WCA January 2014

Telecom news

conference in London, in which he asserted that Ericsson had moved beyond vision into demonstration: of service chaining and a variety of opportunities with customers who “can be unleashed by being able to programme the network.” What remains to be done, he said, is “to connect into real big clouds with this kind of technology.” That blending of carrier and cloud network functionality is still some way from being realised, Ericsson’s chief technical officer acknowledged. The aim of Service Provider SDN – to provide opportunities for networks inside the cloud to be connected to the WAN while letting the WAN be controlled from applications in the cloud – is “something that is totally impossible today,” according to Mr Ewaldsson. (“Ericsson CTO Bangs SDN Drum,” 16 th October). At the heart of Service Provider SDN is software and a major transformation of the OSS layer, which would morph in its role to include control over the network in addition to operations and maintenance. Ericsson envisions the evolution of the OSS into a control plane for the entire network. Mr Ewaldsson urged that this not be misinterpreted as a centralised control point. Rather, he told Ms Donegan, the OSS software will be distributed across all the elements in the network – as in radio base stations, routers, or datacentre equipment. The network elements would house software that is part of the OSS system, he explained, while there would also be a more centralised management capability. “That’s different from a datacentre, where someone says ‘I’ll sell you an SDN controller,’ and what happens is a piece of hardware sits somewhere in the datacentre,” he said. “That’s not the vision that we have of how this will be realised.” Ø Ericsson is not, of course, the sole telecom equipment vendor with this kind of vision for SDN in carrier networks, notes Caroline Chappell, a senior analyst at Heavy Reading. In her new report “Managing the Virtualised Network: How SDN & NFV Will Change OSS,” she puts Ericsson — along with Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco Systems, Inc, and Nokia Solutions and Networks in the

According to the 2013 State of Broadband Report from the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), last year the nation with the highest percentage of people using the Internet was Iceland, with a 97 per cent usage rate. The top 10 countries all had usage rates above 88 per cent and all but two – New Zealand and Qatar – were in Europe. With its 81 per cent rate the US ranked 24 th worldwide in the percentage of residents who use the Internet, the ITU said. As noted by Joan Engebretson of Telecompetitor (22 nd September), the ITU “got a lot of attention” with its report for 2012 of twice as many mobile broadband subscriptions as fixed broadband sub- scriptions worldwide. A year later, it was projecting more than three times as many mobile subscriptions as fixed subscriptions globally by the end of 2013. The new ITU research, presented on 22 nd September in New York at a meeting of its Broadband Commission for Digital Development, identified five countries with mobile broadband penetration rates above 100 per cent, indicating that people in substantial numbers have more than one mobile broadband connection. Singapore, topping the list with a mobile broadband penetration rate of 123.3 per cent, was followed by Japan, Finland, the Republic of Korea and Sweden. The US ranked ninth worldwide in mobile broadband penetration, behind several Asian and European countries and Australia. Just under three-quarters (74.7 per cent) of American citizens use mobile broadband, the ITU said. Writing that the report “contains some interesting data to illustrate the positive economic and societal impact that broadband can have,” Ms Engebretson cited these highlights of that data: Ø A 2013 study from the mobile operators’ association GSMA found that mobile health (patient-oriented health-care apps) could save developed countries $400 billion in 2017 Ø Small and medium-size enterprises that spend more than 30 per cent of their budget on web technologies grow their revenue nine times as fast as SMEs that spend less than 10 per cent, according to 2012 research from the global management consulting firm McKinsey Ø According to research conducted by Arthur D Little and Chalmers University of Technology for Sweden’s Ericsson, a doubling of broadband speed can increase GDP (gross domestic product) growth by 0.3 per cent on average in member-countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. The OECD includes the world’s most developed nations Ø The Little and Chalmers research found an average rise in household income from an upgrade of 4-8 Mbps in broadband speed of US$120 per month in OECD countries. The research also indicated that, in OECD countries, the greatest increase in income may be expected in households that go from being without broadband to having 4 Mbps. Such households gain $182 per month, the researchers said. The threshold to higher earnings is a broadband access speed of between 0.5 Mbps and 2 Mbps. ITU: Broadband speed – key to growth and prosperity for nations and households – is on the rise worldwide

Ericsson’s high-level vision of making networks more relevant is being moved, cautiously, into demonstration mode “After nearly a year since he introduced the term ‘Service Provider Software-Defined Networking,’ Ericsson

CTO Ulf Ewaldsson is ready to provide an update on the Swedish vendor’s vision of the programmable wide area network (WAN) and what it will mean for OSS platforms.” Contributing editor Michelle Donegan of Light Reading was reporting on her interview with Mr Ewaldsson on the sidelines of the recent GigaOM Structure Europe

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Wire & Cable ASIA – January/February 2014