commsday magazine nov 2012
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The new Commsday magazineTRANSCRIPT
October/November 2012 • Published by Decisive • A CommsDay publication
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COMMSDAY
First
6 The new Oceania cable boom
7 Mobile payments on the march:
why all eyes are on India
10 What’s driving rural upstream traffic in the US
Cover Story
12 Made in China: Why the future of the mobile phone
industry may come from Asia’s giant
Features
16 An interview with Martin Geddes
20 How Superfast Cornwall is taking one of Britain’s
most rural provinces into the fibre age
26 Why small cells are a big deal
29 Defining software defined networking:
an extended report
33 A candid insight into Huawei from
an internal change agent
36 Cashing in on white space
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COMMUNICATIONS DAY 19 January 2012 Page 7
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TUESDAY 9 OCTOBER KEYNOTE SESSION 9am Shadow communications minister Malcolm Turnbull 9.25am Alcatel-Lucent researcher and author Alison Cerra "Identity Shift: Where Identity Meets Technology in the Net-worked-Community Age" 9.50am Telstra Wholesale exec director, sales Glenn Osborne 10.15am Optus MD Customer Vicki Brady 10.40 REFRESHMENTS sponsored by Overture Networks MORNING SESSION sponsored by Brocade 11.00 Telstra chief sustainability officer Tim O’Leary 11.25 NextDC CEO Craig Scroggie 11.50 Ovum analyst David Kennedy “The End of Voice?” 12.10 Servcorp COO Marcus Moufarrige “The Subscription Economy” 12.30 Brocade principal systems engineer David White “Accelerate network transformation to deliver new services with Ethernet Fabric and Software-Defined Networking “ 12.55 Lunch sponsored by Telstra Wholesale 1.55 FTTH Council AP VP & Senko Advanced Components R&D director Bernard Lee 2.15 OzHub chairman Matt Healy BILLING, OSS & CUSTOMER SERVICE FOCUS sponsored by Symbio Networks 2.35 Symbio CEO Rene Sugo 3.00 Oracle senior director Rob Gashi 3.20 Afternoon tea sponsored by Overture Networks REGULATORY & POLICY FOCUS 3.35 Norton Rose partners Nick Abrahams & Martyn Taylor “The Impact of the Convergence Review” 3.55 Independent Telecom Adjudicator Rob Nicholls 4.15 Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman Simon Cohen 4.35 ACCAN CEO Teresa Corbin 4.55 THE GREAT DEBATE: Optus GM, Government and Corpo-rate Affairs Clare Gill, Internode founder Simon Hackett, telecom analyst Kevin Morgan, Alcatel-Lucent Australia MD Sean O’Hal-loran and more 5.25 Cocktails sponsored by NEXTDC
WEDNESDAY 10 OCTOBER KEYNOTE SESSION 9am Market Clarity analyst Shara Evans “Demographics of the 1st NBN rollout areas” 9.25 Comms Alliance CEO John Stanton 9.50am ACMA deputy chairman Richard Bean 10.15 NBN Co head of product management and industry rela-tions Jim Hassell 10.40 Overture Networks Asia Pacific MD Graeme Bellis 11.00 REFRESHMENTS sponsored by Overture Networks MORNING SESSION 11.20 Qualcomm VP SE Asia and Pacific John Stefanac 11.40 Optus MD Wholesale & Satellite Rob Parcell 12.00 IBES executive director Kate Cornick 12.20 Australia Post GM telecom products and services Maha Krishnapillai 12.40 iiNet CTO John Lindsay 1.05 Lunch sponsored by Qualcomm WIRELESS & MOBILE BROADBAND FOCUS sponsored by Broadcast Australia 1.45 Broadcast Australia strategy & corporate development director Brett Savill “Snapshot from the Big Apple: update on the world’s largest DAS project in the NY Subway” 2.05 Cambium Networks VP Asia sales & marketing Roy Wittert “Fixed Wireless: Competitor or Complement to Mobile Broad-band?” 2.25 Polyfone CEO Paul Wallace "Ethernet over wireless" 2.45 The Billing Bureau MD David Werdiger 3.05 Afternoon tea sponsored by Overture CLOSING PLENARY: APPLYING POLICY TO PRACTICE 3.25 Vodafone GM Industry Strategy and Public Policy Matthew Lobb “Competition issues in the telecom sector” 3.45 Enex TestLab MD Matt Tett “Internet Regulation - a decade of content filter testing” 4.05 Cisco GM government affairs & policy Tim Fawcett “The Telework Revolution” 4.25 Close
FIRST
The new
Oceania
cable boom While African subsea cable boom seems to be over, a new one has welled up in Oceania, consisting of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Is-lands. In the past month, three new cable projects have been announced in the area – although in the same period an existing project has gone belly up, and another is ru-moured to soon follow. Activity in the South Pacific picked up pace after the origi-nal challenger in the space, Pa-cific Fibre, abandoned its plan to build a state-of-the-art, ultra-low latency system between New Zealand and the US. Almost in the same week as PacFibre’s withdrawal, the Haiwaiki cable - a new trans-Pacific system – came out of hiding, having been in the works for some months. The proposed Hawaiki cable ap-pears to combine ideas from the failed Pacific Fibre and SPIN cable proposals. In fact, its leadership is the same team that was behind SPIN. Instead of connecting di-rectly from New Zealand to the US as Pacific Fibre planned, Hawaiki (pictured) will aim to connect together many of the nations in the South Pacific. But unlike SPIN, which on-ly went as far as Tahiti, the sys-tem will connect into Hawaii where it can be hooked up with other trans-Pacific sys-tems. According to initial com-pany information, Hawaiki will be a two fibre-pair system
with a design capacity of 8Tbps. The main landing sta-tions will be Auckland, Syd-ney, and Hawaii with branch-ing units that can connect Norfolk Island; Noumea, New Caledonia; Port Vila, Vanua-tu; Suva, Fiji, Wallis & Fu-tuna, Apia, Samoa and Pago Pago, America Samoa. There is also hope the Cook Islands may become involved. There has to date been less detail supplied on how the ca-ble will be funded, an issue that ultimately defeated both Pacific Fibre and SPIN as well as a number of lesser inter-island cable system proposals. In order to save costs and maximise flexibility, Hawaiki will use OADM BUs, or opti-cal add-drop multiplexer branching units, which gives it a cost effective and flexible platform to connect up brand-ing destinations. OADM BUs
allow cable builders to put them in first and connect up additional destinations later. AUSTRALIA-SG
Weeks later on the other side of Australia, two prominent telecoms entrepreneurs an-nounced another new cable, this time linking Perth, Indo-nesia, and Singapore. The Ted Pretty and Bevan Slattery-backed Australia Indo-nesia Singapore Cable is launching into a crowded mar-ket occupied by two proposed projects: one backed by Leigh-tons, and the other by Huawei Marine. So far, there is little detail on the configuration of the new system, believed to have been conceived on the grounds that at least one of the two existing planned sys-tems would not get built.
Australia and Singapore is traditionally a thin route served by a single link – SEA-ME-WE3. But there are good reasons to believe this will change. The giant Square Kilometre Array radio telescope planned for the Australian outback will gener- ate tremendous amounts of data for transmis-sion to international research-ers, while both Singapore and Hong Kong are developing as significant regional hubs for content delivery and cloud computing and are set to rival the US West Coast as major global centres for traffic hand-off. The US is also losing at-traction as a landing place for new cables due to the possible introduction of a 15.7% uni-versal service levy on all sys-tems that traverse American territory. SOLOMON ISLANDS
Lastly, news has emerged that a previously planned system to connect together the Solomon Islands has advanced to the funding stage. The private ca-ble system, being built by Solo-mons Oceanic Cable Compa-ny, features a link out of Gua-dalcanal to the PPC-1 system for international connectivity to Sydney and Guam, and two domestic spurs linking Gua-dalcanal with Malaita, landing in Auki, and the Western Province landing in Noro. According to reports in the Solomon Star, Solomon Is-lands minister for finance and treasury Rick Hounipwela told parliament that the govern-ment expects to receive some US$7.5 million in grant fund-ing and US$10.5 million in loans from the ADB, which it will then lend to the cable company.
Tony Chan
Mobile
payments on
the march Apple's snub of near-field com-
munications shows that there
is still no clear technology win-
ner when it comes to mobile
payments. But watch out for
developments in India.
One of the most talked
about omissions in the feature
list of the new iPhone 5 was
direct support for near-field
communications for mobile
payments. A number of ana-
lysts suggested it was a sign
that Apple was starting to lag
behind in the smartphone
arms race, but could the lack
of NFC also signal that maybe
Apple is ahead of the pack
again? After all, the whole area
of mobile payments is chang-
ing shape so rapidly that there
is no clear technology stand-
ard. Perhaps what Apple is re-
ally doing is taking a punt that
NFC will be by-passed in the
mobile payment revolution?
Paying for things on a mobile
phone has been touted as the
“next big thing” for a number
of years now, and NFC was
widely tipped as a technology
leader – particularly when it
was backed by Google. The
search engine specialist has
launched its Google Wallet,
which uses NFC to turn a
smartphone into a mobile pay-
ment device. An Android-
based smartphone that is. Ap-
ple's decision not to put an
NFC chip in the iPhone 5 has
now signalled that it is less in-
clined to go the NFC route.
And to be fair, there are a lot
of options out there, while Ap-
ple is not the first to suggest
that customers are perhaps af-
ter something more flexible.
Today's consumer wants on-
the-spot gratification and NFC
payment systems still require
them to go to a counter and
wave their mobile wallet in
front of a terminal. Peter Wil-
liams, head of Deloitte's Cen-
tre for the Edge and chair of
the Deloitte Innovation Coun-
cil, told CommsDay that any
“slow” solution was unlikely to
survive, including perhaps up-
coming NFC technologies.
“Today’s consumers are
more mobile in their transac-
tions and now have a wealth
of options available regarding
where, when and how they
make purchasing decisions.
The balance of power has
shifted from the traditional re-
tailer to the consumer and the
success of online retail trail-
blazed this,” Williams said.
He noted that the benefits
that NFC brings are quite mi-
nor in the whole scheme of
things, and consumers are
more likely to prefer to use
their smartphone to make pur-
chases on the spot in locations
away from a store counter. Al-
ready there are a number of
newcomers in the payments
market that are allowing them
to do that.
PAYMENT PLAYERS
When it comes to mobile pay-
ments, there are a number of
sectors of the market all clam-
ouring for a piece of the pie.
Device makers like Apple and
Google have indicated they
want a slice of the action, as
do the traditional payment
players such as banks and card
providers. Telcos have also
wanted in for some time, fear-
ing that they could again be
left to provide the pipe but
earn little else from the bil-
lions in transactions that are
expected.
How telcos fare in the mo-
bile payments space varies
from market to market: in
some cases they have proved a
dominant force, while in oth-
ers they are being left behind.
Interestingly, it seems that the
places where telcos do best in
terms of mobile payments is in
countries where other finan-
cial infrastructure is lagging
One of the most successful
carrier implementations of
mobile payments is the M-Pesa
system created by Kenyan mo-
bile operator Safaricom with
help from Vodafone.
Its service provides an e-
wallet on a mobile phone that
can perform many of the same
functions as a traditional
bank: transfers between users,
transfers between a business
and consumers and even cash
withdrawals at designated loca-
tions. M-Pesa boasts more
than 17 million users in Kenya
and has also expanded into
Tanzania, Afghanistan, South
Africa and India with varying
degrees of success.
However, in many devel-
oped countries carrier m-
payment systems have been sty-
mied by regulators, with many
financial regulators of the view
that payment systems need to
be delivered by banks. In many
countries, telcos would first
need to acquire a banking li-
cence before they can offer the
services that M-Pesa and the
like provide
Mobile carriers don't want
to be left carrying the transac-
tion on behalf of someone
else, however. In the US the
three dominant mobile players
– AT&T, Verizon Wireless
and T-Mobile – have formed a
joint venture called Isis to pro-
vide a mobile payment system.
Isis is also based on NFC
technology and as well as the
carrier involvement it has
signed up payment specialists
including JPMorgan Chase,
Capital One, American Ex-
press and BarclayCard. Howev-
er, the system has already been
delayed – it was supposed to
launch in the first half of 2012
– and it could be swamped be-
fore its starts by more nimble
players that are making waves.
IT'S HIP TO BE SQUARE
One of the most talked about
new payment systems is
Square – a credit card based
payment solution built around
smartphones, tablets, and a
small mag-stripe reader that
plugs into an audio socket.
The technology was found-
ed by some of the people that
created Twitter and has al-
ready processed more than $5
billion in payments on an an-
nual basis, according to some
estimates. In September this
year it raised a further US$200
million in funding, which
would value the company at
more than $3 billion.
Also firmly on the “in” list
is a mobile option from
online payment specialist Pay-
Pal. PayPal is a powerhouse in
the online world thanks in
part to its involvement with
parent company eBay. But
more recently it has an-
nounced its mobile payment
intentions through an alliance
with Discover Financial Ser-
vices, one of the biggest card
issuers in the US.
And yet another name that
is being talked up in the mo-
bile payments space is coupon
specialist Groupon. It has cre-
ated its own mobile payments
system, called Groupon Pay-
ments, that is specifically tar-
getting as competitors both
PayPal and Square. And its
main weapon will be substan-
tially lower transaction costs.
Whether any of these sys-
tems take off in Asia remains
to be seen, although no doubt
they would love the chance to
operate in some of the most
populated and technology-
hungry markets in the world.
Which is why an announce-
ment by the Reserve Bank of
India that it wants to rollout
mobile payments as a way of
encouraging financial inclu-
sion will have the world's
would-be providers sitting up
with interest.
India is already trail-blazing
in the area of mobile pay-
ments. The National Payments
Corporation of India, which
runs the country's ATM net-
work, has also been working
with banks on its own mobile
payments system. Dubbed the
Inter-Bank Mobile Payment
Service, it offers a range of ser-
vices already in the B2B space
and in September this year an-
nounced its first IMPS P2P
(Person-to-Person) service.
Through the service Indian
customers can now use their
mobile phones to pay for eve-
rything from railway tickets to
bill payments and online shop-
ping.
“The whole area of mobile
payments is changing shape
so rapidly that there is no
clear technology standard.”
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According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, only a tenth of India’s 630,000 villages have a bank branch. However, over the past two years, RBI has granted 17 wallet licences to mobile carriers. Perhaps if we want to see the future of mobile payments, India is the country to watch.
Geoff Long
The rural
upstream
phenomenon A new snapshot report of rural US internet traffic has shown a surprise surge in upstream traffic from business users, who accounted for the largest portion of traffic going from end-users to the internet. According to the second quarter 2012 report by Calix, business traffic now takes up 30% of all upstream traffic, beating out internet browsing (19%), telephony and commu-nications (17%) and even vid-eo (14%). “The advent of high speed, reliable broadband connec-tions has resulted in the home becoming a virtual workplace – with a rise in telecommuting as well as an extension of the work environment into the home after normal work hours,” said Calix, the compa-ny behind Flow Analyze, a software-as-a-service tool for monitoring network utiliza-tion. “This has resulted in a significant rise in business-related internet traffic.” According to Calix, this cat-egory of traffic, characterised by its unique security and au-thentication applications like virtual private networks, was also the third largest contrib-uting category to downstream internet traffic (7%).
In total rural US users con-sumed an average of 7.1GB of upstream traffic for the quar-ter, while downstream traffic reached 50.3GB. Not surprisingly, video dominated on the down-stream, accounting for 62% of downloads, with users with fi-bre connections outpacing their copper-based counter-parts. “The factor most strong-ly associated with a high vol-ume of video streaming was a fibre network,” the report said. “Service providers whose networks were entirely fibre saw nearly 69% of their down-stream internet traffic com-posed of video streaming – not surprising when you consider that fibre’s available band-width typically translates into a superior video viewing experi-ence.”
FIBRE HOGS
Across all the applications, us-ers on fibre connections tend-ed to eat up more bandwidth. For the second quarter of 2012, service providers that de-livered broadband services ex-clusively over fibre saw their subscriber endpoints generate 87% more downstream traffic and nearly 10% more up-stream traffic than copper-based subscribers. The percentage of heavy bandwidth users on both net-works, those consuming more than 100GB of data per month, was pretty consistent across both network media.
While 13% of fibre connec-tions qualified for this catego-ry, 12% on copper networks did so as well. However, beyond that 100GB point, fibre’s faster connections allowed users to download far more. As a result fibre users in the over 100GB club accounted for a staggering 70% of overall fibre user downstream traffic, while their copper-based peers only man-aged to eat up 31% of down-stream bandwidth on copper networks. For the quarter, 44% of fi-bre-based endpoints and 38% of copper-based subscribers consumed more than 20GB of traffic. These types of users ac-counted for 94% and 93% of traffic on their respective net-works. Interestingly, as many as 20% of the users on fibre and 13% on copper networks rare-ly used the internet, consum-ing less than 1GB of band-width per month. Another surprise was the fact that what was once the biggest bandwidth hog of in-ternet bandwidth, file sharing, appeared to now be generating only negligible amounts of traffic from rural US residents. According to the report, appli-cations like BitTorrent, Lime-wire, WindowsMX and Kazaa accounted for 1% of the net-work traffic downstream and 5% upstream. Likewise, social media only accounted for 1% of down-load and 2% of upload traffic. “Despite the enormous pop-ularity of such services as Face-book and Twitter, these ser-vices consume relatively little bandwidth (this may change rapidly as video becomes more integrated into social media),” Calix said.
Tony Chan
“As many as 20% of
the users on fibre and 13%
on copper networks rarely
used the internet,
consuming less than 1GB of
bandwidth per month.”
S omething strange hap-
pened on the way to the
launch of the iPhone 5. A
Hong Kong-based company
named Goophone uploaded a
video on YouTube in a bid to
make a claim on the design of
its i5 smartphone, which
looked a lot like the then-
unreleased iPhone 5.
The video, which did the
rounds online and through so-
cial networks, contained some
veiled threats against Apple –
claiming a first to market ad-
vantage with its design. The
gist of the video was that as
the first company to show off
the design, Goophone had
“priority” to it.
On top of that, Goophone
reportedly claimed it has actu-
ally been granted the patent
for the design in China, alt-
hough the reports were unsub-
stantiated.
As it turned out the iPhone
5 did look exactly like the An-
droid-powered Goophone i5.
Obviously, the i5 is no match
for the iPhone 5 in terms of
features and functionality, but
many will be fooled by its
looks. If Apple is adored for its
design, then Goophone has
definitely grabbed some of the
spotlight. The Goophone de-
vice even has an Android
theme that precisely mimics
the look of iOS.
So far, nothing has come
from Goophone’s video, ex-
cept lots of media coverage
both in China and overseas of
the product, and heated specu-
lation on whether Goophone
has the right to actually sue
Apple, or block iPhone 5 sales
in China.
Reactions from the online
gadget media community
ranged from quiet amusement
to blatant disbelief, but the
story did receive at least one
serious article in the San Fran-
cisco Chronicle, which high-
lighted Goophone’s patent
claim as a growing form of
trademark squatting in China.
FROM COUNTERFEITS
No one, it seems, is taking
Goophone seriously as a chal-
lenger in the handset space,
and probably no one should.
Its credibility is suspect at best.
A quick browse of its website
reveals clones of all major
handset brands and their flag-
ship models, including copies
of Samsung’s Galaxy SIII and
Note, as well as the HTC One.
On top of that, multiple vid-
China: the future of mobile? It’s been a few years in the making, but the Chinese handset industry finally looks like it is
ready to assert itself, for better or for worse. While recent news of a blatant Chinese counter-
feiter trying to get the jump on Apple’s design with a YouTube video is painting Chinese
handsets in a bad light, the reality is that there are plenty of legitimate Chinese companies
now coming out of the woodwork with their own brands, platforms, innovations, and maybe
even a Chinese version of Steve Jobs, Tony Chan writes.
eos on YouTube showing users
unboxing parcels supposedly
containing the Goophones Y5
– the company’s iPhone 4S
clone – actually showed an ex-
act replica of the Apple prod-
uct, complete with Apple’s
logo on the back. If those vide-
os are taken as evidence, then
Goophone appears to be actu-
ally counterfeiting iPhones,
which would mean it is break-
ing the law – in any country.
And Goophone is far from
the only clone phone maker
around. A quick scan of an
online retailer of Android
phones yields dozens of clones
of major brands running the
Google operating system. One
manufacturer, Drois, lists 30
models with model names like
Gooapple, Touch, Desire, and
Sensation – all clones of popu-
lar brands.
But as counterfeiting repre-
sents the shady side of China’s
handset sector, what gets put
inside the phones shows an-
other side – namely the ability
for Chinese manufacturers to
produce some impressive prod-
ucts at very low price points.
For example, the i5 is
equipped with a 4-inch dis-
play, quad-core 1.4GHz Tegra
3 processor, 1GB of RAM,
two cameras (8MP rear, 1.3MP
front), Android 4.0, and quad-
band GSM and dual-band 3G
support, specs that can stand
up against most mid-tier mod-
els on the market. More im-
portantly, the Goophone i5
sells for about US$150 in Chi-
na – anywhere between
US$200-US$300 including
shipping worldwide. But coun-
terfeits handsets are only half
the story.
TO THE REAL DEAL
A mature manufacturing eco-
system, a dash of entrepreneur-
ial spirit, and healthy amount
of creativity has given birth to
a vibrant domestic handset
market – and some players
who are making international
headlines.
Yes, there are the estab-
lished big names, like Huawei
and ZTE, who have risen up to
the top of the global handset
market, but there is also a
growing list of other home-
grown brands making their
own waves.
One of the hottest Chinese
brands today is Xiaomi, a com-
pany founded only in 2010,
and whose founder Lei Jun
was recently interviewed by
Forbes. Xiaomi is by no means
a big name yet even inside its
home market of China; as of
September 2012, the company
sold a total 3.5 million phones
since it launched its first prod-
uct in the fall of 2011, which
isn’t much considering Apple
had 2 million orders for the
iPhone 5 in the first 24 hours.
But there is no denying that
Xiaomi is on the up and up.
At a recent launch event for its
second model, simply named
the Xiaomi Phone 2, the com-
pany attracted more than
1,000 attendees, many of
whom paid US$31 to get a
ticket with all proceeds going
to charity. Apparently, Apple
has done the same for Steve
Jobs’ presentations in the past.
So it’s no surprise that both
local and international media
is drawing a close comparison
between Lei and Jobs, no
doubt fuelled by the fact that
Lei likes to do his presenta-
tions wearing a black polo (not
turtleneck) and jeans. But it is
definitely more than his dress
sense that is capturing fans –
and investors, who has report-
edly piled US$500 million in-
to the company, valuing the
company at some US$4 bil-
lion.
XIAOMI
As a handset company, Xiaomi
seems to have all the pieces in
place. For starters, it is offering
a compelling hardware pack-
age that features a 1.5GHz
quad-core processor from
Qualcomm together with a
dedicated graphics chip, which
the company claims delivers
an equivalent graphics capabil-
ity to the original Xbox. It also
claims to offer the highest pix-
el density in the market. In ad-
dition, all the usual features of
a high-end model are there, in-
cluding cameras, HD video re-
cording and 3G. As a bonus,
Xiaomi is now offering a
choice of either a 2000mAh or
3000mAh battery.
More importantly, Xiaomi
has a solid software strategy in
place, traditionally a weak spot
for Chinese handset makers.
While its phones are based on
Android, they use Xiaomi’s
own MIUI user interface. MI-
UI is a heavily modified ver-
sion of Android that some say
feels like iOS or the Samsung
TouchWiz UI.
For its latest model, it intro-
duced multi-screen themes, in-
cluding one built by Angry
Birds developer Rovio. With
this feature, the phone’s
screen acts like a window to a
much wider scene, such as a
real life desktop – or in the
case of Angry Birds, a semi-
playable screen from the game.
Users navigate to different sec-
tions of the larger scene to ac-
cess different applications. In
the case of the Angry Birds
themes, there is even a launch-
er for launching birds.
Another innovative feature
of the interface is an option
for making the icons bigger on
the screen, a simple yet no
doubt useful trick as the
smartphone-using population
begins to age.
There is no guarantee of
success for Xiaomi. Its princi-
pal competitive differentiation
in the marketplace – besides
the celebrity status of Lei, who
has 4 million micro-blogger
followers – seems to be its
price point.
Despite its high-end hard-
ware configuration, it sells its
phones at about US$320, or
less than half of the price of
the iPhone 4S (the latest mod-
el available inside China).
Lei even went as far as to
tell Forbes that the company
loses money for every phone it
sells, claiming that its business
model is based on getting us-
ers to pay for services. At this
point, there is no indication it
has managed to build an eco-
system, like Apple, nor that
anyone is making purchases
from their Xiaomi
phones.
But if anyone can do
it, it might be Lei, who
has already founded
and sold several online
companies – including
an online retailer he
sold to Amazon for a
cool US$75 million.
DOTCOM GOES
MOBILE
So far, because it is a
wholly integrated
handset firm with both
hardware and software
strengths, Xiaomi is al-
most unique among
Chinese handsets mak-
ers – aside from of course
Huawei and ZTE, which have
deep pockets for software de-
velopment and global scale for
distribution.
But there are plenty of other
activities in the mobile space
in China. Like the dotcom era,
which gave birth to huge Chi-
nese online brands like Baidu,
Sina, Alibaba, Tencent and
others, the mobile internet is
increasingly becoming a hot
investment area.
Already, there are at least
two domestically developed
operating systems from Baidu
and Alibaba, both built on An-
droid but each promoted as its
own platform, promising opti-
mised delivery of each compa-
ny’s own set of mostly cloud-
based, services.
The success of these nascent
platforms is still very much up
in the air. Already Alibaba’s
OS, Aliyun, has experienced a
major setback. Its first interna-
tional partner, Acer, had to
cancel a launch of an Aliyun-
powered handset because
Google threatened to pull its
support for Acer’s other An-
droid-powered devices. Goog-
le’s rationale was the Aliyun
took the work that was done
on Android by the Open
Handset Alliance (OHA) and
claimed it as its own.
Acer, as a member of OHA,
should not ship non-
compatible Android devices,
Google argued.
In this case, the argument
can go both ways, but what is
apparent is that money is go-
ing into developing the mobile
internet in China.
Aliyun might have fumbled
this round, but there are plen-
ty of opportunities with other
domestic handset brands. Can
Aliyun get it right the next
time, or the time after that?
Quite possibly. One thing is
for sure though: if Aliyun
can’t, then somebody else sure-
ly will.
“But if anyone can do it, it
might be Lei, who has al-
ready founded and sold
several online companies .”
S witching to a quality-
centric view of net-
works, away from the tra-
ditional focus on larger
and large quantities of
bandwidth, is the single
biggest challenge the tel-
co industry faces, accord-
ing to British telecoms
strategy consultant Mar-
tin Geddes.
CommsDay spoke to
Geddes in the UK about
his argument that poly-
service networks are a
“mathematical inevitabil-
ity” and what operators
and regulators can do to
prepare for the paradigm
shift.
CommsDay: From read-
ing some of your work, it
seems like that the tradi-
tional model of throwing more
bandwidth at applications may
not scale much further.
Martin Geddes: It suffers
from a fundamental problem:
reducing packet serialization
time, the bandwidth model,
ultimately can't dig you out of
contention effects. As you
multiplex more applications
per device and more devices
per user, and more users per
household, and you also archi-
tect your network so that you
have less isolation between
households… isolation be-
tween the flows is going
down, and contention ef-
fects are going up. And the
ability for any one subscrib-
er, or subscribing business,
to contend with other flows,
is waning. And the very
thing that TCP requires to
work, which is space be-
tween loss and delay, is like-
ly to erode.
Some of my colleagues have
been working inside Tier 1
operators and the data very
clearly shows that the outli-
ers of loss and delay, which
is what causes application
failures, are not monoton-
ically correlated with aver-
age loads over, say, fifteen-
minute periods. In other
words, even at low apparent
loads, you get applications
failures occurring. Which
means you can't over-provision
your way out of network fail-
ure. And they're happening,
you get these little flash-flood
effects; the very nature of TCP
makes the network unstable.
TCP is designed to have the
least possible level of stability,
Quality not quantity Petroc Wilton talks to UK industry thought leader Martin Geddes
on why the bulk bandwidth charging model won’t endure
because it creates a control
loop that's as wide as possible.
And not surprisingly, when
you break the basics of control
theory, bad things happen!
As you saturate your net-
work, you get increasingly rap-
id variation in loss and delay,
which makes TCP start to os-
cillate, which makes the whole
network start to oscillate,
which makes it career off the
cliff. And you see it happening
in your networks.
CD: So if I'm an operator -
particularly in these days
where capex has become a very
dirty word and throwing more
bandwidth at problems is not
free - what else can I do?
MG: To solve the problem,
you need to step outside the
current framing of how
[operators] see their business.
You've had this 20-30 year bat-
tle between the 'circuit Catho-
lics' and the 'packet
Protestants', where the circuit
Catholics have said 'reserve ca-
pacity on the path, and you get
a deterministic outcome', and
the packet Protestants say
'yeah, but you don't get any of
the benefits of multiplexing if
you do that…multiplex every-
thing together and damn the
quality! Quality problems - add
more capacity!'
And the resolution to this
is Zen - you have to step out-
side the whole thing to focus
on what's inside, which is that
both of those [points of view]
are locked into a bandwidth
idea of the universe. But the
real resource the network has
is contention… what you have
to manage in the network is
not bandwidth, but conten-
tion. And you flip the whole
problem on its head by saying
'rather than how do I allocate
work to queues, how do I allo-
cate the loss and delay that
comes with contention?'
And when you think about
the network that way, you can
say 'ok - in which network ele-
ments, or where along the
path, is the contention actually
occurring?' You isolate where
the problem is. And then 'how
can I manage the contention
at that point using existing
quality mechanisms or new,
clever maths to do it better?'
There's a very different way
of thinking about networks
that exists, and is possible, and
I've been working with some
mathematicians in the UK
who've been using this stuff in
Tier 1 fixed and mobile opera-
tors - to somewhat spectacular
results. It's a different way of
thinking about the problem.
And what it takes you to-
wards, ultimately, is from a
monoservice to a polyservice
network. Today, when people
talk about multi-service net-
works, they're really multiple
mono-service networks; you
get voice, video and data, but
all three of those come with a
fixed quality. A polyservice
network is able to allocate dif-
ferent statistical bounds on
loss and delay to every flow,
and trade across between all of
them. That's the difference -
and it's like the difference be-
tween black and white or se-
pia, and colour.
The internet's mono-
chrome; it offers a single quali-
ty level. Which means that all
the traffic has to carry the cost
structure of the most demand-
ing applications that you want
to work - which ends up being
bonkers.
CD: Can the techniques
you're talking about be applied
to existing infrastructure? Or is
there an element of hardware
refresh needed to make them
work?
MG: There's two parts to the
problem here, one of which is
using the quality-type thinking
to begin to reason about your
costs and revenues - so it's be-
ing able to start to express that
problem in a language that
makes it practical. Then you
start to isolate where the prob-
lem is today; is it in the back-
haul, in the middle mile, in
the device? What is causing
the accumulation of loss and
delay along the path?
Secondly, how do you man-
age it better? We're talking
fundamentally new algorithms
which could easily be mistaken
“Today, when people talk about
multi-service networks, they're
really multiple mono-service net-
works; you get voice, video and
data, but all three of those come
with a fixed quality.”
for QoS, but it's actually a dif-
ferent category of managing
traffic. QoS is allocating priori-
ty, this is about allocating the
'holes': how do I trade loss and
delay between flows.
You can take any sub-
sequence, any path along the
network and pre-contend the
traffic, so it doesn't self-
contend downstream. It's very
similar to the theory of con-
straint in traditional manufac-
turing.
CD: Could you engineer this
thinking into new national
broadband networks?
MG: Yes. But I think there's a
more basic problem, which is:
what is the nature of supply
and demand on broadband
networks, and how do you
match the two together.
Historically, the way the tel-
ecom industry has worked is it
went out and built supply, as
with the PSTN, at a fixed qual-
ity, and then it set the market-
ing department free and said
'go out and hunt for demand'.
Now, that works in PSTN,
because if you have too much
demand, you'll have a busy sig-
nal - which gives immediate
feedback saying too much de-
mand. But on the internet, the
moment you start finding de-
mand, it starts to destroy the
properties of the supply; the
moment you go from the emp-
ty network to the first custom-
er and the second customer,
the quality of delivery goes
down monotonically with
more customers.
And you get to a point
where the quality degrades
enough that you feel obliged
to invest in more capacity.
So the industry, as long as
it has a single-service network,
has a problem of declining
quality. 2G, 3G, HSPA+, 4G…
the time you've got to recoup
that investment goes down. So
the transition that needs to be
made is from finding de-
mand… to finding supply of
the right quality, and quantity,
to match it.
Which means you need to
start to understand what peo-
ple actually want to achieve
with networks, and what is fit-
ness for purpose - what are the
bounds in loss and delay that
different applications will re-
quire, and what is the hierar-
chy of failure that the custom-
ers want to have implemented.
There's a flip in the nature
of the business - but the discus-
sions around national broad-
band networks are entirely an-
chored in supply, not about
what is the contract between
supply and demand.
The nature of the debate
around these things goes
wrong because it doesn't start
with 'what do these users re-
quire?' Once you start with
[the realization that] all any
network does is deliver pack-
ets, but real networks create
loss and delay… how much of
it are we willing to accept?
Stop talking about bandwidth,
think loss and delay, and what
is the appropriate amount that
you need for the kind of appli-
cations that we forsee people
having. And then you've got to
reason about what the kind of
infrastructure is that you need
to support that.
CD: Who, in your view,
should take responsibility for
shifting thinking in this way?
MG: One party… with a major
stake… is the regulator. We've
been talking to Ofcom, for ex-
ample, in the UK, about the
need to change the basis on
which this market is measured.
So just like the car markets
went from… emphasizing
speed, and then it became
about fuel economy… in tele-
coms, it's gone speed, band-
width, bandwidth, speed, [but]
the next phase is one of
'fitness for purpose', which is
kind of like fuel economy.
And there'll be something
equivalent to safety down the
road, and then pervasiveness,
that'll be something else.
The next thing is, what is
the rate of variation of loss
and delay and contention on
different networks? Because
you can have two networks
that offer the same bandwidth,
one of which is totally useless,
and one of which is wonderful
- because of different conten-
tion effects.
“Stop talking about bandwidth,
think loss and delay, and what is
the appropriate amount that you
need for the kind of applications
that we forsee people having.”
C ornwall, a county at the
southernmost tip of the
UK, presents some serious
headaches for mass broad-
band deployment.
Rural and remote, the area
is sparsely populated, and fre-
quent rainfall can present ma-
jor challenges for civil works
and extensive copper net-
works. But via a public-
private partnership under the
banner of 'Superfast Corn-
wall', there's a new broadband
network rollout already un-
derway - and, so far, running
ahead of schedule. If it stays
on track, Superfast Cornwall
could become the poster child
for successful partnerships be-
tween industry and govern-
ment in broadband deploy-
ments.
CommsDay editor Petroc
Wilton travelled to the UK to
find how the commercial
model for the partnership
stacks up, how the stakehold-
ers are driving and evaluating
demand for the network, and
how the access technologies
are being deployed.
"We're aiming to get FTTX to -
well, [we've] said 80% of prem-
ises, but it will be more than
that,” explained BT's director
for the Cornwall and Scilly su-
perfast broadband program
Dr. Ranulf Scarbrough.
“We're going to call it later;
we like to say when we're sure!
Lots of people put wild claims
out, try deliver on them, and
then don't. So it will be more.”
“And we will do that by
2014. We've got 105,000
passed now, so we're about
40%. And we should, by
March, be about 200,000 give
or take. We've exceeded every
milestone so far.
Because the partnership
model sees the network, its
revenues, and the initial fund-
ing remaining in BT's hands,
the project isn't hostage to the
political agenda of the day - or
obliged to commit to a specific
financial return to public sec-
tor shareholders.
“The funding is committed
anyway; I think they've been
bold here,” said Scarbrough.
“Some other areas have said
'ooh, there's lots of money in
these networks, we want a slice
of that because we're putting
money in.' Well, there's issues
with that. If we start to do it
differently here, then we can't
use our economies of scale...
and it's a difficult business
Superfast Cornwall Petroc Wilton reports on how a UK rural broadband rollout is beating the clock
Superfast Cornwall is a partnership between the European Union, BT
and Cornwall Development Company, the economic development
arm of Cornwall Council. The European Regional Development Fund
is investing up to £53.5 million to make the business case for the re-
gion workable, with BT putting in up to £78.5 million; the telco will
ultimately own the network, with the public return measured in eco-
nomic and social benefits, while a combination of BT's functional sep-
aration and national pricing will ensure equivalence of access at all
levels of infrastructure. The end goal for the five-year project is to
bring faster broadband to all of Cornwall's 250,000-plus premises.
case. If we shared revenues
from it, then there'd be less we
could do. The return on in-
vestment for the public sector
is economic and social out-
comes, and that's what we're
delivering. The jobs, a network
which is there for the long
term - once it's in, we should
have broken the market failure
and it should be completely
sustainable from the ongoing
revenues.”
“We worked very hard on
the consultations; I was in-
volved with the previous pro-
ject here, a thing called Act-
Now which ran with first gen-
eration broadband and pio-
neered the deployment in Eu-
rope. And we learned an awful
lot of lessons about what pub-
lic and private can't achieve on
their own, and what they can
achieve by working together,”
he added. “The operating
model here is relatively simple;
because we've constructed it so
that [BT and the Cornwall De-
velopment Council] both ben-
efit from a good network, we
both benefit from high takeup,
the incentives are lined up
from Day 1, rather than hav-
ing an adversarial contractor-
supplier relationship. And
that's quite elegant, really.”
“This is absolutely our flag-
ship… this model of how we
work together.”
DRIVING DEMAND
Scarbrough cast the local ex-
pertise of the Cornwall Devel-
opment Council as key to ex-
pediting the rollout - helping
to prioritise key business areas
for connection, smoothing lo-
cal planning processes and
consultations, and so on. But
one of the areas where the
partnership model is most cru-
cial, he said, is in driving local
demand.
“The marketing program is
really big. We don't go out
with the Cornwall Council
logo, we don't go out with the
BT logo - it's all about the Su-
perfast Cornwall logo, which is
the brand we've tried to get
people to identify as local, rele-
vant, informative, trusted, and
that's what we go to market
with pervasively,” he said. “It's
tricky, because we're trying to
drive takeup, but we can't sell
anything here - you have to
buy from your service provid-
er! But we're getting good re-
sults; the campaign's pretty
pervasive.”
“I'm stunned by how little
focus there is on it [in other
rollouts]. There's so many pro-
jects working out how to get
all this fibre out there, but not
saying 'okay, but the key thing
is, the more takeup you can
drive, the better network you
can build, because the eco-
nomics look better. And the
better outcomes you'll get'. Ac-
tually, driving the takeup is
probably equally important to
driving the network build.”
At the end of August, there
were just over 12,000 connec-
tions through 27 service pro-
viders across 100,000 premises
passed - most of which only
went live earlier in 2012. ”We
have said, jointly, we want to
get 50% takeup by 2015; the
build runs to 2014. I don't
know whether we'll get there.
“We learned an awful lot
of lessons about what
public and private can't
achieve on their own, and
what they can achieve by
working together”
But having targets you know
you can get to is boring!” said
Scarbrough.
“Our business case doesn't
assume 50% takeup; it's a lot
less than that… and if we only
got halfway there, or three
quarters of the way there, I
think that's a bold ambition to
say 'we're not just going to put
this network out so we can say
we've got fibre everywhere - we
want people connected to it
and benefiting'.”
The partnership is also run-
ning a series of supporting pro-
jects to drive not just takeup
but outcomes, ensuring people
and businesses start to use the
new network productively.
“There's a lot of business
support, a lot of stuff with
skills, quite a lot of stuff on
digital inclusion - so not just
about the early adopters, but
those who have never been on
the internet. We're innovating
anyway on the network, but
we're doing a lot with how
people use it, what are the new
products and services, with the
universities,” said Scarbrough.
“And the council's also leading
its own transformation pro-
gram, to try and exploit the
network and change the way it
operates. It's very holistic; the
network is where most of the
money goes, but it's not just
about the network on its own."
EVALUATION
The other side of driving de-
mand, of course, is actually as-
sessing the social and econom-
ic impact of the network - par-
ticularly since those returns
are the basis of the public in-
vestment in the rollout.
“For your tax dollars, you
will get economic outcomes;
how are you going to measure
that, are you going to measure
that, how do you know if
you're successful? There's actu-
ally quite a big activity to meas-
ure the economic outcomes:
how many new jobs, how
much gross value add, how
many new business startups,”
said Scarbrough.
“It's quite hard to measure,
because you've got to get busi-
nesses to work with you…
we're doing some work in the
autumn looking at the first
businesses that have been con-
nected for a year to see what's
happened, to see what the re-
sults are.”
“We did it on the first gen-
eration project, and we identi-
fied an annual GDP increase
of over £150 million, for
something like, from the pub-
lic purse, about £2-3 million.
So ROI was pretty good. I
think this may be a longer
burn, just because we're a little
bit earlier; lots of businesses
are doing what they were do-
ing faster, or with more people
in parallel, but the new appli-
cations and services are still a
little bit more on the cusp.”
ACCESS TECHNOLOGIES
The 80-90% FTTX target is a
mix of fibre to the cabinet and
fibre to the premise, with
FTTC first on the agenda -
and access equivalency a key
part of the architecture.
"In Cornwall, there's 100
exchanges, and running
through the peninsula are two
backhaul chains… you've got
about 14 handover points that
sit on the backhaul. So the ar-
chitecture is that handover ex-
change and the children
around it,” said Scarbrough.
“You've got Openreach, a
functionally separate division
of BT, as local access business,
providing equivalence of in-
puts to everyone downstream.
So BT Wholesale and others
buy circuits from them on the
same basis, and retail service
providers buy from wholesale."
"From those children exchang-
es, you run fibre from the
handover point, past the local
exchange - so where you have
an exchange you just have an
aggregation node - out to
where the copper junction box
is. And in the case of FTTC,
you're on fibre out to [new]
cabinets, and then the service
runs over the existing copper
down to the enduser… and
whether you're at the hando-
ver exchange, or one of the
children, it's the same price,
the same product, for everyone
in the industry."
Handover points are set up
in exchanges with at least four
local loop unbundlers, and
there are also passive products
like duct and pole access avail-
able, plus sub-loop access.
What it all boils down to is
that any putative service pro-
vider has a choice of whether
to resell or use their own assets
at each level of the network,
from backhaul right though to
access. “We make everything
that we do available to others
to do,” commented Scar-
brough. “No-one else is doing
it with their own capital.
FTTH works as an exten-
sion of the model; where prac-
ticable, Superfast Cornwall is
running fibre rather than cop-
per out from splitters to distri-
bution points located on exist-
ing poles - called manifolds -
and then doing cable drops to
order. But the joint venture is
also looking at extending the
FTTH footprint more broadly
in response to demand.
“Originally, what people
said to me at the start of the
project was 'if you're getting
FTTC, does that eventually
mean you might get FTTP?"
said Scarbrough. "The answer,
until about a year ago, was 'it's
one or the other'… but actually
we've debunked that a little
bit; we've run a trial at St. Ag-
nes, of what is being called
'fibre on demand'. So if you're
in a FTTC area and you want
more bandwidth than we can
provide - and FTTC does up
to 80Mbps, distance-
dependent - then we're devel-
oping a product where you can
order… a fibre-based service. I
think that's going to be more
important, because it means
there's a grow-on capability for
businesses and so forth. The
difficult bit is how you price it
and how you order it.”
Outside the fibre footprint,
Superfast Cornwall has been
considering and in some cases
trialling a range of technolo-
gies, from fixed wireless
(following successful shared-
infrastructure trials with one
of the UK's mobile operators)
and TV white spaces tech,
through to the use of regenera-
tors and SHDSL on existing
copper infrastructure, and
even satellite. But for the mo-
ment, it's holding fibre on de-
ciding where it will actually de-
ploy these alternatives.
“We've got a set of other
technologies, and we've done
trials on things, but we haven't
deployed yet. And people say
'why aren't you getting on with
it?' And the simple answer is
we're trying to innovate and
push fibre as far as we can,”
said Scarbrough.
“If you're in a FTTC
area and you want more
bandwidth than we can
provide - and FTTC does up
to 80Mbps, distance-
dependent - then we're
developing a product where
you can order… a fibre-based
service. ”
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Investing in the futureDelivering today
• National Coverage• Supporting Wireless Networks• Shared, Safe and Resilient
CommsDay: So what's your
theme for the IEEE keynote
you're giving?
Scott Nelson: Fundamentally,
it's that the data explosion that
happened in the wireline
world 10 year ago, and that
hasn't stopped, is now impact-
ing wireless and the conse-
quences of that are quite dra-
matic. We're talking about
nearly 100 percent growth eve-
ry year for the next decade.
People talk about 25 to 30
times growth over the last five
years and there will be another
25 to 30 times in the next five
years and it ain't gonna stop.
CD: And that's now impacting
on the wireless network?
SN: Well the bulk of the traf-
fic still gets carried over the
fixed network, that's the reali-
ty. But it's the growth and im-
pact on the network that's the
issue. There have been dra-
matic changes from 3G to
LTE but that alone is not
enough – you can't get
there just by getting more
spectrum. You can't get
there just by improvements
in modulation schemes.
The cells just have to get
smaller, and that's the big
change. I'm not saying the
other things won't have
their impact – the new
modulation schemes will
help and getting more spec-
trum will help – but you
can't get a lot more spec-
trum at the low frequencies
where you want it.
CD: So spectrum and mod-
ulation and these things
help, but small cells are the
key?
SN: Yeah, to get a thousand
times you're not going to get
there by 5 times improvement
even 10 times improvement in
modulation or even 10 times
more spectrum.
So we're going to get there
with small cells and Wi-Fi and
the consequences of that on
the network are pretty dra-
matic – it needs new tech-
niques to manage that mobili-
ty as you move from cell to cell
and interference issues be-
tween small cells and big cells,
particularly where you can't get
different frequencies. If you've
got the same frequency at the
macro and the same frequency
Small cells are a big deal The use of small cells in mobile networks holds the key to carriers coping with the coming
explosion of data traffic, according to Alcatel Lucent global head of network engineering,
Scott Nelson. He spoke to CommsDay's Geoff Long ahead of giving the opening keynote to
the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' International Symposium on Personal,
Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications in Sydney
in the metro there has to be
pretty tight coordination.
CD: So where are we in terms
of dealing with that?
SN: There are standards
emerging, in fact I think the
standards are already written
it's just a matter of implement-
ing them. The preferred meth-
od of course is to have differ-
ent frequencies. So the macro
cell has the lower frequencies
and the small cells have the
higher frequencies and that
way they don't interfere. That's
where it's going to end up but
we're not going to be there in
the short term.
CD: So for a carrier, would
they be looking at getting the
different frequencies?
SN: Yeah, that's a longer term
preferred model but in the
short term the carriers have
only got what they've got. And
that typically means they've got
to use the same frequencies for
the so-called heterogeneous
networks, or Het-Nets. And
that's simply about the coordi-
nation between the macro and
metro layer, although it's not
trivial.
CD: Telstra not long ago de-
cided to turn off their public
Wi-Fi network, is that going
against the trend?
SN: The issue with Wi-Fi from
that point of view is it's not li-
censed. So at some point it be-
comes it's own worst enemy
and it's hard to control.
Well, there is no control,
it's unlicensed. So people can
interfere with each other and
there's absolutely zero plan-
ning. Now the Wi-Fi standards
themselves overcome some of
that if the cells are small
enough. If it doesn't go out-
side the room you're fine but
as a public offering it's fine but
only up to a point.
The fundamental problem
is that it's unlicensed. So it will
be more personal than public
because it's not going to go
away in the home. The next
versions of it we're going to get
1Gbps from your TV to your
Wi-Fi hotspot in the house.
And interestingly the technol-
ogies that we use to do that are
exactly the same technologies
that we use in other networks
– the modulation schemes, the
MIMOs, all that sort of stuff.
CD: So Wi-Fi and mobile
technologies are coming to-
gether?
SN: Well actually they're com-
ing together with the fixed
world as well, because when
you go right back down to the
bottom of the technology
they're all using OFDM.
CD: What can we expect to
come out of the labs next in
terms of small cells?
SN: The automatic manage-
ment of the traffic and the pa-
rameters to get the network
tuned properly. It's reasonably
complex and at the moment
it's done a bit offline and by
humans. In the future it's self
organising – or Self Optimis-
ing Networks (SON). And
that's fundamentally about re-
ducing the opex.
You've got to get some auto-
mation to it so it's as much
about automating the opera-
tion so you start to get a differ-
ent set of requirements be-
cause of the complexity of how
things have to interwork.
It's no longer big cells but
lots and lots of little ones. And
then there's carrier aggrega-
tion, or figuring out the tech-
nology to get a bit of spectrum
here, here, and here and make
it look like one big chunk
when it's not contiguous.
And that work is still going
on. People know how to do it
but you've actually got to know
how to implement it.
CD: And finally, is there
enough spectrum to meet the
demand for data assuming the
uptake of small cells?
SN: It's a natural resource but
what's interesting is that it's
natural to a degree but the
good thing is that as the cells
get smaller, you can go to high-
er and higher frequencies.
And the higher frequencies
you go to the more bandwidth
you get to.
“The issue with Wi-Fi from
that point of view is it's not
licensed. So at some point it
becomes it's own worst ene-
my and it's hard to control.”
W hen it comes to one of the hottest topics in the net-
working industry today, software defined networking, it is easy to get sidetracked and lost in the growing number of solutions and methodologies being proposed by all the major vendors, particularly for telecoms carriers facing in-creasingly broad technology choices and challenging network requirements. The idea behind SDN might seem simple at first – a network environment that is programma-ble via software – but the way it manifests itself in real service pro-vider network environments is still an evolving process. No one doubts the ultimate benefits of SDN. By handing con-trol of the network to software, SDN not only logically centralises network control; it also allows for the creation of applications that automate network processes, sim-plify resource management, and support new services. What the industry can’t seem to agree on is a systematic methodology on how to bring those features to the market. There is plenty of work being done, most prominently by the Open Networking Forum (ONF) in the form of the OpenFlow pro-tocol standard, but the ONF is far from being the only game in town. An increasing number of network equipment vendors, in-cluding Cisco and Juniper, are
enabling direct programmability of their platforms by opening up their network interfaces to third party developers. And other standards bodies, such as the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF), are now working on specific sets of APIs to enable SDN. “There are actually two imple-mentations going on in the in-dustry today. One is the proprie-tary router market where the hardware and software are pro-vided by one vendor,” said Mar-garet Chiosi, technical strategist at AT&T and leader of a Tech-nical Committee on cloud and SDN at the MEF. “This is analo-gous to the server market where IBM in the 70s provided the hardware and software for that market; not only the software for the operating system, but the tools, the database, as well as the applications.” “The second implementation is the ONF/OpenFlow standard, where the control and the data plane are separate and there is a standard interface defined be-tween them. The controller is open source software that can be provided by one vendor, the data plane is provided by another ven-dor, on merchant silicon, verses custom silicon by another ven-dor. The analogy to the server market, again, is the Unix envi-ronment – or Linux, which is an open-source operating system
based on Intel hardware.” It’s important to note here that neither AT&T nor the MEF are members of the ONF and are by no means endorsing either model. ONF AND OPENFLOW
As its steward, ONF describes the OpenFlow protocol as “the first standard interface specifically de-signed for SDN” that “enables networks to evolve by giving logi-cally centralised control software the power to modify the behav-iour of network devices through a well-defined ‘forwarding instruc-tion set’.” Put another way, OpenFlow asks equipment vendors to sup-port a defined set of application programming interfaces (APIs) on their silicon, thus allowing third party software developers to write applications, such as net-work controllers, that run fea-tures on that silicon. In simpler terms, OpenFlow allows software sitting in centralised servers to tell switches in the network what to do. When it first appeared in ven-dor presentations a little over a year ago, OpenFlow promised a whole new paradigm for network manageability. With heavy-hitting backers that include many of the major names in the telecoms and inter-net space, OpenFlow quickly be-
Defining software
defined networking
Software defined networking promises to revolutionise how networks are built and managed
by decoupling the control layer of networks from the data transport layer. By taking all the
intelligence of a network and putting it under software control, SDN introduces a new net-
working paradigm – one that offers greater control of network resources and enhanced flexi-
bility in management, provisioning and service delivery. Tony Chan reports
came the de facto – some say the most hyped – standard for SDN development in the industry. Today, the ONF has more than 70 member companies, in-cluding all the major telecoms equipment vendors, the majority of global carriers, some of the big-gest internet firms – Google, Fa-cebook, Microsoft, and Yahoo – and a large number of leading IT solutions firms. But while OpenFlow is defi-nitely the 100-pound gorilla in the SDN room, vendors are al-ready highlighting its limitations. For starters, there’s a lot more go-ing on inside service provider net-works than just traffic. They have subscribers, they need to bill for services, they interconnect with multiple other networks. Of course OpenFlow, currently in re-lease 1.3, will continue to evolve, but vendors are already branch-ing out with their own strategies. GOOGLE’S OPENFLOW
TRIUMPH
In an ideal network environment, or at least as ideal a network envi-ronment that Google could cre-ate for a backbone connecting 12 global data centres, OpenFlow is certainly proving its worth. By combining centralised control of the network, traffic engineer-ing and traffic prioritisation, Google is tapping into many of the benefits of OpenFlow, em-bodied by the ability to dynami-cally control different types of traffic on its backbone. Those features now allow Google to run the backbone at close to 100% utilisation, com-pared to the typical network utili-sation rates of between 30% and 40%, Google principal engineer Amin Vahdat told Network-World. The key to Google’s achieve-ment is the ability to dynamically switch different types of traffic in the event of a network failure. W While Google doesn’t have any extra capacity on its network to support the traffic on an im-pacted link – since all the links would be running at close to
maximum utilisation – the ability of OpenFlow to move and priori-tise traffic on the fly means that important traffic that is rerouted from a downed link replaces only low priority traffic on the restora-tion link. “In other words, we can pro-tect the high-priority traffic in the case of failures with elastic traffic that doesn't have any strict dead-line for delivery,” Vahdat said. “We can also route around failed links using non-shortest path forwarding, again with the global view of network topology and dynamically changing com-munication characteristics.” Google’s feat is pretty larger-than-life, if not jaw-dropping out-of-this-world, but can it be replicat-ed in a service provider environ-ment? Like all of Google’s technical feats, the solution had plenty of Google in its creation. For start-ers, Google built its own network-ing gear for the project – albeit because it started it two years ago when no OpenFlow-enabled
equipment was commercially available. It also architected its own software controllers for the network, again because it was ahead of its time. As such, Google was building a completely new network, so it didn’t have to worry about legacy equipment, existing customers and traffic – or, perhaps more im-portantly, cost of migration. Few carriers today can afford to spend two years building a network, and few can built one that is so isolat-ed from other services and net-work elements. Then again, if carriers really wanted to build a network like Google’s, they probably could to-day. A number of vendors – Bro-
cade, Huawei, Juniper, Cisco to name but a few – have commer-cialised, or have demonstrated, OpenFlow-enabled gear in their portfolio. And there are a num-ber of OpenFlow controllers, such as NEC’s Trema, and Big-Switch’s Floodlight, now availa-ble on the market. If carriers put in the time and money, service providers might be able to reap the benefits of Google’s example on part of its infrastructure, but is that enough? NICHE APPLICATIONS
Even staunch backers of Open-Flow such as Verizon, a board member of ONF and a keen sup-porters of OpenFlow, are seeing limitations with the technology in its current form. At a recent conference in the US, Stuart El-by, chief technologies at Verizon Digital Media Services, highlight-ed several gaps between what OpenFlow offers today and where it needs to be to be useful in carrier networks. These include the fact that OpenFlow today focuses on Layer 2/Layer 3, which fails to meet carriers’ requirement for multi-layer network capabilities. Open-Flow needs “to include other transport technologies, including optical,” Elby said. At the same time, he argued that OpenFlow only solves part of the lower-layer networking problem, and doesn’t provide “protocol specifications for major aspects of a SDN ecosystem.” In his slides, Elby showed OpenFlow’s ability to control the data plane, but also highlighted the fact that carriers need much more to fully support services. In one use case, where Verizon is us-ing OpenFlow to optimise video streams to its mobile users, the carrier still have to send traffic back and forth to other network elements, such as a transcoding/transrating box, which optimises the bit rate of streams to mobile devices based on the condition of the radio access network. Verizon also deployed a network cache as
OpenFlow today focuses on
Layer 2/Layer 3, which
fails to meet carriers’ re-
quirement for multilayer
network capabilities
part of the delivery model, as well as a real time traffic modelling unit to feed network data back in-to the OpenFlow controller. Another deployment model feature the use of an OpenFlow controller for real time service as-surance. In this case, OpenFlow’s functionality is limited to control-ling the traffic flow, but it doesn’t solve the complex issue of data collection and orchestration, or offer control of the analytic en-gine required to make sense of the data. While Elby notes “OpenFlow is being applied to niche applica-tions that can immediately bene-fit from its improved economics,” it is also clear from his deploy-ment scenarios that it is not a cure-all to the complexity of ser-vice provider networks and ser-vice delivery environments. SDN IN
CARRIER NETWORKS
One industry body that recognis-es the potential of SDN – though not necessarily in the form of OpenFlow – in operator net-works is the MEF, which oversees the standardisation work behind Carrier Ethernet, essentially a backbone and operating wide ar-
ea network technology. According to the MEF, which has not endorsed OpenFlow but acknowledges the initiative being led by ONF, SDN is applicable to carrier WANs in three distinct use cases. One is resource bursting, where capacity can be turned up instantly to support changing de-mand from applications, particu-larly for supporting cloud compu-ting. Another is network slicing, where a carrier can create a net-work inside a shared infrastruc-ture – much like virtual private networking – but with much greater control in terms of specif-ic paths, equipment location and even protocols. The third is relat-ed to the second: traffic engineer-ing which, as Google demonstrat-ed, offers the ability to run net-works at close to full utilisation. A lot of what the MEF de-scribes sounds similar to Open-Flow, but the MEF is cautious enough not to directly associate itself with ONF’s effort. “Getting back to the relation-ship of MEF to SDN, going back to the original definition of open, programmable and application aware, the MEF Technical Com-mittee is focused on the APIs
needed to dynamically configure, monitor, and managed Ethernet services more easily,” MEF’s Chi-osi said.
BEYOND SDN
The reality is that few vendors in the service provider and carrier network space see OpenFlow and by extension SDN as an end in itself. While some of the biggest names, including Cisco and Juni-per, have adopted support for OpenFlow as well as other SDN technologies, they see SDN as on-ly a small sliver of broader strate-gies to bring network programma-bility to a much larger part of a carrier network. In addition to OpenFlow and SDN, Cisco’s solution now takes the form of its Open Network Environment, or Cisco ONE, ini-tiative, which encompasses the entire solution stack from transport to management and or-chestration. As part of Cisco ONE, the company has released One Plat-form Kit (onePK), a software de-velopment kit delivering a set of APIs to all of Cisco’s operating systems and hardware platforms. So instead of just abstracting the switching layer with SDN,
Alcatel-Lucent’s top down approach to network programmability While the industry warms up to software defined networking and its ability to bring programmability to networks, Alcatel-Lucent is making a move of its own, but from a completely different direction. The company has so far steered well clear of SDN and OpenFlow. Instead, Alcatel-Lucent is attempting to add pro-grammability to service provider networks from within the networks themselves. Through its Open API Platform (OAP) initiative, described as “an end-to-end API Monetisation and Optimisation software solution” for service providers, the company is actually focusing on existing APIs already found in networks and helping service providers take advantage of them. What Alcatel-Lucent is talking about is not a set of network interfaces or schemes like SDN, but a set of services that help service providers to identify, manage, and deploy the APIs already inside their network. In this way, OAP assumes from the start that networks are programmable – its goal is to help service providers define what they should do with it. “What Alcatel-Lucent is doing is saying, here’s an ability that you have in your network, what is interesting around that, and how do we think about making that programmable,” said Laura Merling, who heads up Alcatel-Lucent’s API Strategies and Solutions. In this sense, network programmability is not about giving software access to the underlying equipment, but ser-vices access to the network, the classic example being the ability for applications to self-provision resources from the network. “You want to give an enterprise the ability to say, ‘what’s the status of the network, and is it available for me to send this big data now?’ and then to be able to invoke burstable bandwidth to support that transport,” said Merling. In other words, Alcatel-Lucent’s approach centres around exposing a service provider’s network capability to applica-tions. So while OpenFlow and other SDNs are focus on giving network builders programmability of the underlying hardware, OAP is working on exposing that programmability to high-level applications.
Cisco ONE aims to also abstract higher service layers from the net-work into programmable interfac-es, albeit Cisco controlled inter-faces. “My perspective is that service abstractions are a vital next step in the evolution of network pro-grammability,” said David Ward, VP, service provider chief archi-tect and CTO at Cisco. “Abstractions will allow for the definition of layered APIs and NPIs (Network Programming Interfaces). Enabling multi-layered APIs across all of the un-derlying network elements will be a critical first step to ensure inte-gration with operator develop-ment environments.” A similar approach has been adopted by Juniper, which has had a software development kit for its JUNOS network operating system for some time. Late last year, Juniper added the source code to its implemen-tation of OpenFlow to the SDK, along with support for other SDN platforms, such as BGP-TE (border gateway protocol-traffic engineering), PCE (path compu-tational element), and ALTO (application layer traffic optimisa-tion). It’s apparent from their roadmaps that industry stake-holders see OpenFlow, and SDN, as key components for networks going forward, but it is also clear
that it will be just another feature among a host of other program-mable capabilities in service pro-vider networks. OPENFLOW NOW
That doesn’t mean service provid-ers should wait, says Charles ‘Chuck’ Jones, vice president of Worldwide Systems Engineers at Brocade. “The biggest risk is for service providers and carriers not to adopt an OF and SDN strategy. If they don’t do that, they are going to be left behind from a competi-tive perspective,” Jones said. “In that planned develop-ment, I think they will have eval-uate certain feedback from their vendors, and the industry, the di-rection of OpenFlow and adop-tion timing of OpenFlow and so forth.” He does recognise however that the landscape will continue to change, especially over the next year as OpenFlow evolves. On the other hand, he also firmly believes that adoption is inevitable. “There’s a lot to be done in the standardisation, in the de-ployment, I think it will take more time than it should because any time you roll out and deploy new and innovative ideas, there’s some barriers to overcome with comfort with the technology, the reliability,” he said.
“I think what you’ll see in the next weeks and months is the proof of concepts, small produc-tion networks that are being de-ployed now, and the expansion of the capabilities. I would pre-dict that at the end of 2013, there’ll be wider adoption and ac-ceptance of the capabilities, and customers will start to look for places to deploy it.” One area that might kickstart the adoption is what Brocade dubs the hybrid mode model. “Brocade has announced, and I think no one else has announced this, a hybrid model. Right now, the OpenFlow protocol is written with the idea that network devic-es would be 100% OpenFlow en-abled,” said Jones. “Brocade, with a little bit of pragmatism, has said that is probably not always going to be the case.” The company is now propos-ing a solution that carves off bandwidth for OpenFlow applica-tions and OpenFlow functionali-ty, while reserving part of the net-work’s resources for running tra-ditional environments. “Effectively what it is creating is a combination of what we called hybrid mode. It creates comfort for early adopters that the experimentation, and the im-plementation, won’t compromise their existing customer base and so forth,” said Jones.
Why Cisco is not afraid of OpenFlow
It is easy to understand why vendors such as Cisco might have reservations about OpenFlow and by extension software
defined networking. After all, OpenFlow offers to take a lot of the value from existing vendor platforms by taking the
intelligence out of hardware and putting it inside servers running applications.
As Google’s Vahdat puts it: “What OpenFlow and software-defined networking really enables us to do is separate
the evolution path for hardware and software. In other words, you can get the hardware that meets your needs and
separate that from the software that meets your needs for a particular deployment. Historically, those two things have
been wedded together.”
That might be the case for Google, but the reality for telecoms operators extends far beyond the ability to move
traffic around more efficiently at the transport layers of the network.
“SDN, network virtualization and overlay networks (choose your favourite descriptor) are not going to commoditize
the underlying networking infrastructure. These architectures actually place more demands on the core infrastructure
to enable network virtualization securely, with high performance, at scale,” wrote Padmasree Warrior, chief technology
officer at Cisco, in a blog post. “Why? Because customers expect their core infrastructure to be seamlessly integrated
with servers and fabric interconnects. They want a common management framework across all switches (physical and
virtual)… SDN no more minimizes the underlying infrastructure than a new steering wheel undermines the im-
portance of a car engine.”
A s Huawei continues its
rapid program of global
expansion, the vendor is re-
making its image in a bid to
move on from the suspicion
and controversy that has dog-
ged some of its international
operations. In recent weeks,
the firm has even been peti-
tioning governments in both
the USA and Australia to
end what it says is unfair dis-
crimination based on na-
tional security concerns.
But Huawei’s campaign
to change its image also en-
compasses a major internal
overhaul – restructuring its
take on corporate govern-
ance and internal audit un-
der the leadership of Phil
Tarling, the chairman of the
global Institute and Internal
Auditors.
CommsDay editor Petroc
Wilton caught up with Tarling
at a recent Sydney visit to dig
into his role in Huawei’s new
transformation drive.
CommsDay: Can you outline,
in general terms, what you’re
doing at Huawei?
Phil Tarling: My official ti-
tle is VP of the Centre of
Excellence for Internal Au-
dit. My role is to develop
the internal audit function
within Huawei globally to
bring it to what they want -
to be leading edge. They
want Huawei to be looked
at by everybody else and say
'this is what we need to do,
this is the model that we
need to follow’. That’s pret-
ty exciting, both for Huawei
and for me, because it does
Internal affairs How Huawei’s Phil Tarling is driving image change from the inside
push expectations and be-
comes quite a challenge when
at the same time the company
is converting from being a
Chinese company with inter-
national offices to a global
company with, potentially, a
Chinese office.
The Centre of Excellence is
based in the UK; it was delib-
erately based there because of
the provenance that the UK
has in good corporate govern-
ance, having led the world
from the very beginning with
the Cadbury reports and those
sorts of things in corporate
governance… there’s two sides.
There’s the internal audit
side, which is really making
certain that we’ve got the prop-
er systems in place, the right
controls that the business
needs to achieve what it needs
to achieve, and then you’ve got
the investigators.
One of my other roles, and
probably one of the reasons
why Huawei searched me out,
is that I’m the [chairman] of
the global institute of internal
auditors at the moment… so
I’m sort of involved at the pin-
nacle of the profession, as it
were. So I have some pretty
good contacts around the
world, and I’m hoping to use
them! And that’s what we’re
hoping to do going forward…
rather than re-invent every-
thing, to bring everything in
line with best practices.
CD: So it’s not just a limited
financial role; it covers broad-
er business processes and cor-
porate structure?
PT: It’s the whole thing: busi-
ness process, corporate struc-
ture. At the moment, we’re do-
ing the tough audits, the ones
that haven’t been done. For
example, we’ve just recently
done an audit of foreign ex-
change; nobody had ever
looked at Huawei's foreign ex-
change management. For a
global firm, that’s very im-
portant! Whilst the manage-
ment team had been aware of
it, and the foreign exchange
guys had been working on it,
there’s never been this in-
depth audit of ‘exactly what do
we do, are the business pro-
cesses correct, or have they just
sort of come up over time’
The guys that I’ve got have
vast experience of internal au-
dit. One of them is ex-
government communications
HQ in the UK, so he’s got the
telecoms background as well as
the audit background. The
other guy is ex-risk manage-
ment in Cisco, so again he’s
got a telecoms background,
but he’s also got this risk man-
agement audit side.
We're building up people
from across the globe. At the
moment, we have about 170
people in internal audit and
investigation around the
world; we do have authority to
go up to 300. We’ll work our
way up to that, rather than try
and do it in one big splash, be-
cause we want to make sure we
get everything right first before
we start getting lots of num-
bers. At the moment, the ma-
jority of them are Chinese na-
tionals; we’ve got to build it up
through time so that we get a
better spread of who we need.
To deal with, say, audit in Bra-
zil… you need a bit of
knowledge of the local culture.
CD: How much of a challenge
“The Anglo-Saxon way doesn’t
work – it might work with my
Anglo-Saxon colleagues but it
certainly doesn’t work with the
Chinese.”
have the cultural barriers been
so far?
PT: My Chinese director Zuo
Chuan is basically my conduit
into how to get things done. It
would be silly for me to say
‘I’ve been there nine months
and I actually understand Chi-
nese culture’; that’s nonsense,
I don’t. I’m getting to under-
stand some bits of it, but with
Zuo Chuan, he makes sure
that I’m sort of on there… so
I’ll say to him ‘look, we need
to do this’, and he’ll say ‘right,
the best way to do that is this
way’. Because the Anglo-Saxon
way doesn’t work – it might
work with my Anglo-Saxon
colleagues but it certainly
doesn’t work with the Chi-
nese. So you have to be keen
to that sort of difference.
[But] we’re able to go any-
where we want in the compa-
ny; I decide what audits the
Centre of Excellence is going
to do, nobody else tells me.
And whilst at the moment, the
main audit team are doing the
general program, the Centre is
looking at those areas that
aren’t usually audited, or have-
n’t been audited – all those
sorts of areas. And I think the
fact that we’re allowed to do
that speaks a lot for the open-
ness that we’re pushing.
CD: How far will your role,
and that of your team, go to-
wards improving Huawei’s
profile globally? In particular,
especially in the United States,
there’s been quite a lot of con-
troversy around Huawei’s links
[to the Chinese state]; even in
Australia, we had an issue
where it transpired Huawei
had been excluded from NBN
tenders.
PT: The Global Institute of
Internal Auditors is actually
based in Orlando in the US,
so I’m going to be very much
the face of internal audit in
the States as well – and every-
body will know that I’m a VP
at Huawei! So it’s going to be
interesting.
I have said to my colleagues
in the Institute about this, and
they’re relaxed with the fact
that I’m employed by this com-
pany which appears to be hav-
ing a few problems with the
US government!
The interesting thing to me
is that they seem to be forget-
ting all the things that we’ve
done to try and provide a little
bit of comfort to them.
For example, we’ve set up a
cyber-security centre in the
UK; we’ve got John Suffolk,
who’s an ex-government com-
puting guy in the UK, working
on cyber-security issues for us.
That centre is totally inde-
pendent; we just fund it. We
let them get on; they have full
access to all our products.
Now, if there are any back-
doors or anything in anything
that we’re issuing, they’ll find
it – and they have the inde-
pendence to be able to find it
and then blow the whistle.
We’ve got so many oppo-
nents out there – competitors,
shall we call them – that if we
had back doors, they’d find
them, and they’d be shouting
from the rooftops: ‘hey, look,
we found the Huawei back
door!’ In Europe, for example,
Alcatel, Ericsson, Nokia;
they’re all sort of saying ‘hey,
this is stupid, we need compe-
tition; the only way we’re go-
ing to grow is the competitive
edge’. And if you start pulling
that competition out, the only
losers, actually, will be the tele-
coms industry… because some
of the patents that we hold are
necessary for the US compa-
nies to go forward. And if they
start restricting us, then they
may lose out themselves on
taking things forward.
I think by looking at the
transparency that we're offer-
ing through internal audit,
through having an audit com-
mittee, all those sorts of things
for good governance – I think,
in the end, we’ll be able to per-
suade people that it’s not all
bad… it’s a company doing
business, and wanting to do
business.
[And] I think in the end,
the force of change will actual-
ly make it happen.
“In Europe, for example,
Alcatel, Ericsson, Nokia;
they’re all saying ‘hey, this is
stupid, we need competition;
the only way we’re going to
grow is the competitive edge’.
T elevision white space is
the unoccupied band-
width that exists between TV
channels in the UHF spec-
trum. The technology has
great propagation characteris-
tics in terms of distance and
its ability to penetrate build-
ings. So why isn’t it being
more widely considered as a vi-
able alternative to dedicated
spectrum?
Ericsson Australia head of
strategic marketing Kursten
Leins says while mobile net-
works could be theoretically
adapted to utilise TV white
space, there remained a lim-
ited amount of usable white
space spectrum “due to the
need for guard-bands to pro-
tect against service interfer-
ence.” He also points out the
inverse relationship between
population density and the
volume of spectrum available.
“In areas of low population
(i.e. rural areas), there may be
larger amounts of TV
whitespace available; however
due to the low population, de-
mand for spectrum is corre-
spondingly low also. By con-
trast, cities with high popula-
tion densities also have many
primary and secondary TV
broadcasting sites, creating a
much more heavily utilised TV
spectrum band and therefore
far less spectrum is potentially
available for serving high-
capacity, high-density urban ar-
eas,” he explains.
Indeed, TV white space has
been strongly mooted as some-
thing of a rural broadband so-
lution. Independent wireless
technologist Simon Saunders,
of RealWireless, earmarks ru-
ral broadband and machine-to-
machine applications as per-
haps the best fit for TV white
space technology.
“With M2M, machines are
potentially in very different
places to people, so that’s help-
ful – the transducers, the grids
you might want to monitor,
the hospitals you might want
to connect up to patients in
rural areas – that has a very
different profile to typical mo-
bile traffic and population
movement generally… and
might well make use of white
space,” he says.
“It doesn’t actually need
that much bandwidth com-
pared to some of the other ap-
plications; most machines just
need a reliable long range con-
nection but not a lot of band-
width. So that can be quite op-
portunistic – and that’s often
not time-critical, if there’s a bit
of interference for a while, it
can hold onto that traffic and
Cashing in on white space Mobile network operators across the globe are all coming to terms with the reality that spec-
trum, by its very nature, is a finite resource. And with the data explosion forcing service pro-
viders to think outside the box, TV white space technology is entering the conversation as a
potential complement to existing spectrum assets. David Edwards reports
Rural broadband and
machine-to-machine applica-
tions are the best fit for TV
white space technology.
transmit it later on. So it does
seem that the M2M and the
rural broadband applications
are a better fit than some of
the sorts of offload and mobile
and LTE alternatives that have
been vaunted for this.”
Other players have suggest-
ed using TV white space for
wireless broadband back-
haul. In Australia, the Com-
monwealth Scientific and In-
dustrial Research Organisa-
tion’s Ngara Access technology
– originally designed as wire-
less access using TV white
space to deliver broadband ser-
vices over existing broadcast-
ing infrastructure – can now
also be used for backhaul. The
CSIRO’s Jay Guo says that
both wireless and access “have
their merits in different sce-
narios.”
Alcatel-Lucent’s department
head of autonomous networks
and system research Holger
Claussen also sees a real op-
portunity for backhaul via
white space technology in Aus-
tralia over the next five years.
“To take advantage of all the
equipment that’s out there al-
ready, using it for backhaul
makes a lot of sense,” he said
at a recent IEEE conference.
According to Claussen, TV
whitespace is robust enough
for something as important as
a backhaul, especially with a
large number deployment of
small cells in a network.
ANTENNA TECH
“I think with appropriate an-
tenna technology… if you
formed the beam so that you
really have a point-to-point
link between the small cell and
the point where you have the
fibre backhaul, this way you
can reject a lot of the interfer-
ence and the spectrum can be
reused by others as well, so
that’s could be a possibility,”
he says
“It doesn’t solve the prob-
lem if the spectrum that is
available changes dynamically.
But I think the kind of ap-
proach is using some database
– which is not very exciting I
think – but maybe more dy-
namic approaches of sensing
when spectrum is used locally
and then switching over can
be used later on.”
There’s no escaping the fact
that TV white space is unli-
censed spectrum – like Wi-Fi
is – and that’s one of the main
reasons mobile network opera-
tors are cagey about using it.
Saunders explains that as soon
as multiple applications pop
up to use the spectrum, they
have to contend with each oth-
er for that available band-
width.
“So the applications…
[including M2M applications],
will follow very different proto-
cols and standards over the air
– in fact most of them are en-
tirely proprietary. So the way
they will manage with respect
to each other is a completely
unknown quantity at this
point,” he says.
“There are some moves to
establish conventions at least,
but [if] one device is using
some variant of LTE, another
device is using the wireless
protocol that people have pro-
posed for M2M, and some-
body else is adopting a kind of
variant of WiMAX that’s [to]
be used for small cell backhaul
– [those] protocols don’t know
anything about each other,
can’t detect each other [and]
can’t be intelligent about coor-
dinating among each other, so
you run into some serious in-
terference issues.”
One thing that may go a
long way to address these con-
cerns is across-the-board stand-
ardisation of frequencies. A
new study from PolicyTracker,
‘Developing a Global Ecosys-
tem for TV White Spaces’,
concludes that over the next
two years, a number of major
tech standardisation efforts
will be completed, opening up
the gates for a substantial vol-
ume of TV white space devices
to flood onto the market.
However, TV white space
technology remains, for the
most part, unharmonised.
Saunders says that the tech-
nology faces a tough challenge
in terms of creating a mobile
device that can tune across the
whole frequency band. “It’s a
very wide range, 470-862MHz.
If you wanted a phone that
could work anywhere in the
world and make the most of
any white space band, it’d
have to be in that [spectrum
bracket]… and that’s a huge
challenge,” he says.
When it comes to regula-
tion, the US and UK – via the
FCC and Ofcom, respectively
– have led the way in moving
towards utilising TV
whitespace for wireless broad-
band, with other countries
now beginning to follow suit.
But author of the aforemen-
tioned PolicyTracker study,
Catherine Viola, maintains
that regulation – not technolo-
gy – remains the main barrier
Regulation – not
technology – remains the
main barrier to progressing
with white spaces
to progressing with white spac-
es, with respondents citing a
slow pace of introducing white
space rules, uncertainties stem-
ming from the World Radio-
communication Conference
2012 decision on a second dig-
ital dividend in International
Telecommunications Region
1, unduly conservative protec-
tion requirements for incum-
bent services and a lack of reg-
ulatory harmonisation as fac-
tors that still need to be ad-
dressed.
Saunders agrees that this
possible second digital divi-
dend is looming as a potential
hurdle to white space ac-
ceptance, adding that opera-
tors view white space as either
an “add-on complement to do-
ing things in other spectrum…
or as a negative – something
that is not helpful from their
point of view and creates com-
petition they’re not keen on.”
“And it’s not reliable
enough from their point of
view to put their brand to it
and make it off to customers.”
“ I don’t see it being at all
positive for existing mobile
network operators… [and]
while some of them will inves-
tigate the potential, on the
whole they see it as not helpful
and a potential impediment to
them getting a second digital
dividend in a timely fashion,
and they’re in no doubt they
need that and as soon as it can
possibly be made,” he ex-
plains.
2ND DIGITAL
DIVIDEND
“For example, the mobile in-
dustry as a whole – notably
through the GSMA – has a
very strong lobby now for a se-
cond digital dividend, and this
white space uncertainty is one
of the hottest topics in those
groups around what they need
to do to ensure that doesn’t
derail the momentum behind
this second digital dividend.”
But Viola says that despite
the aforementioned regulatory
barriers, consensus is building
around using geolocation data-
bases to manage white space
devices, which in turn is acting
as a catalyst for white space
rule making. “As regulators
start to align behind geoloca-
tion, PolicyTracker expects the
pace of regulation to accelerate
and a harmonised, multi-
regional regulatory approach
to TV white spaces to emerge.
That, in turn, will provide the
clarity and certainty that tech-
nology developers need to
complete the various white
space standards without delays
and bring commercial solu-
tions to market,” she says.
Regulation aside, Heavy
Reading analyst Tim Kridel
adds that operators’ mindsets
will have to change before the
technology becomes a com-
mercial reality. Quoting a re-
cent Heavy Reading report on
TV whitespace, Kridel says
that “positive experiences with
Wi-Fi offload could make
those sceptics receptive to us-
ing TV white space for aggre-
gation, offload or both.”
“Sceptics also would want to
see TV white space technolo-
gies in extensive commercial
service without aggregation so
they can scrutinise and vali-
date vendor claims about their
products' ability to share spec-
trum and deliver a certain lev-
el of QoS.”
But while TV white space
does present opportunities to
network operators, Erics-
son’s Leins says that the funda-
mental business consideration
for mobile broadband service
providers remains “their abil-
ity to provide a consistent and
predictable service to end us-
ers.”
“Today, this is achieved
through the use of dedicated
spectrum allocation for indi-
vidual operator services,” he
says. “It is important to re-
member that network perfor-
mance is a key differentiator
between service providers, and
while use of white space may,
in the future, potentially pro-
vide additional secondary ac-
cess capacity, it is not consid-
ered as an equivalent alterna-
tive to dedicated spectrum.”
“It is important to remem-
ber that network perfor-
mance is a key differentiator
between service providers”
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