Networks are increasing in their complexity, both in terms of cascaded filtering (e.g., via ROADMs in mesh networks) and multiple-bit/symbol modulation formats. For instance, intra-channel noise will increasingly be spectrally carved by filters, the signal bandwidths will frequently be as large as the effective channels widths, and different data rates will be used more and more on a given network. All these factors will affect wavelengths differently, as some wavelengths might have passed through a different number of ROADMs, data rates in a single fiber might vary from one wavelength to the next, etc. Nevertheless, OSNR remains a critical network performance parameter, which requires OSNR measurements optimized on a per-channel basis, like the WDM-aware technique. Purely polarization-based OSNR measurement techniques (e.g., polarization nulling) can perform well when networks and noise sources remain simple, but as demonstrated herein, the robustness and performance of WDM-aware measurement renders it well suited for advanced network architectures and modulation formats.
Carrier Ethernet Basics Educational Series
A comprehensive guide to network and service performance testing—which is comprised of six informative modules, specifically designed to assist you with Carrier Ethernet service testing.
Chap. 1: Carrier Ethernet Basics – an in-depth look at Carrier Ethernet, presents the network services and applications, and provides an overview of the key Carrier-Ethernet technologies.
Chap. 2: Carrier Ethernet Testing Technologies and Methodologies – the different testing standards including the new ITU-T Y.1564, as well as the key elements of service lifecycle management and Synchronization.
Experimenting and Deploying IEEE 1588v2 (PTP Gide)
To meet exploding bandwidth demand, mobile operators are upgrading backhaul networks to packet-based technology. This transition brings a major challenge: maintaining synchronization, a mandatory requirement for mobile network stability and handset handoff. As Ethernet is an asynchronous technology, newer methods and standards have been introduced to implement synchronization over Ethernet. Namely, IEEE 1588v2 PTP is becoming the choice solution for synchronization distribution, as it uses an exchange of timestamp between master and slave devices, thus providing frequency, phase and time sync over the existing Ethernet infrastructure.
This paper proposes a deployment strategy for operators and carriers interested in PTP. More specifically, it presents the five deployment phases that lead to a fully functional and stable PTP-based synchronization network: network survey for real-world metric measurement; benchmarking of various solutions to identify the best one; configuration and turn-up of PTP pipes; synchronization performance monitoring; and troubleshooting of PTP and synchronization-related events.
Determine your mobile subscribers’ QoE in real time
As the expectations of mobile subscribers continue to rise, swift resolution of network issues is critical. To reduce customer churn, network operators must be able to quickly identify the source of network issues. To minimize OpEx, the results of network analysis must be available in real time. In light of this challenge, EXFO’s experts have produced the highly valuable white paper, How to Get a Detailed View of Your Subscribers’ QoE in Real Time, which investigates the options available for determining subscriber Quality of Experience—in the era of increasingly complex and evolving networks
Three Views of Multiplay Convergence
In a converged multiplay world, service assurance becomes more important than ever before. With a nod towards Hokusai’s “Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji”, this white paper describes three views of multiplay convergence (revenue, CAPEX and OPEX) and shows how a converged multiplay service assurance solution benefits all three.
Telenor settles Vimpelcom claim
Telenor has called off an arbitration claim, lodged in January 2011, to protect its voting rights in Russian operator Vimpelcom.
The operator has announced that it has bought 234,000,000 VimpelCom preferred shares from Weather Investments II (Weather), for US$374.4 million. Weather is the investment vehicle through which Naguib Sawiris and his family hold their interests in VimpelCom.
Weather gained its shares in Vimpelcom when Vimpelcom acquired WIND Telecom early in 2011. Telenor protested at the time that it would not accept a diminution in its voting rights.
At the time, Telenor held 36% of the voting shares, but saw that fall to 25% after the Vimpelcom/Wind merger. The deal just agreed now bumps Telenor’s voting share to 36.3%, with Alfa Group’s Altimo Telecom holding 25% and Weather’s voting share reduced from 29% to 18%.
The deal is intended to stabilise the ownership and government of the company, and the parties say they have also “entered into certain put and call arrangements regarding the remaining 71,000,000 VimpelCom preferred shares held by Weather”.
“This transaction takes Telenor to approximately the same voting position as a successful outcome of the arbitration process would have achieved, and is therefore a commercial solution we are happy with,” said Jon Fredrik Baksaas, Telenor’s CEO.
“The withdrawal of the arbitration claim will prevent further dilution of the VimpelCom shareholders, and it will enable a more normal corporate governance situation in VimpelCom. We will work to expand the VimpelCom Board to eleven members.”
“I am very happy about this transaction which will allow Weather to participate actively in the Supervisory Board of VimpelCom, will foster improved corporate governance of the company and ensure a better focus of the management on industrial issues in a context in which the existing disputes among the key shareholders have been resolved,” said Naguib Sawiris.
TE Connectivity announces Copenhagen Metro deal
TE Connectivity supplies DAS to underground system
TE Connectivity today announced that its FlexWave Prism Distributed Antenna System (DAS) has been deployed to provide clear and consistent mobile coverage for multiple mobile operators throughout the Copenhagen Metro subway system. The subway system spans 21 km from the island of Amager to Copenhagen City in Denmark. The TE Connectivity DAS covers the underground section of two nine km parallel tracks as well as eight underground stations in the centre of Copenhagen, providing mobile service in the most important part of the metro system and connecting Copenhagen City to the airport. The Metro and DAS services more than 1,000,000 passengers per week.
The FlexWave Prism system replaces a legacy DAS that was having performance and reliability problems. In addition, the older DAS had active elements in train tunnels – it was necessary to maintain these active elements, however access to the tunnels was severely restricted. The FlexWave Prism system eliminated active elements in tunnels and lowered the number of active elements in the system from more than 50 to 13, significantly reducing maintenance costs while improving reliability. In fact, the Prism remote units are virtually maintenance-free. Another significant saving is the removal of the eight local base station locations deployed throughout the Metro with a central base station hotel, which supports multiple operators from one central location, reducing OPEX and improving reliability.
The new DAS is project managed by Niras, supports GSM900, and can be easily upgraded to support DCS, UMTS-HSPA, and LTE services. The all-digital RF transport throughout the DAS ensures consistent power levels and performance everywhere in the system, no matter how far a remote unit is from its base station. This is a significant improvement of the pervious cascaded system, with improved downlink and uplink signal levels, quality and higher data performance.
“With its combination of stations, tunnels, and elevated trackways, the Copenhagen Metro was an ideal candidate for our FlexWave Prism DAS, and we are honoured that the Danish mobile operators selected our solution for this strategic and important infrastructure in Copenhagen,” said Chris Jurasek, vice president and general manager, Wireless and Services at TE. “Our success in Copenhagen follows other major urban street level and subway deployments, demonstrating that our solution scales to meet the needs of any urban transportation system.”
Femto Forum Becomes Small Cell Forum
The Femto Forum today announced it is to be renamed the Small Cell Forum.
The Forum will address all small cells that operate in licensed spectrum, are operator-managed and feature edge-based intelligence – including what have been dubbed femtocells, picocells, microcells and metrocells. It will also support the crossover between small cells and other relevant technologies including: Wi-Fi, cloud RAN (which connects cellular radio to cloud-based intelligence over fibre), Distributed Antenna Systems, as well as macrocells as part of the new heterogeneous network (hetnet) environment.
The role of the Small Cell Forum will be to tackle the practical challenges facing deployment. This includes finding appropriate small cell sites; delivering power and backhaul; managing interactions between small cells, macrocells and other wireless technologies; and effective interoperability and network management. This continues the work of the Femto Forum which has been actively working on small cells outside the home for some time, as well as their interactions with other technologies. Examples of this work include integrated Femto/Wi-Fi devices and networks; enterprise multi-femto architectures; public access small cell interference management; standards and management processes which are generic across all small cell types; and LTE small cell standards for all environments.
“Femtocell technology was originally designed for the home but has since extended into enterprise picocells, urban metrocells and modern microcells for all manner of locations. The core technologies developed by members of the Femto Forum – including Systems on a Chip, provisioning systems, standardised gateways, and other related innovations – lower the cost of licensed band solutions and facilitate easy deployments for all small cell products. As such it is the ‘small cell’ banner that now best represents these technologies,” said Simon Saunders, Chairman of the Small Cell Forum.
A new orthodoxy?
Alcatel-Lucent began the week by launching its new CEM portfolio. This might just be the dullest opening sentence to a weekly newsletter ever, but there is some importance to it.
What we are seeing is the major network equipment vendors continue to reposition themselves not as, just that, equipment vendors, but as enablers of Customer Experience Management. The fact that you might buy a few base stations from them is incidental to the most important thing, helping you position yourself as the most proactive, responsive, intelligent goddam service provider out there.
How to do this, or how to be this, is something the NEPs profess enormous knowledge of, although, of course, that’s not new. They have been building up their managed services and consulting capability for years, and all that professional services capability needs something to be professionally serving. Alcatel-Lucent in particular has long had a long suit in BSS. I can remember seeing presentations about its end to end services capability years ago, drawing on convergent charging and billing capabilities, through OSS skills (really network element management), service creation and delivery, through to the actual network equipment itself. NSN bought subscriber data management specialist Apertio in 2008, and built a SDM and now CEM practice on that acquisition, adding it to its existing network data smarts. Ericsson too has had major presence in charging and billing type solutions through the likes of LHS and now it has added Telcordia, which gives it a big boost in OSS stuff like service assurance. All of them, of course, offer those network and systems integration capabilities.
So the vendors realised a while ago that all the data they have churning out of their switches, through their charging and billing systems, through their element management and monitoring systems could, if used in association with more customer-facing data,such as charging and billing info, be very useful stuff to an operator looking for an edge.
The battle is not so much in convincing operators the worth of this. They are on board, and have pushed off from the quayside already. Many operators, for example, have a Chief CEM Officer, or similar, who is in charge of making sure that right across the business, units are thinking about what they do in terms of how it affects the customer experience.
The battle is, why work with the NEPs? This is really about shifting data around business units, or rather making data available to business units in a way that makes sense to that unit. And the NEPS, even if they are accepted as being the sort of companies who could do this are (excepting NSN) late to this game. The major players like Amdocs, Oracle, HP, and a host of companies with more focussed, point solutions, are already out there. There have been some big investments in NEP CEM: they are not all going to pay off.
Now, here’s something that might put a dent in a few power point presentations at Mobile World Congress – evidence from Vodafone that is is seeing the annual doubling in data traffic volume start to look more like an annual 20% growth in volumes. For the second quarter in a row the operator said that it had matched data volumes to data revenues growth, at around 20%. I don’t know how many business cases are being built on projections of continuing “n” times growth in mobile data traffic, but it certainly spans everything from new antenna design to WiFi offload to content optimisation to network optimisation to the perceived need for operators to charge content providers for driving bandwidth demand.
It’s just one operator, of course, and a couple of quarters, and there are still many users out there yet to get on the smartphone train. But it will be interesting to see if a new orthodoxy builds around the view that policy, user controls and traffic management have done their job, and the networks are coping OK, thank you.
Indeed, perhaps we’ll go back to seeing demand for solutions that drive traffic across the network, as the operators look to up their data packages. Guaranteed HD video over mobile as a differentiator, anyone?
Rebtel Surpasses 15 Million Users and 500 Million Calls
Rebtel, the world’s largest mobile VoIP company after Skype (based on revenue), today announces it has hit 15 million users worldwide. Rebtel has made significant strides since its inception in 2006 with a total of 500 million calls ever made and two billion minutes of international calls logged.
Rebtel has been profitable since 2010 and its average revenue per user (ARPU) is three times higher than Skype. Skype currently operates an ARPU of around $8 per month; Rebtel’s ARPU is around $24. Rebtel’s figures show it increased revenues by more than 55% in 2011 and hit $60 million in revenue. Its predicted the revenue run rate for December 2012 lies at $95 million. The milestones come at critical time in the company’s history as Rebtel is currently growing at a rate of 500,000 users per month.
The company attributes its success to its dedication to core business values of transparency, honesty and cutting-edge innovation focused on helping people communicate internationally. Its customer loyalty is high with 96% of users stating they would recommend Rebtel to a friend during its customer satisfaction survey in December 2011. Rebtel’s word of mouth recommendations are an integral part of its growth as it drives registrations and accounts for over two-thirds of new user registrations.
Andreas Bernström, CEO at Rebtel, says: “2011 was a great year for us. Our new set of international calling apps with KeepTalking technology were well received; we generated 13 times more downloads in Q4 than Q3 as a result of the launch. We also expanded the our workforce by almost 50% and increased our user base by 50% to 15 million users. 2012 will be more of the same. We are focused on growing our user base, we aim to add up to ten million to our user base this year, as well as maintaining high revenue run rates and ensuring our apps are viral as they can be.”
