Telecom 2020 View

Buying Tivo Premiere XL

2011-01-15T10:20:00.000-08:00

I have placed an order for a Tivo Premiere XL. It duplicates some of the functions of the Vizio Blu-ray player but should provide a more integrated viewing experience. I think that the streaming content will be presented along side the broadcast content rather than requiring the selection of a separate device. The Tivo also supports more streaming content than the Vizio.

I ordered the wireless interface with the Tivo even though I have had inconsistent performance with the Vizio wireless connection. If wireless on the Tivo does not work well, I will send the adapter back and buy some power line Ethernet adapter.

I will make posts about my experience with the Tivo.

U.S. FCC Broadband Definition and Blog

2009-08-20T13:27:00.000-07:00

The U.S. FCC is requesting comments on how to define what broadband is. It breaks the definition down into three categories:

Form, Characteristics, and Performance Indicators
Thresholds – typically minimums
Updates that address the fact that a static definition will fail to address changing needs and habits

This part of the FCC's efforts to create a national broadband plan by February 17, 2010.

The FCC has started a blog called BlogBand discussing its broadband activities.

It appears that the FCC is putting needed attention on broadband in the U.S. It is about time. Broadband in the U.S. is behind leading European and Asian countries by every measure.

Ofcom UK Communications Report

2009-08-08T09:11:00.000-07:00

Ofcom issued a 334 page Communications Report that discusses TV, Radio, Telecommunications, and convergence. It has a lot of interesting information. Several points that stuck out were:

For the first time since Oftel started to collect market data in 1992/93, operator-reported
revenues from telecoms services did not increase in 2008. Total revenues were
unchanged at £39.5bn, with increasing retail revenues being offset by falling wholesale
revenues.
Telecoms services accounted for 3.2% of total household expenditure in 2008, down
from 3.4% in 2007. Telecoms spend fell by 5.2% in real terms over the year, the largest
annual decline since spend on telecoms services began to fall in 2006.
Nearly two-thirds (65%) of UK households had a fixed-line broadband connection in Q1
2009, up from 58% a year previously.
BT’s share of retail fixed voice calls to UK geographic numbers fell to under 50% for the
first time in 2008. Increasing use of wholesale line rental (WLR) and local loop
unbundling (LLU) services contributed to the erosion of BT’s retail share

We should all thank Ofcom for continuing to publish these comprehensive reports that shed light on important trends.

U.S. Telecom Antitrust Investigation

2009-07-07T06:04:00.000-07:00

The Wall Street Journal has published an article stating that the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has begun reviewing if large U.S. telcos such as ATT and Verizon are abusing their market power. This review is not targeted at a specific company today. The review is expected to cover all areas from land-line voice and broadband service to wireless.

The article points to exclusive contracts with handset vendors such as ATT's iPhone contract with Apple as an example. It also points to traffic management such as ATT's suppression of peer to peer traffic on its mobile data network as another example.

It sounds like this review is much more wide ranging than these two examples. The DOJ forced the breakup of ATT in 1984. This has largely been undone through the mergers and acquisitions that Verizon and the current ATT have made. Maybe it is time to take them apart again. The level of competition in the U.S. is certainly much less than in France, and we Americans pay for it.

Survey Shows Preference for FTTH

2009-06-29T10:38:00.000-07:00

The U.S. FTTH Council has published a survey of U.S. broadband users that shows that there is a strong preference for FTTH over cable modem broadband services. DSL had the least favorable rating for broadband services. FTTH had an even stronger preference for HD TV over FTTH compared to satellite and cable services.

The survey is well worth reading. The results are no surprised but do underscore the technical superiority of FTTH technologies.

Femto Applications

2009-06-24T07:06:00.000-07:00

Light reading published an article describing work that is going on to develop applications that run on femto cells. There is discussion that we will see femto application stores in the future.

Many of the applications are based on presence. One example is an application that will tell your room mate to feed the fish when the femto recognizes that the room mate has returned home from work. Other applications involve home control including remotely controlling the TV or home entertainment system, the home heating and cooling system, or other home appliances.

This is interesting; however, the home controller idea has not taken hold as yet. Maybe the femto is the missing element that will make it work.

Femto Cells Coming in the UK and the U.S.

2009-06-24T06:51:00.000-07:00

Vodafone will introduce a 3G femto service in the UK on July 1, 2009 using an Alcatel-Lucent gateway. The femto service will be available under several plans that include no charge to a cost of $250 for the gateway and $8 per month.

ATT is expanding its current 3G femto technical trial with 200 users to a marketing trial where it will be sold at ATT stores in several cities. It plans a full rollout by the end of 2009.

The telcos have significant challenges in pricing and marketing femto cells. They will have to convince a broad market what femtos do and what their benefits are.

Verizon Increases Fiber Upstream Speeds

2009-06-23T07:04:00.000-07:00

Light Reading has published an article describing how Verizon is increasing the upstream speeds of its FiOS FTTH service.

Tier Old New Old New
Upstream Upstream Downstream Downstream
Entry-level 2 Mbit/s 5 Mbit/s 10 Mbit/s 15 Mbit/s
"Flagship" mid-level 5 Mbit/s 15 Mbit/s 20 Mbit/s 25 Mbit/s
Entry-Level (NY area) 2 Mbit/s 15 Mbit/s 10 Mbit/s 25 Mbit/s
"Flagship" mid-level (NY area) 5 Mbit/s 20 Mbit/s 20 Mbit/s 35 Mbit/s

Verizon is taking advantage of the the technical advantages of fiber vs. cable modems to respond to an aggressive Cablevision in the New York area in particular.

Singapore Going to Fiber

2009-06-17T10:15:00.000-07:00

Lightreading has published an article describing Singapore's plans to move to fiber access. This is being developed by two separate entities, known as the NetCo and the OpCo: OpenNet (the NetCo), a consortium comprising Singapore Telecommunications Ltd. (SingTel), Axia NetMedia Corp., Singapore Press Holdings, and Singapore Power Telecoms, which will provide the passive infrastructure; and Nucleus Connect (the OpCo), a wholly owned subsidiary of StarHub Pte. Ltd., which will provide wholesale connectivity to multiple retail service providers.

The companies are working on parallel rollouts that are required to deliver 100 percent coverage by January 1, 2013, and are actually ahead of schedule, with 95 percent coverage promised for June 2012 instead of the 80 percent required in their license conditions.

This is the kind of commitment that will get real results. The U.S. and the UK should take not.

UK Digital Britain Report

2009-06-17T09:51:00.000-07:00

The UK government has published its Digital Britain report along with an Impact Statement. These are extensive reports. The Executive Summary by itself makes 83 separate points. There are a couple of significant things that I saw:

It wants to increase the households that can access broadband at 2 Mbps from under 90 percent to 100 percent. It expects that wireless will be important in accomplishing this. It expects to make 200 million pounds available to support this goal. It also encourages the allocation of new spectrum for this purpose.
It encourages the deployment next generation fixed broadband, which it defines at 50 Mbps by example.

This is not an ambitious set of goals. A number of other European countries have much more aggressive programs, including France, Switzerland, and the Scandinavian countries. It does not come close to matching what is going on in Asia, especially Japan, Korea, and China.

Following this plan will keep the UK at the back of the pack. At least it will be in good company along with those of us in the U.S.

Cisco IPTV Traffic Forecast

2009-06-10T07:20:00.000-07:00

Cisco has released its latest IPTV traffic forecast that covers 2008 to 2013. It finds that video traffic will be of increasing importance and will account for 80 percent of consumer Internet traffic by 2013. It states that Internet traffic and consumer IP traffic will account for more than 70 percent of total traffic by 2013. This means that more than half the traffic on the network will be video traffic at that time.

This reports shows IP traffic growing at a compound annual growth rate of 40 percent per year over this period. This is a bit below the 50 percent per year that I have been assuming. My assumptions are that video on demand to the TV will grow faster than Cisco's forecast. I have seen very high rates of video on demand utilization where network PVR services are available.

It is clear that IP traffic will continue to grow at a high rate and that video will come to dominate these networks. This will require the architecture of these networks to change to optimize the transport of video traffic.

Broadband Providers "Not So Fair Use" Violates Net Neutrality

2009-06-03T06:50:00.000-07:00

A couple of articles have been published recently describing how broadband providers are managing their traffic to their advantage and to the detriment of specific services. The BBC has published an article describing how BT throttles the bandwidth on its broadband service and degrades the quality of the BBC iPlayer at certain times of the day. The second is a Light Reading article describing the results of femto cell testing by Epitiro that shows that traffic management by broadand providers will negatively affect the performance of femto cells during peak traffic periods.

The BBC has identified a clause in BT's fair use policy that permits it to reduce the bandwidth on its broadband service to below 1 Mbps, which degrades the quality of the BBC iPlayer over the top IPTV service. The article cites an example of a user who has been affected by this policy.

The traffic analysis performed by Epitiro shows that some broadband providers are throttling IPSEC traffic so that it provides worse performance that best efforts Internet traffic at the same time.

These are the kind of situations that those promoting the Net Neutrality agenda are concerned about. In both cases the broadband providers are throttling the traffic of competitors. The BBC iPlayer competes with BT's BT Vision IPTV service. Femto cells will compete with the broadband provider's VoIP and POTS services. The broadband providers are building the case for Net Neutrality when they do this and will produce a regulatory reaction that they will not like at all.

Spain to Approach 50% FTTH by 2023

2009-05-23T08:26:00.000-07:00

Spain's telecom regulator, Comisión del Mercado de las Telecomunicaciones (CMT), has published a study that states that 43 to 46 percent of Spain's households would have access to FTTH services by 2023. Competitive telcos would be able to use Telefonica's fiber ducts and trenches.

CMT also estimates that Spain will have about 3 million IPTV subscribers by 2023, with Telefónica atb70 percent of that market, or 2.1 million subscribers. At those levels, IPTV would represent about 36 percent of Spain's digital pay TV market.

This is an aggressive prediction but one that points to where major telcos globally need to be at that time. There does not seem to be any plan for financing this project, which would probably cost about $10 billion.

LTE Issues

2009-05-19T10:24:00.000-07:00

Light Reading published an article based on discussions from the LTE World Summit. Carriers there identified a number of issues that need to be resolved before they deploy LTE, including:

Support for voice and SMS services including circuit switching as well as packet switching.
Building enough back haul capacity into the network to realize LTE's performance promises.
Intellectual property rights.
Spectrum

Much of this discussion revolved around lessons learned from 3G. It does point out the real problems carriers will have rationalizing both their 3G and 4G strategies. I think that they will either stay with 3G or replace their 3G networks with 4G networks. I think that trying to provide both will be a real mess.

Green Telecom

2009-05-15T09:37:00.001-07:00

Light Reading has published a long article discussing the issues around green telecom. It describes why this is an important issue and different ways to approach it. Another interesting approach to this is contained in The Climate Group's Smart 2o20 report that takes a quantitative approach to this subject.

This is an important subject that is being addressed by the entire ICT industry including service providers and manufacturers. It will be important to push this agenda future.

Wireleine Woes

2009-05-10T12:28:00.000-07:00

The New York Times published and article discussing if the U.S. wireline telcos will need a bailout to rescue its copper based access business. It pointed out that AT&T lost 12 percent of its access lines in 2008 and Verizon lost 10 percent. The article paints a pictures that the wireline business in the U.S. is headed toward bankruptcy.

I have been tracking U.S. switched access lines at my website from 1991 through 2007. The FCC has stopped tracking switched access lines, so that one of its most interesting pieces of data will no longer be updated.

It is clear that copper is being replaced by the cable companies coax, by wireless technologies, and by the telco's own fiber services. The more aggressively that they deploy fiber, the better off they will be in the long run.

GVT Brazil to Offer 100 Mbps Broadband Service

2009-04-24T05:58:00.000-07:00

GVT, the Brazilian CLEC, will launch 50 Mbps and 100 Mbps broadband services in cities where it currently operates. This follows on to its successful 10 Mbps offering, which now accounts for 29 percent of its sales and is available to 9 percent of its ADSL foot print.

GVT is taking a disruptive approach to the Brazilian market by offering significantly higher speeds and the same price or less than the incumbent carriers. It is another example that shows the preference for higher speeds.

BT Says No Need for Fiber to the Home

2009-04-21T08:37:00.000-07:00

The Register published and article reporting a panel presentation where BT said that there is no need for fiber to the home. That its plans for a 40 Mbps VDSL deployment provides enough bandwidth and that the economic case for fiber to the home is weak.

This approach is understandable but it will put BT at a significant disadvantage to its cable competitors as they deploy DOCSIS 3.0 technologies. BT's real challenge is to figure out how to make the business case for fiber to the home work out before it is so far behind the technology curve that it will lose significant market share. Customer retention is a powerful economic argument.

Verizon to Deploy 4G by 2014

2009-04-14T10:57:00.000-07:00

Light Reading has published a Verizon interview that states that the timetable of Verizon's planned LTE deployment of a couple of test markets in 2009 and "30 or so" markets in 2010. He then suggests that the build out could be completed relatively quickly after that.

This is an aggressive deployment schedule and I expect that it will be 2012 or 2013 before Verizon's 4G build out is complete.

Telenor and Tele2 to Build 4G Network in Sweden

2009-04-14T10:05:00.000-07:00

Telenor Sweden and Tele2 Sweden plan to build a joint 4G network in Sweden. The agreement includes the formation of a joint venture for network construction and sharing of spectrum. The roll-out will start in 2009 with the intent of launching LTE based services in the end of 2010.

In 2013, the operators expect 99 percent of the Swedish population to have access to mobile broadband at speeds of up to 80 Mbit/s in rural areas and up to 150 Mbit/s in urban areas. The roll-out includes an extension of the GSM network by 30-50 percent, resulting in better indoor and outdoor coverage on mobile voice communication.

This is another example of resource sharing between operators for building 4G networks. I think this will become a common approach for 4G and is likely to become important for FTTH networks.

FCC to Create U.S. to Create National Broadband Plan

2009-04-09T10:14:00.000-07:00

The recent American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 also known as the stimulus act, charged the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service (RUS) and the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) with making grants and loans to expand broadband deployment and for other important broadband projects. Congress provided $7.2 billion for this effort but is not insufficient to support nationwide broadband deployment. Consequently, the Recovery Act charges the FCC to create a national broadband plan by February 17, 2010, that will seek to ensure that every American has access to broadband capability and establishes clear benchmarks for meeting that goal.

This kind of comprehensive plan is over due. Europe and countries such as Japan, Korea, and Australia are well ahead of the U.S. in this effort.

The problem is that such a comprehensive view is very a very complex project. It will be difficult to bring focus to such a large effort that will make it effective. It could easily end up so general that it does not provide a useful perspective.

I think that the FCC should focus on creating an open environment that creates a competitive service environment based on fiber to the home and 4G wireless. The current approach that relies on competition between the telco and cable giants impedes competition. ADSL, VDSL, 2G, and 3G wireless are all technologies that are either now obsolete or rapidly approaching their obsolescence. Drawing such clear lines will help the FCC make this effort meaningful.

4.4M FTTH Subscribers in North America

2009-04-08T13:44:00.000-07:00

The Fiber to the Home Council has issued a report on North American fiber deployments that states that there are 4.422 million FTTH subscribers and 15.17 homes passed. Of these, 2.65 subscribe to video services. 3.3 million are subscribers to Verizon's FiOS service and another 1.13 million are subscribers to one of the 681 other U.S. telcos that offer fiber services.

This shows the extent to which Verizon is driving FTTH in North America. AT&T and Qwest have not made any significant deployments yet.

Femto Cell Standards Complete

2009-04-08T13:35:00.000-07:00

The 3GPP has published standards for femto cells listed in a release from the Femto Forum. The Broadband Forum also contributed to these standards. The new standards cover four main areas: network architecture; radio & interference aspects; femtocell management/provisioning and security.

These standards are based on the 3GPP UMTS protocols and extend them to support the needs of high-volume femtocell deployments. The new standard has also adopted the Broadband Forum’s TR-069 management protocol which has been extended to incorporate a new data model for femtocells developed collaboratively by Femto Forum and Broadband Forum members and published by the Broadband Forum as Technical Report 196 (TR-196).

Femto cells will be a key network element and will generate fundamental changes in how services are delivered and sold. This is an important start.

Australia will Establis New Company to Build Fiber Network

2009-04-08T12:45:00.000-07:00

The Australian government has unveiled a plan establish a new company to build and operate a national broadband network that will provide 100 Mbps fiber connections to homes, schools, and businesses in towns of a population of about 1,000 or more, which will provide coverage to 90 percent of the people in Australia. Wireless and satellite technologies capable of providing 12 Mbps will be used in more remote locations. This network will include fiber links between cities, major regional centers, and rural towns.

The services of this network will be provided on wholesale-only, open access network. The initial estimate is that this network will cost $30 billion to build. The government plans an immediate investment of more than $3 billion. The Australian government will seek private investment in the company to draw on private sector capacity and expertise. However, ownership restrictions will be established to protect the Government's objective of a wholesale open-access network.

This is a strong commitment to an advanced broadband network. It provides a unique approach to provide an open fiber network. It illustrates the importance of government policy in building fiber networks.

Nokia Ubimeda Competition

2009-04-03T09:32:00.000-07:00

Nokia has announced a contest described its website to encourage makers of digital media to generate ideas and develop new and innovative ubimedia products & services. The entries are expected to take a stand on the following questions, for example:

How does ubiquitous computing affect media environments?
What are intelligent media environments like?
What will the location- and context-aware media services of the future be like?

The total award sum is 7,000 euros which may be awarded to one entry, divided between several entries, or not awarded at all.

These contests are an interesting way to stimulate innovation by encouraging broad participation and providing some amount of reward for winning.

Sprint to Introduce 4G

2009-03-25T09:23:00.000-07:00

Sprint announced plans for 4G services based on the network that its Clearwire subsidiary is building, which currently provides peak downlink speeds of up to 12 Mbps in Baltimore today and average downlink speeds of 2-4 Mbps.

Sprint plans to deploy Sprint 4G service in many markets in 2009, including:

Atlanta Honolulu
Charlotte Las Vegas
Chicago Philadelphia
Dallas Portland
Fort Worth Seattle

Sprint also expects to launch service in multiple markets in 2010 including Boston, Houston, New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.

Sprint has several new 4G devices planned for 2009 and 2010, including a single-mode 4G data card, embedded laptops, a small-office-home-office broadband modem, and a tri-mode phone that supports WiMAX (4G), EV-DO (3G), and WiFi.

The Clearwire WiMAX deployment is giving Sprint a head start with 4G services in the U.S. It looks like Sprint may have a two year advantage over Verizon, given the delays in the availability of 700 MHz spectrum and the availability of LTE technology. Sprint will have to make the most of this lead in order to prosper over the long term. It is not clear at all that it has the financial capability to succeed.

Telefonica and Vodafone to Share Facilities

2009-03-23T10:37:00.000-07:00

Telefonica and Vodafone have formed a program to share mobile network assets across European operations. They are also exploring opportunities to cooperate in related areas such as the provision of transmission services.

This program is expected to generate cost savings of hundreds of millions of euros for both companies over the next 10 years. It is also expected to reduce the environmental impact of both companies due to the consolidation of existing sites and the joint build out of new sites. Both companies will continue to manage their own traffic independently.

The details of the agreement include:

Germany: Both companies to share existing 2G and 3G sites. Shared masts can also be used for microwave back haul.
Ireland: Both companies to open all network sites for sharing by the other party. New builds will also be conducted jointly where roll-out plans are aligned.
Spain: Both companies to extend existing site share agreement from 2007, which includes the shared usage of power, cabinets and mast. To date 2,200 sites are shared under this agreement. During 2009 and 2010 additional sites will be included.
UK: Both companies to focus on joint build of new sites and consolidation of existing 2G and 3G sites.

Facility sharing will be an important approach to minimizing costs and the environmental impact of wireless networks during the next decade. It will be a key strategy for deploying 4G networks, in particular.

FTTH in Europe

2009-03-10T06:22:00.000-07:00

Light Reading has published an article describe the state of FTTH in the Netherlands and in Slovakia. The Netherlands has 163,000 active fiber connections, about 2.4 percent penetration. There are several important carriers operating in Slovakia, including France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom that are deploying fiber.

The situation in Netherlands shows how government policy can stimulate the deployment of fiber. Slovakia shows how competition can do the same.

UK Ofcom Publishes Fiber Strategy

2009-03-07T11:29:00.000-08:00

Ofcom, the UK telecom regulator, has published a report Delivering Super-Fast Broadband in the UK that outlines its policies for fiber deployment. Ofcom stated that it will:

allow wholesale pricing flexibility to enable returns appropriate to the considerable risks of building new networks, but constrained by the market in the interests of customers
ensure that any regulatory pricing allows investors the opportunity to earn a rate of return that genuinely reflects the cost of deployment and the associated level of risk
minimise unnecessary inefficiencies in network design and build as a result of regulatory policies, while continuing to protect the consumer interest
support the use of new, more flexible wholesale services by BT to offer super-fast services to other service providers and consumers at competitive prices
safeguard the opportunity for further competition based on physical infrastructure, by facilitating fair opportunities for companies to synchronise their investments with BT’s deployments, should reasonable demand arise, and encouraging network design that takes future potential competition into account.

Ofcom will work with BT to resolve its concerns about generating a return from its intended investment in fiber to the home. It will be interesting to see how it maintains a balance through this process.

T-Mobile Says Mass Market Femtos Will Wait Until 2010

2009-02-16T10:58:00.000-08:00

Light Reading published and article on a presentation by T-Mobile at the Mobile World Conference about its plans for femto cells. T-Mobile said that it will start with a controlled femto cell introduction in the middle of 2009. T-Mobile said that it will wait for Release 8, expected in 2010, before it makes a mass market introduction of femto cells.

T-Mobile tested femtocells from three different suppliers with 100 employees in Germany, about 90 employees in Poland, and about 60 employees in the UK. The trial in the UK is still on-going and will probably involve up to 100 participants.

Some of the problems discovered included limited mobile data rates due to the limitations of lower speed DSL broadband connections; issues with femtocell location detection; reduced battery standby time in terminals; and interference between the macro cell and femtocell.

Femto cells will be a significant development and have far reaching implications for mobile and broadband services.

U.S. Federal Trade Commission Discusses Interactive Advertising

2009-02-13T10:23:00.000-08:00

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has issued a new report titled "Self-Regulatory Principles For Online Behavioral Advertising" that describes its ongoing examination of online behavioral advertising and sets forth revisions to proposed principles to govern self-regulatory efforts in this area. The key issue concerns how online advertisers can best protect consumers’ privacy while collecting information about their online activities.

One of the FTC commissioners stated that the industry needs to do a better job of meaningful, rigorous self-regulation, or it will certainly invite legislation by Congress and a more regulatory approach by the FTC. This could be the last clear chance to show that self-regulation can – and will – effectively protect consumers’ privacy in a dynamic online marketplace.

This is a global problem that will be addressed in many countries. Regulation will be required. The recent financial crisis shows that the self discipline of many business wanes in the face of large potential gains.

Cox Cable's Traffic Management Strategy

2009-02-13T10:17:00.000-08:00

Light Reading published an article describing Cox Cable's strategies for traffic management. Cox's pilot approach divides traffic into "time-sensitive" (e.g., Web pages, voice calls, streaming videos, games), and "non-time-sensitive" (e.g., file uploads, peer-to-peer, and Usenet) categories. The system will delay the upstream, non-time-sensitive traffic when network congestion is detected. All traffic returns to normal when the congestion abates.

This is the right approach - classifying traffic by its response time requirements and delaying lower priority traffic during periods of congestion. This is a much more reasonable approach than the monthly usage caps that other operators are implementing.

Greece to Start $2B FTTH Rollout

2009-02-13T10:07:00.000-08:00

Light Reading has published an article that discusses plans by the government of Greece to spend $2 billion to roll FTTH out in the country. The government intends to pass 2 million homes during the next seven years in Athens, Thessaloniki, and 50 other cities and towns across Greece, including some on the surrounding Mediterranean islands.

Greece is hoping that broadband services of at least 100 Mbps will attract at least 650,000 subscribers. The government stipulates an open network architecture that will be run by a separate entity from the companies that will sell the services and applications, such as Internet access, VoIP, and IPTV, that will run over the network.

This is an example of how government support is accelerating the availability of FTTH services. It also shows an useful approach to creating a competitive environment over this fiber infrastructure.

FTTH Council Publishes European FTTH Penetration

2009-02-12T10:34:00.000-08:00

The FTTH Council has published a chart that shows the penetration of fiber by country. It shows that only Asian countries - Korea, Hong Kong, Japan, and Taiwan have more than 10 percent penetration. The European countries Sweden, Norway, and Slovenia have between 5 and 10 percent penetration.

This chart shows what a long way we have to go.

Cisco Releases Lastest Traffic Study

2009-02-10T12:29:00.000-08:00

Cisco released its latest Visual Networking Index study that updates its global data traffic forecast. Key findings include:

Global mobile traffic will increase 66-fold between 2008 and 2013 based on a 4G mobile Internet.
Nearly 64 percent of the world's mobile traffic will be video by 2013.
4G mobile broadband devices will constitute more than 80 percent of global mobile traffic by 2013.
Latin America will have the strongest mobile growth at 166 percent CAGR, followed by the Asia-Pacific region at 146 percent.
Asia-Pacific will account for one-third of all mobile data traffic by 2013.

The forecast that video will account for nearly two-thirds of mobile traffic by 2013 is interesting. My report Investing in Mobile TV took a close look at the business case for mobile TV and found that it will be difficult for carriers to make money on such a service. It generates too much traffic to produce much profit. It will be interesting to see how this works out.

How Valuable is Broadband?

2009-02-09T10:25:00.000-08:00

The Washington Post published an article discussing the value of supporting broadband in the stimulus legislation that is now before Congress in the U.S. The article discusses the fact that it is likely to be difficult to be difficult to get today's residual dial up users to convert to a broadband service. It also includes statements by people who are dubious about the indirect benefits of creating a "connected society".

The articles ends on a positive note with a statement from Cisco that infrastructure is no longer just about roads and bridges anymore.

Clearly I am a broadband booster. I am not sure of its current status, but the original proposal was to provide funding to rural areas that are under served. From what I have seen, rural telcos that have aggressively deployed broadband have achieved high penetrations. I think that people in these communities appreciate the ability of a high speed Internet connection to bring the wide world to them.

Amsterdam to Expand FTTH Deployment

2009-02-06T06:46:00.000-08:00

Light Reading has published an article that describes its plans to expand its FTTH deployment from 43,000 homes to 100,000 homes. The city sees FTTH as a key service that needs to be provided like power and water. It believes that this network will be important to the development of the city. After this next deployment is complete, the city will consider expanding the network to the remaining 250,000 homes in Amsterdam.

This shows the important role that local governments can take in the deployment of fiber to homes. Amsterdam is insisting on an open network that will give its citizens a choice of service providers. This will provide a better range of services at lower prices than depending on a single service provider.

Korea Plans 1Gbps FTTH Network

2009-02-06T06:36:00.000-08:00

An article in the JoongAng Daily states that the Korean government has a $25 billion plan to deploy wireline and wireless broadband services over the next five years. The government will contribute about $1 billion and the rest will come from industry. This project will deploy fiber wireline services of 1 Gbps to each home and wireless services of 10 Mbps.

This project defines the state of the art. I expect that 1 Gbps fiber services will be come the the standard level of service by 2020. Again, Korea is well ahead of the curve.

Nokia Siemens Introduces Multi Radio BTS

2009-02-05T09:44:00.000-08:00

Nokia Siemens has introduced a based station that will support GSM, WCDMA, HSPA, and LTE. It includes integrated Ethernet switching and transport. It expects to ship this system starting in 2011. This base station significantly reduces power requirements at 790 watts.

This is the kind of system that will facilitate the operation of multiple networks (2G, 3G, and 4G) as well as the evolution to 4G for all services. I expect to see other major vendors to introduce similar systems.

U.S. Delay in Analog Sunset

2009-02-05T09:31:00.000-08:00

The U.S. will delay the completion of the conversion to digital broadcasting from February 17, 2009 to June 12, 2009. This will allow stations to continue their analog broadcasts until that date. There are more than 1,000 stations that have permission from the FCC to shut off their analog broadcasts on February 17. Nearly all stations will have to do it by June 12.

This shows what a mess the cessation of analog TV broadcasting can be. Frankly, I don't think it will be much better on June 12. This move is going to cause problems for a lot of people who have not prepared for themselves. I doubt three more months will change much.

This will delay the availability of 700 MHz spectrum for mobile applications. I expect that Verizon will use this as an opportunity to move its LTE trial to 2010 and commercial deployment to 2011.

Comcast Responds about VoIP Service

2009-02-03T12:51:00.000-08:00

Comcast stated to the FCC that its own cable telephony VoIP service provides better service because it is carried separately from its Internet cable modem service. It believes that this answers the concerns raised in the FCC's letter on the subject.

This raises interesting issues about carriers using walled gardens to provide VoIP and IPTV services. These walled gardens clearly give the carriers a competitive advantage. I suspect that these walls will be broken down by changes in regulation over time as happened with long distance services in the past.

Ofcom Digital Britain Report

2009-02-02T09:25:00.000-08:00

Ofcom the UK regulator has issued its Digital Britain report that discusses the importance of digital communications for a modern society. I makes the following points:

The first, crucial conclusion of the analysis we have done shows that, as
a country, we must ensure that our wired and wireless communications
and broadcasting networks can meet the demands of a modern knowledge-based
economy. Much work has already been undertaken, but over the next five
years we will need to upgrade these networks in order to maintain our
position and meet our ambitions.

This makes the need for an active and strategic approach from government indispensable if we are to close the gap. We need to plan now, identify the market failures that are standing in the way of a full roll out of digital infrastructure in the UK, and act swiftly in Government to help the market in the timely delivery of the
high-capability infrastructure we will need. This industrial activism from government will be critical to ensuring that the UK gets the most out of the digital economy.

This is an interesting analysis that applies globally. We all need to take its conclusions to heart.

Nokia Siemens Releases 2009 Connectivity Scorecard

2009-01-29T13:01:00.000-08:00

Nokia Siemens Networks has released the 2009 version of its Connectivity Scorecard that was accompanied by a presentation. The study gives a score from 1 to 10 for 50 countries based on business and consumer connectivity. It gives a separate comparison for what it calls innovation driven economies and the resource and efficiency driven economies.

The U.S. is the leader of the innovation driven economies with a score of 7.71 and Poland was in last place with a score of 2.49. The median score was 5.37.
Malaysia is the leader of of the resource and efficiency driven economies with a score of 7.07 and Nigeria was in the last place with a score of 1.30. The median score was 3.60.

The conclusion of the study was that the innovation driven economies need to adopt a 21st century infrastructure and that the resource and efficiency driven economies need to take their infrastructure to the next level.

It is well worth taking a look at this presentation. It gives a fair assessment of where the industry stands on a global basis. The good new is that there is plenty for all of us to do, no matter where we are.

Cisco Introduces Green Switches

2009-01-27T07:30:00.000-08:00

Cisco introduced the Cisco EnergyWise technology for its Catalyst switches that measures, reports and reduces the energy consumption of IP devices such as phones, laptops and access points. It also announced industry partnerships along with a middleware acquisition that will enable the management of power consumption for entire building systems such as lights, elevators, and air conditioning and heating.

EnergyWise will roll out in three phases:

In the first phase (February 2009), Network Control, EnergyWise will be supported on Catalyst switches and manage the energy consumption of IP devices such as phones, video surveillance cameras and wireless access points.
In the next phase (Summer 2009), IT Control, there will be expanded industry support of EnergyWise on devices such as personal computers (PCs), laptops and printers.
In the final phase (Early 2010), Building Control, EnergyWise will be extended to the management of building system assets such as heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC), elevators, lights, employee badge access systems, fire alarm systems and security systems.

This is an interesting approach that leverages installed switches and Cisco's industry position to address energy management in businesses. I will not be surprised if Microsoft comes up with a similar offering on its servers.

Inauguration Strains the Internet

2009-01-25T13:28:00.000-08:00

The inauguration of President Barak Obama on January 20 put a significant strain on the Internet. There were reports of difficulties connecting to the broadcast.

Arbor Networks published and article that shows the traffic peak that occurred. Backbone traffic jumped by as much as 40 percent over a normal Tuesday.

This peak occurred with most people using lower speed streams intended for PCs. Think of what would have happened if this content were be delivered to HDTVs at 1080p resolution!

Beefing up the Internet to handle this kind of demand but of HD streams is the challenge that the major ISPs have to face to make Internet TV more than a side show. This experience showed that the Content Delivery Networks were effective in managing backbone traffic, where they were used. This leaves the metro networks. My report Telecom 2020: Transformation Strategies suggests that video needs to be kept at the optical layer in the metro networks to handle this kind of onslaught. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Is Comcast Cable Telephone Service VoIP?

2009-01-21T10:26:00.000-08:00

The U.S. FCC has sent a letter to Comcast requesting clarification of its cable telephony service. It points out that Vonage or other Internet VoIP services can suffer degraded performance due to its recently implemented traffic management scheme. It also says that Comcast stated that its own cable telephony service is offered separately and will not be affected in the same way.

The letter ends by asking Comcast why its cable telephony service should be treated as an Internet VoIP service and exempted from the fees associated with circuit switched voice services.

It looks like Comcast is being hoist on its own petard. I don't think carriers should have it both ways. They need to treat Internet VoIP services equally to their own VoIP services.

Latvia to Offer 500 Mbps Broadband

2009-01-21T10:12:00.000-08:00

Light Reading published an article that describes Lattlecom's plans to offer 500 Mbps broadband service by the end of 2009 that will grow to 10 Gbps over time. Lattlecom is the national carrier in Latvia and is a subsidiary of TeliaSonera. Lattlecom will use an FTTB approach and will bring fiber services to apartment buildings.

I think you have to be careful in evaluating this. It is not clear how much bandwidth will be provided from the apartment building to the network to support the service. While it is possible for a shared facility to provide high apparent speeds to individual users for most Internet applications, TV content will be much more difficult to support because it is deterministic in nature.

Verizon FiOS to Poach ATT Customers

2009-01-14T09:03:00.001-08:00

Verizon is planning to expand its FiOS deployment in the Dallas, Texas area to cover homes now served by ATT. It will extend its fiber network a few miles to accomplish this.

I would like to think that this is a major push by Verizon into ATT's territory, but it is just a border skirmish. Verizon is taking advantage of communities that are close to its current network.

Verizon can do this in other former GTE territories such as Los Angeles and Los Gatos (a small community in the heart of Silicon Valley). Verizon would find strong demand for FiOS in both of these communities.

Free Adds 17 More VoIP Destinations

2009-01-13T10:39:00.000-08:00

Free in France has added 17 more countries that its customers can call using its broadband VoIP service. It now provides free calling to 87 countries globally. These countries include major the Asian countries India and Indonesia as well as Colombia and Costa Rica in Latin America, Bahrain in the Middle East, and Georgia, Macedonia, and Albania in Europe.

Free arguably provides the most attractive broadband bundle globally with 24 Mbps Internet, IPTV, and free VoIP calling to 87 countries at less than 30 euros per month. (If anybody needs a telecom analyst in Paris, je peux parler Francais. (:-)

Seriously, I would like to better understand how Free does this. I assume that it is based on interconnect agreements that are not encumbered with usage charges. If this catches on with other carriers, it will cause a complete collapse of the long distance calling business model.

Cisco Introduces Connected Consumer Electronics Devices

2009-01-07T11:33:00.000-08:00

Cisco introduced a line of audio and video connected media systems for consumers. At the same time Cisco introduced Eos software platform that lets content provider create web sites that can provide content to these systems. Cisco also announced a licensing program that allows other consumer device manufacturers to offer devices that can operate in this environment.

This announcement appears to be a major step forward in making the Internet the central source for entertainment media. Internet content will become very important during the next decade. The Internet will give the cable TV, the satellite TV, and the Telco IPTV providers a real run for their money.

FTTH Broadband Stimulus Proposals

2009-01-06T12:20:00.000-08:00

The U.S. Fiber to the Home Council has published an economic analysis of its proposals for including broadband deployment as part of the stimulus package that the U.S. government is currently considering. These proposals include tax incentives to support fiber to the home in urban and suburban areas and DSL in rural areas.

Including FTTH as part of the stimulus package could bring the U.S. into the 21st century with respect to broadband. The problem will be competing with other kinds of projects, such such as roads and bridges. The second problem will be to keep the focus on FTTH and not have the funding and incentives diverted to VDSL and other short term technologies.

Femto Cell Survey Article

2009-01-06T11:52:00.000-08:00

Light Reading has published a nice survey article about the state of femto cell technology. Femto cells are likely to very important but are just getting off the ground now.

Upgrading TCP for the Heavy User

2008-12-26T12:59:00.000-08:00

Bob Briscoe from BT wrote an article that appeared in the December 2008 IEEE Spectrum that discusses proposed changes to TCP that would help the Internet cope better with so-called bandwidth hogs. It basically does this by providing a mechanism that allows network routers to discard packets from the heavy users before discarding packets from casual users.

Heavy users will declare their packets to be eligible for discard and a feedback mechanism will be created that will inform core routers of congestion that is occurring in the network so that they can start discarding packets.

This approach should provide better performance to the casual user than they experience today without significantly degrading performance for the heavy user.

You can get more details from Briscoe's web site.

It looks to me that this is a much better approach than the limits being proposed by carriers today. It also seems to resolve the Net Neutrality argument by redefining what fairness means and equalizing the performance of the network to a broad set of users rather than equalizing access to bandwidth.

I question how much these techniques will help in an IP network dominated by TV traffic. TV traffic wants to use a lot of bandwidth and have a high QoS at the same time. An HDTV viewer will not like it if discarding packets from his or her video stream causes visual or audio defects.

Altair 4G OFDM Chips

2008-12-26T12:19:00.000-08:00

I recently spoke with Altair, which is an Israeli company that is building OFDM chips to support both WiMAX and LTE. It is focusing on 4G technologies by building handset chips. The company currently has chips for WiMAX and for XGP, which is an OFDM technology deployed by Willcom in Japan.

Altair plans to introduce an LTE chip in the middle of 2009 and a multimode chip by the end of 2009 that will support WiMAX, XGP, and LTE. This will enable support of all three technologies in a single hand held device. The company is also working with a 2G/3G supplier to offer the ability to add WiMAX, XGP, or LTE to a 2G/3G device using the Altair chip as a coprocessor.

This is interesting because it shows that progress is being made on chips that will facilitate the integration of 2G, 3G, and 4G WiMAX and LTE networks. This will help with the evolution of existing networks to WiMAX or LTE. It may also facilitate roaming between WiMAX and GSM, WCDMA, and LTE networks, which may keep WiMAX from becoming the dead end that CDMA has become.

FTTH Green Postitive in U.S. in Six Years

2008-12-21T12:35:00.000-08:00

The FTTH Council has published a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers that shows that the environmental impact of the deployment of a typical FTTH network in the United States will be positive within less than 6 years in average considering only benefits associated to telecommuting.

FTTH is much greener than DSL or VDSL in the U.S. Both of these technologies require powered remotes, which significantly raises their energy requirements. This is a much more significant problem for VDSL than DSL.

Creating a Competitive Fiber Market

2008-12-18T12:39:00.000-08:00

Last week I posted an article about how Swisscom will support competitors in its FTTH deployment. Swisscom will deploy four fibers to each home and reserve one for itself and make the other three available to competitors. It pointed out that the cost of providing four fibers is only slightly higher than providing a single fiber.

This significantly helps Swisscom's business case because it will generate revenue from every FTTH home that it deploys. This will provide it with a return on the investment that it is making on deploying these fibers. Swisscom will also accept investment or trade fiber connections with its competitors that deploy their own fiber networks.

A similar facility sharing approach has been adopted in France and is likely to be adopted broadly in Europe.

Japan is taking another approach. NTT is deploying all of the fiber; however NTT East and West (the two incumbents in Japan) can offer only the fiber connection. The subscriber gets the Internet service from an ISP. NTT operates two of these ISPs itself (OCN and Plala), but has to treat other ISPs on an equal basis. KDI and Softbank are major ISPs that use NTT fibers along with a number of smaller ISPs.

The U.S. FCC has given up on creating a competitive environment with FCC. It traded exclusive use of the fiber for the commitment to deploy fiber services. I think this was a bad bargain. Both Europe and Japan have shown that better approaches are available.

ATT's 2020 Strategies

2008-12-10T12:42:00.001-08:00

AT&T gave a presentation this week where it made some interesting comments about how it plans to address important issues for getting ready for 2020.

The company talked about how network usage will change. It expects that 70 percent of its voice minutes will come from mobile services by 2013 and that data usage will grow by 50 percent per year between now and 2013. Its charts indicate that at least half of its voice traffic came from mobile services in 2007. It expects that voice will account for less than 5 percent of the traffic on its networks by 2013. Its charts indicate that it expects video to account for significantly more traffic than data. Over all its expects its backbone traffic to grow 50 percent annually and access traffic to grow 30 percent annually.

The company also discussed its consolidation into what it calls "one company". It expects to end up with one business services organization, one consumer services organization, and one network and services organization. It is doing this to increase its efficiency and to deliver new integrated/converged services. It stated that its U-verse IPTV service is the template for what it plans to achieve.

ATT plans to focus several areas for new services - femto cells, VoIP, VPNs, along with hosting and CDN services.

ATT is moving along the directions that we forecast in our report Telecom 2020: Transformation Strategies. Mobile is becoming the primary delivery vehicle for many services. This presentation confirms our predictions of the major effects that will occur in the organization of carriers.

Swisscom to Deploy FTTH

2008-12-10T12:06:00.000-08:00

Swisscom is building a fiber network for residential customers and SMEs. Work has already started in Zurich, Basel and Geneva, with the aim of connecting 100,000 households with fiber optic by the end of 2009. The plan is then to further extend the network to include residential premises in the cities of St. Gallen, Berne, Fribourg and Lausanne.

The first offerings for residential customers and SMEs will be launched in the first half of 2009. Over the next six years Swisscom is planning to invest $US2.3 billion in its fiber expansion.

To enable other companies to expand their own fiber infrastructure after the construction work has started, Swisscom will be laying several fibers per household in all areas. One fiber will be used by Swisscom, while the others will be made available to other companies. The multi-fibre model will prevent the creation of a new network monopoly in Switzerland and also meet competitors' requirements for full access to the local loop (copper pairs) as stipulated by the Telecommunications Act.

Swisscom offers other companies interested in collaborating on the construction and operation of the fiber network four different cooperation models:

Construction partnership for other companies with their own ducts, such as electrical utilities or cable network providers. One of the partners takes on responsibility for building the fiber network in a region. Several fibres are laid, and when the network is completed each of the other partners is assigned one fibre. If all the partners network regions which are the same size and are to be shared, no compensatory payment is required.
Investment partnership for companies without their own cable ducts. Network expansion is jointly financed by all the partners. One partner builds the entire network and grants the investor usage rights to the fibers laid.
Rental of individual fibers for companies who do not wish to invest in network expansion but want to decide themselves on the preferred technical level for controlling the fiber network.
Leasing of transmission services similar to established practices.

Swisscom presented its reseller offerings to all Internet service providers at the beginning of November. In the initial phase these offerings will cover bandwidths of 30 to 50 Mbps for download and up to 10 Mbps for upload.

During the pilot phase, which starts at the beginning of March and will become a commercial service in autumn 2009, the offerings will focus on the areas in Zurich, Basel and Geneva which are already equipped with fiber cables. Internet service providers, including VTX, green, netstream and init7, are free to design their own end customer and reseller offerings.

This is an interesting model for handling competition over fiber. It will produce a lot more competition than the U.S. approach that gives the carriers exclusive use of their fiber plants.

More than 1,000 HSPA Devices Available

2008-12-10T11:55:00.001-08:00

The Global mobile Suppliers Association (GSA) stated that there are now 1,095 HSPA devices available with 692 announced since October 2007. The following types of devices are available:

451 mobile phones
16 ultra mobile PCs
218 notebooks
154 USB modems
143 PC data cards
101 wireless routers/gateways
8 Personal Media Players
4 cameras

It is interesting that less than half of the HSPA devices are mobile phones. What is interesting is to see that a dozen consumer devices have become available. The number of HSPA (or 4G) enabled wireless devices will grow to become a significant segment if the operators create usage plans that are attractive for these devices.

Is Google Paying its Fair Share?

2008-12-07T08:42:00.000-08:00

The blog Internet Evolution published and article discussing comments by an analyst who says that Google is not paying its fair share of the Internet infrastructure.

This is an interesting issue. The core Internet network has a robust business model. As the ISPs and ASPs generate more traffic, for example, by providing more video and TV traffic, they need to increase the bandwidth that connects to them to the Internet backbone. They pay for every additional bit of bandwidth that they use. This means that the carriers revenues increase as the traffic increases, which is and has been a sustainable business model.

I think that the question that is raised in this article is if Google is using more bandwidth per dollar spent on backbone capacity than other companies. This may be assuming that Google distributes more videos than others.

The more interesting question is in the access network. The broadband access providers are stuck in the conundrum that customers expect more bandwidth over time but do not expect to pay more for it. This is most clearly demonstrated in countries in such as Japan and France where the price of a 100 Mbps FTTH connection is the same as a 10 Mbps DSL connection. Carriers in these countries are making huge investments to deploy fiber and are not getting significant revenue increases to support it.

I have wondered if Google and the other ASPs and ISPs should pay more for their backbone connections to support the deployment of FTTH. After all, these companies get tremendous benefit from the deployment of higher speed access networks. It only seems fair.

However, there are significant problems with this approach. One is that the combined profits of Google and the other ASPs and ISPs are not nearly enough to cover the cost of deploying fiber at a reasonable rate.

The second problem is that paying additional amounts to the backbone provider will not necessarily lead to a fair distribution of these funds to the access network providers. For example, if Google pays the premium to ATT, how does Verizon get support in its territory. Well, Google will probably by backbone services from Verizon also, so that there will probably be a reasonable allocation. But then, what about Surewest and the thousand or so small U.S. telcos that do not offer backbone services?

This could be handled by an extension of the Universal Services Fund, but then what about the broadband operators in other countries? Do we need to add in a UN Universal Fund charge as well?

None of this seems practical, which leaves the broadband providers without any way to monetize their investments in fiber. This will certainly discourage investment and delay the availability of fiber services That is too bad.

Is Wireless Important to Cable Companies?

2008-12-07T08:33:00.000-08:00

A Light Reading article discusses comments by a financial analyst who believes that wireless is not an important element to add to cable bundles. His point is that bundles require discounts, which reduces revenues.

I think he is probably right about adding wireless to cable bundles. Wireless probably will have less effect on consumer decisions than the other elements of these bundles.

However, in the long run as carriers offer wireless and broadband wireline services based on a single, integrated IMS infrastructure to deliver VoIP services there will be tremendous opportunities to integrate wireless and wireline services into a single offering. The cable companies will have to be in a position to offer similar integrated wireless and wireline services to stay in the game.

The moves that the cable companies are making with Clearwire today are a good step to prepare for that day.

ATT's Cuts

2008-12-07T08:26:00.000-08:00

Light Reading published and article with various opinions on ATT's announcement that it would cut 12,000 people and reduce its CapEx budget. The gist of it is that ATT will not make cuts in wireless or broadband but will cut its wireline operation. The article ends with a quote from one analyst who believes that cutting spending on its POTS network will be a major mistake for ATT.

What ATT is reportedly doing is consistent with how networks will evolve during the next decade. Wireless and broadband will become more important and POTS services will fade away. Personally, I think ATT is making the correct choices.

Taking the Back Office to 2020

2008-11-22T10:25:00.001-08:00

This week I posted an article about a survey that showed how far mobile operators and mobile ISPs have to go to realize the potential in their subscriber information data bases. This is only one aspect of what has to happen to move back office systems to be ready for 2020.

The major goal for all Telcos has to be to dramatically increase efficiency. This will require that Telcos move to self-service and mechanized, if not automated, service fulfillment. They have to get humans out of the loop with systems that permit customers to order services on line and then to have them automatically installed using web-based customer portals.

As operators start providing GigE fiber connections or LTE wireless services, they will be providing access capabilities with spare capacity. The user may order a 50 Mbps Internet data service over a GigE link or a 1 Mbps wireless service. A web-based portal should be available that permits the subscriber to upgrade the 50 Mbps FTTH service to 100 Mbps or the 1 Mbps wireless service to 2 Mbps. The back office system can accept the order and implement while the subscriber is at the web portal placing the order.

Another area where significant efficiencies can be realized is in service assurance. By 2020 there will have to be agents that permit the operator to monitor, trouble shoot, and modify the configuration of devices on home networks or wireless handsets. These systems should proactively search for problems and fix them even before the customer becomes aware of them. This should automated as much as possible and mechanized at a minimum.

These kind of tools will enable the Telcos to offer a much broader variety of complex services and keep them operating correctly with less resource than they put into it today. The goal will be to eliminate the use of call centers, except for quite exceptional cases.

T-Mobile Sets Standards for LTE

2008-11-20T12:52:00.000-08:00

Light Reading published an article that discusses statements from T-Mobile about what they are looking for in LTE. T-Mobile believes that the cost to deliver a Mbps must go down by a factor of 10 because data traffic is increasing at a higher rate than revenues. It also wants LTE networks to be self-organizing and to be software upgradeable.

T-Mobile also believes that femto cells will be important for extending coverage. It also is looking for the early availability of mass market LTE terminals.

T-Mobile plans to go to Ethernet backhaul either over high-speed wireless links or optical links to keep network costs down.

All of these are clear requirements for LTE. Without these, there will be no reason to upgrade from 3G.

Will Femto Cells Rule LTE?

2008-11-19T12:40:00.000-08:00

A Light Reading article describes a picoChip presentation that femto cells will be used rather than macro cells for 4G LTE deployments. picoChip believes that the reduction in speeds that come at longer distances will require reducing cell radii in order to keep performance high. It states that its femto cell technology will solve this problem when used in place of macro cells.

This is an interesting minority position. The mobile operators seem to be adopting a macro cell LTE architecture. However, picoCell's point is a good one. The recent 3G iPhone experience is showing that there is low user tolerance for major variation in data performance across wireless networks.

China Mobile Poised to Jump to 4G LTE

2008-11-19T12:32:00.000-08:00

A Light Reading article stated that China Mobile is poised to jump to 4G LTE before it has widely deployed its 3G TD-SCDMA network. It plans to launch LTE in 2010 and says that 60 percent of its TD-SCDMA investment will migrate to LTE. It plans to use TD-LTE, which uses spectrum in a similar manner as TD-SCDMA.

It will be interesting to watch how this situation progresses. I think the transition will be more problematical than this article indicates, but it show that China Mobile recognizes that 4G LTE is the right technology in the long run.

Microtune Introduces 120 Mbps DOCSIS 3.0 Upstream Amplifer

2008-11-19T12:26:00.001-08:00

Microtune has introduced an RF gateway that permits DOCSIS 3.0 upstream speeds of 120 Mbps and downstream speeds of 160 to 320 Mbps. Its chips are available for less than $5.00 in volume quantities.

DOCSIS 3.0 is shaping up to be a formidable competitor to Telco fiber technologies. It will compete directly with Verizon's FiOS BPON and GPON services. It leaves ATT's VDSL service in the dust.

First 100 Gbps Network for ESnet

2008-11-19T12:16:00.000-08:00

Light Reading has published and article describing the 100 Gbps network that ESnet and Internet2 plan to deploy by 2010. This network will use equipment from Infinera and Juniper Networks over Level3's network to combine ten 10 Gbps links into single 100 Mbps logical links. This is in advance of when 100 Gbps Ethernet will be broadly deployed.

ESnet has found that it is currently supporting single flows of 10 Gbps and needs the 100 Gbps links to be able to handle them along with other traffic.

The U.S. Department of Energy has long been a leader in super computing and high speed communications. This is an example of the kind of application that will drive the speeds of networks up to and beyond 100 Gbps during the next decade.

Gaining Subscriber Insights

2008-11-19T11:51:00.000-08:00

Nokia Siemens published the results of a survey of mobile operators and mobile ISPs to determine their ability to use subscriber data for customer profiling. It shows that these operators have a long way to go and 53 percent of them say that their existing data does not allow for profiling and 46 percent say that the data they have is not analyzed quickly enough.

On interesting result was that the mobile operators are ahead of the mobile ISPs in real time analysis of user activity but that the ISP's have much more aggressive future plans. Today 16 percent of mobile operators perform real time analysis today compared to 10 percent of mobile ISPs. 47 percent of these operators plan real time analysis in the near term compared to 67 percent of the mobile ISPs.

The survey shows that the industry has a long way to go to make good use of the information that is available to them. They will have to make a lot of progress in this area in order to effectively sell and support the array of sophisticated services that they will be offering by 2020.

Telco IPTV Network Architecture

2008-11-16T10:26:00.000-08:00

Both Alcatel-Lucent and Cisco have introduced edge routers that facilitate Telco IPTV networks by supporting fast channel change, packet retransmission, and ad insertion using a large flash memory in the router. Both companies are talking about having enough memory in these routers to support video on demand caching. That is, the most popular video on demand assets would be stored on the routers which would eliminate the network traffic required to provide them from a centralized server.

I think that these developments are a real step forward for IPTV networks. I think that their ability to support fast channel change and packet retransmission are fundamental improvements. The ad insertion and video on demand capabilities will provide significant improvements, up to a point.

The fundamental issue will be the amount of storage provided by the router. In a personalized ad insertion system, this will work fine as long as the number of personalized ads does not become too large. The issue with video on demand will be the hit rate, that is the number of video on demand requests that are served by the content on the router vs. the centralized router.

My own thinking on this issue has evolved. I did a report for MRG in the scaling of IPTV networks three years ago that identified that the amount of traffic required to support high levels of on demand traffic will be a major issue. At that time, I felt that the caching approach that Alcatel-Lucent and Cisco are talking about would be the answer.

I looked at this issue again last year in the report Networking Strategies for TelcoTV Services. With further analysis, I realized that the traffic to fill the distributed video on demand caches would be enough by itself to swam metro networks. My conclusion was that the IPTV traffic had to be removed from the IP/Ethernet networks and move down to the optical level.

My recent report Telecom 2020: Transformation Strategies looked at the issue again and took into account the consolidation of fiber access systems into large centers that would serve very large numbers of subscribers. This architecture would mean that there would be enough video on demand traffic to one of these major fiber access centers to fill a 10 Gbps or even a 100 Gbps optical link; therefor, there is no benefit for bringing this traffic up to the packet layer. It will be much more economical just to pass directly to the fiber access center over a direct optical link.

There are too philosophical points that drive my thinking. The first is that as IPTV moves from multicast to on demand and unicast, the TV traffic will dominate the network. It just makes sense to optimize the network for the dominant traffic type.

The second point is that it is very difficult to understand how a packet network can provide an acceptable SLA or QoS when 99 percent of the traffic on the network is deterministic TV traffic. On the other hand, it is easy to see how this will work over direct optical links.

There is a real question of timing here. For many carriers, the cached approach introduced by Alcatel-Lucent and Cisco will be a big help over the next three to five years. However, I do think that these carriers will be thinking seriously about a direct optical approach after that.

Spectrum Bridge's On Line Spectrum Auction

2008-11-16T10:07:00.000-08:00

"eBay" is coming to the secondary market for spectrum in the U.S. A new company, Spectrum Bridge, has just started an on line spectrum auction system for the U.S. The company's auction web site http://specex.com provides spectrum owners the ability to list excess spectrum for sale and provides operators looking for spectrum to purchase or lease the spectrum. The web site supports the sale of any kind of spectrum resale permitted by the U.S. FCC.

Spectrum Bridge updates the web site daily with the most current information from the FCC. With this information the web site presents a potential seller with a list of their holdings and allows the user to select the specific pieces of spectrum that they would like to list.

The company's staff facilitates sales by helping buyers to identify available spectrum that meets their needs. The company also assists the buyers and sellers to make the deal happen with standard contracts and assistance during the negotiation process.

This is a significant development. With the move to 3G, operators are looking to refarm spectrum and add to existing holdings to increase the bandwidth of current 2G holdings so that they can use them for 3G services. This will be a continuing problem as these operators move to 4G and need even wider bands.
Spectrum Bridge can facilitate this process with its on line spectrum auction.

Spectrum Bridge plans to become a broker for white space spectrum as called for by the FCC's recent ruling. Coordinating the use of white space spectrum to minimize interference will be a natural evolution to its web site.

Its spectrum database intrigued me. This gives the company to do database sweeps and identify markets where one operator lacks spectrum and another has excess spectrum. With this kind of information, Spectrum Bridge could proactively bring potential buyers and sellers together, even before they have decided to buy or sell spectrum. I think this is only the beginning of the kind of services that the company could offer to its customers to facilitate the more efficient use of spectrum.

Qualcomm Backs LTE

2008-11-14T09:41:00.000-08:00

Qualcomm will abandon its UMB 4G technology in favor of LTE. UMB was intended to be the 4G evolution for its CDMA and EV-DO customers.

LTE has been accepted by most of Qualcomm's CDMA and EV-DO customers as their 4G technology choice. UMB has received little or no support. By removing UMB from the table, it seems clear that LTE will dominate the 4G mobile networks. WiMAX has been adopted by some but is likely to be used more for wireline broadband replacement services in under served areas.

Cisco Introduces 100 Gbps Ethernet Edge Router

2008-11-13T12:05:00.000-08:00

Cisco introduced its Aggregation Services Router (ASR) 9000 that will provide significant increases in performance over its work horse 7600 routers with a total of 6.4 terabits per second of capacity. The ASR 9000 is designed around 100 Gbps Ethernet interfaces.

The ASR 9000 incorporates the Cisco Advanced Video Services Module (AVSM) with 4 terabyts of flash RAM storage that offers content caching, ad insertion, fast channel change and error correction of video streams. Fast channel change and onboard error correction for both unicast and multicast video traffic helps ensure that errors can be detected by any set-top box and retransmitted within milliseconds.

This is the kind of improvement in performance that will be required as we move through the next decade as 100 GBps Ethernet links become commonplace.

The AVSM capabilities of the AVSM provide similar capabilities to Alcatel-Lucent's TPSDA 2.0 approach that provides similar capabilities. Both approach will require support from the IPTV middleware to get their full effect.

The 4 TB of storage will be enough to store about 1,000 hours of HD content. This will be enough for the most popular video on demand assets but not for the long tail of for an extensive NPVR service. Cisco will have to add a lot more storage to really offload video traffic from the network as it is currently claiming. I will write a column that will discuss this issue in more detail in a couple of days. I just don't think that a distributed approach will hold up over the long term.

DOCSIS 3.0 to Provide Fiber Push

2008-11-09T10:15:00.000-08:00

An article on Light Reading cited a statement by Charter Communications that it will cost about $8 to $10 per subscriber to bring DOCSIS 3.0 services to a home, including the new cable modem termination system (CMTS) equipment and the routing systems. It does not include the cost of the new DOCSIS 3.0 cable modem or the cost of provisioning the service.

Verizon has said that it costs them $800 to $1,000 per home to make its FiOS fiber service available with a maximum 50 Mbps data service today. The cable companies can accomplish the same thing for one percent the cost.

DOCSIS 3.0 will provide the cable companies a strong defense against FiOS and be a very strong offensive weapon against ATT's VDSL U-verse service. Verizon will need to improve the performance and lower the price of its FiOS high speed data services. ATT will need to move from VDSL to GPON to be competitive.

White Space: Taking the Internet Back to the Future?

2008-11-09T09:38:00.000-08:00

The FCC decision this week to open up the TV "white spaces" to unlicensed wireless services has great potential to break the hammer lock that the cable and Telcos have on the consumer Internet business today.

Ten years or so ago, before the advent of cable modem and DSL services, there where hundreds, if not thousands, of ISPs providing dial up consumer Internet access. There were a few large ones such as Prodigy and AOL along with many, many small providers. It was easy and inexpensive to set up a dial up ISP service. Get a T1 line and attach a dial up mux, and you were in business.

The advent of broadband services brought this to an end. The cable modem and DSL services had the ISP service bundled in with them. This gave the cable companies and the Telcos a strong strategic advantage. AOL continues to exist, but is a shadow of its former self. EarthLink provides Internet services on top of Telco DSL services, but has a very small share of the market. Almost all broadband Internet users subscribe to cable or Telco Broadband services.

The white spaces spectrum is the UHF TV spectrum that is not being used to broadcast TV content. There is generally 100 MHz of vacant spectrum that can be used for white spaces applications in the major metro areas. There is 200 MHz or more of vacant spectrum in more rural locations. This is enough to support several ISPs that want to offer services.

WiMAX and LTE 4G technologies can support wireless broadband data services that will provide a 1 to 5 Mbps. This will compete well with broadband cable and DSL services. These wireless services will share the conveniences of mobile voice service that have made them popular. These white spaces services have the potential to dominate the low end of the broadband data market. People will like their personal nature and their go anywhere convenience.

This will drive the cable companies to DOCSIS 3.o and the Telcos to fiber, which will give us all that still want them much higher performance on our home broadband services. Enabling start ups to compete will be a good thing for all of us consumers.

U.S. FCC Approves White Spaces Unlicensed Spectrum

2008-11-05T11:22:00.000-08:00

The FCC adopted rules to allow wireless devices to operate in unused broadcast television spectrum, commonly referred to as television “white spaces”. These rules will allow for the use of unlicensed devices in the unused spectrum to provide broadband data and other services for consumers and businesses.

These rules represent a first step to and include safeguards to protect incumbent services against interference. Devices must include a geolocation capability and provisions to access over the Internet a data base of the incumbent services, such as full power and low power TV stations and cable system headends, in addition to spectrum sensing technology. The data base will tell the white space device what spectrum may be used at that location.

The locations where wireless microphones are used, such as sporting venues and event and production facilities, can be registered in the data base and will be protected in the same way as other services. The Commission also has required that devices include the ability to listen to the airwaves to sense wireless microphones as an additional measure of protection for these devices.

All white space devices are subject to equipment certification by the FCC Laboratory. The FCC will permit certification of devices that do not include the geolocation and data base access capabilities, and instead rely solely on spectrum sensing to avoid causing harmful interference, subject to a much more rigorous approval process.

The FCC will oversee and monitor the introduction of TV white space devices and will promptly remove any equipment found to be causing harmful interference. The FCC will explore whether higher powered unlicensed operations might be permitted in TV white spaces in rural areas.

This ruling potentially has major ramifications. It makes it much easier and much less expensive to set up a wireless service. It is not necessary to win spectrum in an expensive auction. A service provider only needs to purchase appropriate equipment.

There is a large amount of white spaces spectrum that is available. It is possible for multiple service providers to operate without interfering with each other, even in dense metropolitan areas. Spectrum sensing will prevent them from interfering with each other.

It is likely that these services will have a major effect on ADSL services. It is likely that a white spaces wireless data service will be very competitive with a 3 Mbps ADSL service. This will drive the wireline carriers to fiber technologies.

U.S. FCC Approves Sprint/Clearwire WiMAX Network

2008-11-05T11:12:00.000-08:00

The U.S. FCC approved the transfer of control of licenses held by Sprint and the the existing Clearwire to the new Clearwire joint venture formed by the two companies. This action is expected to facilitate the build out of a nation wide WiMAX network by the new joint venture.

This action clears the way for Clearwire to deploy its WiMAX service in the U.S. in 2009. This will be the first major 4G network in the U.S. and is an important test case for WiMAX and for broadband wireless services.

T-Mobile to Adopt LTE

2008-11-05T11:01:00.000-08:00

Light Reading has and article that describes T-Mobile's wireless network evolution plans. T-Mobile plans to continue to make software upgrades to its HSPA network to improve its performance; however, the company will not make hardware upgrades. Instead it will move to LTE at that point.

With software upgrades, T-Mobile can boost its current 7.2 Mbps HSDPA network up to 14.4 Mbps on the downlink. Beyond that, HSPA Evolution (or HSPA+) can boost 3G network speeds to 28.8 Mbps or more but requires MIMO antennas. That is where T-Mobile draws the line.

T-Mobile also stated that it is considering deploying TD LTE in currently unused TD spectrum that it owns in Europe.

T-Mobile's approach makes sense. It will put them onto the OFDM track earlier than later.

The 4G Conundrum

2008-11-01T10:34:00.000-07:00

The announcement by Cox Cable this week that it is going to build two wireless networks as well as utilize Sprint's wireless network got me thinking again about what I call the 4G Conundrum. I just don't understand how 3G and 4G networks will coexist.

Both 3G and 4G networks will be targeted to the same set of users: laptops, smart phones, and the iPhone class of handsets. Sure, operators can deploy 4G in areas were there is a high level of 3G use as a more economical way to add capacity. But it they provide higher speeds on these 4G hot zones, people will see a significant decrease in speed when they move to a 3G zone. The recent problems with iPhones on the ATT network show that these uses see this kind of performance decrease as a network failure. I think that this kind of zone based 4G deployment will just not provide the level of service that the Internet heads that use iPhone like devices will want.

The other thing is that 3G HSP continues to be enhanced. Performance is getting better. These advanced 3G networks are adopting the same flat IP architectures that is part of 4G networks. The question here is if 4G is really enough better than these advanced 3G technologies to justify deploying it.

There is one situation where the the case for 4G seems clear. The CDMA operators are moving to 4G LTE technologies to enable international roaming. Today the lack of international roaming is a big disadvantage for CDMA operators compared to GSM/WCDMA 3G operators. Verizon is adopting 4G LTE as are many other CDMA operators.

I do think that nearly all carriers will migrate to 4G LTE by 2020. There will be a few such as Sprint and Korea Telecom that will operate WiMAX 4G networks. It is very likely that handsets will be able to support roaming between WiMAX and LTE by that time. Operators will bite the bullet as HSPA's WCDMA reaches its limits and is surpassted by 4G OFDM technologies.

Cox Clarifies Wireless Plans

2008-10-29T09:51:00.000-07:00

Light Reading published an article that clarified Cox Cable's wireless plans a bit.

Cox will have autonomy on the Sprint network, controlling the backoffice, customer service, product integration, branding, supported devices, packaging, and product plans.
Cox will use its AWS spectrum that it acquired in 2006 to support a 3G network based on EV-DO Revision A.
It plans 700 MHz spectrum LTE field trials sometime in 2009.

This approach means that Cox's own AWS 3G service and its Sprint-based service will both be based on CDMA. It is likely that it will be able to offer handsets that can run on both networks. It is less clear how LTE will fit in, but Verizon's commitment to LTE is likely to produce handsets that support both CDMA and LTE. It will be interesting to see how this works out.

Cox historically has taken the leadership on new technologies such as cable telephony. It has taken a strong technical approach in the past that has led to the deployment of robust services. It looks like it is taking the same approach with wireless.

Cox Cable to Offer Wireless Bundle in 2009

2008-10-27T07:14:00.000-07:00

Cox announced that add a wireless component to its bundled offering that includes TV, high speed Internet, and telephone services today. Cox will utilize Sprint's wireless network to enter the market in 2009. At the same time, Cox is building its own 3G wireless network for additional market launches in 2009. Cox will also test 4G technology utilizing LTE. Cox acquired 700 MHz spectrum in about 10 areas in the U.S., including Los Angeles, Phoenix/Tucson, Las Vegas, New Orleans, and Atlanta.

Cox partnering with Sprint is no surprise since it is one of the partners in the Clearwire deal. However, its strategy is not clear. It seems to have the following options:

Sprint's CDMA service on a national basis
3G in the 10 areas where it has 700 MHz spectrum
LTE later in the 10 areas where it has 700 MHz spectrum

It will be interesting to see how Cox weaves all of this together in a way that makes sense to its cable customers. There is no compatibility between CDMA, WiMAX, and 3G. It does not seem likely to me that they will find any handsets that can support all of these serves.

Even with all of these problems, this is a key trend. The cable companies will have to develop strong wireless service offerings in order to be competitive in 2020.

How Much Will Network Traffic Grow?

2008-10-24T09:56:00.001-07:00

Probably the biggest issue in planning for a network for 2020 will be the amount of trafficthat it will have to support. Network traffic has been growing by about 50 percent per year over the last 10 years. At this rate, the amount of traffic will be 100 times what it is today.

The question is how long will this party go on? It seems reasonable that this torrid rate of growth will have to moderate at some point of time. Any decrease in this rate of growth will certainly make life easier for the carriers. They would be able to reduce their investment in their networks.

It is clear that wireless networks are just now starting to see the impact of the growth of data services on their networks. The iPhone and similar devices are bringing a new set of Internet users to mobile networks. This is only the start. During the next decade most mobile users will be making extensive use of data services.

This means that the growth of data usage on mobile networks will probably grow faster than 50 percent per year over the next several years and grow at a rate similar to wireline networks after that.

It is hard to see what will continue drive growth on wireline networks at such high rates. I believe that it will be video and TV content. TV content will particularly important based on the increasing popularity of HD and 1080p.

Over the last 15 years there have been a steady stream of new applications that generate ever increasing amounts of traffic. I am not going to bet that this innovation has stopped. I think that anybody thinking about networks for 2020 must assume a factor 100 increase in traffic.

TelecomView Publishes Report on Telecom 2020

2008-10-24T08:58:00.000-07:00

TelecomView has released its report Telecom 2020: Transformation Strategies. This report discusses the services and networks that will be available in 2020 after the adoption of IP and Ethernet technologies is complete. It discusses the impact on wireless and wireline networks as well as both consumer and business market segments.

This new report finds that this transformation will have major effects on the carriers and on the industry itself. It provides strategies that carriers and systems companies can use to be successful over this transition period.

You can get information on this report at our website. You can also order a free white paper that is based on this report.

Telecom 2020 Blog

2008-10-24T06:23:00.001-07:00

TelecomView has launched this blog as a result of the work that we have done to produce our new report Telecom 2020: Transformation Strategies. This blog will include news items that are relevant to this transformation. We will also publish a weekly column that will give our opinion on an important issue that is relevant to this subject.

We encourage you to post your comments. Anything that is said about the state of telecom in 2020 is an opinion. Your opinions are at least as good as ours. We would love to hear them. The more diverse the opinions included in this blog, the better it will be.

BT Introduces Integrated Wireline/Wireless Data Service

2008-10-20T09:04:00.001-07:00

BT introduced broadband packages for small businesses that include mobile broadband as part of a wireline/wireless offering. It provides a service that includes wireline broadband along with BT Openzone Wi-Fi hotspots and mobile networks (GPRS/3G/HSDPA/HSUPA). It now offers three usage plans:

BT Business Total Broadband Options	Broadband Option 1	Broadband Option 2	Broadband Option 3
Price Per Month (on a 24 month term)	£15	£26.99	£40.50
Fixed line Download Limit	10GB	Unlimited†	Unlimited†
BT Business Mobile Broadband	Unlimited† usage available for £17.50 per month	One Mobile Broadband USB stick per contract – 1GB usage 2,000 BT Openzone minutes	One Mobile Broadband USB stick per contract – 1GB usage 2,000 BT Openzone minutes
Wireless Router	£79 or £59 online exc. VAT	Included	Included
Security	Anti Virus and Anti Spam	Anti Virus and Anti Spam	Internet Security Pack for 5 PCs
Support	24/7 UK-based Freefone Support	24/7 UK-based Freefone Support	24/7 UK-based Freefone Support IT Support Manager - allows our IT experts to help fix problems remotely, no need to call out an engineer

This is one of the first examples of what I expect will be a very important trend. I believe that similar integrated services will be offered to consumers and will become an important competitive advantage for Telcos over their cable competitors. However, this approach to offering services will have a significant effect on the organization of the Telcos as well as the structure of the industry itself. I will write more about this later.

Tecordia to Address ROADM Security Holes

2008-10-18T12:08:00.000-07:00

Light Reading has published and article that describes a technique that can be used for encrypting 100 Gbps optical streams. Telcordia is planning to bring optical layer security to market that uses optical phase shifts for its encryption keys and promises the possibility of 100-Gbps security. The technology, called Photonic Layer Security (PLS).

Telcordia stated that the rise of ROADMs has created a security hole in the network. It is possible to intercept traffic at that add/drop point. It's also possible to insert spoofed traffic there. PLS gets around this because the recipient must have the proper key, otherwise the optical signal cannot be unscrambled.

This is an example of the security problems that the new technologies will bring with them. Paying attention to these issues will an important part of deploying these new technologies.

FTTH Council Says 3.8M FTTH Subscribers in North America

2008-10-17T09:17:00.000-07:00

The Fiber to the Home Council of North America published a presentation giving its latest FTTH statistics. It has found that there are currently 3.8 million FTTH subscribers and 2.2 million FTTH IPTV subscribers in North America. This is an increase of 848 thousand FTTH subscribers and 550 thousand FTTH IPTV subscribers over the last six month. The current take rate for FTTH services in North America is 30 percent.

Verizon is driving this growth, but there are a number of smaller deployments as well. It is well spending the time to review the entire presentation.

Maravedis Says 2.3M WiMAX Subscribers in 2Q08

2008-10-16T15:46:00.000-07:00

Maravedis said that there were 265 WiMAX deployments at the end of 2Q08 with a total of 2.33 million subscribers. This was up from 264 deployments and 1.99 million subscribers at the end of 1Q08. Clearewire was the number one operator with 462 thousand subscribers and Korea telecom was number two with 202 thousand subscribers.

Maravedis said that 67 percent of subscribers were residential and 33 percent were business subscribers. The residential ARPU was $46.73 and the business ARPU was $135.08.

This is the start of the deployment of 4G services. The size of these deployments are still modest. Clearwire and KT are the two service providers to watch.

Femto Cell Interest in Spain and China

2008-10-16T15:30:00.000-07:00

Telefonica's O2 mobile arm is planning a femto cell trial. It expects its femto cell commercial roll out to start ramping up in 2010.

picoChip Designs demonstrated its Chinese femtocell reference design in China today announced that femto startup Digimoc Telecom Technology (Shanghai) will use its chips and software designs to make femtocells based on the country's homegrown 3G standard, TD-SCDMA. The news is an indication that China Mobile is interested in the low-power home base stations, because it is the only Chinese operator that will deploy TD-SCDMA in the country.

This is the start of an important trend. Femto cells will off load mobile networks and blur the lines between wireless and wireline services. This will have a major effect on how services are offered in 2020.

XO Deploys Ciena Ethernet Switches

2008-10-16T15:23:00.000-07:00

XO Communications, a provider of communications for businesses and carriers, has deployed Ciena’s Carrier Ethernet Service Delivery Switches throughout its metropolitan networks as part of its Ethernet Hub service, which provides a way for domestic and international carriers to expand the reach of their Ethernet services in the United States.

XO has approximately one million miles of metro fiber networks in major markets across the United States. XO’s Ethernet Hub service offers customers dedicated access to its Ethernet footprint via a single connection and supports a variety of Ethernet bandwidth options ranging from 5 Mbps to 10 Gbps and key Ethernet features including 802.1Q, VLAN stacking and jumbo frames.

Carrier Ethernet is a key 2020 technology. This is an example of how it is being enhanced to provide new services.

BT's 21CN to Switch VoIP Strategy

2008-10-16T15:16:00.000-07:00

BT is switching its VoIP strategy to emphasize VoIP over broadband rather than using VoIP to replace PSTN services. It said that it is doing this to respond to customer demand.

Putting its emphasis on VoIP over broadband brings BT into line with the strategies of other major operators such as France Telecom and NTT in Japan. It makes more sense to focus on the growing broadband segment rather than the shrinking PSTN market. There will be plenty of time to replace POTS with VoIP later.

BT Working Toward 2010 VDSL Rollout

2008-10-16T15:00:00.000-07:00

BT has announced that it will operate two VDSL trials of about 15,000 customers each starting in the summer of 2009. It plans to provide up to 40 Mbps as part of this service. BT expects to announce plans for the initial market VDSL deployment in early 2010.

It looks like BT is taking a very orderly process that will lead to a commercial VDSL roll out starting some time in 2010. BT will be experiencing serious bandwidth pressures from the demand for HD content well before this. I would not be surprised to see it accelerate this schedule due to significant competitive pressure. In the long run it will have to adopt a FTTH strategy.

Alcatel-Lucent TPSDA 2.0 Provides Better Video Support

2008-10-16T14:14:00.000-07:00

Alcatel-Lucent has introduced IPTV application awareness into its Triple Play Services Delivery Architecture (TPSDA) 2.0. It will add flash storage to its edge routers, its switches, and its access nodes that will support fast channel change, packet retransmission, and targeted ad insertion.

For fast channel change the last few minutes of every multicast channel will be stored in the network and the new channel will be started immediately, eliminating the latency that typically occurs today. Alcatel-Lucent said that HD channel change time will be reduced from several seconds to well under a second.
For packet retransmission the network will store enough packets to immediately service the packet retransmission request.
For ad insertion targeted ads will be stored and inserted in the network.

If the service provider uses Alcatel-Lucent access nodes, these functions can be provided in the access network. These functions can also be provided in the Alcatel-Lucent switches or edge routers for service providers using Alcatel-Lucent's TPSDA 2.0 architecture.

Alcatel-Lucent has also discussed plans to increase the amount of storage in these network elements in order to support rewind TV and video on demand delivery.

TPSDA 2.0 can support these functions for service providers using access nodes from other manufacturers by implementing them in the switches and edge routers.

Microsoft has not announced any support for these network capabilities.

This approach will give service providers new flexibility in managing the bandwidth demands from an IPTV service, especially as more and more on demand and personalized services are provided. I think the flexibility that it gives in placing storage in the network will improve the ability of service providers to optimize their networks.

I think that this solution is a good one for the next several years. I believe over the long run that TelcoTV and other video traffic will need to be pushed down to the optical layer. There will be too much of it for packet switches to handle.

IPTV 3D To Push Bandwidth Requirements

2008-10-16T14:11:00.000-07:00

Light Reading published a keynote interview at IBC given by Dreamworks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg discussing the resurgence of 3D. He said that all of the major studios have 3D projects under way. He also said that the quality of the 3D is much higher than in the past. Digital 3D is expected to be widely rolled out in 2009, when an estimated 2,500 theatre screens will be equipped with the technology.

I saw a compelling 3D HDTV demonstration by NHK at NAB. They told me that this is already available in Japan over satellite. If 3D becomes an important part of IPTV service, it is likely that the bandwidth required to support it will be too much for VDSL. I believe that FTTH will be required to support 3D.