WCA January 2016

Telecom news

no longer be dictated by capacity but by fibre presence and calculations of total ownership costs. Ericsson believes a sevenfold capa- city increase can be achieved with the use of a wide, low-availability link in the E band (70-80GHz) to boost a high-availability link in traditional bands. Accordingly, reported Mr Daniels, the company looks for major growth in E band usage, which would account for up to 20 per cent of new deployments by 2020. The USA looks into claims by smaller players that big telecoms have a grip on the ‘special access’ market For at least a decade, American telecoms including Sprint Corp, XO Communications LLC and Level 3 Communications Inc have complained that large phone companies abuse their market power in what Ryan Knutson of Dow Jones Business News terms “an obscure but important part of the telecommunications market.” In October, the Federal Communications Commission said it was opening an investigation into the practices of AT&T Inc, Verizon Communications Inc, Frontier Communications Corp and CenturyLink Inc. As Mr Knutson reported on nasdaq.com (16 th October), the investigation centres around “special access” – the bulk data connections that businesses buy to connect cell towers, ATMs, retail outlets and the like. The FCC estimates the size of that market at roughly $20 billion. AT&T, Verizon, CenturyLink and Frontier dominate the special access market because, Mr Knutson explained, they effectively control the wires that were built by the legacy AT&T monopoly, which was broken up by the government in 1984. He wrote: “The smaller companies accuse the carriers of locking up the market by forcing them to sign volume commitments and by charging monopoly prices and early termination fees.” For example: Ø Citing a scarcity of alternative providers, Level 3 says it has no choice but to buy 90 per cent of its special access from Verizon in some markets to avoid substantial fees.

According to London-based Beecham Research, low-power wide area networks (LPWANs) are poised to give traditional cellular networks some stiff competition when it comes to machine-to-machine (M2M) and Internet of Things (IoT) connections. In the recent report Low-Power Wide Area Networks for IoT Applications, Beecham said that – from zero in 2015 – it expected low-power WANs for IoT to account for 26 per cent of the overall market for IoT connectivity – 345 million connections – by 2020. Reviewing the report for Telecompetitor , Andrew Burger noted Beecham’s point that LPWANs, cheaper and less power-hungry than cellular networks, are nevertheless able to transmit and receive data over long distances. The suggestion is that this could give them an advantage over cellular connections, at least at the present stage of market development and especially when it comes to connecting IP-enabled and other networked devices installed at sites far from power sources. (“Report: Low-Power WANS for IoT Threaten Cellular Dominance,” 15 th October). Beecham said that budget constraints on cellular network operators – limiting their rollouts of connected M2M and IoT devices – enhance the potential of LPWANs to enable a wider range of M2M and IoT applications. The author of the Beecham report, senior analyst David Parker, acknowledged that lower transfer speeds are the trade-off for the longer distances over which LPWANs can carry data. But in his view this is compensated by what LPWANs offer networks optimised for machine connectivity: much lower deployment costs than traditional cellular networks. Mr Parker cited the expectation of industry observers that low-power WANs for IoT providers will compete and collaborate with cellular network operators in meeting demand for IoT connectivity. Having a wider variety of options will in turn stimulate market growth, he told Telecompetitor . Ø Another Beecham officer, CEO Robin Duke-Woolley, said that the company’s look at LPWANs disclosed many applications that are not “big data” and not necessarily real-time, interactive, or immersive. Urging a sceptical attitude toward the alleged requirement for LPWANs to supply the 3Vs – velocity, volume, variety – in full, he envisioned a near future of shared responsibility and opportunity in telecom. “From a connectivity point of view, the market will move towards 4G-5G for satisfying big data IoT,” said Mr Duke-Woolley. “While, on the other side, LPWANs and equivalent networks will address the low data IoT requirement.” LPWANs may represent a dynamic and potentially game-changing development in the M2M/IoT market

Microwave is seen as gaining ground on fibre ‘on the road to 5G’ – and quickly The Swedish telecom technology and services provider Ericsson predicts that, by 2020, microwave technology will support multi-gigabit capacities in traditional frequency bands and support over 10GB in the millimetre wave (E and V) bands. The company in a recent report said it believes E band spectrum to be key in meeting the need for in backhaul as well as fronthaul capacity increases. “Microwave networks are a vital ingredient for operators to provide the best possible performance and quality

of experience in the most cost-efficient way,” Karolina Wikander, who heads Ericsson’s microwave division, told Guy Daniels of London-based TelecomTV (1 st October). “Capacity needs will continue to increase on the road to 5G, and keeping up requires continued technology evolution and re-imagining network efficiency.” Ericsson foresees that microwave will continue to be the dominant backhaul technology and that, within five years, 65 per cent of all cell sites will be connected by microwave solutions. It notes that markets with existing deep fibre investments, including China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, will be the holdouts. In Ericsson’s view, the choice between fibre and microwave in backhaul networks will

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Wire & Cable ASIA – January/February 2016

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