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Wire & Cable ASIA – March/April 2014
Telecomnews
Ericsson’s high-level
vision of making networks
more relevant is being
moved, cautiously, into
demonstration mode
“After nearly a year since he
introduced the term ‘Service Provider
Software-Defined Networking’,
Ericsson CTO Ulf Ewaldsson is ready
to provide an update on the Swedish
vendor’s vision of the programmable
wide area network (WAN) and what it
will mean for OSS platforms.”
Contributing editor Michelle Donegan
of Light Reading was reporting on
her interview with Mr Ewaldsson
on the sidelines of the GigaOM
Structure Europe conference, held
in London last Autumn, in which he
asserted that Ericsson had moved
beyond vision into demonstration:
of service chaining and a variety of
opportunities with customers who
“can be unleashed by being able to
program the network.” What remains
to be done, he said, is “to connect
into real big clouds with this kind of
technology.”
That blending of carrier and cloud
network functionality is still some
way from being realised, Ericsson’s
chief technical officer acknowledged.
The aim of Service Provider SDN – to
provide opportunities for networks
inside the cloud to be connected to
the WAN while letting the WAN be
controlled from applications in the
cloud – is “something that is totally
impossible today,” according to Mr
Ewaldsson. (“Ericsson CTO Bangs
SDN Drum,” 16th October).
At the heart of Service Provider
SDN is software plus a major
transformation of the OSS layer,
which would morph in its role to
include control over the network
in addition to operations and
maintenance. Ericsson envisions the
evolution of the OSS into a control
plane for the entire network.
Mr Ewaldsson urged that this not
be misinterpreted as a centralised
control point. Rather, he told Ms
Donegan, the OSS software will be
distributed across all the elements
in the network – as in radio base
stations, routers, or data centre
equipment. The network elements
would house software that is part
of the OSS system, he explained,
while there would also be a more
centralised management capability.
“That’s different from a data centre,
where someone says ‘I’ll sell you an
SDN controller,’ and what happens is
a piece of hardware sits somewhere
in the data centre,” he said. “That’s
not the vision that we have of how this
will be realised.”
Ø Ericsson is not, of course, the
sole telecom equipment vendor
with this kind of vision for SDN in
carrier networks, notes Caroline
Chappell, a senior analyst at
Heavy Reading. In her new
report “Managing the Virtualised
Network: How SDN & NFV Will
Change OSS,” she puts Ericsson
– along with Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco
Systems Inc and Nokia Solutions
and Networks – in the category
of “big picture SDN and NFV
management vendors.”
For her part, Ms Donegan noted
that Ericsson is not necessarily
leading that vendor pack. She
quoted Ms Chappell: “Ericsson
is being very cautious about this.
They’re saying, ‘We’ve got to get
this right.’”
Elsewhere in telecom . . .
Ø China’s Ministry of Industry
and Information Technology
will allow China Mobile Ltd, the
world’s largest mobile network by
subscribers, to enter the fixed-line
broadband market in China, state
broadcaster CCTV reported
on 4th December on its official
website. Previously only China
Unicom Hong Kong Ltd and China
Telecom Corp Ltd, the other two
Chinese telecom networks, were
able to offer fixed-line broadband.
As noted by Paul Carsten of
Reuters, the report came on
the same day that the ministry
gave 4G licenses to the three
networks, allowing them to roll
out commercial services using the
high-speed mobile network.
Ø According to GSMA estimates,
the number of LTE connections
worldwide could reach one billion
by 2017. The mobile operators’
trade association places the
current LTE total at 176 million
connections but expects con-
tinued build-out over the next
three years to double the number
of networks with LTE capabilities,
for a total of 500 in service within
128 countries.
While this essentially means
global saturation, LTE would
even so account for about only
about one in eight of the world’s
mobile connections. TelecomTV
One has pointed out that many
LTE subscribers are, at current
rates, likely to be “falling back”
to switched 3G and even 2G
networks to make voice calls
by 2017, when large numbers of
HSPA, HSPA+ and 2G networks
are likely to still be functioning.
As noted by the website’s I D
Scales (28th November), the
roll-out will be somewhat uneven.
The US now accounts for 46 per
cent of global LTE connections;
Korea and Japan, most of the
balance. Taken together, the three
leaders represent 80 per cent of
LTE in the field. By 2017, however,
expansion in India and China will
likely boost Asia to accounting for
47 per cent of LTE connections
worldwide.
Ø Mexican mobile operator Nextel
Mexico has said that it invested
$1.5 billion last year to upgrade
its current 4G network and plans
to launch a 4G LTE service in
mid-2014.
COO Gustavo Cantú told Patrick
Nixon of Business News Americas
(29th November) that the LTE
network would reach the main
urban centres across the nation,
including Mexico City, Guadalajara
and Monterrey. Additionally,
Mr Cantú said in a statement, the
company has strengthened its
strategic alliances with Motorola,
BlackBerry, Huawei, Alcatel and
HTC, offering smartphones like the
Moto X; Huawei’s Mate and Muse
Angel; and the One S, from HTC.
With reference to the
telecom-sector reforms signed
into law in June and designed
to curb the dominant players,
Nextel Mexico said it would
encourage debate on such issues
as new interconnection pricing
mechanisms. One of these,
“bill-and-keep”, is a reciprocal
arrangement whereby one
network will terminate calls from
another network at no charge.