WCA MAY 2015

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Wire & Cable ASIA – May/June 2015
Telecomnews
Once the Telecoms Council states
its position, then the Commission,
Parliament, and Council must
negotiate on rules that they all can
endorse.
“As it looks now, this will be a hard
confrontation,” Ms Schaake was
quoted as saying. “The goals of the
Council are currently far off from the
necessity to shape the economy of
the future.” (“Net Neutrality Fight
Looms in Europe As MEPs Prepare
For a Hard Negotiation With the
Council and Commission,” 3rd March)
At Mobile World Congress 2015,
held 2nd to 5th March in Barcelona,
Spain, Digital Economy and Society
Commissioner Günther Oettinger
raised a voice for the service
providers. With a focus on 5G (the
apparent European industry strategy),
he called for a stance on net neutrality
that takes into consideration the
interests – and the investment
potential – of the telecoms.
“We need a balanced approach,”
Mr Oettinger said. “On the one hand
no blocking or throttling of online
content, applications and services. At
the same time guaranteeing efficient
network management and leaving
space for continued network and
service innovation.”
Ø As to predicting the likely outcome
of the “hard confrontation”,
Mr Scales of TelecomTV
recommended “reading between
the lines with a strong magnifying
glass and under ideal lighting
conditions.” He did hazard the
guess that a ‘permissive’ version
of specialised services would be
negotiated into the single-market
legislation.
Elsewhere in telecom . . .
Ø A committee of the Australian
Parliament is inquiring into the
question of “how to deal with the
authorisation of a disclosure or
use of telecommunications data
for the purpose of determining the
identity of a journalist’s source.”
The inquiry followed on a
recommendation by the
Parliamentary Joint Committee
on Intelligence and Security that
it conduct its own review in the
matter. A report is expected by
4th June.
Ø The annual telecommunications
report for 2013-14 from the
Australian Competition and
Consumer Commission, published
6th March, shows that the prices
paid by consumers for telecom
services fell by 2.7 percent over
the year.
Crediting competition for the
improvement, the independent
statutory authority also said
that the average real prices of
landline and mobile voice calls
have fallen by around 50 per cent
since 1997-98. According to the
ACCC, Australian broadband
customers are also benefiting from
larger data allowances and faster
speeds.
Ø The US Air Force is reviewing
whether or not to open its
future GPS-III satellite buys to
competition, in part because of
late delivery by Lockheed Martin
(Bethesda, Maryland) on the first
one. As reported on 6th February
by Tony Capaccio of Bloomberg
News, the USAF is under contract
with Lockheed for eight GPS-III
satellites, with options for four
more. But the service says that
the first of these – set to launch in
January 2016 – will be 26 months
late.
The head of USAF space
acquisitions, Major General Gen
Roger Teague, told reporters that
the delay influenced a decision
to conduct market research to
determine whether companies
under consideration are capable
of competing. Gen Teague said:
“On programs that just aren’t
executing, you just can’t continue
to pour money” [into them].
Mr Capaccio wrote that the USAF
plans to purchase a total of 32
GPS satellites.
Ø The laptop continues to be the
first choice of US workers who
use mobile devices, according
to various studies collated by
Forbes magazine (“The State of
the Mobile Enterprise,” 6th March).
Some 51 per cent of mobile
workers opt for a laptop, 40 per
cent for a smartphone, and 19 per
cent for a tablet.
Android devices were found to
be popular among workers in
manufacturing, transportation and
high-tech, while the iOS platform
is favoured in the legal, finance
and public sectors. According
to Forbes, workers access an
average of seven mobile apps per
day – double the number of times
a worker logs into a legacy system
daily.
Ø Neustar on 5th March announced
it had reached agreement with
the Canadian Local Number
Portability Consortium (CLNPC)
on an extension of its current
contract, now set to run through
2017.
The Sterling, Virginia-based
information and analytics firm
has served as the group’s
administrator for both the US and
Canada for 18 years.
CLNPC president Jacques
Sarrazin said that, as the future
administrator for the USA had not
yet been conclusively determined,
this short-term extension with
Neustar is the prudent course.
Should a transition take place,
CLNPC will be in a position to
evaluate the new vendor prior to
any commitment by the Canadian
service provider community.
“For HP, the Telefónica deal
is a nice win that includes
a stack of infrastructure,
services and software.”
Editor Larry Dignan of SmartPlanet
was reporting on the systems and
networking integration pact with
Spanish broadband and telecom
provider Telefónica announced on
3 rd March by Hewlett-Packard. The
win is welcome news for HP (Palo
Alto, California), which had just said
that its networking unit struggled
in the fiscal first quarter. HP cited
execution issues in China and the
USA.
For its part, Mr Dignan wrote,
Telefónica is looking to move away
from its proprietary architecture to
virtualisation-powered UNICA. It
will also use HP’s software-defined
networking tools. Telefónica said
it intends to virtualise non-critical
systems, move to virtual-core
networking technology, and then use
virtualisation for home subscriber
servers, among other applications.