WCA March 2014

Telecom news

Ericsson’s high-level vision of making networks more relevant is being moved, cautiously, into demonstration mode “After nearly a year since he introduced the term ‘Service Provider Software-Defined Networking’, Ericsson CTO Ulf Ewaldsson is ready to provide an update on the Swedish vendor’s vision of the programmable wide area network (WAN) and what it will mean for OSS platforms.” Contributing editor Michelle Donegan of Light Reading was reporting on her interview with Mr Ewaldsson on the sidelines of the GigaOM Structure Europe conference, held in London last Autumn, in which he asserted that Ericsson had moved beyond vision into demonstration: of service chaining and a variety of opportunities with customers who “can be unleashed by being able to program the network.” What remains to be done, he said, is “to connect into real big clouds with this kind of technology.” That blending of carrier and cloud network functionality is still some way from being realised, Ericsson’s chief technical officer acknowledged. The aim of Service Provider SDN – to provide opportunities for networks inside the cloud to be connected to the WAN while letting the WAN be controlled from applications in the cloud – is “something that is totally impossible today,” according to Mr Ewaldsson. (“Ericsson CTO Bangs SDN Drum,” 16 th October). At the heart of Service Provider SDN is software plus a major transformation of the OSS layer, which would morph in its role to include control over the network in addition to operations and maintenance. Ericsson envisions the evolution of the OSS into a control plane for the entire network. Mr Ewaldsson urged that this not be misinterpreted as a centralised control point. Rather, he told Ms Donegan, the OSS software will be distributed across all the elements in the network – as in radio base stations, routers, or data centre equipment. The network elements would house software that is part of the OSS system, he explained,

while there would also be a more centralised management capability. “That’s different from a data centre, where someone says ‘I’ll sell you an SDN controller,’ and what happens is a piece of hardware sits somewhere in the data centre,” he said. “That’s not the vision that we have of how this will be realised.” Ø Ericsson is not, of course, the sole telecom equipment vendor with this kind of vision for SDN in carrier networks, notes Caroline Chappell, a senior analyst at Heavy Reading . In her new report “Managing the Virtualised Network: How SDN & NFV Will Change OSS,” she puts Ericsson – along with Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco Systems Inc and Nokia Solutions and Networks – in the category of “big picture SDN and NFV management vendors.” For her part, Ms Donegan noted that Ericsson is not necessarily leading that vendor pack. She quoted Ms Chappell: “Ericsson is being very cautious about this. They’re saying, ‘We’ve got to get this right.’” Elsewhere in telecom . . . Ø China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology will allow China Mobile Ltd, the world’s largest mobile network by subscribers, to enter the fixed-line broadband market in China, state broadcaster CCTV reported on 4 th December on its official website. Previously only China Unicom Hong Kong Ltd and China Telecom Corp Ltd, the other two Chinese telecom networks, were able to offer fixed-line broadband. As noted by Paul Carsten of Reuters , the report came on the same day that the ministry gave 4G licenses to the three networks, allowing them to roll out commercial services using the high-speed mobile network. Ø According to GSMA estimates, the number of LTE connections worldwide could reach one billion by 2017. The mobile operators’ trade association places the current LTE total at 176 million connections but expects con- tinued build-out over the next

three years to double the number of networks with LTE capabilities, for a total of 500 in service within 128 countries. While this essentially means global saturation, LTE would even so account for about only about one in eight of the world’s mobile connections. TelecomTV One has pointed out that many LTE subscribers are, at current rates, likely to be “falling back” to switched 3G and even 2G networks to make voice calls by 2017, when large numbers of HSPA, HSPA+ and 2G networks are likely to still be functioning. As noted by the website’s I D Scales (28 th November), the roll-out will be somewhat uneven. The US now accounts for 46 per cent of global LTE connections; Korea and Japan, most of the balance. Taken together, the three leaders represent 80 per cent of LTE in the field. By 2017, however, expansion in India and China will likely boost Asia to accounting for 47 per cent of LTE connections worldwide. Ø Mexican mobile operator Nextel Mexico has said that it invested $1.5 billion last year to upgrade its current 4G network and plans to launch a 4G LTE service in mid-2014. COO Gustavo Cantú told Patrick Nixon of Business News Americas (29 th November) that the LTE network would reach the main urban centres across the nation, including Mexico City, Guadalajara and Monterrey. Additionally, Mr Cantú said in a statement, the company has strengthened its strategic alliances with Motorola, BlackBerry, Huawei, Alcatel and HTC, offering smartphones like the Moto X; Huawei’s Mate and Muse Angel; and the One S, from HTC. With reference to the telecom-sector reforms signed into law in June and designed to curb the dominant players, Nextel Mexico said it would encourage debate on such issues as new interconnection pricing mechanisms. One of these, “bill-and-keep”, is a reciprocal arrangement whereby one network will terminate calls from another network at no charge.

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Wire & Cable ASIA – March/April 2014