Next Generation Networks

NGN Magazine - Next Generation Networks

2009-02-23T15:51:00.000Z

NGN Magazine - Next Generation Networks: "NGN Magazine" - perhaps more of a compilation than a magazine, but one to watch non-the-less - claims to produce a mag, but can't find it online!

NGN Updates

2009-02-23T13:50:00.002Z

The joy of technology. The latest Total Telecom website enables you to make RSS feeds of your choice on the fly.

For example this one flagging the latest NGN content on Total Telecom. Click here to view it.

webitpr | IEC and Convergence World Magazine Announce Top NGN Innovators at SOFNET 08 in London

2008-05-13T09:43:00.001+01:00

webitpr | IEC and Convergence World Magazine Announce Top NGN Innovators at SOFNET 08 in London

Last month the IEC announced the top NGN Innovators at SOFNET 2008.

They included:

io global who provides the software and services to enable Network Operators, Media
Brands and Advertisers to collaborate in a trading model to personalize
and monetize their interactions with individuals on the run.
Broadsoft, who have the BroadWorks fixed-line applications provide enhanced web-based feature
functionality, real-time service management, and the advantages of a
converged voice and data environment.
Telcordia Technologies for real time charging
Nortel for Provider Backbone Transport
ZTE Corporation who won the best green innovation category

SOFNET failed to wow people in terms of attendance, but it's good to see some recognition for the vendors driving the NGN. The full list of winners and shortlisted companies is available on the SOFNET website.

Next Generation Networks Global Standards Initiative

2008-05-08T14:27:00.002+01:00

Just come across this ITU initiative which apparently sets out to harmonise different approaches to NGN architecture worldwide. It sounds a worth initiative and ties into lots of ITU driven meetings and resources.

What's hot in wireless in 2008

2007-12-24T10:18:00.000Z

"Sorry to be boring, but I reckon femtocells will be the big issue in 2008. There is massive industry momentum behind the idea, but still loads of issues to short out in a short time, including the business case, service proposition and how to actually integrate millions of the things into cellular networks.

If I can cheat and have two top issues, then network sharing will also be big in 2008, as operators realise it's the only way to afford all the investments they have ahead.

As for the hot acronym,funnily enough it might be HSPA+, as people realise that they don't need 3G LTE for the forseeable future if they implement femtocells and broadcast networks."

Alastair Brydon, CEO and co-founder of Sound Partners Ltd

Total Telecom peers into 2008

2007-12-21T14:13:00.000Z

A bit of futurology by Total Telecom's team
Click here

Q&A with Estonia's Elion's head of security

2007-11-20T07:34:00.000Z

In April and May 2007, Estonia came under sustained distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. The Estonian government was forced to close its sites to the outside world, while the country’s largest banks and major newspapers were also targeted. The attacks began after a diplomatic spat with Russia, whose government was seen by some Estonians as being behind the attacks given their scale and prolonged nature (see Total Telecom, July 2007).

NGN interviewed Aivo Jürgenson (pictured), head of security at Elion, Estonia’s biggest telecoms services provider.

Q. Estonia is mentioned as an advanced state when it comes to the use of wired and wireless technologies as well as e-sites. What can you cite that backs the claim?

Last year 81% of tax declarations were submitted electronically. Estonia was the first to use e-voting on the Local Government elections on 2005. Already 30,000 e-votes were given on the and Parliamentary elections on 2007, 63% of Estonian citizens between ages 15-74 use the Internet, people all over the country can access the Internet from over 700 Public Internet Access Points and there are more than 1,100 areas that currently provide high-speed wireless Internet access.

Elion itself has 150,000 broadband customers, which is about 40% of total market in Estonia (approximately 373 000 households own a computer). The portal hot.ee, which provides free e-mail, chat and other features to everybody, maintained by Elion, has about 400 000 active user accounts. The number of Elion's digital television customers has increased most rapidly in the world – in 2006 28 000 new clients were added, nearly 27 000 will be added this year.

The reliance on electronic commerce and communication is rather high in Estonia.

Q. The events of last April and May when Estonia came under cyber attack: Government sites, banking and telecommunication companies came under attack. Is that the full list of targets?

No, we have to add media companies as well. Almost every newspaper in Estonia has website as well, which includes the same content as in paper version and often even additional media, such as photos and videos of the news. Those portals also allow people to leave public comments to news, which is regularly used. During the attacks, these websites were simply overloaded with traffic and also the commenting part was exploited to publish spam so that it needed to be disabled for a while.

Estonian government believes that this was specifically chosen to create the "information blockade" for general public and to prevent other countries to get up-do-date information about what´s happening in Estonia.

Q. Is NGN correct in that Elion itself did not come under attack?

Elion itself wasn't targeted in the same scale as some other sites were. We did notice small-scale overloading attempts of our DNS servers and also identified a single attack to a few routers itself. However, our websites and other services did not come under attack.

As Elion provides the international peering to government networks and also many of the commercial targets were our clients, we had to cope with increased amount of incoming traffic in our network. Because the ISP network is usually built with redundancy and extra capacity in mind, luckily, we didn't suffer any service degradation because of that. If this would had been the case, we would had to work with our upstream providers and peering partners to limit the attack traffic already in their network.

Q. What was the conclusion following the attacks? NGN understands the attacks were relatively straightforward distributed denial of service (DDoS) albeit on a very large scale. Is that correct or is that downplaying the sophistication of the attacks?

Most of the attacks were in fact rather simple, when considering the traffic itself. However, when considering the campaign in total, the coordination of everything, selection of targets and launching many different attacks during those weeks, in total, it wasn't anything close to simple.

Q. Has Elion invested in its network to counter such potential vulnerabilities? If so, can you say in general terms what has been done?

In Elion, we cannot really identify single budget line, which could be considered as a defense against cyber attacks. As always, we have to consider that network links and devices could fail and therefore to plan extra capacity into the network and to build them in fault tolerant way. The network management, intelligence and analyzing capability was already in place before the May and we certainly continue investing in those areas as well. The government of Estonia has taken this lesson very seriously and they are currently looking over the cyber security strategy for the country. I believe that many issues will be discussed, which could help government and private sector work more closely together, when protecting national critical infrastructure. Estonian IT and security community has been working together for some time already and this was one of the things that enabled us to counter those attacks so successfully.

Q. Elion's view regarding security since the May incident - has it changed your view, and do you have a view as to how cyber attacks will evolve in the next year or two?

Technically, those attacks didn't use any new technology and all this was familiar to us even before. What was surprising, was the scale of the attack and the coordination of it.

As more and more commerce and general life is depending on the electronic transactions and Internet, criminal world is also exploring this to see if there could be some ways to exploit this. As we have seen in the last years, they are rather successful with this. In the same way, countries as a whole depend on the economy and the critical infrastructure to function, and in turn, they depend on computer networks and computer security to function. So, it has become possible to attack countries by attacking the computer networks as well. I'm afraid that the state of the cyber security will become worse in the years to come, before the attacks and defenses against them matures and stabilises.

Book: Cyber Security

2007-11-16T08:28:00.000Z

I am reading Cyber Security by Ed Amoroso, chief security officer at AT&T as part of an upcoming technology briefing article for Total Telecom. This is a highly readable and informative book with lots of pointed anecdotes.

"Cyber Security" by Edward Amoroso
Silicon Press, 2007, pp 177

IMS video share

2007-08-23T13:45:00.000+01:00

AT&T has an advert on its web site to promote its IMS-enabled video-share service. It's a valiant effort to highlight to users the value of real-time video sharing as a complement to calls. Useful as it is, video share is unlikely to be the long-awaited IMS killer app.

Click here for AT&T's video share

iPhone comes to Europe

2007-08-22T13:28:00.000+01:00

According to media reports, it appears three operators will be the first to sell Apple's iphone in Europe: O2 in the UK, Orange in France and T-Mobile in Germany.

There is no doubting the progress phones are making - in the man-machine interfaces and their service features. But does the iphone advance the whole handset story? I have a Nokia Communicator and while it is very useful to send emails and browse I rarely use its Windows office features.

Have handsets advanced to a degree that they are an adequate substitute to laptops for users on the move? And if not, just what is still missing?

Storage tutorials

2007-08-21T10:36:00.000+01:00

The Storage Networking Industry Association has some very useful tutorial presentations.

Click here for more details

Ethernet gets in on the SAN act

2007-08-21T10:21:00.000+01:00

Virtualisation is rightly being promoted as an important technology for storage (See upcoming technology brief, Total Telecom, Sept 1). But networking is also playing an important role. Orange Business Services launched in June i-SAN, a Fibre Channel-over-Ethernet SAN service connecting data centres, which Orange Business claims is a first.

The service which uses Orange’s metro Ethernet network is available currently only in France and is aimed at small to medium enterprises. The uptake in France during 2007 will determine whether Orange Business proceeds with a service rollout in other countries.

“Using Ethernet is a lot more flexible than using dedicated fibre between sites,” says Rob Hodgkinson, global practice director, IT services at Orange Business Services. Ethernet also allows point-to-point and point-to-multipoint data backup, and it is scalable: increasing the bandwidth between sites is straightforward.

I-SAN supports synchronous and asynchronous backup at data rates of 1, 2 and 4 Gigabits per second at distances up to 1000km. “i-SAN suits requirements that typically need 1 Terabyte of backup a day, not firms that may use 100 Terabytes a day,” says Hodgkinson.

However, analysts question how innovative the i-SAN service is. “This [SAN over Ethernet] is not a new service and has been available for awhile, especially within the financial community,” says Carl Greiner of Ovum. “Also because of the cost of data centres, they are being put in remote locations – and such sites are not always on MANs.”

Open Spectrum

2007-08-07T14:11:00.000+01:00

Nice resource site all about the use and management of spectrum. "This web site has oodles of information", as a friend pointed out.

Click here

Is BT too innovative?

2007-07-30T04:30:00.000+01:00

Total Telecom has reported that BT is discontinuing its BT Movio mobile TV service, a move that forces Virgin Mobile to stop selling the product. It appears the uptake was modest at best with analysts estimating that the service had 10,000 users only since its launch in September 2006.

BT Movio is based on DAB-IP technology. This enabled BT to get to market early but it had limited spectrum which meant few channels and limited resolution per channel, a point made by proponents of other mobile broadcast technologies such as DVB-H.

BT was also an early proponent of fixed mobile convergence with its UMA-based BT Fusion service. At the time of its launch BT's handsets used Bluetooth for the wireless connection when within the home zone, now of course Wi-Fi is standard. The BT Fusion service continues but has not had the rapid uptake of Orange's Unik service for example.

Meanwhile BT continues to innovate. It is moving to an all-IP network with its 21CN initiative and it is embracing Web 2.0 through initiatives such as its Web21C which makes available a service development kit for third party application developers to tap into BT's network and use such service functions as messaging and presence. BT is also a proponent of IMS.

But based on BT's experience with Movio, is BT too innovative for its own good? Total Telecom's view is no. BT's pursuit of IMS built on an all-IP network coupled with a service delivery platform that embraces Web 2.0 means that it will only be a matter of time before it alights on services that do take off.

But it will be interesting to see what the service successes are and, more importantly for BT's innovators, how long it takes the operator to demonstrate the benefits of being an early mover.

Executive Forum at OFC

2007-04-21T09:54:00.000+01:00

Here are some presentations given at the Executive Forum event held alongside OFC this year.
Click here and then click on speaker presentations

Video consumption in the UK

2007-04-21T09:41:00.000+01:00

The UK regulator Ofcom has published a report listing consumer broadband and content usage habits. There are some interesting findings regarding video consumption.
Ofcom report, click here

IMS years away in North America

2007-03-24T09:43:00.000Z

The extensive deployment of the IMS convergence architecture remains years away in North America (NA). So argues a report from market research firm, The Diffusion Group. It also believes NA is far behind Europe regarding IMS.

Click here for more details as well as a white paper on IMS.

OFC 2007

2007-03-24T09:25:00.000Z

I hope to attend next week's OFC conference. I will report on the state of the industry and the main optical component and comms semiconductor developments.

FIT PIC

2007-02-09T09:59:00.000Z

Photonic integrated circuits (PICs) have long been spoken of but the technology has yet to gain widespead industry support. One company that has adopted PICs, building an optical transport platform around its design, is Infinera. Its design use two devices, a 10x10 Gbps transmitter and 10x10 Gbps receiver, implemented using Indium Phosphide technology.

Infinera has just announced a milestone in that its PICs have passed ten million hours of operation in live customer networks without a single failure. PIC technology will only grow in importance over the next several years, given the steady re-emergence of the optical component industry.

Cognitive Radio: Wireless gets smart

2007-02-01T07:59:00.000Z

“We are suspicious of cognitive radio because of the hidden-terminal problem,” says William Webb, R&D chief at Ofcom. The terminal—a cellphone, for example—can be hidden because a building stands between it and the cognitive radio that is vying to use the same frequency. No amount of sensitivity by the cognitive radio’s receiver will uncover it. “You can use databases and network information between radios, but you can’t be 100 percent sure,” Webb says. Ofcom says it’s therefore inappropriate to introduce cognitive radios in spectrum owned by others—that is, unless the incumbents themselves decide they want to allow them.
IEEE Spectrum, Click here for article

Powerline access to outpace DSL and cable

2007-01-31T08:22:00.000Z

Broadband over power line (BPL) subscriber growth in the U.S. will outpace DSL and cable over the next five years. Research from Parks Associates forecasts subscriber numbers to increase from 400,000 in 2007 to 2.5 m by 2011.

One reason for the growth is the delivery of broadband to households in rural areas, which cannot be served with conventional broadband services.

Soundbite: IMS timelines

2007-01-26T07:30:00.000Z

"No one vendor has all the IMS pieces. Carriers are choosing to use components [from several vendors] and a system integrator, and now they are separating the myth from reality. That's why you are seeing lots of lab trials and [IMS] plug fests. [For IMS,] 2007 will be a critical year: carriers will learn and draw conclusions. If it turns out well and it is a reasonable solution and all the pieces work, there will be some deployments in 2008. If it proves hard to work and is a complex integration there will be no definite timeline."
Dr. Vikram Saksena, chief technology officer, Sonus Networks.

BT's 21 CN

2007-01-23T15:42:00.000Z

Interesting write-up of BT's NGN in this month's IEEE Spectrum. Click here

Q&A with DiBcom's CEO

2007-01-22T08:13:00.000Z

NGN caught up with Yannick Lévy, the CEO of Digital Video Broadcast (DVB) chip specialist DiBcom, to ask his views about the emerging mobile TV market.

NGN: DIBcom backs DVB-H (DVB-Handheld). When we last spoke in early 2006, you said that: “DVB-H [technology] has the lowest power consumption, is supported exclusively by handset makers Nokia and Motorola, and the cost of rolling out a network is a third that of DMB.” Can you point to events since we last spoke that further strengthens the case for DVB-H?

YL: All the narrowband initiatives based on DAB derived standards such as T-DMB, DAB-IP have not been successful. The main reason is that they only offer four TV channels at reasonable quality, or up to six channels (in South Korea) with degraded quality. This is not enough to have people subscribe to mobile TV. Therefore, Germany and UK failed on these commercial trials.

This is pushing forward the broadband solutions such as DVB-H in priority. DVB-H was launched in Italy and South Africa in 2006. It offers 15 channels, and several handsets from Samsung and LG have been launched in 2006, as well as Sagem. The availability of handsets is key for this market, since end users want to have the choice. The reduced number of suppliers in the handset industry (down to 5 players now) makes it challenging for carriers to provide enough handsets for the services they are launching. This is the reason why DVB-H is still very much the major standard DiBcom believes in.

NGN: What are you seeing regarding DVB-H delivery via satellite? What are the merits of DVB-SH and where will it be used?

YL: DVB-SH (Satellite services for Handhelds) will be used as a complementary solution to DVB-H in rural areas. Potentially, the satellite can offer mobile TV outdoor and on the road - usage in cars on long distance, for example. So, DiBcom believes that DVB-SH development will occur in 2009-2010 after an initial launch of DVB-H in 2007-2008.

Alcatel-Lucent has frequencies available in Europe today. They may develop partnerships in the future to extend their solutions to outside Europe, like U.S.A. and China. Currently, China is looking at a similar standard called STIMI, which is similar to DVB-SH.

NGN: TDtv has emerged quite recently. In a UK there is a trial involving four key 3G operators and it appears to offer several advantages such as using available spectrum already owned by the operators. What is your take?

YL: TDtv is a narrowband solution, just like DAB/DMB is. So although there are frequencies available for TDtv, these frequencies are higher and narrowband compared to UHF. Also, they require the installation of new base station equipment which represents a cost similar to DVB-H, but only offering a few channels. In our opinion, it is therefore not a good solution, unless it is used as a complement to DVB-H for local TV channels.

NGN: MediaFlo scored a coup with its trial with BskyB on European soil. Do you see MediaFlo as a threat to DVB-H in Europe?

YL: MediaFlo has not been selected by BskyB. It has only been trialed in comparison with DVB-H, in order to give a better idea to BskyB about which solution they could potentially bid for in the case of a frequency auction in the UK. As opposed to other countries in Europe, UK regulator Ofcom lets the bidders choose their technology. Therefore, it is quite logical that BskyB wanted to test MediaFlo. However, independently of the technological comparison between DVB-H and MediaFlo which showed very little difference after long debates (less than 0.5 dB in favor of DVB-H), the availability of terminals will once again make a difference. The operators will have to understand that GSM will be mostly associated with DVB-H, whereas MediaFlo will be associated to CDMA (because of the Verizon launch in the U.S.) and there will be no GSM/Flo terminal, making it impossible for a European operator to chose MediaFlo and be successful with it.

NGN: What about the spectrum status in Europe - the availability of UHF spectrum that is most suited to DVB-H? Early markets where spectrum is, or will be, released include Finland, Italy and Germany. Do you agree?

YL: France and Spain have also found UHF spectrum for DVB-H. So in 2007, we could have as much as 260 million inhabitants covered by DVB-H in Europe (Spain, Germany, France, Italy)

NGN: In markets where the spectrum is not so forthcoming operators can’t afford to wait meaning they will need to adopt interim or alternative strategies that will only harm DVB-H’s uptake.

YL: Some tried with DMB for instance, but realize that there is no point in doing early launches with a bad technology. They do not find enough handsets, and subscribers do not adopt the service. It is a waste of money and creates legacy that they will have to handle.

NGN: Do you have a view on how the operators’ preferred mobile TV business models are shaping?

YL: Operators want to have a subscription-based model with a flat fee between 6 and 10 euros/month. This is the only way that a deep indoor coverage network can be setup properly. Ads based models are not sufficient to cover network costs. DiBcom has calculated that a deep indoor coverage requires a network 10 times more expensive than an outdoor coverage. So, this amounts to about 10M$/100 sq.km CAPEX. This cannot be financed otherwise but by subscribers.

NGN: What you expect to see for Mobile TV in 2007 in Europe and globally?

YL: In Europe, we expect to see France and Germany launch for sure. Spain is less secured at this point, but may follow if they see the success in France and Germany.

Globally, we expect to see more trials in Asia and emerging countries (India, Brazil, Vietnam). The U.S.A. will do a major DVB-H trial in Las Vegas with SES Americom on the Aloha/Hiwire UHF frequencies, but we would see a commercial launch only at the beginning of 2008. Modeo will also do a reduced launch in New-York early 2007.

NGN: One analyst has pointed out there are approaching 2.5 billion 2G mobile users, a huge potential audience for mobile TV, which currently is almost exclusively available only to 3G users. With the emergence of new technologies, such as Evolved EDGE, mobile TV could be made available to these users at minimal incremental cost - a new handset and a base station software upgrade only. This would bring immediate economies of scale and leave the rest of the market standing.

YL: Orange has just launched its “HD-mobile” service using 3G/HSDPA channel at more than 300 kb/s. This allows them to offer much better [image] quality than what is offered with simple 2.5G. However, Orange also realises that this will allow at most two users/base station, which is incompatible with an uptake of Mobile TV. So, these solutions are short term and provide good short term revenue and customer base build-up for the carriers, but only broadcasting can survive in the longer term, or a combination of broadcasting for major TV channels and 3G for lower audience channels.

Comment: Will DVB-H become the dominant technology for mobile TV?

The IMS message

2007-01-17T06:48:00.000Z

We were having a conversation in the office, or more a remote e-mail conversation. It concerned a recent analyst report suggesting that softswitches will be around for longer than people might think as carriers are not moving to IMS as fast as had been thought, if at all. This led to the following response from a Total Telecom colleague:

"The problem for IMS is it doesn’t spell ‘product’ i.e the vendors aren’t defining the products/applications the operator will get out of it, whereas softswitches spell VoIP and managed VoIP – a no brainer!"

Comment?

TDtv for mobile TV?

2007-01-16T07:47:00.000Z

The results of the current TDtv mobile TV involving operators 3UK, Telefonica, Orange and Vodafone will be announced at this month’s 3GSM. But NGN has already been told the technology “works and works well”. TDtv uses the 3G broadcast standard Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (MBMS) but in an idle part of the 3G spectrum. It has several merits for the operators but is a latecomer - see table. It is a technology to watch.

Table: TDtv versus DVB-H, the mobile TV technology frontrunner

Pros	Cons
It uses existing spectrum and sites owned by the 3G operators	Yet to see handset support for TDtv. Limited equipment support too.
It requires simpler and cheaper base stations. The goal is that only one in four base stations will need a TDtv line card.	DVB-H is proven and already deployed commercially. TDtv is some two years behind.
The handset hardware to support TDtv could be made part of the existing 3G chipset compared to a separate DVB-H (or multi-standard) handset IC.	Not all 3G operators has TDD spectrum, Vodafone in the UK for example.
Operator owns and controls one network, which it fully understands.	Higher frequency of operation and hence inferior indoor coverage compared to DVB-H at UHF.

HDTV as a broadband bandwidth driver

2007-01-10T07:46:00.000Z

High Definition TVs can now be found in over a third of US broadband households. So claims market research firm, The Diffusion Group. There are close to 40 million HDTVs in U.S. broadband households, according to data it collected in December. And among these households, some 40% of HDTVs reside in rooms other than the primarily family or living room.

Happy Holidays

2006-12-29T10:15:00.000Z

Source: Belgacom

Winning the PON wars

2006-12-29T01:09:00.000Z

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

2006-12-26T10:18:00.000Z

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

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.
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+).
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.
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

2006-12-20T16:40:00.000Z

"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

2006-12-18T14:31:00.000Z

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

2006-12-15T08:01:00.000Z

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

2006-12-13T08:58:00.000Z

“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

2006-12-11T18:38:00.000Z

"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

2006-12-10T15:17:00.000Z

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

2006-12-06T05:16:00.000Z

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

Click here for Total Telecom article

Mobile TV: Input sought

2006-12-06T01:58:00.000Z

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

2006-12-05T09:49:00.000Z

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

2006-12-05T09:17:00.000Z

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

2006-11-30T09:07:00.000Z

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

2006-11-26T08:01:00.000Z

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

2006-11-25T16:14:00.000Z

"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

2006-11-23T11:56:00.000Z

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

2006-11-21T12:44:00.000Z

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:

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.

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.

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.

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

2006-11-20T16:49:00.000Z

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

2006-11-17T08:55:00.000Z

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

2006-11-16T17:02:00.000Z

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

2006-11-14T12:08:00.000Z

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

2006-11-10T12:12:00.000Z

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

2006-11-09T08:03:00.000Z

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:

Finisar (issued 113 patents in '05) had a score of 1103
Cisco Systems (453) 909
Silicon Light Machines (26) 700
Motorola (522) 600
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

2006-11-07T04:42:00.000Z

"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

2006-11-06T10:30:00.000Z

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

2006-11-03T09:27:00.000Z

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)

1^st generation encoders: 9.1Mbit/s

2nd generation: 6.2Mbit/s (cable)

7.5 to 8Mbit/s (constant bit rate over DSL)

Soundbite: Optical comms

2006-11-02T07:08:00.000Z

"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

2006-11-01T18:56:00.000Z

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

2006-10-30T08:33:00.000Z

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

2006-10-30T08:30:00.000Z

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

2006-10-27T16:26:00.000+01:00

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

2006-10-26T08:18:00.000+01:00

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

2006-10-26T07:24:00.000+01:00

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.

Data rate: because copper will have difficulty scaling beyond 10Gbit/s, while optical technology already exists at 40Gbit/s
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.
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

2006-10-25T06:20:00.000+01:00

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

2006-10-24T06:00:00.000+01:00

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

2006-10-23T06:11:00.000+01:00

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

2006-10-18T07:55:00.000+01:00

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

2006-10-17T12:06:00.000+01:00

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

2006-10-16T05:46:00.000+01:00

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

2006-10-13T12:06:00.000+01:00

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.

What is copper's life sentence?

2006-10-12T09:14:00.000+01:00

Two service providers, Telefonica and Bezeq, have joined several vendors as well as academic institutions to form the Dynamic Spectrum Management (DSM) Consortium. The consortium is tasked with developing DSM technology to "increase current subscriber broadband rates beyond DSL technology".

The technology promises "fibre-optic rates" over twisted pair, extending the data rates achieved by ADSL2+ and VDSL2 for a given length of twisted pair cabling. VDSL2 achieves 100 Mbit/s at 500m, and 50 Mbit/s over 1km.

Quite what is meant by "fibre rates" using DSM is not stated but at best it will be a doubling of the data rate/distance performance current DSL technology achieves.

Using DSM to extend the data rates over copper is clearly an attractive option for carriers, especially European incumbents who favour fibre-to-the-node/VDSL2 access schemes rather than fibre-to-the-home. Couple that with improvements in coding algorithms such as a 3.5Mbit/s HDTV channel, and copper-based broadband could live years longer than expected.

So just what is the maximum data rate possible over copper? Try 10Gbit/s over 100m. That is what the 10GBase-T standard, approved in June, offers.

Now no one is suggesting 10GBase-T be used for broadband. For a start, 10GBase-T uses special four twisted pairs cabling and is designed for data centres not access networks. And if you were going to the expense of laying new cabling as close as 100m to the home, it would be fibre not copper. But it shows what is possible over copper when advanced signal processing techniques are used.

The ultimate customer premises equipment

2006-10-10T06:05:00.000+01:00

“With teenagers happy to use MySpace (the networking website) and blogs to share details of their private lives, there may be less concern surrounding privacy than for other generations.”

Geraldine Padbury, senior business analyst at The Institute for Grocery Distribution (IGD), a retail think-tank, that found almost one in ten teenagers and one in twenty adults are willing to have a microchip implanted to pay shop bills and prevent card or identity fraud and muggings.

Source: The Times, Oct 10

However, the IDG believes supermarkets will use biometric techniques first, such as fingerprint and iris recognition. Such methods are more popular than paying by mobile phone because of handset theft concerns. This suggests the industry must solve a key concern if handsets are to be used for e-commerce.

Lastly, the IDG survey found 16 per cent of teenagers and 12 per cent of adults want navigation systems on supermarket trolleys to help them round the store. Such a system is already being used in a trial in Germany. Shoppers connect their loyalty card to a trolley-based computer, which displays goods bought last time as well as special offers and their location.

Add RFID to the goods bought, and armed with your chip implant you could breeze past the checkout. Now that's some service offering.

UltraHD and IMS

2006-10-09T18:25:00.000+01:00

It is rare for a commentator to be bowled over by a technology. But that is what happened when Hervè Utheza, a former director of IPTV research for market research company, The Diffusion Group, witnessed an NHK-NTT demonstration of Ultra High Definition (UltraHD).

“I saw something that truly excited me - that is, made shivers run up the back of my neck and goose bumps appear, letting me know I was witnessing was a truly breakthrough technology, not just some repackaging, re-integration, or re-combination of the existing, but something capable of really changing the digital technology landscape,” said Utheza in an opinion piece for The Diffusion Group.

UltraHD has a definition of 7,680 pixels by 4,320, some 16 times the resolution of HDTV 1080p, or 3.75 times that of Digital Cinema 4K.

Utheza believes UltraHD is so outstanding that the industry should leapfrog straight to the standard and scrap Digital Cinema altogether.

Meanwhile, analyst Dean Bubley attended a two-day brainstorming session on IMS. He told NGN that while the event's aim was to look at how to make money from IMS services, it quickly focused on what bits of IMS are ready and what are not.

“IMS is not ready for mobile operators while for fixed it is technically ready in parts," he said. See his post for more detail.

Soundbite: FTTH in Europe

2006-10-06T11:07:00.000+01:00

“No European incumbent has announced a large FTTH deployment because they realise there is no business case... FTTH is very risky and very uncertain, with negative returns just to stay in the game.”

Lars Godell, principal analyst, European telecoms, at Forrester Research, who fears carriers are being pressured to enter the FTTH market in a way reminiscent of 3G spectrum auctions six years ago. Click here for Total Telecom article.

Seeking the business case for FMC

2006-10-05T08:34:00.000+01:00

Today is a big day for Orange and arguably Europe regarding the future of fixed mobile convergence (FMC). Orange’s Unik service goes live in France enabling users to make calls on their mobile through their home’s broadband connection or Wi-Fi hotspot.

Orange plans to also launch a Unik-style service in the Netherlands, UK, Spain and Poland. With 60m subscribers in these markets, mobile handset makers should at last be convinced to bring more dual-mode WiFi-GSM handsets to market.

Orange is only the latest of several European operators to deploy such a service. Telecom Italia just made available its much-anticipated Unica UMA-based FMC service, though Total Telecom has already reported how the service came out with little fanfare. Meanwhile, in August, TeliaSonera's launched its Home Free Mobile IP service in Denmark while Deutsche Telekom started its SIP-based T-One service in Germany.

And all follow trailblaser BT with its Fusion service launched over a year ago. BT’s Fusion subscriber numbers, however, are discouraging. “The latest figures we have are 30,000 at the time of BT's Q1 results [issued in July],” said a BT spokesperson. One FMC industry observer believes BT’s service package has too many constraints. “Operators that understand how to bring the service to market should be well into the million-plus subscribers in the first year,” he says.

Yet FMC service launches will only gather pace in the coming year. ”One year ago the FMC Alliance had a dozen members and BT had launched Fusion. Now it has 26 members and eight have announced or started services,” says Ian Cox, an analyst soon to publish an ABI Research report on FMC. “In mid-2007 I expect all 26 members to have services running.”

Cox notes that UMA is the first standard-based way of enabling handsets to connect via broadband and it has a two- to three-year lead over a full IMS solution. But there are pre-IMS trials and services up and running based on SIP dual use handsets from the MobileIGNITE group.

But what concerns him most is the business case for the service: “There is a lot of expense here.” There is the CAPEX for the UMA controller that costs several million dollars apiece, “and you need at least two”. Then is the cost of the handset as well as the challenge to get a potential subscriber to give up their existing handset, likely to be relatively new.

Cox views the operators’ FMC service launches as a defensive strategy. If carriers don’t do anything they will lose revenue, he says, and with such a service they can offer prices that match VoIP charges of a Vonage and Skype. “The business case for FMC is difficult. There are lots of things to consider,” he says.

The industry observer is more upbeat about FMC services though his gaze is towards the US market. T-Mobile is very encouraged by their FMC trials and the consumer feedback, he says. “They are upping their forecasts.

Are operators harming themselves by offering complicated and inflexible converged service packages to users?

See also the poll in The Register, click here

VoIP as an opportunity

2006-10-04T20:46:00.000+01:00

VoIP need not always be a threat, indeed for cellular operators it represents an opportunity. So argues a report from market research firm, Sound Partners. "In ten years’ hence VoIP won't be the dominant way [voice calls are made] but it will be getting there," says Sound Partners' CEO, Alastair Brydon.

Cellular cannot deliver mass market VoIP services: it does not have the throughput and voice quality would be unacceptable due to packet delays. But this is about the change with the launch in the U.S. this year of CDMA2000 1 x EV-DO Revision A which has hooks for VoIP. Europe will have to wait till 2009 with the introduction of the 3G Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard.

Operators will invest in 3G LTE for such services as Internet access and mobile TV services, with VoIP being one more offering. "A 3G LTE network using VoIP will be 28% of the cost of today's network," says Brydon.

Other benefits going to IP include the reduced cost of a single core network for fixed and mobile traffic compared to a separate circuit switched network for voice, and richer services by mixing voice with multimedia content. Since the trend for traffic is to move from fixed to mobile, all the carriers have to do is manage the transition to VoIP correctly, says Brydon.

And the opportunity? "If it is plain voice, everyone is squeezed but VoIP can be offered as a premium service," he says. Such a service would include superior voice quality as well as instant messaging, presence and multimedia.

Sound Partners forecasts that cellular VoIP will account for 49% of all cellular minutes in 2015 and generate revenues of U.S. $70.9 billion. In Western Europe it will be 33% of all cellular minutes and $54.7 billion revenues.

Unlicensed mobile access

2006-10-03T19:33:00.000+01:00

A website dedicated to the Unlicensed Mobile Access (UMA) technology. Click here

Incumbents as dinosaurs

2006-10-02T06:04:00.000+01:00

The Economist has used recent events at Telecom Italia to survey Europe's incumbents. It highlights Telecom Italia's woes - slow growth in mobile, a decline in fixed-line revenues, competition and huge debts - and suggests these are common with its "dinosaur-like peers" elsewhere in Europe.

Stephen Pentland of Deloitte is quoted as saying that "the economics are not getting better,” and that incumbents can expect fundamentally lower levels of earnings.

In response, carriers have all adopted similar strategies. They have combined fixed and wireless service bundles domestically while competing with their mobile and broadband arms in external markets.

The way different carriers are looking to attack their rivals by bundling services is fascinating. I have been talking to vendors and analysts about femtocells, tiny 3G basestations serving a home which mobile operators are eyeing as a way to compete with fixed line operators while using their broadband networks to carry the traffic. Femtocells are set to appear in the second half of 2007.

The effect of all these strategies is increasing pain for the carriers as they “at last start to compete with each other”. Competition benefits the consumer, argues The Economist, while strengthening the case for carrier consolidation. Such consolidated entities would also be in a better position when negotiating with content providers. But governments will block such moves, it says, hence the "dinosaurs lumber on".

Bring a (telecom) Book to Work Week

2006-10-01T09:02:00.000+01:00

From The Observer newspaper (1/10/2006):

"Thousands of people will take their favourite book to work next week as part of a global initiative by Book Aid International to benefit the world's poorest readers. The idea of Bring a Book to Work Week is that for every book taken in, companies signed up to the scheme will donate £2 to help the charity provide people in some of the world's poorest countries with one of their own."

Would you recommend a telecom book, and if so, please say why you found it so useful?

Trimming the costs of FTTH

2006-09-28T16:55:00.000+01:00

Verizon has provided an update on the CAPEX per home for its PON-based FiOS service. The cost for Verizon is now below $2000 per home

At the end of 2006, it is on track to achieve the following:

CAPEX per home passed: $850
CAPEX to connect a home: $880
A total CAPEX per home of $1730

Verizon is projecting that for 2010 the costs will be:

CAPEX per home passed: $700
CAPEX to connect: $650
A total CAPEX per home of $1350 *

That equates to a 22 per cent cost saving over the next 4 years. Not brilliant but any drop reduces the overall time it takes for end user revenues to cover the construction costs.

* Thanks to Frank Marum, senior analyst, The Diffusion Group for the figures

Optical components - an industry report

2006-09-28T10:48:00.000+01:00

The weather at this week's ECOC, held at the French resort of Cannes, reflected the recent fortunes of the optical component industry: it started stunningly bright (1999 to 2000), suffered a prolonged torrential downpour (till 2003), before returning to clear blue skies.

The "clear blue skies" assessment may raise some eyebrows but the good news is that since 3Q 2003, the component industry has experienced growth. "It is now a U.S. $3.4 billion dollar-a-year industry with 20 percent year-on-year growth," says Daryl Inniss, vice president and practice leader, communications components at Ovum RHK. The market figures include optical modules and discrete components for the wide area network, datacom, and access.

Inniss also agrees that there are still too many component companies and not enough consolidation. And yet component makers are finding it difficult to meet growing demand.

"Every supplier is at capacity or ramp-limited," says Inniss. These include components such as tunable lasers and reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexers - used for upgrading WDM networks - as well as 10Gbit/s transceivers (XFPs) and even thin-film filters, a fundamental optical building block used to separate light paths. Component makers see the growing demand but turning up capacity takes time - six to nine months - and money, and component players are cautious. "They remember the past," says Inniss.

So what was hot at ECOC? WDM-PON, which is surprising given that the basic passive optical network (PON) flavours of Ethernet PON (EPON) and Gigabit PON (GPON) are still in their infancy.

There was also plenty of discussion about 100Gbit/s Ethernet. All recognise there will be considerable challenges before 100G is deployed, as well as concerns about how best to implement it. Will it be 10 channels at 10Gbit/s, 4 at 25G, 5 at 20G or even a 50Gbit/s symbol rate and modulation? There was even speculation that it could limit the 40Gbit/s opportunity.

Overall though ECOC was about incremental improvements rather than radical developments: many component announcements reduced power consumption or reduced cost, operated over extended temperature ranges or fitted into smaller-sized modules.

So where were the innovative products? "Why is it important to have new things?" says Sando Anoff, marketing manager for Europe at optical component company, Opnext. "Why expect revolution when it is steady evolution."

This is an industry that has not forgotten what it is like to get rained on.

Europe falters in the dash to FTTH

2006-09-28T10:18:00.000+01:00

Europe is being left in the dust when it comes to fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) deployments. Japan is installing close to 300,000 lines a month. Europe, meanwhile, has put in 100,000 in the last year.

According to market research firm IDATE, Europe had 650 000 FTTH lines installed by mid-2005, a number that has risen to 750 000 by mid 2006. Japan is installing every seven working days what it takes Europe to do in a year.

Are European incumbents smart to avoid the huge deployment costs of FTTH due to the expected poor returns or will they pay dearly for the delay?

Soundbites: ECOC

2006-09-26T04:51:00.000+01:00

“I first started working on passive optical networks in 1978.”

Dave Payne, Head of Future Networks team at BT Adastral Park, pointing out that optical networking has always taken time to develop.

“Everyone got fooled when WDM came on. There was a clear need but it didn’t change the architecture: one fibre now looked like 16. Now carriers are re-architecting the network, with all the software and control.”

Ferris Lipscomb, vice president of marketing at optical component company, NeoPhotonics, explaining why the agile components that made optical the hottest high-tech sector in 1999 and 2000 are only now being deployed.

Time for carrier investment in components

2006-09-25T10:22:00.000+01:00

Carriers and system vendors will return to investing in core technologies that make no sense for the venture world but will give them a competitive edge. So believes Ian Jenks, general partner at venture firm, Crescendo Networks, speaking at the ONE 2006 conference at ECOC.

Summarising the optical landscape today, he stresses there are no IPOs, few buyers with shallow pockets only, and average technology exits of U.S. $83m. "Bleak but maybe getting better," says Jenks.

He argues that one consequence of convergence will be to bring people together. "People deliver services collect $3 trillion a year, equipment makers $14 billion and optical components makers $2 billion." And with bandwidth demand greatly outstripping supply he expects users will become increasingly frustrated with the slow responsiveness of getting and delivering content. "It [demand for bandwidth] has never been linear, its always been boom and bust."

He thus sees a requirement for new investment in core optical technologies which he foresees coming from carriers and vendors, not VCs, that will give them a competitive edge. "They will rediscover the reasons for their success," he says.

Are carriers and equipment vendors missing out by not working more closely - and funding - innovative optical component start-ups?

What next for the network ... more comment

2006-09-25T09:41:00.000+01:00

"Rapid growth in mobile TV services will have a major impact on mobile networks over the next five years as mobile operators are faced with the need to deliver large volumes of high quality mobile TV and video content to the mass market, cost effectively. Dedicated broadcasting technologies, such as DVB-H, DMB and TDtv will be essential to cope with the most popular content, while operators will also need to bolster the capacity of their 3G networks to deliver personalised video-on-demand services, which will be more valuable than simple broadcasting, for example using W-CDMA LTE and CDMA2000 evolution."

Alastair Brydon, CEO, Sound Partners.

“Forget IMS, don't even mention A-IMS, the most dramatic change will only take two letters "IM". The "next generation" users - todays teens and twenties - are already relying on mobile phones and IM, and as IM evolves to include voice and video on an ever more ubiquitous broadband base, the enhanced user experience of presence will make traditional voice a thing of the past. It won’t be complete in five years, but the writing is on the wall.”

Frank Marum, senior analyst, The Diffusion Group.

ECOC and the economics of FTTH

2006-09-21T10:28:00.000+01:00

I'm off to the European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC 2006). I hope to talk to several leading optical component players to understand their areas of focus in the next 12 to 18 months, their thoughts on 100 Gbit/s Ethernet and what key technologies they believe will be needed in optical networks in the next few years.

I will be taking part in the Optical Network Europe 2006 event at ECOC. The session will be on fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) deployment in Europe and in particular whether the economics of FTTH is still the sticking point. If you will be attending, do please come and introduce yourself.

For a copy of the talk: "Is the economics of FTTH still the sticking point for Europe's service providers?", please click here

Roy Rubenstein

Soundbite: THUS on IMS

2006-09-20T10:15:00.000+01:00

"The introduction of IMS will not be as a big bang but phased. Ideally customers won't even need to know about IMS, but will be able to take advantage of the continual evolution of services and solutions."
Richard McCallum, development director at service provider, THUS

Intel's silicon sees the light

2006-09-19T09:43:00.000+01:00

Yesterday’s announcement by Intel and the University of California, Santa Barbara of an electrically pumped, hybrid laser adds another key component to silicon’s growing toolbox that could make the technology the platform of choice for integrated photonics.

The research work combines the light-emitting properties of Indium Phosphide (InP) - used for telecom and datacom lasers - with the economies of scale and ease of processing of silicon wafers. Bonding the silicon and InP wafers together combines the two materials, with the InP providing the light trigger to cause lasing in the silicon optical wave guide. This promises cheaper wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) lasers, and arrays of lasers.

Complete optical systems-on-chip become possible by combining the laser with other optical building blocks developed in silicon, such as 1 Gbit/s and 10 Gbit/s modulators, wavelength multiplexers and photo-detectors. Intel expects the technology to reach the market in five to ten years’ time. Target applications are those that already use high-speed electrical interfaces such as rack-to-rack and chip-to-chip communications.

One particular application is high-end servers, that will increasingly use multi-core microprocessors packed densely on line cards. Such confined computing will need the terabit/s data rates and lower power consumption optical interfaces deliver. Thus the first application of the technology will likely be within large data centres.

But Intel does not rule out the laser being used for existing optical telecom applications, from fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) to ultra long haul dense WDM. Indeed, Mario Paniccia, director of Intel’s Photonics Technology Lab, believes cheaper optical transceivers for FTTH could result from the technology.

"We believe this success bodes well for rapid progress in active silicon optics though commercial application is years away," says Karen Liu, Ovum-RHK's vice president, communication components.

For more details regarding the Intel-UCSB announcement, click here

What next for the network, continued

2006-09-18T07:26:00.000+01:00

"The end-to-end nature of the original incarnation of the Internet assumed that both ends were trusted, known entities. Typically they were true network participants - engineers who, if their intended application failed, could diagnose and resolve the network problem. Important elements in this - they were trusted, and they were logical peers to at least some elements of the network (the latter meaning they were not excluded by hierarchical dictate from signalling to network elements). These, fundamental points in the architecture of the Internet now have devastating impact, because - clearly - many users abuse the trust and use the logical peer relationship with bad intent (e.g. spam, phishing, Distributed Denial of Service attacks).

Today, these can be resolved only partially, by patching the Internet as we have it. What's interesting and important is that there is growing momentum to consider a clean-start approach to the future, really broadband Internet. It's implausible to imagine that any such clean-start approach would not have network security and rigorous user authentication at its core."
John Ryan, Monitor Group

"The biggest network impact over the next three to five years will be the ongoing transition to a common IP based fixed/mobile network. Separating transport, service control and applications allows network operators to deploy a greater range of new services with significantly less time and effort than is possible on today's service specific legacy networks, providing a large upside for service innovation.

It remains to be seen how much and under what conditions network operators will be required to open the service platforms to third parties and how exposed we will be to the large downside for re-monopolisation."

Craig Skinner, senior consultant, Ovum Consulting

And coming…
Monolithic integration [of optical components] in Indium Phosphide.

Fixed mobile divergence

2006-09-14T08:45:00.000+01:00

Telecom Italia’s announcement that it will separate its fixed-line and mobile phone businesses has surprised an industry with convergence firmly in its sights.

Merging fixed and wireless operations is seen as a necessary development, especially as carriers look to separate transport from service control. One only has to look at the strategies of carriers such as France Telecom, KPN and Vodafone, with its fixed broadband deal with BT.

Indeed, Telecom Italia’s announcement that it will split its businesses into three (fixed access network, fixed retail and content, and mobile) is a reversal of its own recent strategy.

"Completely bizarre," was one wireless analyst's response. He recalls speaking to two executives from Telecom Italia and Telecom Italia Mobile (TIM) last November after they announced details of a new integrated business. “Every other word from both of them was convergence,” he says.

Investment and telecom analysts are split as to what is behind Telecom Italia’s decision. Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan believe it is due to the regulatory environment in Italy.

“The regulatory burden in Italy has become so heavy that Telecom Italia has decided to separate its businesses,” says the JPMorgan report. “Telecom Italia said that such a structure increases its financial flexibility, which we interpret to mean that any of the three assets could be sold.”

Goldman Sachs believes the sale of TIM is risky since Telecom Italia would limit is options and “lose any upside should 3G become more popular in its later generations or should the market consolidate.”

Telecom analysts, meanwhile, have seized on the cost of convergence and the carrier’s debt. “This is not an industry vision just financial engineering,” says Lars Godell, principal analyst, European telecoms at Forrester Research.

Ovum also believes it has little to do with strategic considerations or meeting regulatory requirements. “The main reason seems to be the massive debt that has been accumulated and which is now becoming a real burden,” it says.

“The challenges of integrating the services, networks and organisations of two such large - and largely independent - entities is massive,” adds the wireless analyst. “Perhaps it is simple as TI deciding that the benefits are not worth the cost and pain involved, once it looked at the scale of the challenge.”

Dean Bubley, founder of Disruptive Analysis, believes the issue is financial and not convergence. “Even on the most optimistic forecasts, the majority of mobile customers will be non-FMC for at least the next 5 years, especially if like Italy they are in very pre-pay centric markets.”

Is this a unique carrier issue or the first question mark regarding the wisdom of convergence?

KPN's IMS plans gather pace

2006-09-12T11:34:00.000+01:00

Royal KPN NV will start IP Multimedia Subsystem-based (IMS) voice services over broadband from early 2007. The development is part of KPN’s €1bn-1.5bn spend on its all-IP network, to be completed by 2010.

“Our NGN network will consist of a broadband VDSL/FTTH-based network and IP-based platforms on top of it,” Paul Hendriks, general manager broadband services and of the all-IP programme at KPN, told Next Generation Networks. “In this way we are able to bring new IP high bandwidth broadband services to the customer and switch off legacy networks.”

IMS is central to KPN’s plans. “Once the IMS core platform is in place we will start deploying other types of IP-based communication services, both fixed and mobile,” says Hendriks. Using IMS, KPN will shut down central offices and offer all sorts of new communication services. It will start with simple voice services and move to VoIP-based ones such as IP Centrex, wireless virtual PBX and messaging services.

Ovum research director, Dan Bieler, believes KPN has to embrace IMS. “If you are thinking about a NGN, there is no alternative.” Meanwhile, the latest announcement surrounding KPN’s NGN is no more than an indicator that progress is being made, he says (see Ovum's take). KPN first announced its NGN plans two years ago.

The NGN was save KPN hundreds of millions of Euros a year in reduced network maintenance costs. “It will require between a quarter and a third of the staff needed for [maintaining] current networks,” says Bieler.

The ability to introduce new services rapidly, coupled with significant OPEX savings sounds a winning combination. Yet Bieler has reservations.

First, there is regulatory confusion as to how a VoIP call is classified and charged for. “There is a great deal of confusion here: is it voice, is it data?” While not a big part of the revenue stream now, in five years’ time the issue could impact profits significantly, he warns

Second, a key obstacle facing NGNs remains the issue of net neutrality and IP interconnect. Bieler admits that the issue of who gets paid for what when an incumbent shares its network with third party service providers has not stopped NGN investments such as KPN’s. But he warns that if not resolved, net neutrality could slow down the overall pace of NGN adoption.

Do you believe net neutrality is a threat to NGN roll-outs?

See Total Telecom’s NGN poll

A career in telecom

2006-09-11T06:09:00.000+01:00

The latest issue of Business Week (Sept 18th) reviews the best 50 work places for graduates to launch a career. Two telecommunications firms, Verizon (ranked 11) and AT&T (26), are in the top 50.

Comments include the launch by Verizon Wireless of a trainee programme where a participant may work at up to three locations over two years, while at AT&T free health care is provided, and for certain workers the opportunity for overtime. Average pay at Verizon is $35,000 to $40,000, at AT&T it is not listed.

Disney (1), Lockheed Martin, Deloitte & Touche and Goldman Sachs are ranked as the four leading companies to work for.

Google, classed under technology, is ranked 13th. “Free gourmet lunches, an on-site masseuse, and the freedom to spend one day a week on your own project. What’s not to love?” asks Business Week.

The new new: super-high-definition-TV

2006-09-07T16:27:00.000+01:00

Next Generation Networks spoke recently with Hartwig Tauber, president of the FTTH Council Europe, the organisation promoting fibre-to-the-home deployment in Europe. He had just given a talk in Japan about FTTH in Europe.

What would interest Japan about FTTH in Europe, he was asked politely, given Japan’s lead in FTTH (5.4 m subscribers by Q1, 2006 compared to some 0.75 m in Europe). They are very interested in the open access model, he said, referring to the public-private business model enabling municipalities such as Amsterdam and Vienna to deploy fibre.

What impressions did he come away with? They are already talking about super-high-definition-TV, the next step on from HDTV. “Using the best compression, it requires 40Mbit/s per channel,” he said ruefully.

See the most recent Total Telecom Roundtable on optical access use in Europe which included FTTH Council Europe board member, Rami Houbby.

O2 Germany adds fixed alongside wireless

2006-09-07T02:38:00.000+01:00

O2 Germany has embraced DSL technology to provide its customers with integrated mobile and fixed DSL broadband services. The services, to be available from late October, can be viewed as the latest example of fixed mobile convergence.

But given the operator already offers Surf@Home, a box integrating 3G and wireless LAN technologies for fast internet access without the need for a fixed line, it confirms the view that wireless will always be chasing fixed in terms of access performance. (See 4G post below.)

What will 4G be used for?

2006-09-06T01:46:00.000+01:00

Samsung Electronics has lined up what it calls a 4G mobile technology demonstrator as part of its 4G Forum yearly event. The demonstration involves cell-to-cell handover of 100 Mbit/s data streams while the equipment (housed in a bus) travels at 60 km per hour. One gigabit per second data links within the forum venue is another part of the demonstration. Such figures match 4G’s performance targets.

Technical detail as to how Samsung achieves such performance is sparse. But Samsung has said it would be using 8x8 MIMO (multi-input multi-output) technology as part of a 3.5Gbit/s data transfer demo. Such a MIMO configuration uses a transmitter and receiver arrangement, each with eight antennas, for multi-path transmissions.

The 3GPP standards development organisation has said it will begin work on 4G only after it has completed the 3G Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard. Accordingly, 4G will likely reach the market from 2012 at the earliest.

Projecting fixed bandwidth speeds starting from 1995, 100Mbit/s will be the standard high-speed wireline connection rate around 2011. What will 100Mbit/s wireless data rates enable? And once in service, will such a wireless capability tip the balance between fixed and wireless broadband?

Wireless consultancy and market research firm, Sound Partners Ltd, believes not. Sound Partners has looked at future 3G developments and 4G, and thinks there will be three main service uses.

VoIP over wireless, which 3G LTE will go a long way to resolve. At present 3G cannot deliver the quality of service needed. Such a development will enable operators to flip over to an IP core for fixed and mobile in a cost effective way
Mobile TV, which will grow very quickly. However, still to be resolved is how much will be transmitted over a separate broadcast network and how much will be sent point-to-point
Broadband access: multimedia content and applications sent to a mobile

Alastair Brydon, Sound Partners’ CEO, believes fixed broadband will always be ahead of wireless. “If there is a single user then fine, but with lots of users in a cell, signal quality will be variable and performance mixed,” he says.

Meanwhile, expect some frenetic wireless activity before 4G's arrival. Wireless developments include the High-Speed Packet Access (HSPA) and Multimedia Broadcast and Multicast Service (MBMS) enhancements to 3G, WiMAX and the DVB-H mobile TV standard. These will be followed by the 3G Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard that could be in service by 2009. 3G LTE addresses many of the shortfalls of 3G when it comes to delivering broadcast TV services and broadband access.

Some views on what makes a NGN

2006-09-02T01:35:00.000+01:00

The definition of next-generation networks, as described by the Wikipedia entry, captures many of the core elements. Packets, quality of service (QoS), softswitches, the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), all get a mention.But it’s clunky and has the feel of a serially-edited, multiple-contributed entry.

The International Telecommunications Union’s (ITU) definition is more concise: The “difference between NGNs and today's network is the switch from current circuit-switched networks to packet-based systems”.

Italy’s regulator, AGCOM, adds a further layer of detail. An NGN is “a packet-based network able to provide telecommunication services and able to make use of multiple broadband, QoS-enabled transport technologies, and in which service-related functions are independent from underlying transport-related technologies.”

Market research firm, Ovum, defines the NGN as follows: “The NGN essence lies in the convergence of fixed and mobile, voice and data, data and content, and - most importantly - IT and telecommunications.”

Since NGNs are linked to technologies, any definition will inevitably change with time. This is not surprising. Carriers have made significant investments in their networks and at different stages. Consequently they will undertake NGN upgrades at different stages in the future, once they deem their existing networks to have depreciated. Royal KPN NV started discussing its NGN in 2004, some two to three years after BT began its 21CN plans. Now Deutsche Telekom is starting on its NGN.

It is these network transitions, the rise of particular networking technologies, and the new services they enable that Next Generation Networks will chart.

Meanwhile, if you have a more rigorous NGN definition, we’d love to hear it.

What next for the network?

2006-08-31T19:03:00.000+01:00

Next Generation Networks asked several telecom industry veterans what technology or service they would highlight that is set to have the biggest impact on the network over the next three to five years. Here are some responses:-

"IPTV services will have a huge impact on the metro networks that transport their content. IPTV services require dedicated bandwidth that ranges from 2 Mbit/s for standard definition (SD) to 8 Mbit/s for high definition (HD). As few as 20 percent penetration of an IPTV service will cause the video traffic to dominate the network. Priority based QoS techniques will not be able to resolve congestion issues because there will no longer be enough low priority packets to discard. The answer to this dilemma may be to move away from IP to an optical network architecture that better fits constant bit rate services."
Bob Larribeau, senior analyst, MRG

"The technology would be whatever will deliver high speed data over wireless, with minimum power and maximum QoS. One of these may be the MIMO [multiple-input multiple-output] technology which implementations similar to that of 802.11n*. Another set of technologies are ones that allow seamless integration between different wireless standards, such as software radio, GSM-WiFi hopping and reconfigurable mobile IP."

* The emerging Wi-Fi local-area network standard with a theoretical 540 Mbit/s throughput.

Prof. Izzat Darwazeh, Head of Communications and Information
Systems Group, University College London

Soundbite: The move to 100G Ethernet

2006-08-31T13:49:00.000+01:00

"There is no one killer app driving demand for 100 Gig, but rather it is a shift in the way people are interacting with the Internet... While it has become obvious that the industry will need 100 Gigabit Ethernet in the not-too-distant future, how to best get there is less clear."

Joel Goergen, vice president of technology
and chief scientist at Force10 Networks
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Welcome!

2006-08-31T10:41:00.000+01:00

This blog has been set up to highlight and discuss some of the key themes surround the fast moving arena of next-generation networks (NGNs). It is being produced by Total Telecom the leading information source for the global communications industry.