CEO Germain Lamonde on EXFO’s launch of two integrated LTE network lifecycle products. He tells Keith Dyer how operators can launch and operate LTE networks quickly and efficiently without having to re-educate or train their network engineers.
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Kontron announces its market-readiness for Intel’s 8-core Xeon processor E5-2600 family, with both an ATCA Blade product and a NEBS-Compliant communications rack mount server.
Read more about Kontron’s new Intel-based products here.
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To better meet the mobile data traffic growth, Italy’s leading operator, 3 Italia has signed an extension of its network transformation agreement with Ericsson. Ericsson wil upgrade 3 Italia’s existing 3G mobile broadband access, core and transport network to support 42Mbps HSPA and 100Mbps LTE.
A press statement from Ericsson said that by the end of March 2012, 3 Italia will be the only operator in Italy to offer up to 42 Mbps downlink coverage and up to 5.76 Mpbs in uplink on all its nationwide network and have the network ready for commercial launch of 100 Mbps LTE in 2012.
Vincenzo Novari, 3 Italia’s CEO, says: “Thanks to our continued successful cooperation with Ericsson, we will remain a reference for innovation and network development in the Italian market. We are taking another step toward meeting the demand for mobile broadband connectivity and services from Italian consumers and enterprises. We are making HSPA+ coverage available on the entire nationwide network from the end of March and will launch LTE services already in 2012. Our network will become even more efficient at handling data traffic, ensuring a better quality of experience for our customers.”
Nunzio Mirtillo, Ericsson’s head of Region Mediterranean, says: “We are encouraged to see this endorsement of 3 Italia’s trust in us as prime partner. We believe strongly in supporting operators that intend to remain competitive and are wisely investing in upgrading their networks to ensure the best possible coverage, capacity and performance for their users. It is great to help our long-term partner, 3 Italia, continue its transformation into high-speed mobile broadband and LTE at a time when dynamism and innovation are so important.”
The deal marks another step in the long-standing collaboration between 3 Italia and Ericsson, which started in 2001 when 3 Italia chose Ericsson as the main partner for its 3G core and access technology. In 2005, the operator assigned Ericsson as exclusive partner for managed services of its multi-vendor network and telecom IS/IT infrastructure. In 2009, 3 Italia awarded Ericsson a network transformation deal to upgrade its WCDMA/HSPA network and extend the managed services deal.
At MWC12 Anritsu and Signalion showcased what Mobile Europe understands to be a first live LTE-A demo between device and base station simulators – featuring carrier aggregation, 300Mbps downlink throughput rates and two-vendor interoperability. Two band-1 component carriers with 20 MHz bandwidth each were aggregated resulting in a total bandwidth of 40 MHz. The demo is hosted by Jonathan Borrill, Anritsu.
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Operators must manage and profit from the growth of mobile data services across their networks, and find monetisation models for third party content and data. Diameter signaling will play a vital role, says Tekelec’s Jason Emery.
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Juniper Research is sticking fairly closely to its earlier forecasts by predicting that “NFC will facilitate” transactions valued at $74bn by 2015. This is over treble the estimated value of this market in 2011, Juniper said, and is roughly in line with forecasts Juniper made in 2009 and 2011.
In June 2011, Juniper forecast that global NFC mobile contactless payment transactions would reach nearly $50 billion worldwide by 2014. Back in 2009, Juniper forecast that the value of NFC payments in 2012 would total $30 billion. Now the analyst house thinks that the market will be worth $74 billion in 2015.
Juniper’s current Mobile Commerce Markets report shows that the rapid adoption of mobile devices for commerce-related applications is by no means limited to NFC. All segments – money transfers, banking, payments and coupons – are forecast to exhibit significant growth rates.
Report author David Snow said, “Our report demonstrates the spectacular growth we see across all segments of the mobile commerce market. Four of these segments (money transfer, physical goods, NFC and coupons) will more than treble in transaction value over the next three years, whilst digital goods, banking and tickets will still on average, double over the same period.”
The Juniper report, however, stressed that mobile commerce providers need to keep security issues in mind. Even if there is a perceived, if not actual, security risk in the mind of users, not only the specific mobile commerce application, but also the whole mobile commerce market may be set back until user trust is recovered.
Further findings include:
• SMS is the key to widespread mobile banking service adoption
• Without interoperability mobile money transfer services will struggle to gain a critical mass of users.
• Whilst mobile coupons still represent the smallest mobile commerce segment, it is demonstrating the highest growth rate.
LTE introduces new security requirements and elements to the network. What are operator options for deployment, and who will be providing the solutions? Patrick Donegan, Senior Analyst, Heavy Reading, talks to Keith Dyer.
(This video is produced in association with Mobile Europe sponsor, Radisys)
There were rumblings last week. There were grumblings the week before. This week, Free Mobile’s patience finally snapped, as it struck out against what it claims is an organised smear campaign against it. For a rundown of the claims and counter-claims involved, and some specific accusations that have been put to Mobile Europe, head on over to our story on the whole business.
For what it’s worth, from the briefings I have had I think it’s more of a disorganised smear campaign, although the leaking of a report critical of ARCEP’s methodologies this week was a little…suspicious.
But whatever the truth, the fight is getting bitter, and many in France feel it didn’t need to be this way.
French mobile operators are privately bemused by Free’s approach. It’s not just that Free Mobile came in cheap in its pricing, they knew that was going to happen. It’s that fact that it shot so very, very low. In the view of the incumbents, Free is destroying value in an entirely unnecessary way. One operator told me that they cannot work out the sums in any other way as to make Free’s model completely unsustainable, as a standalone business.
If Free had bought in to the generally cosy “plenty of room for all” mentality then things would have been just about bearable. But in its determination to utterly detonate the market, it is threatening everyone.
It’s not as if there aren’t other markets with four players, but even where one of them is very aggressive in it pricing, things have been sustainable. Take Spain, where three major carriers are represented in Telefonica, Orange and Vodafone, and Yoigo is fulfilling the role of the low cost outsider.
Or take the UK, where again Three has taken the role of the bundle-happy fifth, and now fourth, operator. In both those cases there is a sort of toleration of the fourth placed player, an understanding that in the end, massive scale will not suit the operational capability of the underdog.
The other aspect of the Free row is that it is not all-the-rest versus Free. The incumbents are squabbling amongst themselves too, over the wholesale deal that Orange cut Free. Orange insists that it offered normal rates, and is not the cause of Free’s ability to offer such low rates. Such lack of unity is likely to cause them to race lower in their own pricing, in an effort to win customers from each other, to replace those heading to Free.
Meanwhile Free gives every impression of loving the disruption it is causing amongst its bigger cousins. This week, for example, it innocently let slip that those very operators (SFR, Bouygues) that are criticising Orange for facilitating its market entry themselves offered Free far more competitive terms than Orange.
Not only does this call the other operators out as hypocrites, but it has the added insult of letting them know that Free chose Orange because it thought it had the best network.
It’s not all doom and gloom in France though. This week representatives of all three, er, four operators assembled to praise their initiative in bringing mobile coverage to the Channel Tunnel. Naturally, the French side of the Tunnel would get coverage first, on kit provided by a French (sort-of) company (Alcatel-Lucent). The slow old Rosbifs won’t get around to equipping their side of the tunnel until after the Olympics. This successful example of French endeavour was signed into being in the presence of Trade Minister Besson, to complete matters.
There was no mention, though, that the company providing the bulk of the actual in-tunnel systems is, whisper it, English. Vive La Difference.
Keith Dyer
Editor
Mobile Europe
Free Mobile’s entry to the French mobile market has caused an almighty outbreak of accusation and counter-accusation, leaking and selective briefing.
At stake is the future profitability of the incumbent French mobile operators, so the stakes are high. Just today, unions at SFR reported that they had been warned to expect more redundancies than previously negotiated, partly as a result of the impact that Free Mobile’s low priced tariffs are having on the industry.
The arguments have centred on two key areas – the extent and quality of Free Mobile’s network, and the viability or otherwise of the roaming agreement it has signed with Orange.
There have been repeated rumours, and some public accusations, that the configuration of Free Mobile’s network means it is carrying far less traffic than it could do. Free Mobile has repeatedly denied this.
Yet suspicions persist.
Mobile Europe has itself heard a senior Orange executive make two specific allegations. First, that Free’s network operations team have set antennas up with very narrow “beams” – effectivly reducing the coverage area. Second, that the base stations are configured to operate at lower than maximum power levels, again with the effect of reducing the coverage of each base station site.
There is a third, less obvious, accusation that we have heard: that Free Mobile’s SIMs are configured to instruct the handset to “ping” the network only every 30 minutes, instead of a more usual 15. This has the effect of initiating fewer cell handovers, it is alleged, and as there are far more Orange cell sites than Free Mobile sites, a Free user is likely to remain registered on Orange’s networks for longer. Of course, the reverse would also be true, once a user is registered with a Free Cell, it would stay on that cell for longer (see below for more on how Free’s network design could be affecting that).
Iliad-owned Free mobile, whose 3G network is being rolled out by Nokia Siemens Networks, has a license requirement to cover, at present, 27% of the country’s population. The French regulator ARCEP said last week that the operator has achieved 28% coverage, therefore meeting its license requirement.
Then yesterday, a leaked report from advisory body ANFR that was due to be submitted to the regulator at the end of the month, is reported to have concluded that ARCEP’s test methodologies were insufficient to assess the real life user experience of a Free mobile customer. Specifically AFNR said that by using only SIMs “locked” to Free Mobile’s network, ARCEP was missing out on the actual user experience, where users would be roaming on an off Free and Orange’s network.
Partly in response to that leak, Free Mobile released a statement hitting back at an “organised smear campaign” against it, restating that its network coverage is meeting regulatory requirement, according to pre-agreed methodologies.
Iliad’s CFO Thomas Reynaud admitted that 90% of its users’ traffic is currently handled by Orange. Free Mobile, however, insists this is a function of its poor in-building coverage (it is not due to receive 900MHz spectrum till January 2013) and of other operators’ obstructive attitudes to allowing access to sites and towers.
Other queries have been raised as to the extent of Free Mobile’s network, given that ARCEP also revealed that Free had met its coverage obligation by deploying just 735 base stations (although by the time ANFR carried out its report, that number had risen to above 900). Whether 735 or 900+, that number of sites would indicate that, in fact, Free’s cells must be, typically, quite large. Free Mobile has itself said that it has just 10 antennae covering the whole of Paris.
That could also explain why devices are roaming onto Orange sites more often. That is because a larger cell in an urban environment would reach capacity pretty quickly, and an affected device would therefore automatically seek handover to the best available cell (Orange’s). That could result in Orange seeing an unusually high number of devices attaching to its sites, without Free necessarily “manipulating” network signalling, as alleged.
The question many would ask is, “Why would Free want to handover traffic to Orange?” It has built out its network, so surely it wants to justify its capex and operational expenditure? Well, the suspicion is that Free finds it cheaper to offload traffic to Orange than to carry it itself, and also that, as we have seen, Free’s network simply can’t carry any significant volume of traffic.
Orange signed a national roaming contract with Free mobile that has been criticised by other operators. SFR’s CEO Frank Esser told Le Monde that Orange’s willingness to sign a roaming deal that will earn it €1 billion in wholesale revenues in six years had enabled Free mobile’s entrance to the market. So why did Orange sign its roaming agreement? That’s a murky area. Some Orange executives feel that their hands were tied by the regulator’s determination to bring a fourth player to the market. “Free is Arcep’s baby,” one executive told us. The terms of the deal have not been exposed publicly, although Orange says that ARCEP knows what they are, and is happy with them. And it insists it is offering Free Mobile only normal market rates.
Orange provided Mobile Europe with this statement: “The pricing specified in our contract are (sic) at market prices and completely coherent with the prices that we offer our MVNOs. It is certainly not through the national roaming prices that Free has found the financial means to put its current offers on the market.
“The traffic generated by Free customers, for the moment and to the extent that we can measure it, is significant. In terms of volume it is considerably higher than the estimates that both us and Free had anticipated. Technically we are dealing with this situation. Clearly, there will be financial consequences of this, probably in the form of additional revenues beyond the amount that was initially anticipated.”
So that is a reiteration from Orange itself that it makes money on the roaming deal, despite what the other operators allege.
Just yesterday, Free lobbed another grenade into the roaming fight by saying that those operators that have criticised Orange for the deal it struck had themselves offered Free “far more competitive” terms than Orange. “These operators who were eager to conclude this contract with Free Mobile now condemn the principle of roaming,” a Free Mobile statement said.
In any case, Free Mobile said, in the long term it needs to have its network up and running. “Roaming is a transient need. The profitability of this undertaking can be achieved only by deploying the network,” its statement said.
Finally, there is the issue of Free Mobile taking advantage of financial mechanisms to subsidise its cheap packages. Some in the incumbent operators also feel that Free is banking on something known as asynchronous repricocity in termination rates to subsidise the incredibly low rates it is offering its callers. The mobile termination rate in France is currently 1.5 euro cents a minute. That will be lowered to 1 cent per minute from July and finally to 0.8 cent on Jan 1, 2013.
But Free mobile (along with some MVNOs) is excepted from these rates, and is able to charge rates of 2.4 cents a minute currently, and 1.1 cents per minute min from Jan 1, 2013. This differential will last until January 2014, until the final rate settles at 0.8 cents per minute for all operators.
That means that if an Orange, SFR or Bouygues user, say, calls a Free mobile customer, Free will be able to charge Orange more for terminating that call than Orange could charge Free for calls terminated on its network.
It’s not an unusual mechanism to encourage new entrants, however, and is one that was used to foster Bouyges’ introduction to the market when it entered as a new number three
Meanwhile, Iliad has now said it will take legal action against “anyone who makes disparaging comments about the veracity of its coverage or its investments.” Will that be enough to silence the doubters – in private and public? It seems unlikely.
This 60 page guide Understanding LTE, provides an essential reference for engineers wanting to gain a better understanding of LTE. The guide contains a comprehensive overview of LTE technology and the testing issues it presents to both the engineer and the network operator. Contents cover LTE/SAE introduction, LTE Physical Layer Structure, Self Optimising Networks, Impact on users of the technology, Testing challenges and MIMO Testing plus much more.
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