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.