TMN Quarterly 2015 Issue 10

The Mobile Network // www.the-mobile-network.com

ALSO FEATURING Making sense of the world’s mobile networks

34 O RCHESTRATION 15 A NALYTICS INLAND // MORE...

36 F 2015 // Issue 10

Y T E I C O S I SS U E

THE

LD R WOR U O D ANGE

H ◾ Play BILE C O M t W n e HO m viron ility 20-33 En ◾ ccessib

A Work

ISSUE

REGULARS

GLOBAL CORRESPONDENTS // ANATOMY OF A MOBILE OPERATOR: CHINA MOBILE

#10

CONTENTS

THE SOCIETY ISSUE // HOW MOBILE CHANGED OUR WORLD

21

24

27

31

From family life, to dating, to media consumption, how we live our social lives has been transformed by the network.

Our working lives may not look transformed, but our demands are exerting a powerful pull on network development.

The world’s most startling infrastructure project of the last 50 years has left its mark on our cities and countryside.

The network, and increasingly interconnected networks of things, offer great potential for the billion people with disabilities in the world.

Play

Work

Built Environment

15

34

Network big data can help the digital transformation go down.

How open is open?

Operators are right to be worried, according to one vendor.

Analytics 2.0:

4 TMNQUARTERLY

Orchestration

Accessibility

FEATURE

EDITOR

10

36

China Mobile - the giant with the power to make or break whole technology sectors.

Can you write about the Finnish mobile sector whilst barely mentioning Nokia?

We tried.

REGULARS

Anatomy of a Mobile Operator:

Country Profile: Finland

6-9

FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT

Look out for our

NEW SECTION p. 8-9

Colombia France Italy Vietnam

Commercial Director: Shahid Ramzan // shahid@the-mobile-network.com

Hi!

This issue is our society issue named after a special series of features which look at the impact that mobile technology is having on all of our lives, and on all aspects of them. The underlying enabler for all of this, of course, is the mobile network. As the network has expanded and spread, deepened and densified, so have the possibilities for our working, family and social lives. The impact on our environment has also been transformational, as rooftops, roadsides and tracksides have become colonised by towers, cabinets and antennas.

This issue, then, is our salute and tribute to the change that the mobile network has brought to us all. It has also been my pleasure to be able to commission the likes of Tom Cheesewright, noted thinker on technology and future trends, Chris Lewis, a highly respected analyst, and George Malim, highly experienced telecoms journalist, to put these features together.

This is also an issue that tracks the continuing momentum in the operator community to excavate network data and make sense of it across their businesses. That could be to enrich customer and subscriber analytics, or it could be to feed the orchestration engines that will control the next generations of mobile network services and equipment. Analyst Sandra O’Boyle looks at how operators are taking data analytics to market, and we have a feature asking if operators are right to be worried that “open” orchestration may be less open than advertised.

Please enjoy this issue of TMN Quarterly - it is our tenth issue and one that has been very rewarding to put together.

Editorial Director: Keith Dyer // keith@the-mobile-network.com Creative Direction and Design: Shona Gow // hello@shonagow.co.uk // www.shonagow.co.uk

KD

Keith Dyer keith@the-mobile-network.com

© 2015 TMN Communications Ltd.

TMNQUARTERLY 5

FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT “From Our Correspondent” collects writing from around the world, covering

KD

CORRESPONDENT : Anon

FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT

If you would like to contribute to this section, mail TMN’s editor keith@the-mobile-network.com

mobile network stories in local markets.

COLOMBIA AT&T, which has been expanding its ambitions to the north in Mexico, appears to have turned its sights on establishing itself as a mobile provider in Colombia.

We’re auctioning 700MHz spectrum in August, and the US giant appears to be taking an interest in us, following its acquisition of pay TV player DirecTV. The word is that the US giant has plans to enter that spectrum auction and take on the Colombian mobile market. Our goverment will auction spectrm at 700 MHz, 900 MHz, 1900 MHz and 2.5 GHz - as soon as the TV spectrum at 700Mhz has been cleared.

6 TMNQUARTERLY

Apparently the operator wants to be a major mobile player here within two years, and mobile CEO Ralph de la Vega will make a royal visit in June to “seal the deal”, according to our news title Portafolio.

AT&T agreed to pay a hefty $48.5 billion for DirecTV just under a year ago - so does it make sense to add a mobile “play” to that?

In Colombia, we are well aware that AT&T has been down the route before.

In November it announced the acquisition of Mexico’s third largest mobile operator Iusacell for $2.5 billion and followed that up by purchasing market minnow Nextel for $1.88 billion. DirecTV was part of that process too.

VIETNAM Our government has finally decided to move on 4G, and got things going by stating that it will auction off spectrum in the 2.3GHz and 2.6GHz bands via a bidding process and will also refarm the 900MHz band for either 3G or 4G use.

Getting the operators to use the new spectrum might be another challenge, however. According to Doan Quang Hoan, chief of the Vietnam Department of Radio Frequencies (DRF), Vietnamese mobile network operators prefer to refarm frequencies used for 2G services over investing in higher frequency bandwidths.

He said that Vinaphone, a subsidiary of the state-owned enterprise (SOE) Vietnam Posts and Telecommunications Group (VNPT) is still operating its 3G service on the 900MHz band as it prefers the band for both rural reach and building penetration.

Despite that, the government is hoping that the 4G/LTE spectrum will be attractive to Vietnam’s other two mobile network providers – Viettal, an SOE owned and operated by the Vietnam Ministry of Defence (MoD) with about a 40 per cent market share and MobiFone, owned and operated by the VNPT.

FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT

FRANCE When Free Mobile launched, it seemed to many that it had merely proved that it was possible to give away mobile broadband - especially in a market where the competition had managed to keep prices suspiciously high between them.

But whilst the other operators sniffed and said that consumers would soon regret trading low cost for low quality, consumers appeared not to have listened.

This month Free Mobile said it had added 420,000 new mobile customers in the first three months of 2015, giving it a revenue growth of over 18% compared to last year. Not only that but its overall market share stood at 15% - really now a quite sizeable chunk of people who seem willing to put up with Free’s supposedly awful mobile network.

Of course, the awful network counter argument never really worked in any case, as Orange’s network was there as national back-up for areas Free couldn’t reach which was most places in the early days.

It seems now, though, that Free has consolidated upon its initial impact, and with the future of Bouygues and SFR still unclear, things look OK for the challenger.

For instance, SFR-Numbericable, although under the auspices of Altice, saw revenues go in the opposite direction to Free, dropping over 8%. Bouygues’ sales were more stable, and customer adds were up 150,00, and the owner has once again decided it will go ahead with it as a standalone player. Who would buy it anyway?

Of course, the awful network counter argument never really worked in any case markets.

ITALY The winds of change in European mobile consolidation have been coming from what might be an unlikley direction - the East in the form of Hutchison. With the UK, Austria and Switzerland all witness to the zephyrs, now it is Italy’s turn.

Here Vimpelcom’s Wind and Hutch’s Three Italia have decided that it would be more fun to be a single big ‘un than two little ‘uns, although they have been down this path before and not managed to make a deal stick.

This time around it seems that the lure of becoming number one player in a three player network-owning market might just win out. The two companies released reports confirming that they were looking at bringing their assets together in a 50-50 JV. It seems this was Vimpelcom’s

preferred option last year, when previous talks sputtered, and it is a model that has worked out OK in the UK, where T-Mobile and Orange were able to take themselves over to BT as a single entity, giving a nice payout for both co-owners.

That was a similar move in that it saw the number three and four players combine to become a clear number one. Market shares would be tighter in Italy, but a VimpleThree JV would still be the number one player in terms of share. A combined company would have more than 30 million customers and about $7.2 billion in revenue, running at 2014 numbers.

If a deal does go ahead, it seems it will be Wind’s CEO Maximo Ibarra that will be taking the reigns.

TMNQUARTERLY 7

NEED TO KNOW: NETWORK SHORTS

NEED TO KNOW: NETWORK SHORTS

Nokia to acquire Alcatel-Lucent

All share deal that values Alu at €15.6 billion. 40,000 R&D employees in combined company. €900 million operating cost synergies target by 2019.

“We are now in a cycle between 4G and 5G and the timing of this deal will allow us to accelerate spending on 5G immediately upon closing” Rajeev Suri, CEO, Nokia.

Huawei opens research HQ in Leuven, Belgium Huawei’s European

18

research centres

“On most of the product lines we have delivered better than our peers” Alcatel-Lucent CEO, Michel Combes, on the company’s Q1 earnings call.

CIENA BUYS CYAN

$400m 1,200

Ciena gets Cyan’s SDN, NFV, and metro packet-optical solutions, plus network and service orchestration and network management and visualisation.

CASH

“Accelerates availability of complete solution for virtualised networks and services on-demand."

“Freedom from vendor lock-in” 8 TMNQUARTERLY

17

R&D employees

Framework Programmes and Horizon 2020 projects Co-operation with

120

academic institutions.

NEED TO KNOW: NETWORK SHORTS

CISCO’S JOHN CHAMBERS LEAVES

TWENTY YEARS OF CHAMBERS 1995

2015

8

ACQUISITIONS

176

4K

EMPLOYEES

70K

$1.2 REVENUES

BILLION

$47.1 BILLION

24 HOURS - how long OPERATORS THINK they have to solve a network issue for a customer.

1 HOUR

“We are only on the very front end of what’s possible.”

Chuck Robbins, CEO-in-waiting.

“ Boingo and Sprint break down barriers” “Boingo’s relationship with Sprint removes the traditional barriers between Wi-Fi and cellular service” David Hagan, Chief Executive Officer for Boingo Wireless.

how long the CUSTOMER THINKS the operator should take.

(Astellia-Mobile Squared research)

GOOD MOMENT:

EE 4G net adds up +224% yoy

BAD MOMENT:

Most complained about telecoms firm in the UK: EE

1/2 of operators

think their customer care teams don’t have the tools they need to understand network issues.

Yet 1/3 of all calls Yet a third of all calls are related to network issues.

(Astellia-Mobile Squared research)

TMNQUARTERLY 9

ANATOMY OF A MOBILE OPERATOR: CHINA MOBILE

OPERATOR PROFILE

CHINA MOBILE 10 TMNQUARTERLY

THE MARKET MAKER THE OPERATOR OF THE WORLD’S LARGEST 4G NETWORK HAS THE POWER TO BREATHE LIFE INTO WHOLE TECHNOLOGY SEGMENTS, SUCH AS TD-LTE, CARRIER WIFI AND SMALL CELLS.

A

lthough China is a mind-boggling market in terms of its scale, operators have been actively pursuing more and more growth, especially in 4G, pushed by a government that requires more of its ICT sector and has been pushing competitiveness upon its operators. That has lead to operators pushing ahead on network technology in an incredible way over the past two years.

The reason for that need for growth?

The GSMA states that, “In 2013, China was home to 630 million unique mobile subscribers actively using more than one billion active SIM connections. This shows that ‘real’ mobile penetration based on subscribers (i.e, people) in fact only stood at 46% of the population in China, whereas the industry reported

almost 90% penetration based on connections (i.e, SIM cards). The latter metric has been traditionally used by the industry to measure market maturity and growth opportunities. However, it is largely distorted by the phenomenon of subscribers holding multiple SIMs. Chinese subscribers hold 1.79 SIMs each, on average.”

Alongside this headroom for growth is the factor that mobile is critical to overall internet access. A GSMA survey identified the share of unique mobile subscribers that actively use mobile connectivity to access internet services. The GSMA research showed that in 2013, almost four in five unique subscribers in China use mobile internet services, adding up to 499.5 million mobile internet subscribers.

THE GSMA RESEARCH SHOWED THAT IN 2013, ALMOST FOUR IN FIVE UNIQUE SUBSCRIBERS IN CHINA USE MOBILE INTERNET SERVICES

ANATOMY OF A MOBILE OPERATOR: CHINA MOBILE

HOW CHINA MOBILE IS EXPERIMENTING WITH SMALL CELL BACKHAUL

C Mr. XI Guohua Chairman, China Mobile Limited

100

60%

million

overall market share

4G devices sold

720,000

4G base stations

MOBILE DATA TRAFFIC REVENUE UP

42.9%

MOBILE DATA TRAFFIC

OPERATING REVENUE

of service revenue

billion RMB

=25.9%

90 4G

million

customers

641.448

150

million 4G customers

(end 2014)

(end 2015)

CAPEX Mobile communication networks

2014 213.5

2015 BUDGET 199.7

Transmission Business development

Support systems

hina Mobile has implemented new backhaul technology from UK-based company Cambridge Communication Systems (CCS) - in a busy urban environment of Beijing to support one of its first outdoor deployments of 4G LTE-TDD small cells, and also in the busiest commercial area of Longyan, to backhaul the latest LTE-TDD small cells from ZTE. A CCS unit is installed at an existing macrocell site, which feeds down to the street to provide Ethernet backhaul service in excess of 200Mbps to each small cell site.

The environment is extremely challenging for both RF and GPS – narrow streets with densely packed, tall, reflective buildings on both sides and a poor view of the sky. The CCS system’s self-organising capability enables it to pick up the optimal signal, thereby overcoming RF issues.

Each CCS node is also capable of providing GPS-derived synchronisation to the small cell when the small cell’s own GPS fails.

The Fujian network was deployed by local contractors in just one day after minimal training, without the need for any on-site configuration or manual alignment. The self-organising nature of the CCS backhaul nodes has created a network that can selfconfigure into an optimal topology – without any RF or link planning – and provide automatic redundancy via self-healing features.

Buildings & infrastructure Others

TMNQUARTERLY 11

ANATOMY OF A MOBILE OPERATOR: CHINA MOBILE

NETWORK INVESTMENTS

C

hina Mobile indicated that its network capex rose by 14% in 2014 to reach CNY162 billion ($26 billion), while its competitor China Unicom (which launched 4G in February 2014) anticipated that its mobile capex would increase by 44% over the same period, to reach CNY42.3 billion. While there is a limited amount of publicly available information regarding operators’ 4G rollout plans in China, GSMA Intelligence estimates that 4G networks will cover 20% of the country’s population this year, expanding to cross the 80% threshold by 2018.

In its Q1 2014 report, China Mobile noted that it “faced continuously increasing pressure in infrastructure resources allocation and cost control”. Indeed, combined with subsidy costs for the iPhone, China Mobile’s 4G rollout costs led it to report a third straight quarterly drop in profit during Q1 2014.

Profitability concerns are leading Chinese operators to examine their overall cost bases for potential savings.

This has already led them to explore the possibility of a network infrastructure joint venture. The three Chinese telecom operators confirmed that they would be pooling their resources to set up a joint infrastructure company focused on building and operating telecom towers. China Mobile owns 40% of the newly established firm, called China Communications Facilities Services. All three carriers said the new joint venture will help save capital expenditure and increase investment returns. The new company will focus on construction, maintenance and operation of telecom towers, base stations as well as other transmission requirements such as power supply and interior distribution systems.

Analysts said it would be less favorable for China Mobile as smaller players China Unicom and China Telecom could potentially expand their network coverage quickly by sharing China Mobile’s bigger pool of telecommunication assets.

China Mobile owns 350,000 telecom towers and its smaller rivals China Unicom and China Telecom run 150,000 towers and 100,000 towers respectively, according to Goldman Sachs.

Barclays said China Mobile’s coverage advantage could be eliminated eventually by the joint company.

China Mobile’s TD-SCDMA (a Chinese-developed interface between mobile phones and towers) 3G

12 TMNQUARTERLY

network has been a thorn in the company’s side almost from day one, as its poor data speed has facilitated meaningful share gains for China Unicom and China Telecom at Mobile’s expense. Even through 2013, China Mobile’s 2G network was still a cash cow. Meanwhile, through the first quarter of 2014 the 3G network accounted for under 30% of the company’s subscriber base. Around 70% of the base was still 2G. China Mobile continued spending on 3G base stations in 2014, but the company more than doubled its 4G base station spending in 2014, adding an expected 500,000 to support the network rollout and provide service in more than 300 cities. Perhaps the biggest impact globally has been China Mobile’s desire to exploit all its spectrum assets,and use TDD LTE technology to do so. In doing so it has driven a global ecosystem for TDD, and now claims there are 52 compatible TDD LTE networks globally.

Another area China Mobile has lead the way has been in carrier WiFi. In 2013, Wi-Fi accounted for just a fraction of China Mobile’s wireless data revenue and yet was responsible for two-thirds of wireless data traffic, implying that its offload strategy has been highly effective. The operator had 3.83 million Wi-Fi access points in place at year-end. However, in 2014, the operator announced a strategy to move away from a reliance on WiFi offload, as it expanded 4G coverage following licences coming available during the year.

NETWORK GOALS: • C ONTINUOUS COVERAGE IN ALL CITIES, COUNTIES, AND RURAL TOWNS, HOTSPOT COVERAGE IN VILLAGES; DENSE 2.3GHZ GRID. • F ULL COVERAGE OF KEY HIGH-SPEED RAILWAYS, HIGHWAYS AND TOURIST AREAS. • F ULL INDOOR COVERAGE OF SHOPPING MALLS, OFFICE BUILDINGS, TRANSPORTATION HUBS. • L TE-A AND EVOLUTION: CARRIER AGGREGATION AND MULTI-STREAMING TRANSMISSION 100M 200M 600M 1G

ANATOMY OF A MOBILE OPERATOR: CHINA

4G NETWORK CAPEX (RMB Billion)

80.6

2014 2015 Budget

72.2

4G CUSTOMERS (Million)

1Q 2Q 3Q

2.792014 13.94 40.95

4Q

90.06

(RMB Billion)

HOW CHINA MOBILE SUPPORTED GRAND PRIX WITH SMALL CELLS

I

n April, Shanghai ‘s Grand Prix saw around 145,000 visitors – including 69,000 peak hour China Mobile users and 49,000 4G TD-LTE peak users.

TD-LTE users accounted for 80% of the total traffic, and total throughput was 466 Gb, up 150% from the same event last year. The event also saw the world’s first use of TD-LTE Carrier Aggregation using a commercial chipset at an international sports event.

China Mobile Shanghai deployed Nokia TD-LTE-Advanced HetNet solution, with Flexi Zone small cells as well as the Flexi Multiradio 10 Macro Base Station and supported a record-breaking 600 simultaneous active LTE users per cell.

Twenty Flexi Zone small cells in Band 41 were deployed in addition to existing macro sites in Band 39 and Band 41, including three truck-mounted units, to provide an underlay that boosted data traffic performance substantially. During the event itself, the small cells off-loaded close to 50% of all traffic from the macro layer.

Equipment provider Nokia said the small cells deployment enabled China Mobile to totally outperform its rivals in terms of user experience, with a fast download rate during the busiest hour.

412.240 66.529 53.876

Voice + SMS & MMS

2012

Mobile data traffic

2013

Applications & information services

2014

397.006 105.373 57.327 343.739 150.571 63.482

HOW CHINA MOBILE IS DEVELOPING CLOUD COMMS In March 2015, Huawei announced the successful demonstration of a virtualised VoLTE solution designed specifically to support China Mobile’s Cloudified VoLTE service. The demonstration was an extension of Huawei’s ongoing partnership with China Mobile and reinforces the vision of network function virtualisation (NFV) as the next-generation core network architecture. The demonstration featured NFV-based core network elements, including a virtualised IP Multimedia Subsystem (vIMS), a virtualised subscriber data management (vSDM), and a virtualised policy and charging rules function (vPCRF).

TMNQUARTERLY 13

Is your network VoLTE ready?

Voice calls remain central to mobile operator’s business model as they receive over 60% of their revenues from voice and SMS traffic. Operators know there is no room for error. It is therefore necessary to have a viable and standardized solution to provide these services and protect this revenue. LTE is designed as a complete IP system for carrying data exclusively where initially operators have to carry voice by reverting to 2G/3G networks through CS Fall Back. Today, VoLTE has become the next logical move for handling end-to-end voice calls over IP. How can Astellia help operators ensure on-time VoLTE introduction?

As with any new network feature introduction, VoLTE comes with a lot of challenges to be tackled within a very aggressive time schedule. Astellia provides a troubleshooting solution with dashboards to efficiently benchmark vendors, detect malfunctioning handsets and assess interoperability issues between vendors. On top of its product portfolio, Astellia offers consulting services consisting of on-site experts engaged with operator’s teams during Lab Tests, Field Interoperability and Friendly User Tests. They generate dedicated reports, pinpoint issues, find out root causes, and provide evidence to transfer tickets to the right vendor.

1.

Ensuring voice call establishment For a good voice call experience it is crucial to be always reachable and get fast access to your respondent. Astellia addresses the needs of Core EPC and Core IMS teams. In addition to reporting 4G bearer setup success or delays, Astellia monitors SIP at S1-U interface to detect interworking issues between 4G network layers and SIP voice service layers. Furthermore, Astellia provides in-depth monitoring, analysis and troubleshooting of SIP/Diameter at the Core IMS.

2.

Ensuring voice call continuity When a subscriber leaves the LTE coverage area a handover to 3G/2G layer is automatically performed thanks to Single Radio Voice Call Continuity (SRVCC) bridging VoIP IMS Core with the legacy Core CS. Astellia brings KPIs to monitor, analyze and troubleshoot E2E call traces and hand-over efficiency between Core IMS, EPC, legacy Core CS and 2G/3G RAN. Through E2E KPIs, Astellia masters the global performance of SRVCC and pinpoints origin of delays occurring during handover.

ASTELLIA CONFERENCE 11TH ANNUAL

USING SMART METHODS TO INCREASE NETWORK PROFITABILTY

Wednesday, June 24th at 2:45pm

3.

Ensuring voice and data quality Subscribers moving to VoLTE expect the highest voice experience as HD voice is marketed. But they don’t have a clue of the difficulty for operators to handle VoIP end-to-end down to the handset. Astellia provides VoIP call quality metrics including Mean Opinion Score (MOS), packet delay, jitter, packet loss and latency. Through relevant Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) CSPs get precious information which helps them troubleshoot areas with poor quality, investigate customer complaints and hence improve the customer experience.

Thierry JACQ Global Solution Marketing Director - Astellia

Astellia shorlisted in: BEST LTE CORE NETWORK PRODUCT BEST TEST/MEASUREMENT SOLUTION

ANALYSE THIS

FEATURE: ANALYTICS

SANDRA O’BOYLE ASKS: Are Operators Starting to Make Sense of Big Data Analytics?

The telecoms industry loves its buzzwords and Big Data Analytics perfectly fits the bill. Yet for mobile operators sitting on a mountain of network and subscriber ‘big data’, analytics is becoming a serious and strategic part of their business. Real-time analytics and deeper insight into customer behavior is critical as mobile operators transform, sometimes painfully, into digital service providers.

It’s early days The transition involves operators becoming customercentric and contextual in terms of services and support, yet agile in their ability and speed to capitalise on new revenue and innovation opportunities. The role of analytics in this journey, although a key one, remains a work in progress. Broadly speaking, analytics use cases break down into two areas operational (network planning and customer care) and revenue generating (marketing and commercial teams).

“On the operational side, it’s the perennial question of how to make the processes more efficient?” says Anil Rao, Senior Analyst at Analysys Mason. “Increasing service complexity is having a negative impact on the two most important operational metrics first call resolution and mean to time to resolve. VoLTE is a case in point. Real-time network analytics, using analytics on network data from probes, network performance monitoring and assurance systems will therefore be necessary to enable better insight and in a real-time fashion. Operations personnel can take action in a proactive manner rather than being reactive, which improves operational efficiency as well as enhance customer experience.

Big data analytics in mobile networks bridges four key areas: the network data (from probes, mediation layer, etc. which is combined with other information sources and overlaid with the value vendors bring in terms of adding logic to the data), the Hadoop layer for data storage, analytics and business intelligence technologies and last but not least visualisation. Hadoop-based analytics, an open source big data platform, is quickly becoming the de facto standard.

Vendors themselves are basing their use case implementations on Hadoop or working around the platform.

TMNQUARTERLY 15

FEATURE: ANALYTICS

Vendor Gold Rush Vendors across the mobile network, from CRM, billing, service assurance, network monitoring and traffic management domains, either have added or are in the process of adding analytics solution capabilities. A key selling point is their telecom experience, the fact they are proven carrier-grade vendors and already established within an operator. It then becomes easier for say an incumbent OSS/BSS vendor to add value with an analytics layer.

The caveat is that operators are no longer throwing money at Big Data projects. Use cases are more specific and targeted around operational benefits “how do we make this better”. This makes for long sales cycles where vendors need to impress not only on technical merit, features and thoroughness of how their solutions address the use cases, but also the value in terms of return on investment and total cost of ownership.

Mark Davis, Senior Director, Product Marketing at Citrix maintains, “It’s a Strategic C-level decision that big data is a strategic initiative. The Big Data organisation has taken over from IT in the larger operators where they have the funds and people to do that. Interest from small operators is there but may have a narrow view e.g., an emphasis on analytics for purposes for revenue generation, incremental ARPU, a one cent

increase in ARPU for an operator in Asia can make a big revenue difference.“ Mounir Ladki, President and CTO of MYCOM OSI concurs “We definitely see analytics being use case driven, take value-based capacity planning for example where we need to look at specific BSS big data e.g. ARPU, tariff plan, type of handsets, net promoter score. Another example is service assurance - a new type of technology in the big data store - and being able to map it with rest of the network data dynamically. An online analytical processing engine can enable an operator to see all congested cells where I have an ARPU greater than “X”.

The goal is to correlate ARPU, tariff plans, importance of consumer, and satisfaction levels with network congestion, QoS,

load on equipment, for surgical planning purposes, that is to put capacity where it is needed.“ David Bouchon, Marketing Director at Astellia, sees demand from operators that “are looking to invest in infrastructure”.

“In terms of value - where are the high value subscribers using the network - let’s make sure VIPs or enterprise customers with high ARPU have the best quality of service and network investments.“ One of Astellia’s customers Zain in the Middle East shares the same analytics tools and the same data and metrics from different sources such as CRM, service assurance across its network operations and customer care teams to take better care of its biggest customers.

“OPERATORS ARE LOOKING TO INVEST IN NETWORK INFRASTRUCTURE, IN TERMS OF VALUE” 16 TMNQUARTERLY

FEATURE: ANALYTICS

Crowd Behaviour & Analytics Revenue Understanding their own customers better to drive new revenue and loyalty is hugely important but additionally mobile operators are seeing what they can do for other enterprises by unlocking valuable insights and revenue opportunities in anonymised customer data.

One example is Fluxvision, a service developed in Orange R&D Labs for business customers in France, which now provides real-time data and insights to over 70 customers, mainly in the transport, tourism and government sectors. Fluxvision is based on algorithms and technology that analyse mobile data of 30 million users on an anonymised basis and as much as 4 million per minute. According to Olivier Ondet, VP Marketing for Orange Applications for Business, “ The service is affordable, for a few thousand euros per month, Orange can provide targeted insights and visual data in real-time which is especially popular within the French tourism industry. We can tell them how many people are in which area, how many are residents vs. tourists, how many stay overnight, overlaid with social and demographics insight. Of course, we have

worked closely with the privacy regulator in terms of data protection, there is a minimum granularity of 50 users, that adheres to strict French privacy laws.”

O2 UK offers something similar called SmartSteps which extrapolates trends from anonymised and aggregated data to help companies and public sector organisations make informed business decisions. East Coast trains in the UK uses Smart Steps to gain insight on customer journeys, for example, the volume of passengers on a particular route, the specific demographics they fall under and their pre and post journey connections.

This allows the train company to better understand where their customers and potential customers begin and end their journeys and can help identify potential problems, such as poor transport links to and from a particular station.

If further validation was needed, Cisco also joined this crowd behavior space

Customer Trust and a Fair Value No discussion on big data analytics is complete without a word on privacy.

While operators are at pains to point out that big data analytics is about trends and behavior of crowds, not individuals and personal data, customers will still need to opt in and data protection concerns means all operators have to work with local regulators and privacy groups.

Customer trust is the overarching theme, customers need to trust the companies that they deal with in terms of managing their personal data. Consider how much data and freedom customers are happy to provide Google when accepting their

terms and conditions, basically “saying yes it’s OK to look at what I do in Gmail and browsing in Chrome and make connections to serve me targeted ad content for example”.

O2 UK finds that appropriate use of customer data insight is a win-win for O2 and its customers. One example is O2 Priority where O2 can provide locationspecific offers and discounts to its customers. Priority has proved extremely popular. On average, one Priority offer is redeemed by customers every 12 seconds.

In 2014 O2 customers collectively made over £15m savings from the scheme.

with its MobilityIQ solution, unveiled at Mobile World Congress in March 2015.

MobilityIQ aggregates data from multiple sources e.g. Wi-Fi infrastructure, small cells, to provide analytics and insights on network usage and subscriber behavior mainly indoors to customers at stadiums, airports, shopping malls, and large events. Keith Day, Marketing SVP at Cisco contends, “One of our differentiators is having a cloud-based visual dashboard and pay as you go model, limited need for professional services and speed of deployment in terms of getting started in as little as five days.”

What’s Next?

And in terms of future opportunities for big data analytics, Lakni from MYCOM OSI sees big potential in terms of “monitoring performance of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs), Internet of Things, enterprise customers and high value ARPU customers“. As operators move to virtualised networks as part of their transformation, analytics will be a big requirement of virtualisation and ensuring that functions are performing correctly and where improvements can be made.

So the journey continues full steam ahead and means great demand ahead for all those budding data scientists out there.

TMNQUARTERLY 17

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Y T E I C SO I SS U E

This section of TMN Quarterly examines the relationship between society and mobile technology.

20 TMNQUARTERLY

It looks at the ways mobile network technology has impacted on how we live our lives, how we work, on the environment we live in, and how mobile networks can be an underlying enabler for the inclusion of people who are often marginalised or denied access to mainstream services. It’s often hard to notice change when you live in the middle of it; even if you are, as many of you reading this are, the cause of it. These pages give us a chance to pause and reflect on what mobile network technology has achieved in the past 30 years, and also to think about what is about to be possible.

// ACCESSIBILTY // WORK

As we chase the next trend, the next release, the next network G, it’s often difficult to remind ourselves of what the end result of all this is - to think of the impact these waves of innovation and change are having on society.

FEATURED PLAY // ENVIRONMENT

THE

SOCIETY: PLAY

THIS NETWORKED LIFE How has the development of mobile networks impacted on

the way we live our lives. Tom Cheesewright tells the story.

“Dad, why don’t you ask Siri where they are?”

I can’t be the only parent to have received this question while frantically hunting for their keys.

It’s amusing, once you’ve found your keys. But the child’s view of the world that forms this question is important.

In less than 20 years mobile operators have blanketed the world in data networks that provide instant access to information. They have marketed and underwritten the cost of the devices that provide access to these networks, equipping the majority of adults in many developed countries with portable, location-aware computers. In the process they have enabled transformational change in media, commerce, and communication.

Have these developments fundamentally changed our personal lives? Our social interactions with friends, partners and family? Or have we bent the technology to our will, our ways, forming it around our own life patterns?

don’t “Dad, why i where ir S k s a u yo ” they are?

Around 2001, GPRS arrived on the scene with much fanfare. A fanfare since rightly mocked for the scale at which it oversold the reality of the service. WAP, at a theoretical maximum of 80kbps, did not make you feel like the ‘silver surfer’ riding the digital highways, as depicted in the adverts. It was more like Teletext in miniature.

“I, for one, wouldn’t buy a GPRS phone for the internet.

I expect that it will be a failure, because it is being marketed wrongly. They should be building this technology into laptop computers, so that you can actually access the full-blown internet without the need to be connected through a modem. Most people who want mobile phones already have them, and won’t pay out £200 just to get something they don’t want.” A member of the British public, interviewed by the BBC as GPRS launched in the UK.

SOCIETY: PLAY

Nonetheless, it excited the geeks among us. I’m probably the only person I know who ran a WAP server on their home PC using a short-lived product called PocketWatch. With it I could access my digital photos, of which I had just a few megabytes at the time (I now have 14GB on my phone alone), I could see my emails and calendar, and I could even stream MP3 files (albeit not very many with a meagre data allowance). Strutting down the street to your Spotify playlist this was not.

But it was a sign of things to come. And some of the impacts on our personal lives of increasing connectivity were already becoming evident, or at least reported.

HOME INVASION

G

PRS and generally more reliable mobile data standards meant access to email. Ever since mobile email arrived, and particularly since the launch of the Blackberry smartphone in 2003, there have been endless stories about work encroaching on home life.

T

It has become accepted as fact that we are all now tethered to the office by our devices and more stressed as a result.

There’s certainly evidence that something has changed. BAuA, the German national institute for health and safety, reports a 40% increase in the number of sick days taken due to psychological reasons between 2008 and 2011. Major French and German companies have responded by stopping servers from forwarding emails around the clock.

Yet a 2012 study by the Pew Research Center didn’t show quite the universal effects you might expect. 64% of respondents reported that it was no harder (with a mobile device) to forget about work when at home. Only 9% said it was a lot harder.

This may in part be explained by the difference between American and European attitudes to work. But perhaps it’s a sign that the changes we so often ascribe to the impact of technology are instead wider societal changes of which technology is simply one enabler?

his would be the argument made by the RSA’s Adam Lent. Answering a question after a recent talk he rejected the idea that technology has been the primary transformative force in society over the last few years, and instead presented it as a symptom of change. He put the human desire for freedom at the root of changes - specifically around the redistribution of power to smaller centres: cities over states, causes over parties etc.

Technology clearly has no agency of its own. We are not yet in the Age of Ultron, despite the warnings of impending AI doom from Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk.

But it’s hard to ignore the effect that technological developments specifically have had. And the mobile network has been at the heart of many of these changes.

Some of the biggest cliches about the impact of mobiles have been shown to be true. Are we now less likely to organise meetings and chores in advance, and instead operate on the fly? Yes, says a Vodafone-sponsored 2013 study by the Cologne Institute for Economic Research that looked at changes across 10 countries. Does the constant presence of buzzing boxes and flashing screens disrupt our interactions with friends and family? Yes, say this and other studies.

Even if there are underlying human drivers behind the technology, being connected has changed our behaviour. And as you might expect, some of these changes are most evident in the young.

22 TMNQUARTERLY

THE 3GENERATION

T

he availability of a mobile data connection enabled established users to access the drug of email.

But faster connectivity and lower data costs created alternatives that largely replaced it for anyone born after 1990.

As Apple rolled out the App Store in 2008 with a whopping 522 applications (there are now more than a milion), adding new software to your phone became a mainstream activity.

This wasn’t the first time apps were available of course: Java games and adult content had been big markets for years.

But the ease of access was now much greater than before.

What did people choose to download?

While the paid charts were dominated by games (Super Monkey Ball anyone?), the free charts told a different story.

In the top ten were, AOL Instant Messenger, Facebook, Myspace and Twitteriffic. Google, shopping apps and radio apps rounded out the list.

Mobile devices were now the fastestgrowing gaming platform. But they and the networks behind them had also enabled a shift in the way we communicate: real-time, short messages, and rich attachments. One to one, or one to many. We were all media owners now.

PERSONAL EMPIRES

T

he distributed nature of the Internet and the low-friction of digital publishing had always held the potential to disrupt both markets and power structures. But it was only when connectivity became so pervasive that the effects started to be accelerated. Placing the power of broadcasting via text, video and photo into the hands of millions has proven to be a disruptive force in the challenging of governments and the established media alike.

While the major barons such as Murdoch retain their hold on the primary levers of influence in the UK and beyond, there are

SOCIETY: PLAY

clearly more alternative voices than there were before. New stars have arisen from this media morass, with names like Zoella, Pewdiepie, and KSI familiar to millions of younger followers, and each earning millions of dollars. In recent days the success of Twitter’s Periscope live video broadcasting app has demonstrated a continuing appetite to share the minutiae of our daily lives, as well as larger events, with the world.

DIGITAL LOVE

W

hat has surprised many from previous generations is the young’s willingness to share large parts of their previously private lives over the network. Social networks rely on us wearing our hearts on our sleeves.

The intimate relationship we have with our phones has made them the gateway between the private and public. Nowhere is this more evident than in the field of dating. Apps like Badoo, Plenty of Fish, and Tinder are now defining the way many people meet prospective partners, whether they’re partners for a night or a lifetime. Tinder alone has millions of users in the UK, the most active users in its global base, and is growing at over 25% per quarter.

As a long-married late-thirty-something the lens through which I view this change is inevitably more telephoto than macro.

Though the data on this trend today remain slight, the anecdotal evidence comes over strongly in any conversation with single friends.

For many, apps have displaced any prospect of the cold approach at the bar.

The app is the default route. Confident, attractive people of both sexes have told me they are less likely to approach someone, and are very unlikely to be approached, without an app doing the initial brokering - and giving a level of permission. Remember: you both have to ‘like’ the other’s image and introduction before the match is made.

MANY SMALL WORLDS

U

ntil we surrender to our robot overlords, technology will never be our master. But it is the conduit through which the impact of many other change drivers is carried. Market forces, societal shifts, economic development and perhaps a fundamental desire in humans to connect and communicate with absolute freedom. Technology is the means through which these forces have driven disruption and dis-intermediation, and driven commentators to distraction.

But it is also the medium that has created connections, carried global conversations, and most arguably most importantly, democratised access to information.

Of all its impacts, nothing will probably change our personal lives more than this. The mobile network has been the fundamental bearer of information between individuals and the bandwidth in which we share this information is only going to increase. In parallel, more and more devices are starting to share their information, with us and with each other.

In the near future when my daughter tells me to ask Siri where my keys are, it will probably know the answer.

TMNQUARTERLY 23

SOCIETY: WORK

WORKING FROM MOBILE Did mobile networks change how we work, or did how we work change mobile networks?

Mobile has changed the way we work.

It has freed us from paper, from offices, from commutes. It has allowed us to form ad-hoc teams from federations of interest within companies, rather than be walled within siloed operational cul de sacs.

It has won us back hours a day. It has given us instant access to our contacts, applications, messaging and files.

Does that feel like your working life, or something from an aspirational piece of video at an enterprise mobility conference? The truth is, these are our aspirations for work (or at least some of the above are for some people), and we have been dragging mobile networks

Mobiles have increasingly replaced fixed line phones...

People want their phones to work when they are at their desks.

along behind. Until now. Perhaps now, for the first time, mobile networks are running ahead of us. But more of that later.

Certainly there have been changes to date. Offices look very different from 20 years go, and although most of that is due to the internet, rather than anything inherently mobile, there has been some impact we can put down to mobile networks. Mobiles have increasingly replaced fixed line phones. And as that has happened that has thrown up the need for increased coverage within office buildings. People want their phones to work when they are at their desks. It has also, in some cases, brought about the need to bring the phone within the same sort of control as desktop phones.

And it has introduced management and security concerns for large companies.

Witness the amount of articles on Mobile Device Management, and then on BYOD. As mobile phones, and then tablets, became the default on the road option for accessing email and messaging, then so other apps became mobilised too – the sort of sales and resource management apps that keep people working whilst they are away from the office. This move mapped nicely with the increasing adoption of cloud-based software as a service as a model for application consumption. And with that, mobile coverage and suitable capacity was important.

MOBILE NETWORK:

Tom Platt of SaaS provider BCSG, says, “A large part of what we are doing relies on LTE and 4G to be in place with sufficient bandwidth and connectivity. We are building on the societal trend of flexible mobile, virtual, offsite working.”

Platt sees a combination of technology enablement and changing socio-demographic trends creating something powerful for new ways of collaboration, fast synching services, mobile devices that access for cloud services, anytime/where access.

In any event, even without these enterprise changes, mobile came to dominate our “other” lives, our consumer lives, so that the need for good mobile coverage within the workplace became much more important.

That need for indoor and in-building coverage has in fact given birth to an entire class of mobile network product – those solutions designed to spread mobile coverage and capacity throughout large buildings. These range from standalone small cells to small cells managed by a central controller node, to DAS systems that feed macro capacity through fibre to remote antennas. In essence, though, these systems all follow consumption rather than drive behavioural change.

SECURITY:

This connected working world comes with one big issue though, according to Chris Halbard, of Synchronoss.

Halbard says the connected mobile enterprise “opens up the network to a massively larger number of security issues”. To address that, he sees solutions that can “create user groups within secure user groups, with a set of features that anonymise the IP endpoint so it cannot leave a trace that exposes the corporate network.”

“There’s a general CIO paranoia on uncontrolled IP endpoint type networks, but we must address this because that’s how people want to work. The raw economics of providing everyone a secured hardened IP phone is very expensive, so the new workspace will be about enabling your users to use any phone, tablet, device and then securing the content on it and access to it.”

FEATURE

Even where there is a native app on a device, there is a need for that cloud access. Platt references an app for receipt management for tracking expenses: the app uses the camera, scans a receipt, and then posts it to bookkeeping software. “Even for things like that there’ quite a lot of data transfer,” he says. “That connectivity is critical. That’s why EE associates business apps with its 4G offering, starting to build its messaging around this stuff being a proof point for 4G. I think if you start to provide real use cases, say that with 4G you get access to HD video conferencing, then you can create useful proof points.”

TRENDS

But is there a real change in our working environment? Halbard says that although the trends were visible four years ago, they are now becoming more accelerated

so working in this way is standard rather than exceptional. And that has been matched by a changing culture at work.

“Four years ago there was still a hardware product type mentality, with time reports and so on. Now it is all SCRAM groups and things like this, where groups spend a few hours together and then disperse - and some work through nights and are more flexible - and as long as at the end of the period the outcome is good then it’s understood that different people work better in different ways. You couldn’t do that four years ago but now you can because we have the bandwidth to do it.”

To 4G or not to 4G?

It’s interesting, isn’t it – that the mobile network opens up the possibility of change (say flexible working) but then creates challenges for itself in the wake of that – coverage, capacity, security. Once they are solved, though, the next class of workers is much more “native” in this environment. And now perhaps we are seeing the networks run ahead of what people want to do in their working lives. Yet 4G, for example, is still largely unexploited by medium and small businesses.

A recent Vodafone survey found that businesses who have upgraded to 4G clearly understand the ways in which it can help them by improving customer service and enabling flexible working. Benefits cited include:

51% INCREASED SPEED FOR DATA TRANSFER

43% FASTER

RESPONSIVENESS TO CUSTOMERS (AND SUPPLIERS)

Interestingly, the majority of businesses that have not yet made the move to 4G also perceived these as benefits of the technology. However, they do not appear to recognise the positive impact that these benefits (from the increased speed and capacity that 4G provides) could have on their business . For example, despite not having 4G, 41 per cent said downloading,

48% ABILITY

TO USE ALL BUSINESS APPLICATIONS WHEN WORKING REMOTELY

42% BETTER

FLEXIBLE WORKING

transferring and accessing data-heavy content is important to their businesses and nearly all said speed (95per cent) and capacity (97 per cent) are key factors when doing so.

As a result of the lack of awareness around 4G’s benefits to enterprise, businesses could be missing out on the bigger prize - how 4G can help

“Now developers in their early 20s are quite comfortable with that multi-stream interactive environment.” them to meet their business priorities.

Respondents across all types and sizes of businesses consistently cited, ‘increasing operational efficiency’, ‘improving customer service’ and ‘improving profits’ as their top business priorities. High speed and capacity are intrinsic characteristics of 4G, meaning the technology is a key enabler for effective flexible working, which in turn will contribute to greater operational efficiency, one of the top three business priorities for 50 per cent of businesses surveyed. In fact, 42 per cent of those businesses with 4G agreed that it better enables flexible working.

So if 4G capabilities are already running ahead of businesses’ ability to change and adapt to new working methods, how will the future evolution of networks affect us?

Will businesses adapt to sensor-rich, very low latency networks, fed by big data analytics engines, that can provide resources on demand as we move in and out of areas, where our work teams are formed of hologrammatic avatars, and the walls of our offices are 3D displays?

Will work, as a place, as a process and as a system, be digitised? It seems both unlikely, and inevitable.

TMNQUARTERLY 25

smart cities internet of things converged services

emerging technologies

economic impact

innovation strategy

SOCIETY: BUILT ENVIRONMENT

BUILT ENVIRONMENT MOBILE’S HERITAGE DISAPPEARS AS DEVELOPERS LOOK TO BUILDINGS DESIGNED WITH WIRELESS IN MIND WITH COMMERCIAL MOBILE CELEBRATING 30 YEARS OF OPERATION IN THE UK, MUCH OF THE EARLIEST-DEPLOYED TECHNOLOGY HAS DISAPPEARED AND THERE IS A REAL RISK THAT IMPORTANT MOBILE HERITAGE WILL BE LOST, WRITES GEORGE MALIM. According to UK regulator Ofcom there were approximately 54,000 base stations in operation in the UK in 2011, the last year for which it has been able to provide figures after operators stopped supplying it with site data. That figure demonstrates the sheer scale of a roll-out that, from a standing start, saw a basic, voice-oriented analogue service offered by two operators develop into a highly competitive market for digital services delivery.

“THE MOST PERVASIVE ARTEFACT IS THE MOBILE PHONE BUT THERE IS VERY LITTLE INFRASTRUCTURE BEING KEPT”

That industry is now mature and looking towards the fifth generation of mobile technology. However, much of its past is being swept away. Unlike other, earlier utilities, mobile sites were constructed quickly and cost effectively so there aren’t the ornate plant buildings associated with sewerage, power generation or gas distribution that Victorian utility companies built.

TMNQUARTERLY 27

SOCIETY: BUILT ENVIRONMENT

“THE MOST PERVASIVE ARTEFACT IS THE MOBILE PHONE BUT THERE IS VERY LITTLE INFRASTRUCTURE BEING KEPT,” SAYS PROFESSOR ANDY SUTTON OF THE DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTING, SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING AT THE UNIVERSITY OF SALFORD. “IN THE SCIENCE MUSEUM THERE IS AN OLD CELLNET TACS (TOTAL ACCESS COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEM) BASE STATION BUT QUITE OFTEN PEOPLE THINK NOTHING HAS CHANGED BECAUSE THE TOWERS HAVE BEEN THERE FOR 30 YEARS; BUT THE EQUIPMENT HAS CHANGED EVEN THOUGH THE HUT AT THE BOTTOM HASN’T.” Sutton, who is working on a project at the University of Salford to record mobile heritage, bemoans the lack of a photographic record, particularly of analogue equipment. “Technology is always considered as transitory but even getting photographs of analogue equipment is difficult – remember digital cameras weren’t around – and a lot of people simply don’t notice it on a day-today basis,” he says.

For Askar Sheibani, the chief executive of Comtek, which extends the life of existing equipment through maintaining and repairing it after manufacturers have stopped supporting it, heritage is being lost and serviceable equipment is being prematurely retired. “There’s very little interest in preserving any historic or early versions of telecoms infrastructure,” he says. “The legitimate and understandable reason is vendors want to generate profit for shareholders but society has a duty to always make sure any heritage is safeguarded.”

Although many thousands of sites have been established, those at higher levels such as on rooftops and large towers have little impact on peoples’ perceptions.

There is more to see at street level, which has seen the volume of equipment proliferate rapidly.

28 TMNQUARTERLY

“A first generation network was basically museums or by organisations such as the about building a PSTN network that Science Museum.” swapped the last quarter mile of copper Infrastructure has simultaneously become for a wireless communication,” says Colin less noticeable and more widely accepted Bryce, the director of technical solutions as operators have made their coverage at Commscope. “Therefore the approach more dense to add capacity. was to build as few towers as possible “As an industry we have been proactive so we saw the construction of lattice and minimised the impact of sites,” explains structures around the country which Sutton. “Structures are slimmer these you can still see in high places and on days and we try to integrate antennas into rooftops. Most of the original sites are still buildings. In addition, there has been a used in the network because they were change to planning attitudes to embrace placed in such a way to provide the best the digital society.” coverage. They still offer the best coverage Bryce agrees: “While the public have so very few will be replaced quickly.” become aware there are more installations Mark Keenan, a director of consultancy they view them in the same way as Real Wireless, doesn’t agree and thinks chimneys or air conditioning plant,” he says. some of the technology deployed and “There’s not a lot of concern about them.” sites selected were mistakenly chosen for “When we started it was a lot about coverage rather than capacity. mobile operators pushing the technology “In the early 1990s I was a programme and local residents complaining about new manager for GSM roll-out at BT Cellnet installations but now we are seeing pull with the responsibility for getting the sites from residents and authorities that built where they needed to be built,” he want digital technology to attract explains. “We started in the centre of London THE WORLD’S BIGGEST EVER but actually a lot of the sites we chose to provide INDUSTRIAL ROLLOUT? coverage from high Across the world, there are points were removed over six million macro base – probably within five stations. Go back thirty years, years – because we and there were none. That’s six actually needed lower 6 MILLION million truck rolls, six million sites and more of them. antenna alignments antenna alignments, High site replacement power backhaul connections, saw many of those connections power connections. sites dead and buried or used for microwave transmission.”

Bryce doesn’t see the towers themselves, particularly those in inward investment,” he adds. “We’re rural locations, as industrial heritage. “It’s now seeing campaigns to request the unlikely they’ll become industrial heritage deployment of cellular technology as users because they’ll continue to be used,” he accept a mast or tower will enable them to says. “The equipment mounted on them have the coverage they want.” is akin to traditional IT equipment in that That’s not to suggest infrastructure if we want to keep heritage it will be done deployment is without sensitivity and by individual organisations in corporate Sutton highlights how the industry has

SOCIETY: BUILT ENVIRONMENT

“IT’S NOT ONLY TOWN PLANNERS AND ARCHITECTS BUT ALSO DEVELOPERS THAT REALISE THEY HAVE TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT WIRELESS IN THEIR BUILDINGS – THE CAPACITY ISN’T PROVIDED BY A MAGIC FAIRY.”

backhaul connections

struggled to deploy installations in keeping with their surroundings.

“We’ve had a variety of guises of masts made to look like trees or farm buildings which sometimes have been mocked,” he says. “Yet we are always constrained by the scientific fact that a certain physical form factor is required with antenna gain.

There are many forces pulling on ultimate site design.”

Bryce sees the proliferation of installations requiring heightened discretion. “The nature of our business has changed from being a fixed-line voice replacement to being an IT delivery service and that has required significantly better use an reuse of spectrum which meant the number of cells is 6 MILLION increasing rapidly,” truck rolls he says. “That means building a radio frequency domain in the streetscape but you can’t have lattice towers or even big mono-polls down the length of Oxford Street.”

Sutton anticipates a future in which mobile infrastructure becomes better integrated with its surroundings as organisations of all types engage with it to support the needs of users in the internet of things. “There will be more and more remote radio heads which eventually will lead to smart antennas and equipment at the bottom

of tower,” he says. “In the longer term there has to be a complete integration of communications infrastructure around us.”

Bryce agrees and points to work being done by China Mobile to integrate equipment into building panels or disguising it in smart tiles or mosaic patterns on building facades. “That will certainly involve designing the core RF infrastructure into architecture in a way that hasn’t been done in the past,” he says. “We’ve only seen colour matching of equipment to its surroundings so far.”

The final element is in-building coverage, which has only recently become a significant issue. “We will see wireless technologies enveloping buildings so they are pre-plumbed in a way that allows you to easily configure wireless in a building,” adds Bryce, who returns to air conditioning as a comparison for integrating wireless into buildings.

Initially air conditioning was a retro-fit with unsightly units mounted outside windows or on the roofs of buildings.

As server rooms and tenants demanded better cooling, plant rooms were integrated within buildings and new designs incorporated all the necessary ducting. Ultimately buildings will also be designed with mobile signal propagation in mind.

“There is an awareness now among town planners and architects that wireless technologies can be built or hidden behind the facades of buildings but we are at the very early stage of that,” says Keenan. “It’s not only town planners and architects but also developers that

realise they have to do something about wireless in their buildings – the capacity isn’t provided by a magic fairy.”

However, he points out that if thinking is starting now, it will be at least five to eight years before buildings designed with wireless in mind become available.

He also warns that insufficient attention has been given to indoor coverage even though 80% of mobile usage occurs indoors. That is something the building designers should be considering but will also need to involve mobile operators.

“It’s primarily in the gift of mobile operators to deploy in-building systems because they own the spectrum,” adds Keenan. That’s where the situation becomes more complex in comparison to deploying air conditioning. In addition to spectrum access, building owners will need to deal with multiple operators.

“With air conditioning, a developer didn’t need a licence to cool the air and there wasn’t four different types of air for them to cool,” says Keenan.

“It’s the property side that needs to be educated, though, the operators get it and understand the issues.”

BUILDING CONSENSUS TMN tried and failed to find people involved in designing buildings to talk to us about how mobile infrastructure could be integrated with the built environment - so that buildings themselves can be designed with good wireless coverage in mind, and also so that the visual impact of mobile sites can be mitigated. It seems nobody wants to talk about it, or has thought about it. Yet.

TMNQUARTERLY 29

SOCIETY: ACCESSIBILITY

AN UNTAPPED MARKET

Hearing impaired Visually impaired

One of the potential benefits of mobile network technology is its ability to underpin services that can make the lives of people with disabilities easier, and bring new capabilities. Chris Lewis explains.

13m

148m 194m

285m

In the world of telecoms we often talk about different flavours of convergence. Well, even I, having been registered blind for over 25 years and an analyst looking at the telecoms industry, would not have put disability and mobile into a convergence discussion, but I do now!

Technology supporting different disabilities tended to be very expensive, disability specific and single function. It was a classic case of a fragmented market with every disability, charity, NGO and pressure group working in glorious isolation. To put this ‘segment’ of the market into context as can be seen from the pie chart, there are roughly a billion people in the world with some form of disability: hearing impaired is the largest category, vision impaired second, cognitive and learning third. Just think about it – it equates to 1 in 7 people. Disability affects 4% of children and 10% of the working population but over three quarters of those over 65. And, experience shows that the older you are when you ‘acquire’ a disability, the more difficult it is to embrace new ways

!*

360m

Learning/cognitive Physical disability Other disabilities

of doing things. Just think of your ageing parents or grandparents and their often Luddite attitudes to technology!

The disabled’s spending power is in the order of $3.5 Trillion, roughly two thirds from employment and a third from state benefit. However, those in employment, and it’s not a high proportion, earn on average 60% of their ‘able-bodied’ peers.

So, it’s a massive segment with significant economic power, but underperforming.

COMPUTING AND ACCESSIBILITY Over the last 30 years I have used a variety of clunky and expensive devices to get me through home and work life. And believe me, a lot of expletives have been hurled in the direction of most of it. The parallel developments of computing and accessibility (or assistive technology) never looked like they would converge. The first optical character recognition device I used was the size of a washing machine and cost in the region of $100,000. Assistive Technology was often seen as a bolt-on issue and hence little true integration offered. The developers of these 3rd party

offerings have spent most of their time keeping up with operating system changes without the luxury of product evolution.

We are now seeing the signs of more and more built-in accessibility, leveraging the operating systems and working more efficiently with apps and content. And, the signs are there from multiple platform providers that a more homogenous experience will be provided in the near future. To put this into context, that washing machine size scanner from 1980 is now a free app on my smart phone.

TMNQUARTERLY 31

SOCIETY: ACCESSIBILITY

The advent of smart phones with increasingly built in accessibility features, means that the disabled billion are increasingly exposed to the joys of apps and online content. Furthermore, this is no longer limited to high end devices. Apple leads the way in terms of accessibility with its Zoom, Voiceover and other accessible features. But, the good news is not limited to high-end devices. Android and Microsoft are picking up their pace and offering good accessibility on their devices. Android’s position in the market allows for some sub $50 devices and Microsoft is taking the entry barrier even lower.

The Mobile Manufacturers Forum has built a repository of mobile devices and their accessibility features. The Global Accessibility Research Initiative (GARI) holds up to date information about devices and their accessibility options.

Mobile operators can extract their set of devices from this database and have all retail outlets furnished with the information. Hundreds of devices are now included. (www.gari.info)

WEARABLES bring more options for complementing, replacing input and output facilities: think of the body and a series of input/output functions linking to the brain and the different parts of the body that can conduct information. At the extreme we have someone like Stephen Hawking accessing his information sources and writing presentations through the twitching of a cheek muscle.

I often use my mobile with a Bluetooth earpiece and a mini Bluetooth keyboard and leave the actual device in my pocket while walking along the street with my white stick out. Similar options exist for hearing impaired, physically impaired and their specific peripherals. The mobile device, coupled with its connection to the outside world is fundamentally changing the way disabled people think about living and conducting their lives.

It’s not all outbound from the individual.

Because the mobile service links the individual into other eco systems it can be used as the channel for monitoring, home care and, of course, a wealth of e-health applications. The good old days of dedicated devices monitoring, tracking and even dispensing

!*?

32 TMNQUARTERLY

medication or information can be distilled down to the mobile device and its wearable/peripheral cohorts.

The emerging plethora of wearables also bring some fascinating opportunities. It’s not all linked into one mobile device and offering. Some medical specific issues like a patch monitoring Parkinsons, could be in a dedicated closed loop feeding information to a carer, medical person or hospital or to the individual for selfmonitoring. It’s all part of the explosion of personal monitoring services and I don’t mean just personal tracking devices making you feel guilty about how few steps you have managed today!

ROBOTS: I’m not sure where they fit into the taxonomy, but they, along with drones, form another extension to the mobile control angle. At MWC in early March I chaired an accessibility workshop where the demo was provided by a quadriplegic presenting from his home in California using a set of goggles to control the robot on stage next to me! Oh, and he uses the same technology to ‘visit’ museums around the world, to fetch things from his fridge and to fly a drone around his garden to see what’s happening with his vines! I am not sure that robots will replace guide or hearing dogs in the short term but you can see the range of possibilities emerging.

SMART CITIES then complete the picture by offering a series of services to dovetail with the personalised service offered via the smart phone and wearables/peripherals. This needs cooperation between mobile operators, local authorities and local business to build out the extended small cell and even iBeacon type infrastructure. But, as with most aspects of the accessibility issue, it also offers better service, more accurate location information to everyone.

This requires a broader, all-embracing approach from the local authorities

SOCIETY: ACCESSIBILITY

HUMAN INPUT: By the way, disabled people don’t want the clunky specialist devices of old. They want to use the same smart sleek devices as everyone.

And, they want to use mainstream apps wherever possible. Some specialist apps, even designed by disabled people, will be necessary and (an important issue to keep in mind) human intervention is ANALYTICS: recognising the needs of also an option. The recently launched a disabled person can also leverage recognition apps for the vision impaired the explosion in data. It can be used to (e.g Be My Eyes, Tap Tap See) don’t rely identify the particular requirements of an on automated image recognition and individual, for example guiding a wheelchair OCR but on volunteers signing up to user to a particular door in a building. open up a live link to the individual to Proximity services can then open the door explain what things are – the human as the wheelchair user approaches touch can make all the difference!

– simple really. and government as they take the smart city issue on board. It shouldn’t be only about greener cities but also about better services for all citizens, whether that be integrated transport, social services, or simply information about civic activities. All will benefit from this more integrated approach.

STANDARDS: there are standards for web access and applications building which help developers conform to accessibility.

If this is done as part of the development and product refresh cycle, it will mean accessibility converges if not disappears into the world of personalisation.

Think of people being disabled and not yet disabled. As we get older, it is likely that the majority of us will have some form of sensory deterioration in hearing, sight, dexterity or cognition. And, even before that, given our dependency on our mobile devices and services, we can be temporarily disabled at different times.

For example, when driving many users are benefiting from the voice activation features of their smartphones. The better the services are designed, the better everyone can use them at whatever stage they find themselves.

The net/net is that everyone benefits: device manufacturers, apps and content providers, society and, of course, the disabled themselves. If we get it right, accessibility will disappear into product development and become a part of that oh so oft promised personalisation of services. Inclusively designed apps will benefit everyone and avoid any unnecessarily expensive add-on accessibility enhancements.

This is a business opportunity for the mobile industry and a chance to bring a massive market segment up to mobile speed.

ORGANISATION: Don’t keep accessibility in the CSR group but make it part of the product development and overall marketing. In the same way that connectivity is becoming embedded in our personal and business lives, so accessibility for the world’s billion disabled people should disappear into mainstream devices and applications to allow this formerly excluded segment of the market to benefit from the digital dividend!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Chris Lewis is a 30 year industry analyst veteran increasingly looking at the accessibility issue in addition to his consulting work with the telecoms industry as it mobilises, virtualises, commoditises.

You can read more from him at www.chrislewisinsight.com

TMNQUARTERLY 33

FEATURE: ORCHESTRATION

HOW OPEN IS OPEN? Delivering services via virtual functions will only be as successful as the technology that manages the architecture.

Can operators trust the industry to give them fully open solutions, and if so where will they come from?

Yves Bellego, Director of Network Strategy, Orange, puts it like this. “One thing where I do not see as an industry that we are making huge progress is the overall architecture: virtualised functions, orchestrators, VNF managers - what is the exact function of each of these, how does that fit together, all that is not clear today” “At the end what we need is an NFV system that is open so we can really use an orchestrator from one vendor with different functions from different suppliers, and hardware all from different suppliers.

“Our questions are, what is in the orchestrator, what is in that layer, what is in the VNF manager, how is all that is put together? Today if we put it together there is some overlap. They [vendors] all claim to do the same thing, so at the end where do we do that type of function? We need to ensure there are not some missing elements, especially in the management of VNFs.” What Bellego is addressing is the need to manage virtual functions in a carriergrade manner. One body that is trying to address this is the TM Forum, through its Zoom (Zero-touch Orchestration, Operations & Management) programme.

It recently asked the question, “now that network functions have been separated from devices, how are network services managed, while ensuring security, resilience, performance and scalability

34 TMNQUARTERLY

of these virtualised functions?

To date, the go-to answer has been to say, “Orchestration,” but in the NFV context, orchestration has become an increasingly overloaded and misused term.

The challenge, according to a Cisco paper, is that OpenStack alone is not enough for a carrier-grade NFV orchestration as telecom applications span over multiple virtual machines, especially when it comes to a carrier-grade NFV deployment. Thus a higher layer of abstraction is needed that orchestrates virtual network functions (VNF) instead of virtual machines (VMs).

The additional difficulty, according to Cisco, is that “although traditional OSS vendors are trying to adapt their existing product lines to cater to the needs of the NFV world, the reality is that most of them have yet to effectively address the needs of service providers.”

Not that you’d catch traditional OSS vendors agreeing with that. Here’s one of them, Mark Bieberich, Senior Director of Strategy for SDN/NFV at NetCracker, telling TMN, “Our system is supported by all network operators because they need a system of openness. What they would avoid is vendor lock in so whatever they can do to avoid that they will. So openness is really one of the key issues. Without it NFV doesn’t work. NEC is a big supporter

of openness, and we are actively involved in most standardisation bodies to create ecosystems, participating in an active way to make sure openness is maintained.”

“I can give you a concrete example; a tier one operator trial that required us to show that we could bring third party vendors into a security application that was virtualised by other vendors.

The orchestration platform that we are providing has open interfaces between orchestration and the VNFs, with those virtual functions run on separate virtual infrastructure managers - so OpenStack is one, VMWare is another - so in this POC we are supporting both of those. Our service provider customers are asking us not only to bring third party vendors into the fold, but to ensure we can instantiate and bring up VMs using any VM manager, and even within OpenStack itself asking us to make it more carrier grade. One of the more common criticisms of OpenStack is it lacks carrier grade attributes, and NEC been innovating around Openstack extensions over the last few years.”

FEATURE: ORCHESTRATION

WHAT IS ORCHESTRATION? In NFV the orchestrator provides lifecycle management of the network services that includes instantiation, scale-out/-in, performance measurements, event correlation, resource management, validation and authorisation for resource requests, and policy management.

When a service provider introduces a new service request, the NFV orchestrator receives the service data model from the OSS/BSS. The orchestrator determines the availability and features of the physical platform resources and generates an optimised map of resource locations.

It specifies both where VNFs should be instantiated and also the required connections between VNFs that are necessary to achieve the overall customer-facing service that has been ordered. (TM Forum)

Service providers are right to be concerned about the extent of the openness However, concedes the NEC man, “Service providers are right to be concerned about the extent of the openness.

There are already some early adopters like Telefonica, that has already introduced vCPE with NEC, so those early adopters are already there but there are operators that are more conservative and waiting for maturity of the system. But we need to make sure that we vendors get together and demonstrate that the ecosystem is there.”

One other “traditional” player that sometimes stands accused of defending its position is Oracle. Here, head of NFV Barry Hill says that Oracle is uniquely positioned to address the data-driven,

cloud-based network opportunity.

Hill says that up to now the company has been “delivering against our commitments for the acquisitions we made” but that it would now step up a gear as the company addresses the possibilities enabled by virtualisation.

“We believe we have got some [capabilities] about how you should deploy this virtualisation stuff that puts us way ahead of the competition - not a bit ahead, way ahead.

“So we are getting more and more aggressive about making the sort of statements that say we want to have a seat at the table that previously was dominated by Ericsson, Huawei, Cisco, Nokia, Alcatel-Lucent. It’s a different business, a different game - the world has just changed.”

Hill said that current orchestrators, including Oracle’s, are at a 1.0 level - statically connecting VNFs as a VNF manager. Level 2.0 would take that and add the ability to dynamically change VNFs, driven by network analytics.

“You don’t want to just orchestrate a static service, you want to have it active, be able to change, add capacity, a service, a customer with very little human

involvement. And the way you do that is orchestration with a powerful analytics capability so you can consume gobs of data coming out of network and feed it back into network to create the concept of JIT - where you are mapping supply and demand.”

Hill said that would necessitate feeding data through a policy framework which rules what you can and can’t do in the network, before sending to the orchestrator to make the change.

The third piece, for Hill, is Orchestation 3.0 - being able to map this network to business transformation. “What they’re saying is how do you transform the business and not just the network.

We are so caught up on ‘can I run on x86 and blah blah’ - it’s just a bunch of technical guys - but the CFO is trying to work out how transform the business.”

“That’s where the magic is. The trouble is the world of business orchestration speaks a different language to the network guys, so we have to think about driving a common service description language, common data models, to be able to orchestrate things in a way that the business drives the network and the network doesn’t drive the business.”

TMNQUARTERLY 35

COUNTRY PROFILE: FINLAND

, D N A L N I FF O W O N K EY H T O D T W? O WHA N K A I K NO Y L N O O WH ARE

VOICES D. RAISE OULDER

A SH HED. IS PUS HEY

ARE T “WHAT ABOUT?” G N I U G AR E WAP R A Y E H “T ,” COMES S R E P O L DEVE , AS IF Y L P E R E TH ERED W S N A T THA ING. H T Y R E V E

36 TMNQUARTERLY

I

t’s 2000. Helsinki. In a jostling queue at a late night snack bar, the sort of place that would only attract inebriates, the in-need-of-company and the sleepdeprived, things are getting tense. Voices are raised. A shoulder is pushed. “What are they arguing about?” “They are WAP developers,” comes the reply, as if that answered everything.

This, then, is a country where even (perhaps especially, given the above anecdote) the late night delinquents are immersed in mobile technology. As Nokia celebrates its 150th anniversary this year, and Nokia Networks looks set to swallow Alcatel-Lucent to add to its previous consumption of Siemens Networks, and of most of Motorola’s wireless network business, it’s tempting to write up the story of Finland as the story of Nokia. Even more tempting given the heroic (anti-heroic?) rise and fall of the mobile phone part of Nokia.

And triply tempting given Nokia’s central status not just to Finland’s economy and political nexus, but to modern Finland’s sense of itself.

And of course, you can’t write about mobile in Finland without also, and nearly all the time, writing about Nokia, but there’s a lot more to mobile innovation that what gets fed into Espoo House. Although Juha Sipilä, the most recently elected President started off his business life in the mobile industry, he is not an ex Nokia man.

Instead, he made his money when filter and RF component company Solitra was sold to ADC. Is there another country in the world with a President with a background in mobile technology? There are certainly few (that also have a pre-existing mature fixed telephony infrastructure) in which 80% of all voice minutes are on mobile networks.

The list of companies following this article is geared towards those active in some way related to mobile network technology. Over the years there have been more that have been acquired or integrated into other companies - including the likes of NetHawk (Exfo),Renesas (Broadcom),

The country is now determined to have a say as a prime mover in 5G research. The City of Oulu, hit hard by the withdrawal of Microsoft/Nokia and or Broadcom, is investing heavily in facilitating an environment for 5G deployment and testing. Oulu plans to erect a city-wide platform for 5G, on which tech companies can experiment with the currently undefined standard. Whilst one part of the network will be closed within the VTT premises, a public network at Oulu University will be an open test platform,

a of the programme gives an ide r ea hG 5t e th of an og The sl ications aditional telecommun tr e th nd yo be es go focus that

5G enables”.

– ts ec nn co on ti sa li a area: “Digit

which anyone can take advantage of in order for the network’s performance under heavy load to be examined.

Extended coverage throughout other areas of the city is planned.

The partners agree it can be used in the IoT market and that it will allow usage of multimedia and cloud-based services.

The project manager, VTT’s Atso Hekkala, was keen to stress the international implications. ‘This will enable a long-term collaboration between the operators within the entire wireless ecosystem.

With this venture we will stay abreast the international 5G development’, she said.

Oulu University’s Matti Latva-aho claimed: ‘5G will be the standard technology for the traditional, fast-growing wireless multi-media communications, and for the future massive machine-tomachine sector. Although 5G demands for significant architectural changes and the use of whole new technologies, it must also enable a flexible move from current application architectures and technologies to new ones’.

Whilst the current agenda is very much focussed on the network as a testbed, VTT have picked the commonly used 2020 date as the prediction for the environment’s evolution into a full-scale 5G network.

And Oulu is not alone. Tekes, a publicly funded expert organisation for financing research, development and innovation in Finland, has recently set up 5thGear, a new funding programme for 5G. Tekes launched 5thGear as one of three digitalisation related programs. It will run for five years and has a budget of EUR100 million of which Tekes funds around EUR50 million.

These new programmes follow-up Tekes’ previous long-term measures promoting the utilisation of digitalisation in the likes of the game industry and in the spheres of smart cities and learning solutions.

The slogan of the 5thGear programme gives an idea of the focus that goes beyond the traditional telecommunications area: “Digitalisation connects – 5G enables”.

Finland, the land of combative WAP developers and average users churning through 3Gb per month, seems set to continue connecting and enabling the world.

TMNQUARTERLY 37

COUNTRY PROFILE: FINLAND

COMPANIES Accanto Systems

Exomi

Accanto Systems provides Customer Experience Management (CEM) and advanced analytics solutions to Service Providers. By analysing big data, network performance and customer satisfaction, Accanto’s iCEM calculates the QoE (Quality of Experience) of all customers, across multiple services and devices. By identifying the business impact of the revenues that are lost through poor experience, Accanto provides recommendations to improve the QoE in order to achieve an optimised ROI for each customer segment. The benefits to the operator are increased customer satisfaction and a decreased churn rate.

Exomi develops mobile messaging and data infrastructure solutions that enable mobile network operators and service providers to take control over services and optimise network resource usage. Product suites include Mobile Messaging and Browsing, Mobile Marketing, hosted RCS, PMR (Tetra, Tetrapol) and Mobile Identity management.

BaseN

Haltian

BaseN is a mature Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) provider. With 13 years in continuous development, BaseN provides an extremely scalable, fully distributed, resilient, secure, and combined real-time monitoring and control platform for ICT, M2M, and the Internet of Things (IoT).

Callstats.io

callstats.io monitors and manages the performance of video calls in an WebRTC application. A Javascript client library measures the performance of a browser endpoint.

The dashboard provides service- and call-level metrics; enables WebRTC service providers to identify endpoints/ users experiencing poor media quality; and diagnose networking issues.

Comptel

300 service providers across 90 countries use Comptel’s big data solutions to manage service and order flows, capture data-in-motion and refine it for fulfilment, decision-making and monetisation actions.

Creanord

Creanord works in Performance Assurance,giving carriers visibility to the service sold and helping to extend this visibility to the customer via a service portal. Products include the CreaNODE 3000 Advanced Probe and EchoVault Performance Management.

Elektrobit

Provide a range of products for public safety markets, from subsystems all the way to a turnkey device or base station delivery, with base station frequency variants for WiFi, LTE, WCDMA, Mobile WiMAX, TETRA and GSM. 38 TMNQUARTERLY

Goodspeed Mobile WiFi by Uros

Goodspeed’s mobile hotspot works as a portable 3G router that uses the mobile network of the country you’re traveling in converting the local 3G to a Wi-Fi connection.

Engineering house high technology electronics design and productisation, designing and developing wireless devices, from miniaturised mechanics combined with sensors and radio technology and IoT to software .

Magister

Magister provides secure wireless communication and technology R&D solutions, simulators & test-beds, training, advisory and high end software development, and R&D on wireless systems.

Omnitele

Consulting and services for telecom operators and regulators in network strategy, design and quality assurance. Its mission is to maximise mobile subscriber quality of experience and minimise operator network expenditures.

Tieto

Product development services provider enabling communication infrastructure, connected device and semiconductor manufacturers build next generation networks, connected devices, cars and things. Together with alliance partners Tieto delivers chipset, software and services solutions for LTE & Hetnet, Cloud & NFV, Mobile Devices, Wearables, IoT and connected cars.

Wirepas

Wirepas’ Pino is a wireless multi-hop mesh protocol stack for IoT networks. It provides a distributed network management system where the nodes locally adapt for the best time and frequency domain for the benefit of the whole network.

FINLAND’S OPERATORS: TELIA SONERA -

3.2 MILLION

SUBSCRIBERS (4G LAUNCHED 2010)

ELISA -

2.9 MILLION

(CORPORATE 4G SERVICES LAUNCHED 2010)

DNA -

2.4 MILLION

(4G LAUNCHED 2011) Recent analysis by Tefficient found that the average Elisa SIM generated 2.9 gigabytes of mobile data per month in 2014. That meant that Elisa carried almost as much mobile data on its network in 2014 as Vodafone did in Germany, with an eighth of the customers.

One reason for the high usage is that Finnish operators still operate uncapped data plans. Neither Elisa nor DNA have caps and even though Sonera has, caps are often so high (e.g. 50 GB) that it in reality doesn’t matter. Instead of charging on a per volme basis, Finnish tariffs offer different speeds.

A network challenge for Finnish operators is Finland’s geography with its very low population density, but propensity for Finns to spend time at remote second houses, operators must cover large areas of sparsely populated countryside.

This has lead to Elisa claiming 95% LTE population coverage by the end of 2014 and DNA 85%. DNA is also part of a network sharing JV with Sonera, with a target to have 99% population coverage in 2018.

OpenSignal’s WifiMapper is a global free Wifi finder.

Using a Wifi database built up from its users of 500 million hot spots, OpenSignal built an algorithm to detect which of these hotspots are free for users.

It believes this is the most complete free Wifi finding tool in the market, with over 2 million recommended hotspots around the world.

TMNQUARTERLY 39