mobile design for 2012 a continual moving target? Here is just one example: Nokia have said there is a working group at 3GPP looking at inter-working between WiMAX and 3G-LTE. Clearly they see the technologies co-existing and think mobile WiMAX will be for non-3G operators.

RL: It is a moving target and it is moving faster and faster. You need to make sure you have a flexible platform in case things change, then it is just software you adapt not hardware. With software-defined radio, it is not just about multiple standards but the evolution of standards. IMEC is implementing IEEE 802.11n, IEEE 802.16e and 3GPP-LTE [all on the one platform] and the three aren't standards so we aren't standard-compliant but we are confident the platform will be able to handle the standards when they will be finalized. Companies are now saying let's start earlier - pre-standard- and we will adapt using the same platform.


NGN: Next Generation Networks keeps asking this question: By 2012 the 4G standard will be starting, offering 100Mbit/s (mobile) and 1Gbit/s (static) data rates. Just what will such data rates be used for?

I have been asked this already many times. You only have to look at wired connections. A friend of my son was sharing his music library between their PC hard drives and were copying over a 100Mbit/s link and it took 4 hours. This would be less than 30 minutes over a 1Gbit/s link.

What will 1Gbit/s be used for? As a cable replacement and for sending video wirelessly in bursts. Solid-state storage in a video camera will be 256 Gbyte by 2012. Sending it over 100Mbit/s will take forever.

In the home, video is likely to be sent uncompressed from a central hard disk store to displays around the house uncompressed. Three uncompressed HDTV channels will be greater than 1Gbit/s in total.

NGN: Will that be 4G?

RL: No one agrees what 4G will be. We expect the air-interface to be flexible. If used indoors it will be wireless LAN-based while outdoors it will use a different set of radio parameters.


Professor Lauwereins heads one of IMEC's four research divisions. His group develops enabling technologies for consumer and battery-operated devices in the nomadic and mobile arena.

Broadband's impact on an economy

Accepted wisdom is that broadband is an important economic enabler. Certainly that is the argument of those promoting FTTH deployment in Europe. But is it true?

The findings of a 2005 study, by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Center for Technology, Policy and Industrial Development, suggests broadband does benefit an economy. But it is extremely difficult to measure, according to one of the work's authors.

Using U.S. national data, the MIT study showed communities experienced more rapid growth in employment and businesses once mass-deployment of broadband occurred between 1998 and 2002.

What the study didn't answer is whether the economic benefits are short lived once neighbouring regions catch up, or whether the benefits of getting broadband earlier compound into the future. Nor did it measure the relative economic impact of particular broadband technologies such as digital subscriber line (DSL) versus FTTH. But new data collected from late 2005, as mandated by U.S. regulator, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), will enable such analysis in future.

"The big problem with determining the economic cost - benefits foregone, loss of competitive advantage - associated with slower broadband adoption is that it is very difficult to measure,” says William Lehr, research associate in the Center for Technology, Policy and Industrial Development at MIT. “It is difficult to measure the impact of any IT related input and even more difficult to measure the impact associated with a specific kind of IT”

"Qualitative: broadband seems to produce benefits," says Lehr. "Quantitative: in our study these were on the order of 1% higher job growth which is huge and increased share of firms in higher value IT-intensive sectors.

“However, we are not convinced we have adequately controlled for causality. Simply put, this is the question of whether broadband follows economic activity (communities with broadband are ones that had greatest growth prospects) or whether broadband produces economic activity. Our study used the best metrics available to control for causality but this remains an important question.”

Lehr continues:

“With respect to FTTH and who lags whom, there are no good empirical studies. Some will argue that early pioneers may be the ones with arrows in their backs. That is likely the case with some of the municipal broadband deployments. That said, it seems clear to me that FTTx is a good thing and more bandwidth in the last mile facilities will help promote growth across the value chain. But -- I do not have a number to say how important.

Also, catching up is relatively easier as systems become more modular and commoditised. So it is unclear whether communities that fail to adopt broadband will lose much in competitive advantage if they follow more closely.

Real issues are whether future global economy based on broadband will promote localism or accentuate the scale/ scope of the economies of the leaders. Will Hollywood become even more dominant or will French local content finally be able to reach a viable audience? Both equilibria are possible. I believe that broadband enhances opportunity for local content and local economies, but this is unproven.

Another obvious benefit of broadband sooner is you realize the consumption gains sooner. It has been estimated that the cost of delaying mobile telephone services in the US because of regulatory delays was on the order of $40 billion in foregone consumer surplus. These sorts of economic losses are sizable but again are difficult to estimate,” he says.


Does it matter that Europe lags in FTTH deployments?

Are equipment vendors right to raise concerns or should they be investing more effort to quantify the cost to Europe of its non- deployment?

Verizon turns heads

Verizon Technology Organization (VTO) allowed analysts into its Waltham, MA labs recently to tour its FiOS test integration and digital home labs. Ovum-RHK, for one, left with an extremely favourable impression of Verizon’s FiOS fibre-to-the-premise (FTTP) -based triple-play programme.

Verizon now has close to 500,000 FiOS subscribers of which 100,000 are FiOS TV subscribers. The service provider also expects its investment in FiOS to earn positive operating income by 2009, with a positive impact on earnings in 2008. From 2004 through 2010, Verizon believes that it will have spent $18 billion passing 18 million households, says Ovum-RHK.

“Basically, they were there to tell the analyst community “look at us, we are doing the right thing, it’s economically viable, and it will pay off.” They are off to a good start,” says Ken Twist, vice president, technology consulting and broadband networks practices at Ovum-RHK.

Will the increasingly favourable reports on Verizon's progress change the plans of other carriers? A recent report by U.S. investment banker, Cowens & Co., says that AT&T remains committed to its Project Lightspeed fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) deployment through 2009. But with cable operators looking to upgrade their networks with FTTH beyond 2010, the competitive landscape is shifting rapidly. “AT&T may feel compelled to transition from FTTN to FTTH more rapidly,” the report says.

Cowens & Co. makes a further observation that while the financial community concentrates on AT&T’s Lightspeed project, it expects the service provider to “focus on its largest and highest growth potential businesses – wireless and Enterprise”.

These represent 60% of its expected revenues in 2007. Residential, in contrast, accounts for 23% of revenues only, and Cowens & Co. expects it will generate modest growth only.

Fibre is not the sole way for a carrier to bolster its financial performance.

Q&A: The future of mobiles - Part I

Next Generation Networks (NGN) asked Professor Rudy Lauwereins, vice president of Belgium’s Interuniversity Microelectronic Centre (IMEC) for his thoughts on mobile handsets through 2012.

Professor Lauwereins heads one of IMEC's four research divisions. His group develops enabling technologies for consumer and battery-operated devices in the nomadic and mobile arena.

This is the first of a two-part interview.


NGN: Looking at current handsets, they do everything: they are cameras, MP3 and video game players, as well as providing web browsing and email. What will handsets deliver by 2012, and what will be new and novel?

RL: This is a difficult one. Today's phones deliver all you can imagine. But that doesn't mean there won't be new applications. What I can say is that screens will have higher resolution and probably be bigger in size, plus there will be much more storage. Devices will thus support more realistic games, higher (data) throughput and much more compute power. All these will make several applications possible but I have no clear idea.


NGN: What specification will they have and how will they compare to today's phones in terms of processing power, storage, and technologies within the handset? One example you have mentioned in the past is that handsets will have more than one camera to create views from any angle.

RL: I have been tracking the cost of compact flash (non-volatile memory) for the last eight years: what capacity memory you can buy for Euro 50 and what for Euro 1000. It is doubling every year. At the end of 2006, you can buy 16 Gbyte for Euro 1000 and 2 Gbyte for Euro 50. Memory companies tell me they expect this to continue for the next five years. That means handsets - at least high-end ones - will have 64 Gbyte in 2012. For low-end phones it will be 16 GB. What applications will use such cheap storage? Current cameras provide stills and poor quality video clips. By 2012 you'll have a video camera with you all the time.

Handset devices in 2012 will also have multiple processing cores. Handsets now have multiple cores but having had discussions with nine companies recently, the expectation is that by 2012 there will be between 16 and 100 cores per handset. That's ten times greater than today. There will also be silicon-scaling benefits [using smaller feature CMOS processes which will further boost each core's processing performance] so the overall processing performance improvement will be greater than ten times. It is hard to say exactly but maybe a factor of 30.

As for the multiple cameras, all nine companies say they don't know whether there will be a suitable business model for it and hence it is not a strong focus. Where there is pressure is to combine video and 3D graphics on one platform. High-end phones have a graphics-processing-unit now. There is a need to find an architecture that deals with video and 3D graphics without needing a dedicated [hardware] unit. The video and graphics will be used mainly for games but also for graphical data such as navigation maps.


NGN: What are the leading technical challenges to be overcome to make such handsets possible? For a start, Nokia and Qualcomm both mention that handsets will need to support eight distinct radio standards. Then there is the issue of growing power consumption while the energy capacities of batteries are not advancing in lock step.

RL: Sofware-defined radio will be in products in 2009 and the work on that is almost done, so this is almost in the past! What is being finalised now is passive software-defined radio – a flexible platform that can implement a number of radio standards but they will be ones I select when I want to use them.

The next step, to appear by 2012, is agile radios. This is a much more active form of software-defined radio. Here the handset scans to select the network available based on the user profile, such as what is lowest cost or what offers highest voice quality. But the terminal rather than the operator does the selection.

Then there is cognitive radio where the terminal scans the whole spectrum, finds a frequency it can use and then chooses the most appropriate modulation scheme. But a true cognitive radio is beyond 2012.

Batteries aren’t scaling well but then current phones, with batteries weighing 30g or 40g, last twice as long as previous ones, so we can solve the problem at the architecture and application level.

With 3G handsets it’s a new problem again but there is quite some innovation here in processing technology, algorithms and storage. All are used to increase the compute power for the same energy capacity.

The idea that by 2012 there will be new fuel cells that offer a quantum leap in energy stored is not seen as likely, but current batteries are increasing in energy capacity by 5% to 10% each year. We can certainly live with it.

Companies also points out that even if larger batteries emerge, the instantaneous power consumption will not rise above 3W. You put a phone in your pocket and it cannot go above the 3W mark for temperature reasons.

There is also the issue of programming the software code onto a multi-core architecture. The C [high-level language used to write the software code] compiler needs to be aware of the multi-processor architecture.

Then there is the issue of predictability. One application mapped onto the hardware may run in real-time and so may a second but when you run both? The mix of applications changes over time and guaranteeing that all the combinations will run in real-time is a problem. Ensuring all the applications in all combinations working correctly is infeasible. There are stories that after mapping applications onto the hardware correctly, it took 100 man-years of effort to solve the predictability stuff.

Another issue is scalability. Cell phone makers support some 60 different phone models using several general hardware platforms ranging from low end to high end. Since mapping applications is a huge job, they don't want to spend all this effort on each of the platforms. Rather they want to develop them once and get them running quickly on these platforms.

One last challenge, that IMEC is expert in, is building a reliable silicon platform with predictable performance, when going to smaller CMOS processes results in increasing transistor variability and decreasing reliability.

The second part of the interview covers fixed-mobile convergence, how to ensure designs of 2012 meet the fast-changing requirements of wireless, and what will 4G data rates be used for.

Fixed mobile convergence's second wave

There is something odd about spending a fortune on 3G spectrum licenses only to discover that signal coverage in the home is poor. Did mobile operators always know that after rolling out 3G cells at a macro level, they would need to turn their attention to the home? Or have they been surprised?

Either way, the result is the emergence of the femtocell market. A femtocell is a tiny base station that sits in the home and which is connected to the network via broadband. Femtocells are a mobile operator play: you need to be a spectrum owner to offer them.

They also address 2G as well as 3G, although 3G will enable operators to best exploit good in-door signal coverage. Femtocells also work with existing handsets unlike FMC services being deployed now. The user also avoids trading in their handset for one of only a few dual-mode cellular-Wi-Fi handsets available.

Femtocells can thus be viewed as the next wave in fixed mobile convergence (FMC). “For the cellular carrier, the central notion [of femtocells] is to capture more of the consumer spend,” says Stuart Carlaw, ABI Research’s principal analyst, wireless connectivity.

Operators will start femtocell trials in 2007, and ABI forecasts that by 2011 there will be 32 million femtocells deployed, supporting 102 million users.

But there are challenges. Radio interference is one. 3G mobile networks are planned carefully in terms of the cell frequencies and scrambling codes used. Once femtocells are sold, low-power base stations will start appearing within existing 3G cells. If a user’s phone detects a stronger 3G-macrocell signal, will it switch over to the regular 3G cell? Equally, if femtocell signal is louder than a macro cell, will a passer-by’s phone try to connect?

“No one has done this in anger,” says Dean Bubley, analyst and founder of Disruptive Analysis. “No one knows what it does to the frequency plans when 1000 of these light up in a square kilometre.”

Another challenge is snaring households to adopt a femtocell. Do all a household’s users have 3G handsets? Then there is the issue of connecting yet another box to the home gateway, and the help-desk cost and support needed when there is a problem.

That said, all the makers of femtocells, and associated networking equipment, that NGN has spoken to are bullish about the market's prospects. You only have to talk to the operators to know this will happen, says one.