From Telco to Techco March 2024 Virtual Conference by Mobile Europe https://www.telecomseuropeevents.com/
Sponsored by Intellias
With:
Kester Mann – Moderator – Director Consumer and Connectivity, CCS Insight
Dr. Mariam Kaynia, VP Director of Massmarket, Telefonica Germany
Michelle Hastings, Head of Digital, Vodafone Business
Ahmed Soliman, Sr. Director – Telecom & Media, Intellias
From Telco to Techco March 2024 Virtual Conference by Mobile Europe https://www.telecomseuropeevents.com/
With:
Siniša Arsić, Director of Data, Analytics & Intelligent Automation of Business Processes, Telekom Srbija
From Telco to Techco March 2024 Virtual Conference by Mobile Europe https://www.telecomseuropeevents.com/
Session sponsored by Redis
Presented by Henry Tam, Principal Solutions Manager, Redis
Further resources related to this presentation:
Case Studies:
Redis TCO datasheet: Download the PDF HERE
From Telco to Techco March 2024 Virtual Conference by Mobile Europe https://www.telecomseuropeevents.com/
With Philippe Ensarguet, VP of Software Engineering, Orange
From Telco to Techco March 2024 Virtual Conference by Mobile Europe https://www.telecomseuropeevents.com/
Session sponsored by Red Hat
With: James Crawshaw – Moderator – Practice Leader, Omdia
Pål Grønsund, Director Cloud Strategy and Architecture, Telenor
Lasha Tabidze, Group Chief Digital Operations, Veon
Brian Klafstad, Global Account Manager, Red Hat
Fixed wireless access (FWA) is predicted to deliver a healthy 14% CAGR 2023-29, reaching almost 265 million subscribers by 2029. And of this, 5G FWA is expected to account for 45% of the total subscription base by 2029, reaching 118 million at a CAGR of 35%. These figures are according to ABI Research’s latest report.
Admittedly, operators like India’s Reliance Jio are skewing the numbers – they alone have committed to reaching 100 million 5G FWA-connected premises in India – but ABI still believes the growth reflects the expanding role of FWA technology in enhancing connectivity worldwide in densely populated and remote areas.
Earlier this week Analysys Mason were less bullish, instead highlighting the subscriber in-fill model where operators utilise spare capacity on their mobile networks to offer FWA services and increase their presence in fixed broadband markets. This approach, they say, will mean FWA revenues only account for 4% of fixed broadband connections worldwide in 2027 – but will still be able to disrupt fibre builds.
So, what is going on here? As with all access technologies it comes down to price and economics. Provided it doesn’t impact a telco’s 4G and 5G mobile subscribers, FWA remains a cost effective to attract customers looking for higher speeds but balking at the potential cost of moving to a fibre network.
The “cost is a thing” market
You don’t need to look far to see how cost can impact subscribers and subsequently change the economics for FWA. For example, Poland is one of the cheapest countries in the EU for fixed broadband services and still its market is being impacted by subscribers opting for cheaper FWA alternatives to the point where the regulator has recognised that fibre tak-ep is slowing overall.
Telko.in has dissected the latest market report by regulator UKE which demonstrates this point clearly. After a sharp increase in interest in access to optical fibre in 2020-2021 due to the pandemic, the enthusiasm for purchasing FTTH connections has declined. According to the UKE study, in 2023 there was a decrease in the percentage of households using fibre-based internet (by 8 percentage points compared to 2021). It decreased from 50% in 2021 to 42% in 2023.
Since 2021, the percentage of households whose members do not use the Internet at home has halved but rather than this going to fibre, there has been solid increases in accessing the internet “in mobile phones (+16%) and LTE home mobile internet (+9.5%). The most frequently mentioned reason for not taking advantage of the offer of connecting to a fibre optic network is the “too high monthly cost of such a service” – indicated by 40.2% of survey respondents.
The artificial price construct market
In Australia, the fixed line broadband market is dominated by the government-owned National Broadband Network and wholesale prices are historically high meaning the most popular speed tier in the country is 50Mbps. The three mobile operators Telstra, Optus and TPG have strong 4G LTE networks and as a result, by the end of 2022 the regulator ACCC reported there were more than 400,000 home wireless broadband services supplied by mobile operators at the end of 2022, around 5% of the broadband market.
The arrival of 5G has made the business case for 5G FWA for the three MNOs a no-brainer to the point that they have had to carefully manage network congestion given FWA users consume way more data than mobile users in the same cell. A typical NBN download speed of 50Mbps costs roughly A$85 per month, but Optus and TPG provide FWA 5G broadband at the same speed but for A$10-15 less. Towards the end of last year, NBN Co warned that “accelerating” competition from mobile broadband endangered its market share and profitability.
Last month, NBN Co finally reacted to the FWA threat – and to its stagnating fibre take-up figures – announcing it would quintuple download speeds on its Home Fast product at no extra cost to retail service providers. This will see wholesale download speeds accelerate from 100/20Mbps to 500/50Mbps.
FWA is still improving
ABI’s 5G, 6G, and Open RAN research analyst Larbi Belkhit said as the demand for a more connected world continues to grow, the performance and efficiency of FWA technology remain a key driver in bridging the connectivity divide, providing high-speed, reliable internet access in both the enterprise and consumer markets.
“Furthermore, technology advancements in the 5G FWA space are also playing a key role, with ZTE announcing the world’s first AI 5G FWA CPE in the market during Mobile World Congress in 2024, improving the bandwidth utilization and reducing network congestion of 5G CPEs, further driving the adoption of this technology,” he added.
To show how far the technology has come, Italy provided a good example yesterday in a collaboration between wholesaler Open Fiber and Intracom Telecom. Since 2019, Open Fiber has been pioneering in the use of FWA for rural networks in Italy, with an extensive deployment. In 2022 it took part to the tender for “Italia 1 Giga” plan and was awarded by the Italian government the rollout in eight provinces.
The two companies just completed field tests at one of Open Fiber’s commercial sites in Puglia, South Italy. With Intracom’s WiBAS G5 dual-BS hub and G5 GigaConnect terminals operating at 28GHz the two managed to deliver 1Gbps at 5km.
The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has confirmed its decision to refer the proposed $19bn merger of Vodafone UK and Three UK to a Phase 2 review. The conformation comes after the companies offered no solutions to ease CMA concerns over the potential for higher prices.
Last month, the CMA said the deal might leave consumers “considerably worse off” and asked the telcos to come up with “meaningful solutions” to answer its concerns. “On 28 March 2024, the Parties informed the CMA that they would not be offering any undertakings,” the regulator said in a statement.
In late March, when it was becoming obvious the deal was heading for an in-depth investigation, the operators responded by saying it was “was an expected next step in the process and is in line with the timeframe for completion that we set out from the outset.”
The phase 2 review will take 40 working days (deadline 18 September 2024) to identify whether the deal could lead to a “substantial lessening of competition”. The CMA has named the independent panel of experts to probe in more depth initial concerns identified at phase 1.
The chair is Stuart McIntosh, an economist and specialist in regulatory economics. He was previously an executive Board Member and Group Director at Ofcom. Joining him on the panel will be Stephen Rose, Ashleye Gunn and Crispin Wright.
The CMA, like the EU, has said in the past that the UK needs four large mobile groups to provide effective competition. A merger between Vodafone and Hutchison-owned Three would cut the number of major UK mobile networks to three from four.
However, the operators said the current market structure has resulted in “the quality of mobile network services in the UK lagging significantly behind other European countries”. They argue that Vodafone UK and Three UK are “sub-scale, unable to cover their cost of capital, and constrained in their ability to invest and compete effectively against the two market leaders.”
Telecom Namibia (TN) announced the deactivation of 191,598 unregistered prepaid SIM cards to align with the recently implemented SIM card registration regulations mandated by the Communications Regulatory Authority of Namibia (CRAN).
As of 31 March 2024, TN’s records indicated a total of 442,410 active mobile subscribers. Following the deactivation, TN said it will maintain a base of 250,812 registered prepaid subscribers. Customers with deactivated SIM cards can regain service by completing the registration process. TN is encouraging affected users to visit any Teleshop to register their SIM cards.
Speaking to the Namibian newspaper, the telco expects a loss of between N$6,3-$8,6 million (€311,500 – 425,200) per month due to the deregistration. TN chief executive Stanley Shanapinda told Desert Radio these figures are the telco’s biggest concern as it monitors the reactivation process. Huge numbers of customers have reportedly been queuing outside of teleshops over the past couple of days as a result of the deactivation.
Shanapinda said TN partnered with post offices in areas where they did not have a presence, to enable customers to register their SIM cards. The telco had hoped to get to 90% registrations but the logistical challenge of doing so in such a vast lightly populated country proved too difficult.
The telco has now drafted in interns and extended its operating hours to try to deal with the surge of registrations. This compounds the revenue shortfall as it increases the telco’s costs.
On 1 April, TN implemented what it called “a comprehensive deactivation procedure” to suspend unregistered prepaid SIM cards. This process involved transitioning these cards to a “two-way block” status, effectively preventing them from initiating or receiving calls, texts or data services.
The deactivated SIM cards can only be reactivated by completing the established SIM registration process. This ensures that only registered users can access TN’s services: “thereby strengthening regulatory compliance and data security measures,” according to the operator.
According to the regulator CRAN, the campaign to identify Namibian telecom subscribers was launched on 1 January 2023 and was expected to end on 31 December of the same year. As of 27 December, 62.5% of SIM cards were registered. The government decided to push back the deadline to allow people to comply. Despite this, the registration rate was 70.6% as of 29 February across all operators. On that date, the regulator said 1,687,742 SIMs were registered out of a possible 2,387,230.
Vodafone’s Fixed Access Centre of Excellence and Nokia’s research arm Nokia Bell Labs have successfully performed the world’s first demonstration of L4S running over PON in Vodafone’s lab in Newbury, UK. Pioneered by Nokia Bell Labs and other collaborators like BT, L4S stands for “Low Latency, Low Loss, and Scalable” throughput. It is an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard technology that tackles a significant source of peak latency on the Internet: queuing delays. Queuing delay happens when packets wait idly in buffers across the network, for instance in routers and modems, before being forwarded.
Like most IETFs, L4S has been percolating for more than a decade but it is easy to see why operators like the idea of it as it consistently achieves near-zero packet queuing delay, no matter how much load the network experiences. By eliminating queuing delays, L4S removes big variations in latency without compromising network speeds.
Using a replica fibre-to-the-home link serving a standard laptop over a busy wi-fi broadband connection, Vodafone and Nokia Bell Labs measured consistent latencies of 1.05ms at local Ethernet ports running over a fully congested access network (BNG to ONT), and 12.1ms – down from 550ms – when including a fully congested wi-fi link as the final connection. The tests showed extremely low and consistent end-to-end latencies when travelling across every element of the network.
The interesting thing is that L4S can be implemented over any access technology, wireless or wireline, and applied to any latency-dependent application. And that potentially removes the need to do network slicing, depending on the application.
In November, Nokia Bell Labs and enterprise XR solutions company Hololight created a proof of concept demonstrating how L4S could support multiple simultaneous XR users over the same wireless connection without sacrificing performance.
“Vodafone aims to give customers a faster, more responsive, and reliable service unhindered by lag even during peak hours,” said Vodafone head of Fixed Access Centre of Excellence Gavin Young. “L4S is an exciting technology with huge potential to achieve this goal, as well as deliver a more interactive and tactile internet experience for our customers.”
“These highly encouraging results show L4S will unshackle any real-time application that would normally be constrained by high latency,” said Nokia Bell Labs head of Network Systems and Security Research Azimeh Sefidcon. “Videoconferencing, cloud-gaming, augmented reality and even the remote operations of drones would run flawlessly across the internet, without experiencing any significant queuing delays.”
What L4S does differently
Today’s applications try to “sense” what data rate they can send through the network, using congestion-control algorithms that adjust their sending rate based on the number of packets that are dropped and the observed delay in the network. These classic congestion-control algorithms require large buffers and delay in the network to run fluidly. L4S removes the need for big buffers.
Nokia Bell Labs said it invented two of the crucial components to kick off L4S. The TCP-PRIme congestion-control algorithm removed the need for a queue, and the related DualPI2 network concept enabled compatibility with the classic Internet. Nokia Bell Labs subsequently contributed the first open-source implementation of the new congestion-control algorithm, called TCP Prague.
L4S repurposes unused bit combinations in the IP header, the so-called Explicit Congestion Notification or ECN bits, enabling an optimal collaboration between the L4S Prague application on the one hand, and the network on the other. This collaboration avoids queue build-up within the network, reducing network queuing delays to “insignificant near-zero values”.
According to Nokia Bell Labs, L4S also resolves another issue with standard congestion controls. It provides a scalable control signal that can control rates from practically zero up to infinite throughputs. Besides scaling for throughput, L4S also provides the means to make low latency deployments scale toward the whole Internet, as networks don’t need to guarantee the required throughput to support low latency.
Broad support
Nokia said it was the first company to globally demonstrate network support for L4S in a proof-of-concept on its Nokia WiFi beacons back in 2019 during the Broadband World Forum. Since then, L4S has received broad industry support. Apple built beta support for L4S into iOS 16 and macOS Ventura. During its Worldwide Developer Conference in 2022 and 2023, Apple demonstrated to its developer community how they can benefit from the technology.
In 2022, L4S was adopted in 3GPP 5G-Advanced Release 18 to support XR over 5G RAN networks. CableLabs has included L4S in the low latency DOCSIS standard. At the 2022 and 2023 interop-events in Philadelphia, Denver and London, communications and Internet-services giants, including Comcast, Charter, Nvidia, Apple and Google, collaborated to test the end-to-end performance of L4S.
Canada-based Vecima Networks announced it has entered into an asset purchase agreement to acquire the cable business assets of Casa Systems and certain of Casa’s subsidiaries for $20m. Casa filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and is seeking approval of Vecima as a “stalking horse” bidder for the Cable Business assets under Section 363 of the Bankruptcy Code. The stalking horse bid sets the low end so that any additional bidders can’t underbid the purchase price.
Earlier this year Vecima, which has several European cable operators as customers entered the emerging virtual cable modem termination system (vCMTS) market with a new platform that will support DOCSIS 4.0 as well as giving DOCSIS 3.1 cablecos a speed boost. The platform is also designed to support PON deployments off the node, which are enabled via remote optical line terminals (OLTs).
If Vecima is successful in acquiring the cable parts of Casa, closing of the transaction is expected to occur at the beginning of June 2024. The company will then be better placed to compete with vCMTS market leader Harmonic which already counts the likes of Vodafone, Comcast and Rogers Communications. CommScope is the other vCMTS competitor but all are dwarfed by Harmonics current market presence.
Market development
Dell’Oro Group analyst Jeff Heynen said that assuming Vecima’s bid is successful, it will have acquired assets that in 2023 generated revenue of $41m, primarily coming from licence revenue from its installed base of C100G CCAP platforms.
“Casa’s cable products are well-regarded in the industry for their architecture and reliability. We regularly hear from cable operators that the C100G platform continues to serve as the core of their broadband offering,” he wrote in a blog. “What Vecima offers to the Casa cable unit is a renewed focus on the cable and fixed broadband markets, which was arguably missing at Casa as the company tried to balance R&D investments in its cable, vBNG, mobile core, and fixed wireless access product lines.”
He added: “With the focus and continued support by Vecima of Casa’s existing customer base, Vecima can potentially turn those customers into longer-term DAA customers.”
Heynen said Vecima will gain Casa’s Axyom vCMTS software, which it can use alongside its own Entra vCMTS platform to scale overall vCMTS deployments as they continue to expand at cable operators around the world. “Additionally, we are aware of deployments where Vecima’s RPDs have been deployed along with Casa’s vCMTS, so demonstrating interoperability at other operators shouldn’t be a challenge,” he said.
“Ultimately, we would expect the Axyom and Entra vCMTS platforms to be integrated into a single software stack to avoid parallel development efforts that could sidetrack operator deployments,” he added.
Comcast-led revenue for Harmonic
Although Harmonic currently dominates the vCMTS market, holding 98% of global revenue in 2023, a good portion of that revenue comes from Comcast, which was the early mover in deploying vCMTS platforms in the industry.
The analyst points out the market is nascent and there are dozens of cable operators which have yet to begin their transition to vCMTS. “There are many more who are facing the discontinuation of Cisco’s CBR-8 platform, which will not be upgraded to support DOCSIS 4.0, thus pushing operators to transition to a vCMTS platform,” he said.
Vecima’s acquisition would include Casa’s Axyom vBNG platform, which could provide subscriber management and routing functions for Vecima’s SF-4X Remote OLT and EXS1610 OLT—particularly in those cases where operators are deploying XGS-PON, according to Heynen.
“Though Vecima has demonstrated interoperability with existing, hardware-based BNGs, as well as third-party vBNGs, being able to supply both the OLT and vBNG delivers an architecture and vendor relationship similar to the vCMTS and RPD combination that cable operators have become familiar with,” he said.
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