TMN Quarterly 2016 Issue 15

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

ALSO FEATURING Making sense of the world’s mobile networks

35 N ETWORKED WORLD: HEALTH 22 P ICTURE STORY: UNDERGROUND OVERGROUND 2016 // Issue 15

E R E H ork N w t E e n P Ofor the open ANCE R U S S ORK AL A VIRTEUVIRTUAL NETW

FOR TH

REGULARS

COUNTRY PROFILE: INDIA // ANATOMY OF A MOBILE OPERATOR: THE CHALLENGERS

CONTENTS

ISSUE 15 // OPENING UP THE NEW NETWORK

12

18

25

30

Openness has become the unnoticed buzzword in the mobile network industry. But what does it really mean, and how open is Open?

A virtualised network will need to be tested and monitored in a very different way to today’s networks. Welcome to the self-aware network.

Siting and planning authorisation has become a key part of regulatory and Government efforts to foster wider mobile broadband and establish 5G leadership.

5G asks us to think in terms of building the unkown with the known, imagining the unimaginable. That doesn’t have to be a paradox that concerns us.

Open Networks

NFV Assurance

Siting & Planning

5G doublethink

REGULARS ////////////////////////////////////////// Republic Wireless

Play

Smile

xl axiata

06

Anatomy Of A Mobile Operator: The Challengers From Africa to the USA, Poland and Indonesia, TMN looks at four operators who have gone about their businesses in a very different way to their competitors.

4 TMNQUARTERLY

MORE REGULARS /////////////

Hi!

EDITOR

Do you know your Open Daylight from you ONOS, your OpenNFV from your Open Networking Foundation?

This issue we look at the multitude of Open Source bodies that are developing software for the telecoms SDN and NFV space, and ask if Open can mean Open, and what that in turn the rise of Open means for operators.

35

39

Mobile seems a perfect fit to transform healthcare, but pilot projects have stalled.

India faces its greatest disruption in a network generation as Reliance Jio opens its doors for trading.

Networked World: Health

Country Profile: India

22

Picture Story: Underground Overground From the unusual to the unlikely, we picture some alternative proposals for mobile networks.

As national governments ask their communications providers to “lead” in 5G, driving the transformation of vertical industries and the way that businesses interact with their customers and government authorities with their citizens, so the pressure is loaded back onto those governments to provide a landscape in which operators can deploy networks. There’s no better example of this than in the area of site planning and site approvals process. Our Planning feature tracks what can be done.

5G asks us not just to believe in the unimaginable, but actually to build it. Or at least it asks us to build a framework upon which the unimaginable can be built. If that sort of paradox sounds like your thing, then you are going to love our 5G Wonderland feature. If it doesn’t, then read it for the the lost of 5G use cases (that we currently know of).

We’ve also got a terrific picture story looking at all the weird and wacky proposals for providing mobile network connectivity. From under the ground antennas to balloons and drone, it’s all here?

Finally, we ask how you can instrument and test the virtual network… and the answer is with virtual test equipment, of course!

Enjoy Issue 15

Commercial Director: Shahid Ramzan // shahid@the-mobile-network.com Editorial Director: Keith Dyer // keith@the-mobile-network.com Creative Direction and Design: Francesca Tortora // info@francescatortora.com

KD

Keith Dyer keith@the-mobile-network.com

© 2016 TMN Communications Ltd.

TMNQUARTERLY 5

ANATOMY OF A MOBILE OPERATOR: THE CHALLENGERS

S R E G N E E CHALL

erator obile Op M a f o natomy oss ition of A d e l ia from acr c e s p r s o t a is r h e t In four op he one, but oach to t t r o p n p t a a t n k e r we loo n a diffe ave take h t s model a h t f busines o s the world m r e her in t gers. arket, eit e challen m h t e e il s b e o h t m We call l rollout. a ic n h c e or t

TH

COUNTRY

INDONESIA

SUBSCRIBERS

100 MILLION

FOUNDED

BOUGHT BY AXIATA GROUP IN 2009

PERSONNEL DIAN SISWARINI CEO WILLEM LUCAS TIMMERMANS Director / Chief Strategic Transformation Office

58,000

OPERATOR PROFILE

BASE STATIONS IN NETWORK END 2015: +50% IN 3 YEARS

27%

42%

SMARTPHONE USERS GREW FROM 27% TO 42% IN 2015

6 TMNQUARTERLY

It seems a bit odd to include an operator with 100 million subscribers, and one that sits in second place in terms of market share in a massive country like Indonesia, as a challenger, but XL Axiata deserves further investigation.

Take note of the fact that as recently as 2010 the country had only 40 million subs. Hidden in that rise in numbers is a merger with another player, Axis, and a commitment to transform the company into being a data-led, higher ARPU company that went beyond competing on price.

To do so it adopted a 3 R’s strategy — Revamp, Rise, Reinvent — as it undertook to raise ARPUs by prioritising and increasing its LTE network presence.

Here are those elements: Revamp — to shift subscriber acquisition (from largely ‘no value’ to ‘value’ subs) and distribution strategies as well as a total overhaul of the product portfolio to improve yields. ise — moving the XL brand up R the value ladder via a dual-brand strategy with Axis to address different segments of the market. einvent — going beyond today’s R business model.

It embarked on an extensive LTE rollout, launching 100Mbps LTE with kit from Huawei and Ericsson in 2015.

Huawei is also planning to evolve XL’s packet core to an NFV-based platform,

as the operator moves to a cloud network architecture. The Chinese vendor says its NFV-based CloudEdge solution will provide a bespoke solution to the operator’s virtual network modernisation requirements.

Thus XL’s 4G LTE footprint is now at 5,250 sites as at the end of June 2016, with presence in over 58 cities and areas. In an effort to further improve data experience for XL’s smartphone users, XL also continues to invest in improving its network quality and coverage with more than 23,000 3G Node Bs at the end of June 2016 taking total BTS site footprint to 66,353.

This number will be complemented by indoor and small cell LTE cells from Ericsson, as the operator seeks to extend high capacity coverage into major buildings. Initial rollout will take place at Jakarta International Airport and represents the first commercial implementation of its kind in Indonesia.

This strong take-up of 4G LTE and the increased adoption of data enabled phones have led to continued strong growth in data traffic. Total traffic grew by 88% YoY in 1H 16 compared with the same period last year and was mostly driven by growth in Data traffic as legacy traffic fell in line with the changing trend of consumer behaviour that XL is endeavouring to enable and capture. XL’s total Data users are now at 24 million or 55% of the total base.

ANATOMY OF A MOBILE OPERATOR: THE CHALLENGERS

Smile’s story is one of using LTE, a managed services-based rollout and new technology to offer a new type of voice service in Africa. It has also done so in a country where competition is severe and territory complex for new market entrants.

COUNTRY

NIGERIA

SUBSCRIBERS

N/A

FOUNDED

2013

PERSONNEL IRENE CHARNELY CEO SUDHIR CHOPRA CTO

$365 million FUNDING RAISED IN 2015

Remote integration was performed

by Ericsson’s Global Competence Center. The network rollout in Lagos was completed in record time with a deployment period of just one month.

Coverage continues to expand rapidly with its SuperFast 4G LTE internet available in Lagos, Port Harcourt, Ibadan, Abuja, Benin City, Kaduna, Onitsha and Asaba. Smile claims it is already Africa’s largest 4G LTE provider.

Now Ericsson has extended its presence to provide network operations as a service, including network operations, performance, optimisation, field support and maintenance.

In March 2016, Smile announced the introduction of two 4G LTE innovations to its customers in Nigeria — SmileVoice and SmileUnlimited.

Smile is the first operator in West Africa to offer its customers Voice over LTE services, giving them access to the fast growing Global standard for voice and video calling.

SmileVoice comes in two options; using a downloadable free mobile App that affords customers with a Smartphone Android and Apple iPhone device the ability to make SuperClear voice calls over Smile’s 4G LTE network, or through the use of VoLTE-enabled handsets plus a Smile SIM card, such as the latest Samsung devices. SmileUnlimited offers customers 30 days of unlimited access to Smile’s SuperFast 4G LTE mobile broadband service.

TMNQUARTERLY 7

OPERATOR PROFILE

OFFERS BOTH VOLTE & SMILEVOICE APP TO NON VOLTE CUSTOMERS

The company launched the first 4G LTE network in West Africa in Nigeria in 2014.

It was awarded the license to use the 800 MHz frequency spectrum in Nigeria, enabling the operator to leverage LTE technology and achieve a highly advanced network. Partnering with Ericsson, Smile Communications began a three-year LTE network deployment project, deploying transmission and Ericsson’s Packet Core solution, in over 1,100 LTE sites across Nigeria.

The first phase of the rollout was completed in Ibadan in February 2013, making Smile Communications the first operator to deploy LTE technology in West Africa. Commercial services were launched in Lagos a year later, and plans are in place for continued rollout across the country.

In order to cement its place in the market, Smile Communications needed a managed partner it could rely on to deliver a quick completion. Ericsson was responsible for the design, installation, implementation and integration of the network.

For the first time in West Africa, Ericsson also deployed its compact and fully integrated AIR (Antenna Integrated Radio) Antennae, which offer a fast rollout time, and better coverage and throughput. A project team of around 15 people rolled out the full core network, 75 LTE Radio sites and approximately 80 microwave transmission links.

DISCOVER the DISCOVER the POTENTIAL DISCOVER the DISCOVER POTENTIAL POTENTIAL POTENTIAL

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XCellAir brings ordermulti-market, to the chaosWi-Fi of leveraging Quality of Experience (QoE) solution for the management and optimization Quality of Experience (QoE) solution for the management unlicensed spectrum.

Our self-organizing network (SON) and andoptimization radio resource of wireless networks.

XCellAir brings order to the chaos of leveraging Introducing the industry’s first cloud-based, multi-market, Wi-Fi and LTEof the of wireless networks.

XCellAir brings order to the chaos leveraging optimization (RRO) capabilities dramatically improve QoE –ofWi-Fi regardless Introducing the industry’s first cloud-based, multi-market, and LTE unlicensed spectrum. self-organizing network (SON) resource Quality of Experience (QoE) solution for the management andradio optimization unlicensed spectrum. Our Our self-organizing network (SON) and and radio resource access point vendor technology –improve with flexibility andoptimization scale.of the Quality of Experience (QoE)orsolution for the management optimization (RRO) capabilities dramatically QoE – and regardless of wireless(RRO) networks.

XCellAir brings order to theQoE chaos of leveraging optimization capabilities dramatically improve – regardless of the of wireless networks.

XCellAir brings order to the chaos of leveraging access point vendor or technology – with flexibility and scale. unlicensed spectrum.

Our self-organizing (SON) and resource access point vendor or technologynetwork – with flexibility andradio scale. unlicensed spectrum.

Our self-organizing network (SON) and radio resource optimization (RRO) capabilities dramatically improve QoE – regardless of the optimization (RRO) dramatically– improve QoE –and regardless access pointcapabilities vendor or technology with flexibility scale. of the access point vendor or technology – with flexibility and scale.

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ANATOMY OF A MOBILE OPERATOR: THE CHALLENGERS

COUNTRY

POLAND

SUBSCRIBERS

14.6 MILLION (25% MARKET SHARE)

FOUNDED

2006

PERSONNEL JORGEN BANG JENSEN CEO HANS CRONBERG CTO

$386 million Q2 2016 REVENUE: +12% YoY

70%

The company has grown from zero users to 14 million, a 25% market share, in just six years, punching an enormous hole into the Polish mobile market previously dominated by the likes of T-Mobile and Orange. In Q3 2015, it reached number three status in the market for the first time, edging out Plus and Orange.

It is extremely brand-aware as an operator, taking its purple colour and its “blob” logo very seriously. Allied to this brand identity was a commitment to offering the lowest cost tariffs, for voice and data and especially in the prepaid market. Its PlayFRESH offer was introduced in 2008, followed in 2009 by an offer that provided free on-net calls. This was echoed with an unlimited Play Internet data offer in 2014 and a Fair Play concept followed in 2016 — offering customers the chance to change their contract terms even after signing.

A plan to float the company was deferred by investors who chose instead to refinance the company’s debt. P4 earned $1.01 billion in revenue for the 12 months ending September 2015, and is controlled by Greek businessman Panos Germanos, who owns 50.3 percent of P4, with the rest in the hands of Novator, controlled by Icelandic businessman Thor Bjorgolfsson.

Play’s story proves that a challenger can become an establishment player, by combining extremely sharp pricing with consistent and aggressive branding, whilst in the background leveraging technical efficiency. Where the operator goes next is still up for debate, however.

TMNQUARTERLY 9

OPERATOR PROFILE

LTE ULTRA: 3 CARRIER AGGREGAGTION LTE COVERS 70% OF POPULATION

Play’s story is that of the challenger operator that entered a market via a national roaming agreement and a plan to build in new spectrum, and became an established market presence in just a few short years.

With only a 3G license, prior to its 2007 launch Play signed a domestic national roaming agreement with Polkomtel allowing Play subscribers to access Plus’ GSM network. Roaming was nationwide, free and unlimited. Then in July 2010, Play signed a domestic roaming agreement with Orange operator — Centertel, and in 2013 Play announced that the third domestic roaming partner will be T-Mobile operator — PTC. The company had taken advantage of funding from China to finance an aggressive 3.5G rollout provided by Huawei, followed by an LTE upgrade. Meanwhile the company was also building out its own GSM network as an underlay to its 3G network, to reduce its reliance on roaming agreements.

By 2016 its own LTE network — launched as early as 2011 — covered 82% of the Polish population, and had added further spectrum blocks in the 2015 auction, one frequency block of 800MHz and four frequency blocks of 2600MHz. Following that it announced in 2016 that its new quadband carrier aggregation (CA) solution ‘LTE Ultra’ is now up and running.

The upgraded network uses the 800MHz and 2600MHz frequencies alongside its existing 1800MHz and 2100MHz spectrum and is now live at around 1,500 sites — enough for 70%+ of the population.

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ANATOMY OF A MOBILE OPERATOR: THE CHALLENGERS

COUNTRY

USA

SUBSCRIBERS

N/A

FOUNDED

2011

PERSONNEL DAVE MORKEN CEO CHRIS CHUANG COO

9

THE NUMBER OF DEVICE MODELS REPUBLIC NOW SUPPORTS

$20

increase in Wi-Fi call quality and a 209% increase in service quality at the edge of a Wi-Fi network. If there is no data link available then the call can still fall back to circuit switched cellular voice.

The firm also said it planned to add a second cellular carrier, with rumours suggesting T-Mobile would be its second national carrier. Chris Chuang, COO, says, “As in any new technology approach, innovation often initially comes with a few compromises; and in the case of our hybrid WiFi calling, it was a limited selection of devices and cellular network. Thanks to some key breakthroughs in our Adaptive Coverage technology and the addition of a GSM carrier partner, our vision will become reality, as we will remove these limitations so we can serve many more customers with our top-ranked offering.”

As well as technical innovation, the company has never shied away from a marketing trick or two. Notably, it offered to pay customers back for any “unused” data from their plans. It was a nice trick — to get users thinking about how much data they left “unused” with their other carriers, and to give the idea that you had only paid for what you had actually used. Customers can also change plan as they go along, and the company promises that “the plan you sign up for is the bill you get, period.”

These sorts of innovations led to the company being ranked above all the major wireless operators in terms of customer satisfaction and value for money, in a large poll conducted

by PCMag. TMNQUARTERLY 11

OPERATOR PROFILE

MONTHLY UNLIMITED CALLS/TEXT AND 1GB OF DATA

Our last challenger is a mobile operator that has no mobile network, but is much more than your average MVNO. Republic Wireless initially launched in 2011, offering something it termed Hybrid Calling — which was essentially a model that leveraged smart connection software to offer users Voice over WiFi as a first choice, with a reversion to a cellular signal only where necessary. “We believe that most smartphones should be communicating over Wi-Fi natively, and only using cellular spectrum if needed, not all the time,” said Dave Morken, CEO, as he launched the service.

Sprint provided its initial mobile network fallback capability, although the company has since added T-Mobile as another “host” carrier. The company has also added smarter connectivity management as well as a much wider range of phones. In mid 2015 it added the capability to move in a smooth handover from cellular to wifi coverage and vice versa.

In April 2016 it announced “bonded calling” technology that Republic claimed could combine cellular and WiFi signals in real time to improve service quality. The carrier said the technology senses the quality of a phone’s connectivity over WiFi and uses available cellular data links as back up to fill in any gaps. Republic duplicates each audio packet — sending one over each available transport — one over WiFi and one over Cell. The Republic server listens for both — fifty times a second — and takes whichever wins the race. Republic noted in testing the technology has resulted in a 52%

FEATURE: OPEN NETWORKS

Operators are insisting on

Open,vendors certainly all claim to be Open, but what is open, and how opn is Open?

12 TMNQUARTERLY

open

FEATURE: OPEN NETWORKS

A seemingly bewildering number of open source networking initiatives have opened up in the past 2-3 years — each promising to deliver an Open way to deploy SDN, NFV management, service orchestration, infrastructure management and so on within the network.

In telecoms we are used to identifying and then becoming scornful of buzzwords. This is because a word becomes so “hot” that a word starts to lose its meaning. So “Cloud” or “Big Data” or even “5G” have become words that are used to signify a concept, and tend to get attached to technology initiatives to lend them weight.

The latest word that does a lot of heavy lifting as a signifier, without always meaning the same things to those that use it, is the word Open.

“Open” is without doubt the buzzword of 2016 in the telecoms software and infrastructure space, driven by the increasing realisation that NFV and SDN development and deployments will not offer telcos the flexible, vendor-neutral, environment they were hoping for if, at their core, they rely on a certain vendor implementation of cloud or NFV management.

One way this realisation manifested itself was in orchestration, where around 18 months to two years ago vendors each brought their own orchestrator to the market, in some way adhering to an ETSI model for NFV MANO that itself was a bit gappy.

Because of these gaps OpenStack, the de facto open source approach to cloud management, was deployed to provide extensions to support NFV MANO — meaning that each implementation was a question of interpretation by the vendor concerned. The end goal of NFVSDN — the open, vendor-neutral network that can be controlled by a master OSS, as contrasted to dozens of OSS managing vendortied network elements, was receding.

Some operators therefore surmised that the way round this was to drive

the industry around collaborative approaches to defining cloud management and network and service orchestration.

And so we saw a variety of open source projects established — you can see a list of them following this article.

In open source, software is developed by a community, with software remaining free and the source code of that software available to all. The idea that underlines the importance of the openness of open source is that nobody can dominate the code — at least in theory.

Open source based approaches in the telco NFV and cloud management space include ETSI’s Open Source MANO, which is intended to develop an Open Source NFV Management and Orchestration software stack.

The Group thinks that Open Source software can facilitate the implementation of an ETSI aligned NFV architecture, provide practical and essential feedback to the ETSI NFV ISG and increase the likelihood of interoperability among NFV implementations.

One chief backer of this project is Telefonica, which wants, through the release of open source code, to encourage industry and software developers to explore new NFV

possibilities from a welldesigned and tiered architecture proposal, thoroughly validated in realistic conditions.

Another approach more narrowly targets orchestration. OPEN-O, or Open Orchestration, aims, “To set up the world’s first SDN and NFV unified orchestrator, serving as an important step in promoting deeper convergence among SDN and NFV technologies and innovation in the networking industry,” according to Jim Zemlin, executive director, The Linux Foundation.

Other operators have gone about things slightly differently. AT&T has developed its own cloud and NFV management software — known as E-COMP — internally, and now it wants to make the code available in an open source environment for other operators to contribute to and test. Orange is the first operator to have said it will do so — raising the possibility of two different operators using the same software platform for network and service operations.

Vendors, too, have namechecked openness at every opportunity, and make great play of their contributions to open source bodies as well as to highlighting their open APIs. Sometimes this is even on a more multi-lateral basis such as the OSS interoperability alliance between Nokia, Ericsson and Huawei — in which

Everyone will say they have

OPEN APIs BUT ouR UNIQUE claim IS THAT INFORMATION WE OFFER models.

OPEN

TMNQUARTERLY 13

FEATURE: OPEN NETWORKS

open APIs to their OSS suites are offered to each other and to other industry providers.

So what does this expectation of Openness mean for vendors providing commercial equipment to operators? Certainly the expectation of Openness is now translating itself into real vendor approaches, as well as marketing. To take one example, optical transport equipment provider Infinera has launched an open-source SDN controller, and some pre-configured SDN-enabled applications, to enable greater programmability and control of its core optical transport equipment.

The Xceed Software Suite is intended to foster greater use of SDN control in carriers’ transport networks where, according to Infinera’s Geoff Bennett, SDN progress has been slower than in data centres.

One way of overcoming that slow progress will be the ability to offer a common view of different layers in the network including down to the photonic layer (WDM layer 0) and up to IP at L3, — even though those topologies will be different. That multilayer path computation capability will enable end-to-end service provisioning and control, making it easier to deploy SDN applications across subsea, longhaul and metro networks.

The software is a purpose built design based on the Open Daylight framework, which Bennett said “offered more” than alternative open-source development alliance ONOS which simply has not been around as long. It also a network abstraction layer that features northbound and southbound open APIs, including open APIs to the company’s YANG-based information model.

“Everyone will say they have open APIs,” Bennett, Director of Solutions

Join the conversation

14 TMNQUARTERLY

and Technology at Infinera, said, “but our unique claim is that we offer open information models.”

Bennett said that Infinera was able to extract greater benefits from SDN because it already developed an advanced, programmable, data plane. mCORD and CORD are two further Xceed also includes some intitiatives from within On.Lab. ready-made apps, with two Launched in February 2016, and built examples being an instant virtual on top of the ONOS open source project network and the capability and Central Office Rearchitected as a to provide dynamic bandwidth.

Datacenter (CORD), M-CORD combines Wholesale operators could take data center economies and the cloud advantage of the IVN capability agility of CORD infrastructure with to offer flexible services to MNOs mobile edge computing architecture. and MVNOs sharing physical links Essentially it’s a way to enable service and infrastructure, for example. delivery in a cloud fashion from “And IVN would given them all the edge of the network. That requires the control they need in their disaggregation and virtualisation own network, but with non of the of mobile infrastructure components. responsibilities of facilities and plant and so on.”

So why has Infinera designed its own SDN controller? “Our original starting point was to be controller-agnostic,” Launched within ETSI in February Bennett said, “but service provider 2016, Telefónica, British Telecom, customers said they would not decide Telenor, and Telecom Austria Group on a specific controller and would like joined with key NFV cloud solution us to develop a controller so they could providers Intel, Canonical, RIFT.io, jump to transport SDN.” and Mirantis as founding members Bennett added that the controller to form a new ETSI-hosted openis really a “value add” that offers source project called Open Source a different spec on its optical equipment.

MANO (OSM). The project will “It’s about making our equipment focus on evolving an ETSI NFV work better and work better with ISG-compliant information model other people’s equipment. We’re not (IM) to an implementable data making money by selling the SDN model, which will in turn drive software, it’s about enabling the future an OSM code base to address of our hardware.” multi-use-case NFV. Such an For Open to really mean open, the various open-source implementation industry contenders, listed here, will begins to realise the promise of need to develop real, deliverable software an open ecosystem of virtualized and code to the industry vendors who in network function (VNF) vendors, turn can turn these into commercial models. by working toward a uniform We are a long way from the end game. deployment model and providing the path to true multi-use-case network services (NS), which Is there a risk that Open networks will can in turn be deployed by the turn out to be not so open after all? operator community at the #TMNtalkingpoint Contact: talkingpoint@the-mobile-network.com lowest possible integration cost.

CORD and mCORD (Central Office ReaRchitected as a Datacentre)

Open Source MANO

FEATURE: OPEN NETWORKS

The

en Opcontenders

ONOS: Open Network Operating System Formed as a Project Organisation in April 2015 following incubation within ON.Lab, ONOS says its goal is “To produce the Open Source Network Operating System that will enable service providers to build real Software Defined Networks”.

Has board-level backing from AT&T, China Mobile, China Unicom, NTT DoCoMO, SK Telecom, Verizon, as well as a range of vendors. Produced its first open source network OS code in December 2014.

OPEN-O The Open Orchestrator Project is aimed at the delivery of end-to-end services across Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) Infrastructure, as well as Software Defined Network (SDN) and legacy network services.

OPEN-O is seeking to offer network operators an incremental path to transform their networks, and OSS/ BSS, through adoption of SDN and NFV without scrapping the vast investments in existing equipment and technologies.

Launched in early 2016.

i p h c am onship

ECOMP

Open Daylight

AT&T’s internally developed OSS for managing NFV and SDN networks. The carrier has placed the code into open source for contributions and adoption by the wider industry. Orange has been the first vendor to commit to test the ECOMP software.

A relative veteran of the Open Source space — it is now on its fourth full release — Open Daylight wants to build a common platform for SDN. The Open Daylight (ODL) platform includes a wide range of SDN-use cases for both carrier and enterprise deployment.

Open Networking Foundation Founded in 2011 by Deutsche Telekom, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Verizon, and Yahoo!, the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) is best known for contributing Open Flow — the protocol that allows an SDN Controller to manage the forwarding element in the network.

Open NFV Now two years old (it was founded in September 2014) this is another Linux Forum project. Open NFV is intended to provide some standards to the management of NFV infrastructure and Virtualised Infrastructure Management.

Open Stack Project that defines the open source cloud operating system that manages the structural elements in a SDN. Has become a de facto industry standard in cloud OS, deployed and supported by most of the major cloud and virtualisation vendors in the industry.

TMNQUARTERLY 15

SPONSORED FEATURE

Seven things I know about…

MONITORING THE VIRTUAL NETWORK NFV brings complexity to assuring a good customer experience Roberto Artola, Architecture & Platforms, Chief Architect at Astellia outlines the key aspects of network monitoring to be aware of as operators move to virtualise network functions.

NFV enables quick creation and deployment of innovative services, but this can be quite risky to subscriber’s QoE if managed incorrectly. In order to ensure the availability and reliability of the network and properly measure the customer experience in virtualised and hybrid environments, a probe-based service assurance solution is critical.

Glossary

2 VM

Virtual Machine

NFV

Network Functions Virtualisation

VNF

Virtual Network Function

SDN

Software Defined Networks

vEPC

virtual Evolved Packet Core

vIMS

virtual IP Multimedia Subsystem

OpenStack Widely deployed Open Source Cloud Operating System

16 TMNQUARTERLY

As network functions are virtualised, monitoring solutions must evolve as well

Astellia provides integrated solutions that capture data from the network and perform network analytics, subscriber intelligence and troubleshooting. When functions in the network are virtualised the interfaces can no longer be physically tapped. This changes how and where we need to monitor. Monitoring solutions must be virtualised to be deployed together with the network and to follow network elasticity. Monitoring solutions hence become themselves a VNF as part of the virtual network.

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3

Monitoring a virtual network brings challenges...

As I said above, things change within a virtual architecture.

We need to find ways to duplicate virtual flows to our monitoring solution. There is also a challenge around orchestration integration. NFV orchestration is dynamic and automated, reconfiguring the network in real-time.

Therefore the monitoring solution must also reconfigure and rescale in accordance with the changes in the virtual EPC or virtual IMS infrastructure. Additionally, the industry is also working towards control and user plane separation (CUPS) and this in turn means we need to tap and monitor both planes, although they will be logically separate in the network, and may even be in different data centres.

So we will also need to correlate the two planes.

As orchestrators reconfigure the NFV network, so our monitoring fabric adjusts Our Network Topology Manager can detect if a new VM instance has been launched for a new VNF and can then reconfigure our monitoring solution to launch a new vProbe and reconfigure the tapping to monitor the new VNF. The second component we offer is a VNF Manager that takes care of the health of the monitoring solution and is in charge of automatically starting a new vProbe in case of failure or overload.

Operators need to think about monitoring when they think NFV Those customers that already have some NFV deployment might have better knowledge but in most cases these topics are quite new and different from what operators have been used to. Customers are asking us for meetings and workshops to be educated on how we can perform monitoring within NFV. We are available to provide that support, have the experience, expertise and the solution flexibility to do so.

www.astellia.com

…but also opportunity for innovation To meet new IP flow duplication requirements, we propose an application “TAP manager” that is able to detect any changes in the network and instruct the network controller to duplicate and forward the relevant flows to virtual probes.

Our TAP manager leverages the northbound API of SDN network controllers that manages the network in an endto-end perspective, connecting all VNF functions together.

Some SDN controllers are more adapted and easier to implement since they provide a higher level of abstraction (such as Cisco APIC) and manage entirely the network topology. This is interesting to use because it takes away the requirement to know exactly which ports to monitor.

NFV can increase reliability via smarter redundancy You can achieve a minimum level of redundancy just by having the VNF Manager restarting the VNF instance in case of failure. The only issue with this approach is that there will be a few minutes downtime (depending on the underlying virtualisation platform) until the new vProbe is running and has been configured.

Astellia’s vProbes run in a N+1 redundancy mode, having one standby vProbe that is running for a set of N active vProbes. For this to work you need to consider the additional procedures for monitoring and detecting “outage conditions” and automatically switch over a failing vProbe to a standby vProbe and provision a new standby vProbe. This approach provides a much shorter downtime in case of failure.

Astellia is a leading provider of network and subscriber intelligence enabling mobile operators to drive service quality, maximise operational efficiency, reduce churn and develop revenues.

www.astellia.com

TMNQUARTERLY 17

FEATURE: NFV ASSURANCE

Using virtualisation to provide assurance to virtualised networks means building something akin to a sensor network operating within NFV and 5G networks as part of the fabric. This creates an embedded monitoring and sensing capability that provides feedback to the brains of the network.

the fifth sense

A Fifth (Generation) Sense.

18 TMNQUARTERLY

FEATURE: NFV ASSURANCE

One theme emerging during 2016, as operators and vendors begin to rollout out NFV implementations, is the requirement to do something about collecting and managing network data within a network composed of, or partly composed of, virtualised network functions.

The vision is broadly this — to use virtualisation upon itself. In other words use virtualisation techniques to move data capture from centralised physical appliances to a distributed, virtualised instrumentation of the network that can intelligently provide information flows to where they are required. The idea is to embed data capture, flow monitoring, performance and service assurance within the fabric of the network itself. This shifts monitoring from being external to the network, probing and inspecting and reporting, to being something integral to the network. This integral assurance capability acts like a sensor network, working out what is happening in the network in real time, based on state info from devices, network elements

and functions. Decisions as to what to do with this information — say to discard it as superfluous or instead to escalate it to orchestrators and controllers to act upon — are taken in a structured way within the network.

That is the vision. How to get there is more problematic.

Balaji Ethirajulu, Director Product Marketing at Ericsson, says that in the legacy world, service assurance played a role to manage the network, identify root cause of a problem, provide performance reports and also take some proactive action. But, the role of service or requirements of service assurance will be different for NFV, SDN and hybrid networks. More than ever, service assurance will play a key role or act as a catalyst for the NFV and SDN. That’s because automation, network agility and service agility are the cornerstones of NFV, and this will only be achievable if service assurance can match those demands. To do that will require network analytics to play a key role by providing proactive and predictive actionable intelligence.

Service assurance can help close the loop to enable the automation, network agility and service agility, enable policy decisions to be applied by using actionable intelligence from network analytics. Similarly, assurance and analytics information can be used by the orchestrator to manage the service and network resources efficiently both in legacy and virtual networks.

For example, network assets can

be optimised, moved around or scaled up/down based on the proactive and predictive information and thus providing the network agility. And based on services need at a certain time, VNF’s can be scaled up/down or new VNF’s can be created.

Ethirajulu, writes, “Open source projects such as OpenDaylight and OpenStack (Ceilometer) need to enhance their performance and assurance information that takes into account the network functions that will run on top of NFVI. Both ODL and OpenStack are upstreaming into OPNFV. So, OPNFV with the projects such as SFQM (Software Fastpath service Quality Metrics) is moving in the right direction in the area of service assurance of NFV. To provide end-to-end service assurance of hybrid networks, service assurance solutions will rely on legacy network information (performance counters, alarms, events etc), NFV (OpenStack) and SDN (ODL) as inputs for its decision making.”

NFV transformation will also push the probes into virtualised environments as virtual probes.

NO GOD BOX NetScout Director of Product Management John English said in early 2016 that the key focus for the company will be providing assurance, instrumentation and analytics that can make sense of the amount of information coming from the network. The company’s virtual probes, based on COTS hardware, will be able to support “new, top-down modern workflow approaches” that curate data where it is collected and flow data that is essential, but retain the ability to go deep into forensic session analytics where required.

“You can’t move everything to the God Box,” English said, encapsulating the problem.

Also addressing the issue was Spirent,

TMNQUARTERLY 19

FEATURE: NFV ASSURANCE

“You can’t move everything to the God Box.” another company that is assembling its assets in a bid to provide a living, breathing view of service and network performance.

Spirent’s Ross Cassan adds that customers are complaining of the number of probes they are supporting in the network, and of data overload — something that will only get worse as IoT connectivity takes off and video volumes increase.

Spirent’s approach is taking automated “active testing” from the lab to the network, an approach described

by Cassan as a “better methodology” that can create a picture in real time for business units, if necessary feeding into the orchestration platform in a network. There’s still a requirement for probing capacity in the network, but Spirent thinks there is scope to automate test methodologies such as walk/drive testing, deploying virtual tests as VNFs that instrument the network upon any interface.

“It’s about going up the stack from L2-4, testing through to the real service,” he added. “You can do what was only available in the lab in the network.”

Procera’s Cam Cullen said that the advantage of virtual probes is that they can be placed into the network where needed, then moved or scaled up and down as required.

Cullen said that Procera has worked hard to provide feature parity between hardware and software probes, with no performance impact. That is not the case for other companies, he implied, which still have some hardware dependencies and need for acceleration.

As for what to do with the data you capture, the company was showing a GUI that allowed an operator to view

20 TMNQUARTERLY

a network in terms of its fitness for purpose per a certain application.

So by using the DPI capability and knowing what application flows there are, it can build up a picture if latencies might be affecting a certain gaming app, or throughputs impacting on video experience. It gives operators a view of the actual likely customer experience per app, rather than just a red/green light on a network KPI. Also thinking hard about how to capture and deliver information across the network for performance management and assurance is Accedian, which has introduced its new FlowBROKER product. At core here is a separation of the analysis from the data tap, so that a more distributed means of access to network data can be deployed, but data can flow through the network.

Accedian has been able to demonstrate some of this thinking in the field. An Asian operator with a 100,000 LTE base station network is carrying out live testing and monitoring of its network using virtualised instrumentation from Accedian.

The operator, who TMN is unable to name, is using virtual probes from Accedian to send test packets into a network that has more than a quarter of a million endpoints, generating 20 billion metrics per day to feed into its big data analytics systems. Metrics being monitored include delay variation, packet loss, MoS scores. The operator is using the feeds for ongoing analysis,

“The big change is that we are not just saying we are all-software but that we can offer software live in that service provider environment, allowing our customers to spin up and down resources for instrumentation to grow with traffic load as they want to.”

FEATURE: NFV ASSURANCE

and to assure backhaul links when new parts of the network are brought online. Accedian has claimed the deployment is the first such fully virtualised assurance solution in a live commercial network.

Some service measurements — such as on VoLTE — are made 50-60 times a second, with KPI reports every minute, according to Henrik Nydell, Senior Product Manager at Accedian Networks. A single virtual probe instance can instrument around 4,000 base station connections, Nydell said, by being plugged into the network at the aggregation layer. Accedian’s Skylight Director then orchestrates those probes, setting up automated measurements on the network.

If the virtual instance is sited deeper in the network, at a central location, then Small Form factor Pluggable (SFP) agents provide the feed from the network elements to the centralised cloud instance.

The deployment shows the ability of virtual test agents to scale and flex to service providers’ needs, Nydell said. However, he added that new measurement protocols will be required in virtualised infrastructures expected to underpin 5G and mass IoT networks.

IETF test standards for networks — such as Two-Way Active Measurement Protocol (TWAMP) RFC5357 — will need to be upgraded to ensure that standards that work for 4G work well in 5G. “For 5G virtualisation will be key, but you can’t really put a probe in the cloud. 5G will be a living entity. Not only users will move around but services

will too as operators spin up new servers new data analytics capabilities, and the ability for operators and instances dynamically. Things will to customise the service intelligence be floating around and you cannot they are offering, is allied to its ability see that at the network level, so that to deploy its instrumentation software instrumentation capability will need in virtualised form. to be built-in. For IoT the responsibility Product manager Phil Gray says, for monitoring the KPIs will need to be “If you have been in the tools business be built inside the app itself.” for any length of time you will know Nydell added that one example that people want to deploy tools where more work is required is time in exactly the same way as the services stamping in virtual architectures. environment, so virtual appliances He said that Accedian is amongst those and software is the only model that working with Linux groups to find a way to provide accurate time sampling “Things will be floating around and for server hardware supporting virtualised you cannot see that at the network architectures.

To return to level, so that instrumentation NetScout, as we said, it has been capability will need to be builton a mission to transform itself into in. For IoT the responsibility for a company aligned with the strategic monitoring the KPIs will need transformation of networks to be built inside the app itself.” from hardwarespecific appliance to virtualised instances running follows the desire customers have on COTS hardware. to deploy services that way. NFV-SDN On a results call in May, CEO Anil are real and our expectation is our tools Singhal said: “Supporting customers need to go same way. with their virtualisation and cloud-based “The big change is that we are not infrastructure initiatives is just one just saying we are all-software but that area where ASI tips the scales in our we can offer software live in that favour… NetScout ASI technology will service provider environment, allowing play an important role in positioning our customers to spin up and down us to win this technology turn and even resources for instrumentation to grow potentially accelerate this transition with traffic load as they want to. for our customers as we have been We never had a reliance on custom able to do multiple times during hardware, never made a card with the last two decades.” acceleration or anything, so it’s very easy That means that its aim of introducing for us to do.”

Is enabling service assurance within NFV given enough priority?

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#TMNtalkingpoint Contact: talkingpoint@the-mobile-network.com

TMNQUARTERLY 21

Up at 60-70,000 feet, how about Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) transmitting data and video down to cellular base stations on the ground. One company, Roke Manor Research has said it is designing a system designed to give the ability for unmanned craft, such as the Airbus Zephyr, to communicate with a base station up to 50km away.

Roke says it anticipates using beam forming technology of its own design to beef up the capabilities of standard 3G hardware. The adaptive beam forming will intelligently direct signal to a specific point on the ground — which could be commercial cellular infrastructure, or to a dedicated military base station. Facebook is also operating at this altitude, with its Aquila project that is designed to use solar-powered UAVs equipped with lasers to deliver data to any specific location within a 60 mile area on the ground. “Eventually, our goal is to have a fleet of Aquilas flying together at 60,000 feet, communicating with each other with lasers and staying aloft for months at a time.”

HIGH ALTITUDE PLANES

Google Loon is a project based on balloons launched between 10km and 60km from Earth with lifespans of 100-150 days. High speed internet is transmitted up to the nearest balloon from the ground, relayed across the balloon network, and then back down to users on the ground. Google claims it has demonstrated data transmission between balloons over 100 km apart in the stratosphere and back down to people on the ground with connection speeds of up to 10 Mbps, directly to their LTE phones.

BALLOONS

At the highest level, from heights of 600-1500km are the satellite projects. Despite the recent loss of a satellite in an accident, Facebook, SpaceX, Samsung and Google are all investigating or actively working towards launching satellites that could provide mobile communications connectivity. SpaceX, supported by Elon Musk with Google and Fidelity, has said it wants to launch 4000 satellites up to 600km altitude between 2022 and 2030. OneWeb, supported by Richard Branson (with Virgin, Qualcomm, Airbus, the Indian Bharti Entreprises, Hughes Network, Intelsat and Coca-Cola), wants to deploy, before 2019, 648 satellites at 1200 km altitude by leveraging LTE, 3G and WIFI technologies. Samsung is designing a constellation of 4600 satellites 1500km from Earth using 5G networks.

SPACE

D N U O R UNDERG D N U O R G OVER

COMMERCIAL AVIATION

Ericsson and antenna company Kathrein have developed an underground cell site that puts the radio under a manhole cover, and then connects that via a cable in an existing duct to a specialised antenna that sits in the road or pavement. The antenna comes with a special hard-wearing lid of its own so can withstand traffic of the non-mobile variety. Literally building a network from the ground up. Swisscom has piloted the tech in public trials in Bern.

UNDERGROUND

Getting small cells onto street level is about deploying in an unobtrusive way, where power and backhaul is likely to be available, Vodafone has been experimenting with bus stops and advertising signs that have builtin small cells. Outdoor ad “inventory” owner JC Decaux provides the ad signs and bus stops, while the likes of Huawei and Nokia Networks have integrated their small cells into the design. So far, Vodafone has trialled the system in the Netherlands.

STREET LEVEL

Could you put a base station in a drone, and fly the drone to where you need coverage, say for an emergency or some other location that just needs more capacity at a given time? Why, yes you could. Several operators and vendors are exploring doing just that — including AT&T which even has a name for the concept — Flying COWS (Cell On Wings). Google is also reported to be investigating drone cells, in a project known as Google Skybender. And Ericsson and China Mobile have said they are looking at the potential as part of their 5G research. They reckon you need an edge core network as well, to reduce latency, and they also warn that safety will be paramount. After all, as they say, “Nobody wants to go out every day equipped with a helmet fearing for drones falling from the sky”!

DRONES

Taking the idea of flying cell sites one stage further is a company called Airborne Wireless Networks. This company wants to use commercial aircraft as mobile base stations — essentially as mini satellites — connected to each other in a meshed network, as well as to mobile entities on the earth’s surface (ships). Although AWN’s core patent is nearly 20 years old, it has just signed agreement to give it access to its first three commercial jets for a pilot of its system.

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Designed by

FEATURE: SITING & PLANNING

PLANNING

FOR A

DENSER FUTURE

n average in the UK it can take 18 months to get a site live, whilst in the USA legal objections and processes can delay matters indefinitely. Yet if 5G is going to be a reality, it will rely primarily on network densification to exploit spectrum reuse for high capacities, and edge networkworking for low latencies.

There is a concern, however, that current siting and planning approval processes will be a significant stumbling block to the deployments of future networks. Even to date, the planning and site acquisition process has perhaps put the brake on small cell deployments. Roger Entner of Recon Analytics says that Verizon has It’s the unseen work that happens before a strong lead in its deployment model any network hits the rooftops, towers of small cells because it has struck key and streets, and it will be increasingly deals with municipal authorities for crucial to the future of mobile networks. access. He said that this has given TMN looks into the world of site planning, it a “strong lead” in getting hold of sites, approvals and authorisation. giving Verizon a seven or eight to one lead over its next competitor.

The chief advantage, Entner said, of working to sign MSAs with municipal authorities rather than private landowners is that sites can be acquired cheaper. Entner said that by going through the municipality Verizon has been able to pay $200-300 per month per small cell site, which he said is a lot less than the $2,000 per site per month that private landlords have been asking for.

TMNQUARTERLY 25

FEATURE: SITING & PLANNING

This economic reality is a reason why AT&T and T-Mobile have both “pivoted” to DAS deployments, says Entner, and is why There are just over we have not yet seen a huge rollout in small 200,000 cell towers in cells that “everybody the USA, but there may was predicting”.

Although it’s an estimate, Entner says be millions of small cell that even Verizon’s sites in the 5G future deployment so far encompsasses only a few hundred sites, at max a thousand or so, and the issue is now enough of a concern for regulators to have taken notice.

FCC Commissioner Jessica Roesenworcl has stated publicly that the Commission should be giving more attention to how siting and approvals are managed. Over a series of Tweets in August 2016, she said, “Though spectrum gets all the glory, the ground ERO SITE: matters as much as the skies. We need policies to promote small cells — ERICSSON they’re a big thing. If we want to lead AND PHILLIPS in 5G we need to find ways to get SEE THE LIGHT infrastructure on the ground... Why not hold a contest and reward communities Ericsson and Phillips’ Zero Site that put in infrastructure needed product uses lampposts, equipped for 5G service as part of SmaryCities with their own smart metres, Initiative?... Why not have the broadband as hosts for small cells. The concept equivalent of #LEED certification for is to integrate small cells solutions buildings and facilities that have #5G with streetlight poles to provide infrastructure in place” optimal urban coverage with minimal And FCC chair Tom Wheeler went visual impact. a lot further in a speech to CTIA The large site version hides remote in September, outlining a streamlined radio units and antennas inside approvals process as one of the key the pole and macro radios, baseband aspects of enabling 5G rollout. units, transmission equipment, Wheeler said that there could be a extra capacity, power, batteries and requirement for hundreds of thousands, additional equipment underneath. maybe even millions of new antennas.

A small cell version is intended That’s hundreds of thousands, if not to enable bulk acquisition and mass millions of siting decisions. deployment of sites.

“There are just over 200,000 cell Phillips says that as cities swap towers in the U.S.,” he said, “but there out older inefficient lights for smart may be millions of small cell sites in the versions, Zero Site offers city officials 5G future. If siting for a small cell takes an innovative way to integrate LED as long and costs as much as siting for lights in the same pole as cell sites a cell tower, few communities will ever — to provide power savings (opex) have the benefits of 5G. of 50-80 percent in the city.

26 TMNQUARTERLY

“What can government do accelerate investment in building out small cells?

How can federal, state, and local levels of government work more effectively with the private sector? Or to take it down to real brass tacks, how can we work with siting authorities to allow the plethora of antennas that will be required quickly and at a reasonable cost?”

Wheeler hit on two things. The first is that the industry has to make the case for the benefits of 5G to society, so that people and communities are less likely to object to dense mobile networks, and also so that authorities put in place the procedures required to make siting approvals quicker.

“Let’s talk about the benefits of smart city energy grids, safer transportation networks, and new opportunities to improve health care. Let’s paint the picture of how 5G will unleash immersive education and entertainment industries, and how 5G will unlock new ways for local employers to grow,” he said.

The second proposal Wheeler had for his industry audience was that they work together to facilitate more network sharing.

He emphasised that he was not endorsing shared infrastructure in every and all circumstances, and certainly not opening a door to consolidation… “but I am saying that if we’re talking about thousands of antennas in a city, and you’ve got four carriers, and we are serious about leading the world in 5G deployment in our very large and spread-out country, we ought to explore creative options on how best to build that infrastructure.”

Wheeler said that the FCC is doing what it can to make processes shorter — for instance adopting a softer approach to allowing small cell and DAS deployments in historically listed buildings, and also decreasing its ‘shot clock’ for siting application reviews.

Although the FCC has recognised the siting approvals process as a priority for 5G, there is progress too

FEATURE: SITING & PLANNING

IF OPERATORS DO NOT COMMUNICATE EFFECTIVELY, RESIDENTS WILL TAKE MATTERS INTO THEIR OWN HANDS. Activist sites such as No Ugly Cell Towers (nouglytowers.wordpress. com/), which is “dedicated for preserving the beauty” of upmarket area of Palos Verdas, California, or Broadband4California, a group that objects to unsightly small cell deployments, are signs that wireless carriers are far from going to get their own way on small cell siting and planning.

in other jurisdictions.

Rob Matthews is head of planning at Vodafone, working with CNL — the newish name for Cornerstone, the partnership that Vodafone and Telefonica O2 initially struck up to establish passive element network sharing. CNL goes further than Cornerstone in that it is now the vehicle through which both operators are building a common grid for site and spectrum sharing.

As such the company has had to merge some sites, enhance others with greater power or equipment, and in some instances develop totally new sites. The company will always aim to upgrade or merge existing sites, rather than plan new locations, but of course that is not always possible, and it is also tasked with meeting obligations to improve and extend coverage.

Where a new site is required, Matthews says the process can take 18 months from start to finish. It can often involve a protracted round of negotiation with site owners, with

HAT GOVERNMENTS CAN DO TO HELP • Make small cell siting de minimus i.e. don’t treat small cells like macro sites • Give preferential access, especially in terms of time, to Governmentowned real estate • Co-ordinate between departments: i.e. get environmental, planning and broadband/communications departments on the same page • Introduce, where necessary, fair negotiation terms between landlords and operators • Facilitate spectrum and site sharing rules for operators

planning authorities and with local residents. However, proposed changes to the Electronics Communications Code will, he says, make things easier — meaning that many site upgrades can be achieved with a simple listing, rather than a full planning process. He also hopes to see small cells regarded as “de minimus” — in other words requiring no specially achieved consent — so that where a site needs to go down “within the building clutter” it can happen quickly.

So what would Matthews like to see happen to make mobile network rollouts easier in the future?

“First I would like to see accessing public land for digital infrastructure speeded up. We’ve seen some areas of the Government portfolio where it gets protracted — so that could really help speed up areas with no coverage.

Second, to be able to upgrade under code notice is a huge step in the right direction and we are seeking for more ability to upgrade under the code.

Where we need new sites that would speed things up hugely.”

WHAT THE INDUSTRY CAN DO TO HELP • Consider alternative approaches to network design — think bottomup and small to large, rather than top down and big is best.

• Deliver genuinely low impact small cells and site equipment — too many “small” cells are still pretty ugly • Work together on neutral host and sharing models — the fewer the sites required, the lower the cost, the quicker the approvals process • Appreciate that nobody owes you a living - set aside enough budget for site negotiations

TMNQUARTERLY 27

FEATURE: SITING & PLANNING

“Did you know? In the

good intent to move forward into execution.

UK towers are normally In the USA, Greaves has found that the loudest voice in planning 15-20 metres maximum, discussions tends to be the lawyer in the room, and that on the whole while in Europe 25m the process is viewed legally in terms is a more normal of who may be a barrier, and how that can be overcome. maximum height.”

Yet it is in China that Greaves has been most impressed by CCS is a company that makes radio co-operation between planners, nodes designed to provide backhaul site owners and the operator. Here, links between outdoor small cells Greaves describes visiting an urban and the core network. The backhaul location where small cells were due nodes need to be very close to, to be installed to improve coverage or co-sited with, the small cell radio and capacity, with the local government, access nodes, which means the the infrastructure owner and the mobile company is therefore often present operator walking the streets together when small cell planning and siting and choosing locations, with installation is being discussed. done by the end of the week.

CEO Steve Greaves says that in the “From my point of view it was UK he has found there is a top level a completely new experience,” he says. desire to incentivise deployment Greaves also points out that it is up — especially to enable smart city to the industry to enable the planning type applications. However, there process by designing new solutions can be a disconnect between these that truly fit in. He points out that some programmes and the actual planning small cell solutions — and here he sites processes on the ground. some US rollouts — are not exactly “We have found that within [local small. CCS itself is experimenting with and regional] Councils there is a a combined access point/backhaul general will to move things forward. unit to lessen the physical impact Where things tend to fall down is of deployment, and Greaves also that these groups and incentives are points to the company’s involvement somewhat divorced from the planning in a project to provide a neutral groups, so there can be a disconnect host small cells solution in London. between desire and execution.”

(See Luminet side panel). Technical It can also be the case that private solutions that also allow for ad hoc companies often own contracts deployment and organic growth can for maintaining street furniture such also aid planning, in that they can as lighting - making things more difficult be more flexible, adding elements only for the network operator to negotiate. as and when required.

However, Greaves says that there are If 5G is going to come then we will definite signs that “in places like London need to dense deployments and that things are beginning to move ahead.” will mean a new way to facilitate site and that all that is required is for this acquisition and approvals.

Goverments that talk up national leadership in 5G must make it easier and quicker to deploy dense mobile networks.

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28 TMNQUARTERLY

#TMNtalkingpoint Contact: talkingpoint@the-mobile-network.com

EUTRAL HOST MODELS ON A CITY WIDE BASIS One way of reducing the planning and site approvals process is to share sites. But is that possible for small cells? One company, Fixed Wireless Access provider Luminet wants to build out a neutral host transit network across the London metro area by early 2017. The network, composed of a mixture of high speed wireless links and fibre could be used for a range of applications, including shared or wholesale backhaul connectivity to outdoor and inbuilding small cells ,and high speed fixed wireless enterprise connectivity.

Luminet already has pushing 2,000 customer sites in London, and it has just signed a partnership agreement with CCS to deploy that company’s small cell backhaul product — MetNet — across over half of that site footprint. CCS’s solutions will form 250 “polygons” of coverage at 1,050 sites — providing enough capacity to meet the peak small cell backhaul demands of all London’s mobile operators, Sasha Williamson, Luminet CEO, said.

FEATURE: 5G

The favourite saying of 5G technology developers is that they are designing a network to support uses that are as yet unknown.

But what could a 5G future actually look like?

30 TMNQUARTERLY

FEATURE: 5G

It has become a cliche to say that for the 5G network developers are designing a network to enable users to do such things that we haven’t thought of yet. Although we are designing for a future that we cannot imagine yet, we must somehow make a structure that can support the unimaginable. One way of looking at this is to express the view that 5G must not only be the next network, but in some senses be the last G — in that it must be able to meet future use cases out to 2035 — perhaps further.

To date, this attempt at futureproofing and imagining the unimaginable has been expressed mostly in terms of a set of KPIs that the network must deliver. If we state specifications that are so close to the physical maximum, then surely there cannot be a use case that can go unmet, right? Again, this list of specs has become the stuff of cliche — the sub milisecond latency, the support for ultra-density of devices, support for huge non-uniformity in device types, the massive 10-120Gbps throughput, near-100% ubiquity and availability, 90% increase in energy efficiency.

All this must be delivered through a single network platform, or as near as possible, and so to support these KPIs has risen a supporting cast of technologies. These include a new unified control plane and SDN, network slicing taking advantage of NFV, automation and mass analytics to create a self-aware network, perhaps even a new protocol going beyond IP to something Information-centric

or code-based (rather than labelbased). Of course with human-IoT interaction and the like we will need a new security and trust architecture.

These technical building blocks will then be stacked to build something completely different — with cloudbased virtual elements distributed according to need and use case — something that is really a new network architecture.

And as we build this future, here come the technical milestones: new waveforms to enhance or supplant LTE’s OFDM, massive MIMO, MU-MIMO and beam-forming move up in orders of magnitude as 64 and 128 element arrays emerge blinking out of the lab. Increasingly wide bandwidths are supported at the radio to enable massive carrier aggregation and combinations of licensed and unlicensed spectrum. Virtualised instances of network functions, controllers and orchestrators, platforms to enable masively dense small cell deployments, Mobile Edge and cloud computing proofs of concept, are tangible — albeit often virtual — technical milestones we can tick off.

And as the pressure builds, and certain network operators say they now want standards set in early 2018, or even late 2017, so that they can get cracking

and build this thing, the sense that we don’t know what it is for yet gets punted further and further back in our minds. See the shining city on the hill, marvel at the newly minted materials and self-cleaning windows, but don’t ask who is going to live there.

Because what the 5G debate is losing sight of, and it’s a strange paradox when so much prestige, so many research dollars, so much future stock market value is at stake, is this question: what is 5G for?

Sure — there are lots of proposed use cases that the industry has identified as requiring these new network specs and is working towards. Let’s not be disingenuous and pretend that there is a completely blank piece of paper.

Here are some of them:

REMOTE AUTOMATION Industrial equipment in remote or hazardous locations being remotely controlled, perhaps even by another machine.

SMART CITIES

Millions of sensors testing air quality, traffic conditions, parking availability, lighting, waste management, all co-ordinated to communicate with cars, devices and people to smooth the path of our daily lives.

REMOTE SURGERY Similar to remote automation above, but instead of driving a digger or manufacturing plant the operator is a surgeon conducting an operation on a remote body using haptics and VR technology.

TMNQUARTERLY 31

FEATURE: 5G

AUTONOMOUS OR ASSISTED DRIVING

VIRTUAL REALITY AND AUGMENTED REALITY

Vehicles with advanced collision avoidance, and/ or real-time navigationassisted driving, controlled by a combination of onboard vehicle to vehicle sensors that manage the near-field environment and a cloud-based “mind” that coordinates the “whole” traffic management landscape.

Near-instantaneous delivery of information or an immersive experience, as the user moves through a physical reality. Could be used for gaming, of course, but also in other situations such as meetings, conferences, museums, as an enhanced channel at a live event.

BROADBAND EVERYWHERE Multi Gbps, wherever you are. Basically — much much more broadband that is ubiquitous and available and inexhaustible. Includes extended urban hetnets, rural coverage, and indoor coverage.

This list is not exhaustive, it’s not supposed to be. But these are the use cases that tick the following boxes: • They

require some new element of network capability that 4G cannot meet • T hey have some chance of commercial viability • They can currently be imagined • T hey got on a 5G use case list once and now cannot be removed 32 TMNQUARTERLY

And there are a host of projects in place that look at these use case requirements and work out how to meet them — in terms of cell site density and antenna gain and the number of UE (device) elements and channel mode and all the rest of the detailed technical inventory that is currently being taken.

The point is not to argue that nothing is happening, it is to state that it is to these use cases that the technology is being developed, and although these are 5G use cases, they cannot of themselves define 5G. Beyond what we know, we cannot go, although we have to do just that.

In fact, 5G has the industry existing in two simultaneous but logically inconsistent positions. We are making plans for 5G, but we don’t know what it is.

Here’s a quote from a white paper by industry vendor mouthpiece the Global Mobile suppliers Association (GSA) from as recently as December 2015: “There is currently little clear consensus on how 5G will be defined, even though work has been progressing on the vision for 5G, the standardisation process for 5G, and technologies for 5G for at least three years.

We are not yet at the stage that candidate technologies are fully fleshed out for submission to the ITU and 3GPP.

TACTILE INTERNET Connected devices that respond to human touch in a certain way — perhaps to deliver information or to carry information.

Nonetheless, the industry has a need to come up with some workable concept of 5G (or something close to what 5G will become) because several big players — in Japan, South Korea, Russia and the USA — have already given notice of their 5G plans.”

If you actually tear those statements apart, they recognise and give voice to a real internal opposition. There is no clear consensus, but work has been ongoing for three years. There is no concept of 5G but certain operators have said they are going to have it.

Indeed they have given notice of their plan: we don’t know what 5G will be, but we will have it first.

Yet that is fine. Although this is an uncomfortable position to hold, it is the only viable one. Because what is 5G for? It may be for all of the above use cases, or some of them, but more than that 5G is for the end of the network G, it is for building a future network that delivers on a future we cannot foresee.

So it is not sophistry to state that 5G is about building an enabling infrastructure for future uses

5G has the industry existing in two simultaneous but logically inconsistent positions. We are making plans for 5G, but we don’t know what it is.

FEATURE: 5G

There’s another incompatibility in 5G — it must be all new, but it may also enhance the old. If you look at the list of use cases in the main article, none of them will need all of the new network capabilities — that is not the point. The point is that none of them is achievable using the current network architecture or radio technology. This is what makes them, at heart, a 5G use case rather than something that, say, a massively enhanced 4G network could meet. The biggest differentiators here are latency and responsiveness, combined with a new sense of scale (density).

Yet 5G becomes about more than latency and scale when we consider what else is required to deliver these use cases. There is a host of data analytics to be done — where perhaps some of it needs to be done close to the user — requiring a new network architecture. Because not every service needs every network resource to the same level there is a need to control a pathway through the network on a per-service basis. That requires a new control mechanism. There are new

and applications that we have yet to invent — whilst we build it to meet use cases we can currently define.

That means 5G is “for” and about building the selfaware, breathing, sentient, fluid and expandable network — deploying the full range of technologies that are available to build it.

It may be, in fact it will be, that this is not what we get when we first get told a network or a service experience is “5G”. They first “5G” networks will carry a throughput label, an IoT label, an NFV label, perhaps a Cloud label. These are the real technology signifiers that we can hang onto. But the best way to understand 5G in its entirety is not as this throughput, or that latency, or this bit per Hz per Km, but as a new network state.

security requirements.

So we can see where the idea of 5G as something greater than the sum of a new radio and a developed core comes from. If you need the allencompassing network transformation to achieve the use cases that you think can benefit from the ultra-advanced specifications, then all of that becomes 5G. The fact that some of those mechanisms — NFV, edge computing, automation and analytics — can then be applied to and wrapped around 4G networks and services does not make them faux 5G. That is why having a narrowly prescriptive view of 5G — one that demands a “purity” of newness — a view that says that something can only be 5G if it is not compatible with 4G, is not sustainable. Of course, this is not to argue that it is “right” for vendors and operators to label technology as in some way 5G, or a 5G component, where it is clearly intended as an upgrade to the 4G network and can meet no new use case that is currently unachievable.

But saying something is not 5G just because it also has non-5G applications does not in fact serve to clarify 5G. So another paradox of 5G is that we need to hold in our heads the idea that technology that is necessary to support 5G use cases may not be solely 5G technology.

Is the industry too hung up on what “real 5G” is — let the market decide?

Join the conversation #TMNtalkingpoint Contact: talkingpoint@the-mobile-network.com

TMNQUARTERLY 33

2nd

2016世界光纤光缆大会 World Optical Fibre & Cable Conference

翡翠赞助商/ Hosted by

600 attendees

2016年11月2日-4日 武汉光谷希尔顿酒店 2-4 November 2016 • Hilton Wuhan, China

expected!

Asia’s premier optical fibre and cable conference goes global Following the enormous success of CRU’s APAC Optical Fibre & Cable Conference, this year we are bringing the world’s optical fibre industry to the China Optics Valley in Wuhan. CRU’s World Optical Fibre & Cable conference offers unrivalled access to senior decision-makers from the world’s largest fibre optic cable manufacturers.

5

5 great reasons to attend:

• Network and raise your profile among 600 representatives from across the optical fibre and cable supply chain • Hear presentations from the most influential executives that are driving this market • Join the interactive discussions and put your questions to the leading industry experts and analysts • See the latest innovations in the lively and interactive exhibition • Gain first-hand knowledge of the key challenges and opportunities facing the market

Senior executives from these companies are confirmed to speak this year YOFC, China

Shin-Etsu, Japan

State Grid Information & Telecommunication Branch, China

Sterlite, India

FiberHome, China INCAB, Russia Futong Group, China Heraeus, Germany Hengtong, China Prysmian, Netherlands

DSM, USA China Mobile, China Nextrom, Austria China Unicom, China Domino, Germany Hubei CATV, China j-fiber, Germany

ZTT, China

China Telecom, China

FTTH Council APAC, Singapore

Photon Kinetics, USA Huawei, China

NTT, Japan

Umicore, Belgium

Gold sponsors:

Silver sponsors:

Bronze sponsors:

Official publication:

Supporting partners:

XYT 鑫友泰

For more information and to book your place visit www.worldopticalfibreconference.com

NETWORKED WORLD: HEALTH

CHECKING ON THE HEALTH OF MHEALTH The potential of mobile technology to transform the quality and delivery of healthcare has been heralded for years.

TMN looks at how mobile networks can deliver new outcomes for healthcare patients and staff.

Mobile offers a communication channel where none previously existed. It can deliver information to and from remote locations rather than requiring visits to clinics and hospitals. In the hospital it can expedite information transfer and sharing.

The GSMA’s mHealth programme has been at the forefront of driving partnerships between the health sector and mobile operators across the world. The GSMA’s mobile health service tracker has over 1200 projects listed — 77 in Nigeria, 287 in the USA, for example — in a database covering the last 9 years or so. These range from text alert services offering free

information on epidemic outbreaks to using mobile networks to send back monitoring and point of care data for pregnant women, to “using the imaging, computation, and mobile network capabilities of mobile devices to enable diagnostic-quality microscopic imaging in regions where access to conventional diagnostic tools is limited”.

In theory, mobile phone-based initiatives can solve several of the major problems encountered in low-income countries: distance, limited computer access, and a lack of health care workers, thus enabling improvements in terms of efficiency and lower health care delivery costs. In the developing world, a key issue, however, has been that, to use the GSMA’s own words, “Very few currently demonstrate scale, an ability to replicate, or significant and sustainable impact on the health system. To date, there has been no effective method of facilitating shared learning — helping mHealth services reach their full potential by learning from industry best practice.”

The frustration with pilots remaining just that and multiple services failing to scale is that mobile seems to offer such fertile ground for healthcare provision.

TMNQUARTERLY 35

NETWORKED WORLD: HEALTH

Although many of the innovations in mHealth focus on remote and mobile applications, hospitals too are a target for those offering dedicated wireless solutions — such as Private GSM, small cells and integrated cellular/wifi solutions.

Upcoming standard MuLTE Fire, which offers the potential to offer a dedicate LTE network in unlicensed spectrum, has been suggested by its proponents as a candidate technology for large buildings such as hospitals.

36 TMNQUARTERLY

Mobile’s nexus of identity authentication, location awareness, connected wearables for monitoring, video for communication and diagnostics, and the app developer environment seems to offer a rich blend ideally suited to a wide range of healthcare services. Yet often progress seems to stall after an initial launch.

To address this, the GSMA has introduced a Service Maturity Tool, which is designed to help a service provider evaluate their own service and give recommendations and next steps to take a service forward.

The GSMA’s Kai-lik Foh, in a post written in August 2016, said that the reason that most projects do not scale could include government support, physician acceptance, user adoption and last, but not least, adequate incentives for participation from the private sector. For example it calculates that in Europe, the total inpatient expenditure in 2006 was as high as $600bn, or 40% of the total healthcare expenditure. If replacement of hospital stays with home care remote monitoring solutions saves healthcare providers as little as 2% of this total, capturing 20% of this value could translate into a $2.4bn revenue opportunity.

The GSMA sees its role as articulating the incentives that mobile operators have to support such services — for example in increased customer retention due to carrying a service — even if for free. In 2015-2016, for example, it has supported the launch of services to deliver content on nutrition in Nigeria, Ghana, Tanzania

and Malawi in the area of Nutrition (with another four more markets targeted in the next year), and says it is currently reaching over half a million people in these countries.

The body is also working on identifying various successful funding models to ensure that operator, health service provider and other stakeholders can remain committed to supporting longer term projects.

Aside from the developing world use cases, one key driver for health programmes that take advantage of mobile network connectivity will be a wider acceptance of healthrelated wearables and use of mobile applications that can track and report data. The number of U.S. consumers who use wearables and mobile apps for managing their health has doubled in the past two years, according to a 2016 survey by Accenture. Specifically, the number of consumers who use mobile health apps increased from 16 percent in 2014 to 33 percent today, and the number of consumers who use health wearables increased from 9 percent to 21 percent during the same time.

Of the one in five consumers in the most-recent survey who were asked by a doctor to use wearables to track their health, such as fitness or vital signs, three-quarters (76 percent) followed their physician’s recommendation. The majority of consumers (77 percent) and doctors (85 percent) alike said that using wearables helps a patient engage in their health.

Consumers most frequently use health apps for fitness, diet/nutrition,

NETWORKED WORLD: HEALTH

Very few currently

USE THE SIM

demonstrate scale,

Very few medical services leverage a key aspect of mobile network connectivity — the SIM card.

SIM cards could be used to verify patient and healthworker identity, protecting access to data whilst ensuring data portability, and ensuring that health services are not duplicated — for example where users receive lots of messages from different services on the same topic. A GSMA white paper said, “A SIM-based approach uses the SIM card in a mobile phone coupled with network-based authentication services, to provide secure access to medical information for healthcare providers approved by the patient, with a centralised record of who accessed the information and when.”

To enable this operators in a market will need to provide a standardised authentication system to third parties.

an ability to replicate, or significant and sustainable impact on the health system. symptom navigation and accessing their patient portal. While the vast majority (90 percent) of consumers said they would be willing to share wearable or app data with medical providers, far fewer said they would be willing to share that data with their health plans (63 percent) or employers (31 percent).

There could also be a role for mobile networks in enhancing or replacing face to face consultation. Nearly a third of consumers in the survey — compared with just under a quarter in the 2014 survey — said they prefer virtual doctor appointments to face-to-face doctor appointments. However, doctors and consumers alike believe that virtual visits provide benefits for patients, such as lower costs, convenience and timely access to care.

Whether it is enabling diagnosis of disease in places where healthcare infrastructure is limited or unavailable, or providing more efficient provision of healthcare in more developed areas, the mobile network could, if operators, government and authorities plan and work together, yet be a key supporting element underpinning healthcare access and infrastructure.

5G AND THE REMOTE SURGERY PROMISE One of the key attributes that 5G promises to bring is very low latencies that mean that something can happen on the network in nearreal time. A use case for this sort of very low latency network capability is remote surgery.

Ericsson recently, working with University College London, demonstrated a mechanical probe that was able to offer someone wearing specially adapted gloves the same “feeling” as the probe, as the probe moved over a harder area of a test surface. The idea is that a surgeon at a remote location would be able to operate on someone even if they were not there.

The question persists for many — apart from the most extreme cases, will health service providers not find it easier and cheaper to get a surgeon and a patient together in the same theatre rather than move both to the location of highly advanced equipment that relies on extremely advanced wireless connectivity?

TMNQUARTERLY 37

COUNTRY PROFILE: INDIA

INDIA’S 4G RACE GETS JIO BOOST A market that has lagged its principle BRIC rival is set, finally, for real growth. Or at the very least for real disruption.

The most striking aspect of India’s mobile market is its scale. Even the fifth and sixth operators have tens of millions of subscribers, and the largest are pushing a quarter of a billion. They are the sort of numbers that lead many to making an over-easy comparison with China. But scale is about all these markets have in common. China, for a start, has its own telecoms equipment manufacturing sector, driven by the twin engines of Huawei and ZTE and backed by a committed government. This has lead to a symbiotic relationship between the network operators and the vendors. The operators get preferential access to advanced network R&D and products, while the vendors get the same access to a huge home market. That is one reason why China’s mobile networks are far ahead of India’s in terms of 4G coverage, capacity and market penetration.

Another reason for India’s relative slowness has been India’s much less certain regulatory and legislative regime.

In short, scandal, controversy, and red tape has lead to a delay in market rollouts and investor indecisiveness.

The “2G spectrum scandal” of 2010 — where 2G spectrum licenses were sold to front organisations for much

less than market value and then sold on for profit, sometimes to external investors — made global headlines with its combination of graft, corruption and secrecy. It ended in prison sentences, including one for the Communications Minister.

India has also allocated less spectrum to mobile operators than other Asian countries — for example releasing just 2x23.6MHz bands in the 2100MHz 3G band, against a more normal 50-60MHz in other Asia Pacifc markets. In 2015 the GSMA identified that, “India’s mobile operators still have access to only a fraction of the spectrum that has been identified globally for mobile services.”

Others have pointed to planning law and siting approval restrictions, with the GSMA stating that the costs of obtaining approval certificates from municipalities have reportedly increased by 500% in recent years. There is also room for improvement where mobile networks rely on a supporting infrastructure, such as available power. “The Department of Telecommunications’ guidelines for state governments on the installation of masts stress that electricity should be provided as a priority, but in reality this often does not happen,” argues the GSMA. TMNQUARTERLY 39

COUNTRY PROFILE: INDIA

INDIA’S OPERATORS

TOTAL MARKET SUBSCRIBERS

AIRTEL (BHARTI AIRTEL)

MARKET DEMAND

VODAFONE INDIA

The top four telecom operators reported overall data consumption increased 46% year-on-year and 4% quarter-on-quarter for the quarter ended 31st March 2016. Total data traffic was 5.5 times higher than total data traffic in 2013.

250 MILLION 200 MILLION

RELIANCE COMMUNICATIONS 100 MILLION

MOBILE INTERNET: TOTAL DATA TRAFFIC (Bn MB) 43.4

52.4

64.5

76.7

89.9

Q1

Q2

Q3

Q4

Q1

111.1 127.9

157.9

181.1

Q4

Q1

217.5 251.7

286.9

325.5

359.4

403.4

419.6

Q4

Q1

Q2

Q3

Q4

RELIANCE JIO

(Just recently launched LTE service)

N/A

IDEA CELLULAR

(20% owned by Axiata)

175 MILLION

AIRCEL

(Maxis Communications)

FY13

90 MILLION

BSNL

(Government owned)

88 MILLION

Q2

Q3 FY14

Q2

Q3 FY15

FY16

ROOM FOR GROWTH 25% of Indian mobile users have smartphones and only 10% of those use LTE.

TATA DOCOMO 60 MILLION

TELENOR INDIA

SPECTRUM HOLDINGS AND 2016 AUCTION

55 MILLION

A spectrum auction being held from September 2016 promises to release nearly 2.5GHz of spectrum across bands ranging from 700MHz to 2.5GHz.

India’s mobile market is formed of 22 Telecom Circles or Service Areas. These are broken down into 4 groups: ‘metro circles’ and then ‘A’, ‘B’, and ‘C’ circles. The ‘metro’ circles cover the mega cities: Chennai, Delhi, Kolkata, and Mumbai. The other groups are roughly geographic groupings — South/ North West/ North East.

SPECTRUM HELD BY TOP TELCOS

Spectrum bands (MHz) MHz

700 770 Spectrum bands (MHz)

RELIANCE JIO 595.8MHz

850

48.8

900 1,800

107

2,100 2,300

40 TMNQUARTERLY

TOTAL SPECTRUM UP FOR AUCTION

440

VODAFONE 301.8MHz

AIRTEL 769.9MHz

IDEA 270.7MHz

83.8

116.4

59

143

213.5

151.7

75

100

60

340

800

73.75

900

9.4

1,800

221.4

2,100 360 2,300 320 2,500 600 Total

2,354.55

COUNTRY PROFILE: INDIA

The spectrum situation could, however, be about to change, with the advent of a large auction across a range of bands. Many worry that reserves are still too high and the Government too ambitious in its revenue targets.

However, there has been almost no auction globally where this allegation has not been made, and by the time you are reading this an auction of significant amounts of spectrum will be under way.

2,354.55MHz of spectrum is up for hire, across 700MHz, 800MHz, 900MHz 1,800MHz, 2,100MHz, 2,300MHz and 2,500MHz. Some predict that Idea Cellular Ltd and Vodafone India Ltd will seek to outbid Airtel and new entrant Reliance Jio as they are both thin in spectrum holdings. Airtel has 769.9 megahertz (MHz) while Reliance Jio, of which more later, has 595.8MHz. Vodafone has just 301.8MHz and Idea 270.7MHz.

LAUNCH OF RELIANCE JIO AND 4G ROLLOUT After years of planning and pre-publicity, India’s newest operator, Reliance Jio, announced its official market entrance in September 2016. The company said it would offer the world’s cheapest internet data at $0.7 per gigabyte (GB).

Jio owns spectrum in 800 MHz and 1,800 MHz bands in 10 and 6 circles, respectively, of the total 22 circles in the country, and also owns pan-India licensed 2,300 MHz spectrum. Ahead of its digital services launch, Reliance Jio entered into a spectrum sharing deal Reliance Communications. The sharing deal is for the 800MHz band across seven circles other than the 10 circles for which Jio already owns. Reliance Communications will therefore gain access to Jio’s 4G without having to incur its own capital expenditure while Jio will be able to access contiguous spectrum at 800MHz — something it is lacking in 6 out of its 10 circles.

Some market investors have predicted that India’s Tier 2 operators — such

as Aircel, Tata DoCoMo and Telenor — will come under increasing pressure following Jio’s launch. One advantage that Jio does have is that it has been able to build a radio network virtually from scratch, leveraging the expertise of suppliers such as Samsung, Cisco and Ericsson. Its network is designed with a high level of convergence as well as automation and should be able to operate at significantly lower costs than rival networks.

As India’s market evolves, then, it does so not as a China-lite, but in its own way.

As India’s market evolves, then, it does so not as a China-lite, but in its own way. There’s no doubt, though, that no market in the world still offers as much room for market expansion, and service innovation as India.

INDIAN TELCO VENDORS One notable aspect of India’s telecommunications market is the lack of a highly visible home-based vendor sector. That is not to say there is not considerable vendor activity in the country, however, even if there is no equivalent to Huawei or ZTE to point to.

In 2013, India imported telecom equipment worth $10.5 billion while exports were valued at mere $3.1 billion. The “Make in India” initiative was launched in India by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sep 25, 2014, with an aim to turn the nation into a global manufacturing hub. But many major networking or network equipment hardware or software players already have some sort of operational presence in India. Ericsson has a new manufacturing facility in Pune, India and already operates a facility in Jaipur.

Ericsson has more employees in India

than in any other country, with 19,971 employees working in engineering, R&D and other functions.

Nokia Networks’ Chennai factory, which employs 1,200 people, has manufactured over two million components for telecommunications networks, of which about a quarter have been used for 4G technology — including the flagship Flexi Multiradio series.

Previously the government banned Chinese telecom equipment manufacturer Huawei and ZTE due to security concerns but they have since been allowed to sell telecom equipment to Indian operators. The telecom ministry has created a list of core equipment for mandatory security clearance such as call servers, firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention systems, LAN switches, media gateways, MSC servers, mobile switching centres and routers. Now Huawei says it may start manufacturing in India and today, India is Huawei’s second largest market outside of China with an employee base of over 6,200 employees.

The presence of these external players has, some think, acted as a stimulus for the growth of Indian companies by generating increasing numbers of skilled professionals (powered by the growth of R&D centers). Some, such as VMC Systems and Tejas Networks have invested in their own manufacturing facilities along with building R&D capabilities. Other home grown companies in the RF and wireless equipment space include the likes Tata Elxsi, Maksat, VNL and WiFi-soft, while a recent entrant into the mobile network equipment space has been Omoco — which markets a system designed for remote, rural and other coverage applications.

Of course, as you’d expect, the ICT and software sector in general contains much better known names, such as ACL, Subex, Tech Mahindra Comviva, Tata and Wipro that all provide services and products to the mobile networking space.

TMNQUARTERLY 41

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