TMN Quarterly Issue 19

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

ALSO FEATURING Making sense of the world’s mobile networks

15 C ROWD-SOURCED CEM 32 C RITICAL COMMS APPING THE IoT 35 M 2017 // Issue 19

k r o w t e n I A e l th a e r s

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ISSUE

ANATOMY OF AN OPERATOR: TIM /// NETWORKED WORLD: SMART CITY /// COUNTRY: SINGAPORE

#19

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CONTENTS

ISSUE 19 // THE THREE PARTER ////////////////////////

20

32

What’s coming up in LTE-A Pro. From architecture to mission critical features.

Operators can use new standards to target emergency and critical comms markets.

22

35

As 5G and the IoT loom large, security architecture needs a large rethink.

Where in the world? Where IoT projects in NB-IoT, Lora and Sigfox are cropping up.

12

26

38

Viewing the network from outside in.

Crowd-sourced CEM’s second wind.

Can equipment manufacturers truly commit to an open, programmable hardware layer?

Those looking to manage the cultural and technical shift from NetOps to DevOps.

NETWORK SECURTIY

LTE Advanced Pro

Emergency Comms

15

Artificial Intelligence

AI in the network. Getting beyond the trend to what’s real.

Network Security 22 TMNQUARTERLY

Crowdsourced CEM

4 TMNQUARTERLY

Network Hardware

IoT Market Guide

Managed Services

Energy age

FEATURE

MORE /////////////////////// Media/Content Delivery & Distribution

Traffic Management Realtime Travel/ Transit Planner

Weather Monitoring

Utility & Building Planning

Assisted Parking

Smart & Mobile Payments

Assisted Driving

28

41

The network requirements and enabling technologies of the Smart City.

The country often held up as an exemplar of network-based tech innovation is an unusual case.

Smart Cities

Singapore

6 TORINO

BARI

Anatomy of a Mobile Operator: Telecom Italia TIM takes a journey to accelerate network beyond a sluggish LTE buildout to be a 5G leader.

Hi!

EDITOR

Back in early 2013, when TMN launched and the first issue of this magazine was somewhat hastily assembled with the backing of some core supporters, we made our early focus the Intelligent Network.

At MWC 2013 we sought out companies and operators that were taking steps to embed intelligence in the network, via the very nascent edge computing, via open and closed loop optimisation tools, via DPI-fed assurance and monitoring tools, and via more active network testing. Our first features, published just a short while after ETSI’s initial NFV white paper, looked at SDN and NFV and asked what these would mean in terms of network architecture and the intelligence required to feed the controllers and orchestrators in the network.

What we knew then was that the future of the network was automated and intelligent.

What we didn’t know was that by mid-2017 this amalgamation of analytics, big data, SON, active test — all this gathering and sorting and placing of data would be known under the catch-all of Artificial Intelligence. But it’s important to remember those same core questions of AI. Where in the network will it happen. Can the elements in the network support that? What is each part, each bit, of AI intended to achieve?

Who, or what, controls it?

That’s the intelligent approach to Artificial Intelligence.

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

© 2017 TMN Communications Ltd.

TMNQUARTERLY 5

ANATOMY OF A MOBILE OPERATOR

OPERATOR PROFILE

NOT TIMID ABOUT 5G

With 4.5G hitting 500Mbps, and four Cities set to host 5G trials in 2018, TIM is pushing ahead with the next generation of mobile network. It’s also advancing IoT services aimed at key industry verticals using its licensed spectrum.

TORINO

17,000 LTE NODES

80% 4G COVERING 80% OF CITIES

BARI

97% SANREMO

97% POP COVERAGE WITHIN THOSE CITIES

1,106

TOWNS & CITIES 4G PLUS PALERMO

11

11 CITIES 4.5G SPEED UP TO 500 MBIT/S

6 TMNQUARTERLY

ANATOMY OF A MOBILE OPERATOR

Telecom Italia was officially created on 27 July 1994 by the merger of several telecommunication companies, with TIM being spun off in 1999 as the mobile telephony division. TIM proved to be the stronger brand, and 20 years later the entire business (fixed and mobile) was aligned under the TIM name.

Now, TIM’s mobile networks operate in Brazil and in its home market of Italy.

Outside of these countries TIM operates a wholesale cloud and IP connectivity presence under the Sparkle brand in many countries.

Although TIM was a late entrant to 4G services, in global terms, it has over the past 2-3 years developed aggressive LTE-A plans, including Cloud RAN, enhanced carrier aggregation and the deployment of small cells.

Its Olivetti subsidiary is its presence for marketing and delivering IoT services, underpinned by the mobile network.

5GINNOVATION INNOVATION 5G TIM will build Italy’s first 5G network providing innovative services in the urban area of the Piedmont capital, Turin.

Over 100 small cells will be installed in the main streets and squares of the city during 2017, making Turin the first Italian city and one of the first in Europe to have a new 5G mobile network. By 2018 in Turin, where TIM’s innovation and development centre is based, the first 5G technology trial in a metropolitan area will be launched with the aim of driving the development of a new generation mobile network, confirming the company’s commitment to mobile innovation, a role that it also plays at global level contributing to the definition of the 5G standard.

The “Turin 5G” project includes the gradual extension of the new mobile broadband infrastructure to the municipal urban area with the aim of covering the entire city by 2020.

As part of this project, TIM plans

to install small cells in the main areas of the city, in addition to the 200 mobile ultrabroadband (UBB) sites which the operator will use to guarantee the best radio coverage in the city. The new mobile network will be supported by TIM’s optic fibre infrastructure which already covers almost the entire city.

The trial will involve up to a maximum of 3,000 users who will be able to take advantage of very high performance and transmission speeds and experimental services and applications, provided by the city administration and made possible by TIM’s 5G network.

Specifically, TIM will provide new generation services linked to a Smart City platform relating to public security, the management of public transport fleets and the provision of the information services associated with them.

NETWORK INNOVATION TIMELINE

2010

21Mbps HSPA mobile network launched in Milan and Rome

2012

42.2 Mbps in Milan, Rome and other Italian locations: LTE services rollout in Rome, Milan, Turin and Naples

2014

Polytechnic University of Turin and Telecom Italia experiment a new generation of drones for smart cities: LTE-A network features rolled out providing 180Mbps service

2015

First LTE Broadcast technology live test in Italy; Three carrier aggregation reaching 300Mbps

2016

In Palermo, the first operator in Europe to deploy Huawei’s CloudRAN technology; 500Mbps capability in Roma

2015

Starts building 5G network in Turin

“INTELLIGENT” PALERMO INTELLIGENT 4G4G ININ PALERMO TIM launched Huawei’s innovative CloudRAN technology, including increased Carrier Aggregation coverage and higher speeds in download and upload.

TIM had already tried Huawei’s CloudRAN technology in its Turin TIMLab and the results in terms of performance and capacity stimulated the “live” trial with TIM customers in Palermo, the first ones in Europe to benefit from the new technology.

Through this initiative TIM aims at delivering an ever-faster and reliable network able to respond to the growing mobile UBB demand driven by increasing social network and multimedia content usage. It offers high quality/high resolution video and image sharing in mobility, along with the transmission of videos in real time such as video surveillance or TV images, as well as the immediate update of one’s cloud — all new digital services requiring increasing speeds both in upload and download.

TMNQUARTERLY 7

ANATOMY OF A MOBILE OPERATOR

IOTADOPTION ADOPTION IOT

FINANCIALS

€9.8 billion

PERSONNEL

GROUP REVENUES

GIOVANNI FERIGO CTO

€12.5 ITALY ARPU

20-33%

CAPEX RUNNING AT 20-33% OF REVENUES

€900 million

OVER €900 MILLION FROM 2Q REVENUES OF EUR3.8 BILLION

SAVERIO ORLANDO VP Technology, Head of Planning, Architectures & Quality LUCY LOMBARDI SVP, Technology Innovation, Standards & Innovation Development MICHELE GAMBERINI Head of Core, IP, Transport and Service Platforms ENRICO BAGNASCO Head of Innovation, including 5G & NFV GRAZIANO BINI Head of Mobile Access MAURIZIO MARCELLI Head of Network Resilience

data

DATA REVENUES CROSSED OVER VOICE AND MESSAGING AT THE END OF 2016

MICHELE LUDOVICO Head of Radio Propagation and SON GIOVANNI PICCIANO Head of Fixed Network Engineering & Development VALENTINA BRIZI Head of Optical Long Haul Networking

8 TMNQUARTERLY

For IoT service delivery, TIM partnered with Cisco Jasper IoT using its connectivity management platform — Control Center — through Olivetti, TIM’s digital and ICT subsidiary unit.

Control Center enables a managed connectivity solution fully integrated in TIM’s Italian mobile network, with customers including: • Energy & Utilities Energy and utilities companies including Snam, Italgas and Estracom are leveraging IoT to optimise the flow of information, improve asset performance, increase energy efficiency and provide smart metering services.

•C onnected Car & Usage-Based Insurance In this market, Associated Consulting and Infomobility are providing telematics services to leading insurance providers thanks to the adoption of Control Center.

•R etail & Payment Retailers are capitalising on IoT to offer new services, reshape the customer experience and enter new markets.

Tailoradio, a provider of innovative solutions for in-store video displays and radio, selected Olivetti to connect and monetize their in-store systems.

•S ecurity & Home Automation Security and automation providers including La Pantera and Sicuritalia are using IoT to accelerate installs and increase service reliability, automate monitoring for rapid response times, and reduce costly truck rolls with remote diagnostics.

•T ransportation & Logistics IoT increases productivity and profitability with 24/7 visibility, automated control, and remote diagnostics for transportation and logistics companies like Italia Distribuzioni, Italy’s first distributor of promotional mail.

Find faults wherever they’re hiding.

Because “good enough” mobile network testing just isn’t good enough anymore.

As you transform your next-gen networks, you need reliable test data and clear insights into their performance so you can find and fix faults before subscribers are impacted. Let us help you see what your competitors don’t.

We’re the global network test, data and analytics experts, and we’ve got your success in sight.

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ANATOMY OF A MOBILE OPERATOR

IOTOPEN OPENLAB LAB IOT TIM operates an open lab for IoT testing activities. The lab includes:

BRAZIL

•a workstation for testing NB-IoT radio coverage, with a console that allows you to adjust the level of the signal received so as to reproduce the behaviour of the receiver in different conditions (outdoor, indoor or even deep indoor).

60.8 million MOBILE LINES

• an IT platform (ICON) in the cloud environment on the public network, with access via REST protocols, for the collection and processing of data.

€2.8 billion REVENUES

• availability of NB-IoT SIMs.

19 Real

SANREMO REMO 4.5G 4.5G SAN In TIM’s San Remo network, 4.5G reaches the maximum speed of 500 Mbps. That represents a pretty good step forward compared to the 42 Mbps possible with the 3G network in the first decade of 2000. The shift from the third Generation to 4G, in 2012, brought the speed up to 110 Mbps. Two years later, in 2014, with 4G Plus, videos could be downloaded at speeds of up to 225 Mbps and 11 cities in Italy have activated a service — with 3 carriers, meaning greater bandwidth than the initial 4GPlus bandwidth — to reach 300 Mbps.

Key 500Mbps enablers include Carrier Aggregation, coding and modulating the frequencies and new mast transmission systems. In addition to Sanremo, the 4.5G network is gradually being extended to other cities, one of which is Turin, where TIM’s laboratories are located and where, in October last year, TIM tested a service that exceeded 500Mbps on a live data connection.

ARPU

29.7M MOBILE LINES 12.5M MOBILE BROADBAND 11.2M FIXED CONNECTIONS 7.4M RETAIL BROADBAND

CUSTOMERS

TMNQUARTERLY 11

CROWDSOURCED CEM

Quietly and with much less publicity than before, on-device and crowd-sourced approaches to determining user experience are growing in use.

12 TMNQUARTERLY

CROWDSOURCED CEM

“P3 is working on an IoT score, designing new use cases In one of TMN Quarterly’s earliest issues, back in mid-2013, we carried an article looking at the different means that operators had of gaining a truly customer-centric view of network performance. In it we predicted the rise of a new wave of disruptors. These disruptors were companies that would bypass the monolithic and complex networkbased approaches — probes, big data analytics of network element stat counters, centralised tooling systems — with on-device based clients and software that reported the actual performance that users were experiencing.

At that time we mentioned OpenSignal as an upstart, and in fact RootMetrics as another. Since then, RootMetrics has moved away from the crowd-sourced role, to offering a sort of bespoke walk and drive test service to operators.

But OpenSignal has continued to blaze a trail with its “State of…” reports, which use its user-reported stats to build a picture of a number of metrics related to network quality and user experience.

Another on-device approach comes from Ookla, which provides a simple speed and ping test platform for users.

Ookla provides insight into these stats on a subscription basis to carriers, who use their results in marketing. Notably, T-Mobile and Sprint have both leant on Ookla stats to hail their own network performance. P-3 is a third company that has adopted an element of crowdsourcing to add to its traditional walk and drive testing.

Its on-device solution is behind a bespoke project for UK regulator Ofcom, where it is being used

to provide in-the-moment analysis of battery consumption, what apps users are using and throughput.

“That’s real customer experience,” P3 CEO Hakan Ekmen says, “we’re not evaluating a speed test but the real customer experience.”

P3’s tool is passive, meaning once installed it works without any active involvement of the consumers.

The company has 100,000 installs already for its Ofcom project, providing 2,000 samples per hour.

Nor will these sort of metrics end at producing signal strength and throughput scores. P3 is working on an IoT score, designing new use cases such as for connected cars. It is also looking at a security performance score, especially as networks evolve to 5G. This security score could include a score for the automotive industry itself.

Not only that but it is evaluating going even further, and producing a score per OEM, and for companies such as Amazon, Google and BMW to have their own network evaluation.

A new name to the crowd-sourced area is Tutela. Tutela works in an interesting way. Instead of existing as its own app to download, it is instead software that is downloaded into the phone as a user downloads another app. So, in other words, Tutela makes a deal with a games developer to pay that developer to include a few lines of code within the install of that game.

It adds only a few minutes to the app development process, Tutela claims.

When the user downloads the game, the Tutela code is installed

such as for connected cars.

It is also looking at a security performance score, especially as networks evolve to 5G” in the software, and starts generating reporting data from the phone as the installed test agent — an SDK downloads a file in the background, a 2Mb default file from Tutela’s CDN on AWS — starts communicating with a test server in the network.

The game or app that was originally downloaded does not need to be active for the software to work. Once the download is made, then the ondevice agent is ready to go. Naturally, this requires a set of permissions from the user that, Tutela says, are made clearly visible within the app permissions settings.

So far Tutela cannot officially disclose which apps it has partnerships with but it says they range from the tiny in scale to the very large, with apps including dating and gaming titles. Tutela’s Tom Luke says that this approach solves the distribution problem of crowdsourcing CEM apps. On the other

TMNQUARTERLY 13

CROWDSOURCED CEM

“People tend to test their speed when they think they have a very bad or very good experience.

And that tends to give a skewed view of network performance.” side of the business, Tutela’s multidisciplinary team requires not only iOS and Android coding smarts, but appreciation of how test mobile networks and of running global servers for setting up latency and packet loss type tests across mobile networks.

One technical optimisation feature that Tutela says it can very easily help with is something known as cell tower overshooting. This is the scenario where a user is effectively connected to the “wrong” base station, and would receive a better performance by reattaching to a nearer site. Because Tutela has relevant location id, as well as performance stats, network engineers can easily see when someone in a given area is attached to a tower that is “over shooting”. Luke says that it is hard to otherwise discover this without running a specific drive test. Another technical solution that location info enables is to detect Backlobe, where a user is connected to the “wrong side”

of a directional antenna.

Luke says Tutela solves a problem inherent in all other speed test type apps, which is that people tend to test their speed when they think they have a very bad or very good experience.

And that tends to give a skewed view of network performance.

So how big is Tutela’s reach? Well Luke claims that the company is currently receiving data from 100 million active user devices every month. That is a large number. If that seems like a privacy risk, Tutela claims that it runs in the background and is designed to collect no personal (ie name) data or id data or ip or MAC address — nothing that in any way could id the user. The software is only interested in signal strength, location, and a range of other KPIs such as download and upload speed, jitter, latency, packet loss and cell power.

Tutela said that it has worked with operators, but needs to do the legwork to convince them that its data is superior to the speedtest companies they are used to working with. Luke says the company has 30 Tier One operators “actively looking” at trials. TMN can also reveal that the company partnered with Telefonica Mexico to monitor crowd-sourced data collected from over 150,000 subscribers, from all operators in Mexico. Regulators are another natural target for Tutela — given that it gives the regulator a good tool to verify operator network quality claims, by being able to provide

TL:DR

A new class of on-device agents could give operators a true customer view of network performance.

Join the conversation

14 TMNQUARTERLY

very accurate location-based performance data.

A third newcomer to this market is French company v3d. V3d’s Equal One solution collects data directly from the subscriber’s device via performance KPIs collected on their smartphones. The company, like Tutela, offers an SDK that can be delivered within an application.

It has built a range of use cases, from coverage and network investigation to benchmarking and VIP customer care.

The question for mobile operators now is one of understanding.

There is a new range of on-device platforms that can provide data sources on the customer experience.

But there is still a lot of work to do in analysing that data into meaningful insights. There is also a significant job to do in correlating that data with their own internal data “lakes”, to cross-check and understand why issues are arising in the network. That is something that still requires work. When TMN asked three crowd-sourced providers if operators are talking to them about how to integrate their data with their wider datasets, the answer was, in no particular order, “we don’t know”, “they will look at it, but not yet” and “no”. It is here then, that the role for AI and machine learning steps in — to make sense of the madness, or wisdom, of crowds.

@TMNmag • Contact: info@the-mobile-network.com

?

E L L L C A A A I I N E C I E R F G I T I T E L R L G A N E T T IN

So you

What’s a platform business? It’s one that lets other businesses build their businesses on your platform.

If network operators want to move to being platform businesses — vertical use cases, Industry 4.0, all of that — then they need to build their networks as platforms.

That means open APIs that businesses can build to. It also means, for mobile operators, building that edge cloud that extremely local to the service — because what mobile networks will be able to provide what other (i.e. fixed) networks will not be able to is low latency mobility.

This means having control of the network, service and application layers in the business so that cloud performance and service quality can be measured and monitored.

In networks that are wanna be a platform business? virtualised, software defined and controlled, You need to automate, with services spun up and that’s just the start. and down in instants, often in highly localised instances, that assurance must be automated. There’s no way that that can happen without the in-built functioning of what we know as Artificial Intelligence.

All of this thinking was described to TMN by one player that has already virtualised active test agents in the

network, to provide real time reporting on network performance. Now that company, Accedian, is just one that is thinking about how the next stage of the network — the distributed mobile cloud - can be “instrumented” in a truly cloud native manner.

Accedian’s Scott Sumner says that the mobile cloud platform represents the “first time in decades that mobile operators have had the opportunity for a real hike in revenue”.

But this platform business will require a change in assurance towards a full micro services monitoring platform.

That has to be OpenSource, because operators simply will not be able to control anything that is in the cloud.

As an example, anything Google gives you as an API is open sourced

by Google — because Google does not want to maintain that. Accedian’s call to the community is that there needs to be an OpenSource movement that allows for OS monitoring to come alive in a way that it can instantiate itself. This must go beyond an industry “OSS standard” as it has to be loose because of the potential multitude of use cases. Additionally, orchestration will be location dependent, with monitoring following slice locations.

“Every customer will have its own slice and monitoring must be inserted or embedded in that orchestrated slice,” Sumner says.

Is the industry in any way ready for this radical view of cloud-network orchestration? Well, there are some signs of movement.

ZTE officially released its Artificial Intelligence (AI) Solution to help operators build next generation highlyTMNQUARTERLY 15

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

“This is the first time in decades that mobile operators have had the opportunity for a real hike in revenue.” intelligent and cost-effective automated AI networks. From platform, services, network and chip aspects, the solutione elaborates on future-oriented AI endto-end architecture, applications, as well as typical scenarios.

With a unified AI platform, ZTE’s AI Solution can provide diversified applications, for cloud service, intelligent network, as well as chip and terminal. Its AI-based cloud service application can provide voice and video services which are based on face recognition, human and vehicle identification, speech recognition and Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies. And an AI-based intelligent network application, which is based on precision algorithms, can provide intelligent network operation and maintenance, network optimisation and more.

At this stage, operators and vendors are still proactively exploring and seeking more efficient, stable and accurate AI algorithms and solutions to reduce the operational labour costs and effectively improve operating income.

“The introduction of AI provides the SDN/NFV network with vast potential for use in operation and maintenance, resource utilisation and efficiency,” ZTE’s Wang Rui said.

TL:DR Network as a Platform business models are going to rely on OpenSource.

16 TMNQUARTERLY

“In our practice, the AI correlation algorithm and data cleaning improve the extraction efficiency of root cause analysis (RCA) rules by 70 percent, which greatly reduces the dependence on staff skills.”

The ZTE cloud-oriented network management platform, CloudMaster, has a built-in AI engine, realised multi-layer fault correlation, real-time network fault positioning and realtime prediction in the virtual network, to provide a strategy of automatic decision-making.

Another vendor to have made a recent AI-based analytics announcement is Nokia. The company has expanded its Analytics Services offering to draw on Nokia Shannon Intelligence, which integrates augmented intelligence throughout the company’s end-toend portfolio.

The upgrade now includes six new services that draw on AI: Mobility Analysis and Optimisation, Spectral Performance Management, Cell Site Degradation Prediction, Similar Ticket Recognition, VoLTE Audio Gap Analysis and Predictive Video Analytics.

Dennis Lorenzin, head of Network Planning and Optimisation, Global Services, Nokia said, “Our analytics services help to cope with the complexity of today’s networks. We can augment human intelligence to improve efficiency and reduce the cost of operations. In addition, we can provide deeper insights to improve quality of experience based on subscriber, device and application usage patterns.”

Meanwhile, TEOCO’s Dima Alkin, VP of Service Assurance Solutions, says that automated assurance capabilities are maturing, but adds that most telco companies are not yet leveraging the available technology to its full extent, and therefore not

benefitting from those new and truly revolutionary capabilities.

“Two important factors are at play here: the maturity of the available tools and the maturity of the organisation.

“Mobile operators are currently missing the value that can be obtained through AI and machine learning in part due to generic approaches, utilising tools that weren’t built to address specific telco use cases, challenges and business processes.

As a result, the analytics that are produced tend to be non-real-time, too general and descriptive in nature, and lacking any actionable information.

Another hindering factor is the maturity level of the organisation itself and its readiness to effectively consume and act upon the insights brought by the analytics. Integrating the analytics and AI into the existing business processes, or modifying them to take full advantage of the newly available technologies also presents a challenge.

“With the rapid evolution of network technologies driven by 5G and cloud-driven advancements, and the introduction of more sophisticated and dynamic services, the focus is shifting from traditional network monitoring to servicesoriented assurance which takes services consumption context into consideration. Modern NOC, SOC (Service Operation Centres) and Engineering departments will

“Automated assurance capabilities are maturing, but most telco companies are not yet leveraging the available technology to its full extent”

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

increasingly require access to ever-growing amounts of real-time information. The network operations and engineering departments have no choice but to start relying on the insights provided by sophisticated analytics and machine learning algorithms. These analytics will become the first step in enabling the network management automation that will allow a reduction in problem discovery times and resolution processes.”

One operator that has started augmenting its network optimisation with AI technology is Vodafone.

Vodafone Germany and Huawei recently trialled machine learning in a Centralised Self-Organising Network (C-SON), to identify the optimal settings to deliver voice over LTE services across 450 mobile cells chosen at random.

The algorithm completed the task in four hours. The same task would have taken an engineer around 2.5 months to do manually.

Vodafone Ireland and Cisco are also leveraging automation and machinelearning algorithms in a C-SON to predict locations where 3G traffic will peak in the following hour. The technology works by monitoring network traffic trends.

The company says it has further machine learning trials planned and expects to begin utilising the technology in its commercial networks during the 2018/19 financial year.

CAREBOTS Proactive Bot technology uses knowledge systems — fed by data collected over time — and applies them to future problems.

With this background information, proactive care bots actively analyse data that is constantly generated by connected devices and the wider network.

Any disruption or hiccup in service — such as a slow down in network speeds — will be detected and acted upon automatically thanks to the knowledge system that proactive care bots have at their disposal. Issues are solved before the subscriber ever knows they existed. Subscribers have no reason to call, or consider switching providers.

Source: Nokia

TMNQUARTERLY 17

TECHNICAL FEATURE

LTE D E C N A ADV PRO

CUPS allows for: •R educing Latency on application service, e.g. by selecting User plane nodes which are closer to the RAN or more appropriate for the intended UE usage type without increasing the number of control plane nodes.

CUPS

June 2017 saw the functional freeze point for 3GPP’s R14 — the most recent version of specifications that can be included under the LTE Advaced-PRO marker. TMN selects the most important

3GPP has completed the Release 14 specification of CUPS — set to be a key core network feature for many operators.

CUPS stands for Control and User Plane Separation of EPC nodes and provides the architecture enhancements for the separation of functionality in the Evolved Packet Core: SGW, PGW and TDF. This enables flexible network deployment and operation, by distributed or centralised deployment and the independent scaling between control plane and user plane functions — while not affecting the functionality of the existing nodes subject to this split.

enhancements to LTE.

•S upporting Increase of Data Traffic, by enabling to add user plane nodes without changing the number of SGW-C, PGW-C and TDF-C in the network.

•L ocating and Scaling the CP and UP resources of the EPC nodes independently.

• I ndependent evolution of the CP and UP functions.

•E nabling Software Defined Networking to deliver user plane data more efficiently.

•C UPS introduces 3 new interfaces, Sxa, Sxb and Sxc between the CP and UP functions of the SGW, PGW and TDF respectively.

CONTEXT AWARE SERVICE DELIVERY

DEVICE TO DEVICE

The 3GPP proposal says that network-based proprietary solutions either require extensive DPI for user plane packets or a private interface to the content server. It wants to study whether UE assistance can enable more efficient crosslayer optimisation and caching. In addition, it says these existing solutions may be difficult for operators with multiple network vendors to deploy and operate.

In summary, there is a need for further study in the RAN to fill the gap between current LTE network capability and the diverse user service requirements of the future network. The work will be undertaken as a study item.

One study item is to give networks the ability to differentiate between traffic coming from a wearable and from the relay device (e.g. smartphone) in the access layer. Achieving that differentiation would allow the operator to treat the wearable or remote device as separate devices, say for billing or security. 3GPP would like UE-to-Network relaying to be enhanced to support end-to-end security through the relay link, service continuity, E2E QoS where possible, efficient operation with multiple remote UEs, and efficient path switching between Uu and D2D air-interfaces.

A second strand in the study item is to look at enhancements to give remote devices the ability to operate at lower power, rate and complexity. The current PC5 link design — the interface between devices — is inherited from the design driven by public safety use cases and represents a bottleneck that prevents low power and reliable D2D communication, due to lack of any link adaptation and feedback mechanisms.

There were over 30+ studies in Rel-14, on topics such as... 5G requirements (SMARTER, NexGen) • Multimedia Broadcast Supp

Control and User Plane Separation of EPC nodes • SRVCC Enhancements • Ph2 Emergency

TECHNICAL FEATURE

services over WLAN • S8 Home Routing Architecture • Robust Call Setup for VoLTE subscriber in LTE...

MISSION CRITICAL SERVICES

MULTEFIRE

(SEE OUR MAIN ARTICLE ON PAGE 32 FOR MORE)

The MulteFire Alliance expects to see vendor trials of MulteFire technology by late 2017 and some MulteFire-capable devices to be available by mid-2017, and then full vendor trials by late 2017. (Qualcomm, which is a the key proponent of MulteFire, is already a leading supplier of LAA chipsets to the market.)

MulteFire is, in essence, standalone LAA by another name — in that it allows LTE small cells to operate in unlicensed and shared spectrum even without requiring the LTE cell to also have a licensed spectrum anchor. That opens up the potential for enterprise and building owners, as well as to cable operators and neutral host operators to deploy LTE networks.

MCPTT was the first major step in a series of MC Services and functionalities demanded by the market. In Rel-14, completed in 2017, 3GPP added additional MC Services and enhancements to its repertoire of standardised applications, specifically: Enhancements to MCPTT • MCData • MCVideo.

Given the tight timeline for Rel-14 and with an eye on the upcoming 5G work, the MC Services were split into smaller, self-contained features in order to allow 3GPP to finish the majority of them in Rel-14, by September 2017, and to complete the remaining features in Rel-15, due to be completed in June 2018.

The MC Services introduced in Rel-14 offer stand-alone functionality that enriches the existing base of MC Services. The set of features included was carefully chosen so that implementers need not have to wait for the completion of additional standardized functionality in Rel-15. The Rel-14 MCVideo and MCData specifications therefore offer equipment vendors as well as network operators a consistent and fully specified set of standards, ready for initial implementation and deployment.

LTE WIFI LINK AGGREGATION (LWA)

On LAA there is a new study item and a new work item to complete work on defining an Uplink Access scheme. R13 defined the downlink channel access mechanism but stopped short of completing work on the uplink. The work item will support uplink carrier aggregation for LLA small cells, using the downlink access mechanisms as a starting point, with the aim of specifying the necessary device and base station performance requirements needed to support Uplink carrier aggregation for an LAA small cell.

Location services • Mission Critical Video over

LTE • MC DATA • LTE support for V2X services • eFMSS• LICENSED ASSISTED ACCESS

plement for Public Warning System • User Control over spoofed calls •

Getting LAA and LWA into R13 has been something of a rush, so necessarily some elements have been left until R14.

One of these is to enhance interworking between LTE and WLAN at the radio level. This has become more necessary because of the increasing speeds being built into WLAN 802.11x standards. One of those, 802.11ay, is an amendment that can offer data rates of up to 20Gbps in the 60GHz wave band. 3GPP said that such increased data rates “may require additional optimisations”. These would include supporting 60 GHz channel measurements, and increased data rates for 802.11ax, 802.11ad, and 802.11ay — for example

by PDCP optimisations.

There are also objectives to gain additional information collection and feedback for better estimation of available WLAN capacity, and for the introduction of Automatic Neighbour Relations for LWA — for the discovery of WLANs that sit in eNodeB coverage.

TMNQUARTERLY 21

NETWORK SECURTIY

IMSI catchers, SS7 spoofing, a dark web enabling malicious hackers for a few dollars. With 5G enabling critical comms and IoT use cases, the network simply has to get more secure, and to enable greater security for its customers.

GETTING SECURE 22 TMNQUARTERLY

Attack vectors increase. Diverting a message from its intended recipient is easy. And once you’ve done it you can subvert the authentication contained within the message, giving access to bank accounts. Gaining physical access to a remote, unattended access point or even static M2M device is very different to breaking into a protected cell site. Securing a distributed, edge-based, cloud network running on IP connectivity is very different from securing a private, proprietary network. Small cells in offices and homes form an attached part of the mobile network. Social hacking, exploiting the greed or trust of someone well placed to give you access, will always remain and the threats increase as the rewards increase.

This litany of threats and attack vectors is not an exaggeration. Recently TMN was told that just fifty dollars spent on the dark web can provide hackers with the means to exploit vulnerabilities in the SS7 signalling network so that

NETWORK SECURTIY

they can carry out frauds via means such as spoofing user location and hijacking calls and messages.

Steve Buck, of Evolved Intelligence, said that companies that gain access to SS7 networks for supposedly legitimate purposes can then resell access to fraudsters or hackers — sometimes even on a subscription basis. Often the “host” operator offering access is a smaller operator of some kind that either lacks the means or desire to investigate what its supposedly legitimate partners — say ones that purport to require SS7 access to offer enterprise SMS services — are up to.

Providers of SS7 security solutions such as Evolved Intelligence — others would include players such as Adaptive Mobile, Xura, Cellusys, Haud Systems and Symsoft — have been publicly marketing SS7 Firewall products since at least late 2014. However Buck said that operators and security companies have seen fraudulent exploits of SS7 signalling networks increase in the past 12-18 months, prompting groups like the GSMA to get involved in writing specifications to guard against attack.

Up until now major operators have been aware of the potential for brand damage caused by SS7 vulnerabilities, but there has been less focus on fraud, Buck told TMN. “This is not just a security problem, it is a fraud problem,” he warned.

In June 2016 a working group known as the Communications Security Risk & Interoperability Council (CSRIC) was tasked to report to US regulator FCC on SS7 vulnerabilities following high publicity “attacks” carried out by researcher Karsten Nohl on the cellphone of Congress member David Lieu. It said that operators should continue to implement firewall methods

to protect from attack, but also that there should be more information sharing within the industry on attacks.

This recent shift in momentum towards fraudulent exploits has partly been a result of target companies such as banks tightening up their own procedures, making it harder for fraudsters to successfully carry out attacks via methods such as internal fraud and social engineering.

This has led them to exploit the communications network as a means of attack.

Another reason for the shift is that operators were previously able to ring-fence access to SS7 hubs to a small range of trusted partners.

But with a larger number of companies benefiting from a direct connection to the signalling layer, it has become harder to police access.

IoT SECURITY And what of the growth in IoT? With devices exposed, and operators running platform businesses, how will the security of devices and data be established? Signalling vendor Adax says that the first step for operators is to ensure any connection from the IoT device to the core network over S1 and Gb interfaces is fully authenticated. Adax’s Robin Kent says, “In order to do this, they must invest in and revisit the capabilities

“Securing a distributed, edge-based, cloud network running on IP connectivity is very different from securing a private, proprietary network.”

of their GTP and SCTP protocols, which will handle the hundreds of connections into the core network.

Authentication can be delivered by the RFC 4895 for the SCTP protocol without compromising performance or network monitoring visibility like IPsec/VPNs do. This can prove vital as networks are subject to attacks with greater frequency and demonstrated disastrous outcomes.

Another prevention technique operators should be implementing is to provide data analytics and Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) services to identify threats in the data generated by IoT services. Today’s interconnected networks are highly vulnerable to hijacking via insecure SIGTRAN links or rogue network nodes, and application vendors can unknowingly allow the network to be compromised, when presumably ‘secure VPNs’ invisibly transport threats within packets. This issue has to be addressed as a first step to ensure network performance and Quality of Service (QoS) is not compromised.”

Adax adds that another potential headache for mobile operators is that IoT has many additional security requirements because of the nature of the endpoint devices and the potential high level of service criticality.

In serving a high volume of devices, networks are exposed to signaling storms, and intentionally malicious Denial of Service attacks. Kent says, “Network operators should be taking it upon themselves to set their own security measures to ensure the potential capabilities of IoT can be recognised and embraced.

The demand for such services is continuously growing so having the right tools and protocols, such as GTP and SCTP solutions, in place ahead of the expected rush will be vital.”

TMNQUARTERLY 23

NETWORK SECURTIY

5G SECURITY

“In serving a high volume of devices,

5G Ensure is asking the industry in an open consultation:

networks are exposed

Are security requirements across vertical industries clearly understood and defined?

malicious Denial

Have security threats across 5G technologies been clearly identified?

5G SECURITY

Are the right solutions in place to address the requirements and risks?

Do we have a common definition of network slice and which security mechanisms apply? What other security aspects should 5G prioritise, e.g. IoT, security management?

The project wants your input.

For more information see: www.5gensure.eu

to signaling storms, and intentionally of Service attacks.”

5G will bring a whole new level to network security demands. Network slicing envisages the establishment of virtual networks within the overall network, each with their own security defined and provided within the slice.

That means 5G networks must 5G have security natively supported within the 5G infrastructure to ensure the correct support for 5G use cases and fulfil the needs coming from vertical industries.

5G-PPP project 5G Ensure has been defining a new security architecture for 5G. It has designed a test bed to demonstrate the security enhancements provided by the capabilities/features of each delivered enabler but also to showcase the added value of combining them to improve access control, privacy, trust, as well as network management and virtualisation security.

5G Ensure describes the new security architecture in these terms - essentially redefining 3GPP’s security architecture to adapt to the new way that service building blocks are delivered within 5G. “The security architecture builds on the current 3GPP security architecture (TS 33.401) where the network and its security functionalities are represented

TL:DR

IoT and new edge-based networks introduce some proper security headaches.

Join the conversation

24 TMNQUARTERLY

in terms of domains, strata and security feature groups. These building blocks have been revised in terms of concept and extended to capture the characteristics of 5G system such as the strong dependency on SDN and NFV and the need to support multi domains and vertical use cases.

“Therefore the concept of domain has been revised to distinguish between infrastructure domains, related to physical network aspects, and tenant domains, reflecting the logical network aspects. These domains are strongly connected to the 5G trust model as many of the domains will typically be coupled to administration/ ownership. The strata concept has been extended to characterise the different functional aspects related to the provisioning of a service.”

The work shows that there is still a lot of work left to define “where” Security is needed and “What” type of Security is needed. That work is ongoing, and vital to the future success of the the 5G business model that relies on interaction with vertical industries.

@TMNmag • Contact: info@the-mobile-network.com

OPEN S M R O F PLAT

NETWORK INFRASTRUCTURE

There’s little doubt what theme is emerging from the first autumn product releases — OpenSource in operator networks — specifically to support NFVI management and VNF integration and lifecycle management.

VMWare is triumphantly proposing its VMware vCloud NFV-OpenStack as “delivering the fastest path to deploying production NFV services on OpenStack”

If the netw ork is going to b e a platfor m that is ope n via APIs , then the h ardware itself mus t be open and progr ammable.

What doe s that mea n for those companie s providing the netwo rk hardware , and the software th at runs it?

26 TMNQUARTERLY

Here’s the PR blurb: “The new vCloud NFV-OpenStack platform is integrated, tested, and certified with VMware’s NFV infrastructure platform.

Using VMware Integrated OpenStack as an NFV Virtualized Infrastructure Manager (VIM), network architects can easily deploy, upgrade, and operate an OpenStack cloud on top of VMware’s carrier-grade NFVI platform.”

Significantly the vendor has announced that Vodafone will deploy VMware vCloud NFV as part of its NFV-SDN transformation programme.

In a parallel announcement, Vodafone said it was joining ONAP, the alliance that has established around AT&T’s efforts to OpenSource is network management and automation software.

This is a pretty significant moment for Vodafone and for ONAP, and also for VMWare.

Meanwhile another ONAP member, Amdocs, has announced that it has introduced the industry’s first complete software and services portfolio for NFV SDN automation that is powered

by ONAP. ONAP is due to release its first specs — known as the Amsterdam release — in November this year.

Ann Hatchell, VP Open Network Marketing at Amdocs, told TMN that Amdocs has introduced three elements: 1, a packaged, modular software based on ONAP specs for complete NFV lifecycle management based on the Amsterdam specs. 2. A more “hardened” set of services to help operators that would like a more integrated route to get to market. 3. A hosting environment for operators to test new services, including accelerator toolkits around different services, with the first being SD-WAN. Hatcher says this three prong approach takes Amdocs way beyond mere service orchestration, giving operators the capability to decouple the service roadmap from the vendor roadmap.

Another company significantly imbibing the Open juice for a while has been Radisys, which went so far

NETWORK INFRASTRUCTURE

M-CORD ENABLING THE EDGE CLOUD PROCESSOR PERFORMANCE — THE NOT SO SECRET ENABLER

Core Cloud vMME

CU-u

CU-u

vSGW-u

vPGW-u

CU-c Low

vMME

vSGW-c

vPGW-c

XOS

ONOS xRAN

vMME

vSGW-u

MEC Services

Open Stack

HSS

PCRF

vPGW-c

vSGW-u

vPGW-u

vSGW-c

ONOS

M-CORD Edge Cloud

PDN

RRU + DU

as to create new corporate messaging around being Open. Radisys, for a long time a platform provider to OEMs, now intends to use its ongoing commitment and transition to Open to sell more directly to operators. That’s because it sees Open as an opportunity to break the vendor lock within operators. As an example, the company announced an M-Cord (Multi Access Central Office Re-architected as a Datacentre) proof-ofconcept and an Extensible RAN (xRAN) proof-of-concept. It says the two new use cases, both running on Radisys’ DCEngine open hardware, enable Communications Service Providers (CSPs) to optimise resources in a CORD™ environment. Multi-access means a single data centre can manage fixed and mobile access

What carriers would love is to be able to buy radio products that are low cost, whitebox products based (most probably) on open software. The two barriers to this are 1. Existing major vendors that don’t fancy cutting their own throats just yet and 2 That it’s hard for new entrants and smaller players to get any kind of scale developing on their own.

Therefore, TIP is aiming to replicate the OCP Open approach, but in the radio layer. Although it reflects a genuine intent and investment, in some respects operator support of TIP is pour encourager les autres.

And indeed we are seeing Les Autres respond, reasoning that they would be better to be inside the Open tent than outside completely.

OPEN RADIO HARDWARE Aside from the open edge core, some operators are seeking new hardware platforms for the radio network. DT and Facebook will cochair an initiative within the Telecoms Infrastructure Partnership (TIP) to investigate mmWave networks.

The aim is to concentrate on solutions at the 60GHz band.

To enable the network as an open platform, underlying processor performance is key. As well as platforms such as Intel Xeon and 3rd-generation Intel Atom Processor technology, companies are providing specialised support for the future. One such company is Ethernity, which feels that software programmability alone won’t be enough to enable generic hardware to scale easily with growing bandwidth demands.

Hardware itself must be reprogrammable in order to optimise the system overall performance. That will allow vendors and service providers to leverage NFV and SDN in a “work smarter, not harder” manner, to meet growing demands of end users — the network customers. A programmable hardware and software infrastructure is the only way to truly implement the vision of NFV and SDN. Ethernity’s core FPGAbased technology, populated on programmable logic, “enables data offloading at the pace of software development” — improving performance, power consumption and latency, therefore facilitating the deployment of virtualisation of networking functionality.

EDGE CLOUD BASICS Wireless Access

Edge Cloud

Core Cloud

DISAGGREGATE CORE

VIRTUALISE all components Realise virtualised components in the CLOUD PROGRAMMATICALLY instantiate use case specific core network slices

DISAGGREGATE RAN

VIRTUALISE some of its components Realise virtualised components in the CLOUD SDNise it for PROGRAMMABILITY PROGRAMMATICALLY instantiate RAN slices for different use cases

TMNQUARTERLY 27

S E V I T A I T I Y T IN I C T R A M S SMART CITY INITIATIVES

We hear a lot about

GREENING THE CITY, LJUBLJANA, SLOVENIA

Smart Cities. But what

Many worldwide cities are following environmental standards to reduce the number of illnesses induced by air pollution and to lower emissions.

For that reason, they need to detect the problems and respond with green projects.

does the term mean?

Here TMN breaks down actual example applications, and

This Smart City project is based on a Waspmote Plug & Sense! Sensor Platform that has been installed in the BTC City shopping area in Ljubljana to control

highlights some leading projects.

Smart Metering

Air Quality Measurement Crime Mapping & Prevention

Smart Lighting

Water Usage & Flood Control

SMART TRANSPORT, CHINA China Unicom, Huawei, and the Shanghai government recently signed a strategic partnership to implement a smart parking solution in Shanghai, using an NB-IoT based network.

Weifang will use Huawei’s city-level IoT platform to access, manage, and collect data from sensory equipment spread across the city in real-time.

Huawei said it has already enabled smart lighting applications across Weifang, using it to monitor the status of street lamps, automatically adjust brightness, and detect faults, with the system designed to save 80 percent of traditional electricity usage and 90 percent of previous maintenance costs.

ambient conditions and air pollution.

The devices and sensors monitor Luminosity, Temperature and humidity, Noise, air pressure, CO, O3, NO, NO2 The information collected by the sensors is sent to a Meshlium IoT Gateway through 868 protocol, which requires to locate sensors within a radius of 500 meters. The communication among the SmartCityPlatform and the IoT Gateway has been carried out via WIFI.

Integrated Healthcare

Driverless Cars

In-Home Assistance

Building Energy Usage

TMF’S SMART CITY MANIFESTO “Technology and infrastructure alone will not make a city smart. Data must be accessible via openAPIs, with privacy and security paramount.” To align cities behind this message, industry body TM Forum has released a Smart City Manifesto.

1. City platforms must enable services that improve the quality of life in cities; benefitting residents, the environment, and helping to bridge the digital divide ity platforms must bring together both public 2. C and private stakeholders in digital ecosystems 3. City platforms must support sharing economy principles and the circular economy agenda

SMART CITY INITIATIVES

BRISTOL IS OPEN, UK

Bristol is home to R&D projects that use Bristol’s own digital infrastructure: fibre in the ground; a mesh of 1,500 lampposts across the city; and a mile of experimental wireless connectivity along Harbourside.

These networks are controlled in Software (SDN) based on the OpenFlow standard.

It uses Network Function Virtualisation to make the infrastructure sliceable and usable by many different projects at once.

Small sensors, including the smart

phones and GPS devices of willing participants, will supply formation about many aspects of city life, including energy, air quality and traffic flows. A city operating system will dynamically host this machine-to-machine communication, allowing the development of a wide range of applications.

All the data generated will be anonymised and made public through an ‘open data’ portal.

Media/Content Delivery & Distribution

ACCELERATED MEDIA CONTENT As part of the Bristol is Open (BIO) concept InterDigital, along with ETSI, sponsors and project participants, recently hosted an inaugural open, public trial in Bristol, which demonstrated the significant advances in content and media streaming between traditional IP and a solution known as FLIPS (Flexible IP-based services) is about accelerating delivery of IP-based content and streaming media.

Emergency Response Corridor

Traffic Management Realtime Travel/ Transit Planner

Weather Monitoring

Utility & Building Planning

Assisted Parking

4. C ity platforms must provide ways for local start-ups and businesses to innovate and thrive ity platforms must enforce the privacy 5. C and security of confidential data 6. C ity platforms must inform political decisions and offer mechanisms for residents to make their voices heard ity platforms must involve the local 7. C government in their governance and curation, and are built and managed by the most competent and merited organisations

Assisted Driving

Smart & Mobile Payments

8. City platforms must be based on open standards, industry best practices and open APIs to facilitate a vendor neutral approach, with industry agreed architecture models 9. City platforms must support a common approach to federation of data or services between cities, making it possible for cities of all sizes to take part in the growing data economy

Rubbish Collection

10. City platforms must support the principles of UN Sustainable Development Goal: Making cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.

This Manifesto supports the use of Open APIs and common standards, such as those supported by the European Commission’s Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) and TM Forum, which offer a direct path to creating an open, flexible and interoperable city platform model.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PARTNER CONTENT

THE NEW Nir Laufer explains why synchronisation and timing will be increasingly important, and outlines the options to support advanced synchronisation in the network.

Nir Laufer is director of product line management at Oscilloquartz, an ADVA Optical Networking company. He also represents ADVA in ITU-T SG15 Q.13 and regularly contributes to the development of network timing standards.

LANDSCAPE

Devices interconnected across a network must be synchronised to some degree of measured precision and across one or more dimension, enabling the scarce, shared resource of spectrum to be optimised and consumed efficiently.

There are different layers of synchronisation, and the first question that an operator must answer in costefficiently designing its network is whether frequency, phase and/or time synchronisation is required for the applications to be delivered. Ultraprecise synchronisation is an increasingly important capability for interconnection of mobile small cells and other applications, and there are different strategies for deploying the capability across a network.

DIMENSIONS OF OF DIMENSIONS SYNCHRONISATION The most common and basic type of synchronisation is frequency only. There is no notion of time; the challenge simply is to get a frequency clock ticking at the same rate across the appliances within a network.

Frequency

30 TMNQUARTERLY

synchronisation is a basic requirement for all wireless technologies, from GSM all the way through each generation of mobile technologies.

When someone is driving a car and the person’s smartphone receives data on a given frequency, the Doppler effect can make the observed frequency higher or lower depending on the velocity and direction at which the car is being driven, so the signal is synchronised in frequency to account for this and ensure coordination across the network.

There are specifications for how precise the frequency must be, and it is measured in a metric called fractional frequency offset (FFO).

A network operator is typically required to synchronise base stations to a FFO under 16 parts per billion, allowing for a margin of error.

The next layer of synchronisation, then, is phase. One way to think of phase synchronisation is like a heartbeat ticking across the network. If the heartbeat is to be one pulse per second ticking at all base stations, a capability for phase synchronisation allows all of the base stations across the network to coordinate around the same understanding of the beginning of that second. This effectively enables all of the base stations to know when to carry out certain processes in a coordinated way.

Finally, there is time synchronisation.

For specific applications, not only must the base stations be aware of when the beginning of a second occurs,

PARTNER CONTENT

but they also must understand to which time of day that second corresponds. For example, the application might need the base station to comprehend whether 12 o’clock means midnight or noon. This type of synchronisation is needed in more advanced features. Time and phase synchronisation is measured using a metric called time error (TE) and the typical requirement in highend applications such as LTE-TDD and small cells is to synchronise network elements and bound the time error under 1.1 microseconds.

GRANDMASTER OPTIONS The most prominent use case demanding ultra-precise time synchronisation is the radio access network (RAN). For the sake of efficient utilisation of radio spectrum, as well as optimal user experience, different mobile cells must be tightly aligned in phase, in order for transmission and reception of data across base stations, small cells and other mobile devices to be coordinated.

Strategies around two different approaches have emerged in the marketplace for building a capability for synchronisation at sub-microsecond precision of individual instances and applications in a distributed network environment.

The first approach leverages Global Positioning System (GPS) and Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS).

The network operator synchronises devices to the clocks in GNSS satellites which are UTC traceable. With GNSS receivers deployed at every location, a time alignment with an accuracy of better than 100 nanoseconds of UTC can be delivered across network elements.

Of course, deploying all of those GNSS antennas across a large, distributed system environment can be quite expensive. Also, the GNSS “everywhere” approach can result in frequent service outage since the

GNSS signals are very weak and therefore easy to jam or spoof.

And GNSS alone is not a sufficient solution when interconnecting indoor small cells, which are becoming more and more prominent for enabling much higher throughput indoors, where GNSS signal-to-noise ratio is very poor.

Most network operators must therefore look to a backup solution for the synchronisation of performancecritical applications. An alternative approach is to distribute timing information via the underlying data network. Well-designed network-based timing distribution typically entails less operational complexity and can deliver a timing precision in the range of several hundred nanoseconds.

IEEE 1588™-2008, “IEEE Standard for a Precision Clock synchronisation Protocol for Networked Measurement and Control Systems,” supports delivery of frequency, phase and time synchronisation across heterogeneous systems via switched, packet networks.

In Precision Time Protocol (PTP), timestamped packets are traded between a master and a slave clock.

The tradeoff with IEEE 1588 PTP is that maximum precision relies on minimal network delay asymmetries and packet delay variation. In this sense, the quality of the clock is not determined by the protocol itself; rather, it depends on the architecture and dynamics of the network. The use of PTP aware network elements such as boundary clocks and transparent clocks can help control network asymmetry and packet delay variation.

REMOVING RESTRICTIONS In truth, the optimal solution may involve some combination of the two approaches. You could have GNSS at aggregation sites, connecting to PTP grandmasters, forwarding packets to small cells to deliver time.

Solutions integrating GNSS antennas,

“Ultimately, operators require the flexibility to reliably and affordably enable synchronisation in any environment.”

GNSS receivers and PTP engines have emerged in the marketplace to provide accurate and affordable phase synchronisation for the rapidly growing small-cell market. This is crucial because small cells figure to play a larger and larger role with IoT proliferation and 5G on the horizon.

Ultimately, operators require the flexibility to reliably and affordably enable synchronisation in any environment and with no restrictions in terms of technology, form factor, etc.

A thorough understanding of the new synchronisation landscape is needed today to make wise design choices for tomorrow’s requirements.

For further information: www.oscilloquartz.com

TMNQUARTERLY 31

CRITICAL

COMMS New technical capabilities, and the requirements of emergency services and enterprises, give operators a new opportunity to support critical communications over LTE networks.

Ken Rehben explains.

32 TMNQUARTERLY

In this turbulent time, it seems few days pass without news of a major incident that calls for Herculean response efforts from emergency services. Be it a terror attack in a major commercial business district, widespread wildfires in remote regions, or devastating flood; the news brings reports of courage along with stories describing enormous challenges facing agencies coping with these destructive events.

An essential fabric that underpins emergency responses are the critical communications networks linking control centers to fire, police and emergency medical personnel. Primarily voice oriented, these networks deliver mission critical push-to-talk (MCPTT) capabilities essential to operational command and control.

Beyond the conservative world of public safety mission critical

operations, enterprises have made tremendous progress migrating applications to the cloud. For enterprises with mobile field force workers, the shift relies upon highperformance LTE networks to ensure fast access to cloud-hosted data.

The payoff for these enterprises is significant, from costs savings in server infrastructure to efficiency boosts that come from more time in the field. The benefits of a shift towards LTE-enabled cloud network has not escaped the attention of emergency services officials, but without confidence in network availability at times of crisis, these agencies must remain with tried and true functionality.

BREAKING WITH THE PAST Ideally, public safety agencies would simply leverage the trusted legacy push-to-talk services. While these systems provide a minimal level of data service support, they occupy narrow slivers of spectrum designed for support of voice communication paths that come and go as system users push microphone buttons to speak.

Cloud-based applications and video rapidly exhaust the bandwidth available in these narrowband systems.

As a case in point, TErrestrial Trunked RAdio (TETRA) provides Professional Mobile Radio (PMR) functions over multiple 25 kHz channels. Another PMR technology, APCO Project 25, operates over 12.5 kHz channels. These systems are optimized for voice, not data, and these channel sizes make sense.

In contrast, supporting data-intensive applications calls for wide bandwidth and vastly different architectural approaches for radio access and core network design. Not surprisingly, agencies now turn to 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology for an answer. LTE networks bring access to wide spectrum bands, with flexible sizes up to 20 MHz. For more

About the author: Ken Rehbehn is founder of Critical Communications Insights.

FEATURE: CRITICAL COMMUNICATIONS

“With release 12, 3GPP added the essential elements needed for critical communications traffic support.” demanding requirements, multiple LTE carriers can be combined with LTE aggregation to enable gigabit service delivery.

In major public safety agencies across the United States, day-to-day operations already tap the power of commercial LTE services to link computer aided dispatch (CAD) systems with terminals in police and fire vehicles. But no public agency counts on these LTE systems for mission critical operations and provisions exist to fall back to pure voice operation on a PMR system in event of LTE network congestion or failure.

3GPP SAVES THE DAY Before LTE can serve the needs of public safety agencies, 3GPP needed to expand the capabilities supporting quality of service. With Release 12, 3GPP added the essential elements needed for critical communications traffic support. The first feature, Access Class Barring, protects a cell sector when too many users attempt to access the radio resources of the sector.

The standards body added a ranked set of five priority access classes to differentiate high priority non-public safety users, security services, utilities and emergency services. The Access Class is incorporated into the user’s SIM, allowing rapid acceptance or barring of access attempts during periods of congestion.

After the base station admits the UE connection, the base station must allocate base station scheduling resources. The allocation and retention priority (ARP) feature of Release 12 handles the setup and prioritisation

of data bearer connections. With this feature, lower priority connections may be pre-empted by higher priority connections.

As traffic flows between the user equipment and application, the base station’s scheduler software executes Quality of Service (QoS) procedures that ensure guaranteed bit rate and non-guaranteed bit rate traffic is handled properly. In the base station and across the Evolved Packet System (EPS), bearer connections are associated with an QoS Class Identifier (QCI) that reflect the needed traffic characteristics. Before Release 12, the original QCI mechanism helped distinguish between best-effort data and Voice over LTE traffic. With Release 12, 3GPP introduced new QCIs that allow a higher level of priority than Voice over LTE. These QCIs are needed to ensure low latency mission critical push-to-talk transmissions.

Taken together, the features of Release 12 provide the basis for mission critical data application support on public and private LTE networks. But full support for MCPTT remained incomplete due to a requirements for group calls and direct device-to-device communications when the network is not available. That condition arises frequently during emergency operations and PMR systems all provide a direct mode of connectivity for users to continue operation.

To address this gap, Release 13 efforts addressing MCPTT requirements introduced functionality for group calls, call prioritisation and operation in off-network mode. Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Services (MBMS), the underlying architecture for pushto-talk group calling, gained a new interface to support applications such as MCPTT console systems.

But efforts to leverage LTE deviceto-device proximity services to solve the problem of supporting users

that are out of network coverage remain incomplete. Beyond signaling challenges, the limited power transmission possible with LTE UEs raises concerns about the suitability of LTE for direct mode operation.

That said, device makers can replicate direct mode functionality with simpler non-LTE mechanisms such as an emulation of TETRA direct mode or even simplex analog capabilities.

TMNQUARTERLY 33

FEATURE: CRITICAL COMMUNICATIONS

“Operators can ill-afford to sit back and wait for public safety users to arrive.”

Combined, the features of Release 12 and 13 set the stage for LTE network support of public safety communications and other mission critical applications. These networks can be either public commercial networks or private networks.

MISSION CRITICAL LTE NETWORKS PRODUCE RESULTS Early network deployments with Release 12 features demonstrate that mission critical LTE networks work as promised. In Australia, Telstra’s LTE Advanced Network for Emergency Services (LANES) supported critical communications operations during trials conducted at the 2014 Brisbane G20 event, the 2015 Woodford Folk Festival and the 2015 Australian Football League (AFL) Grand Final.

Emergency services workers used devices with Lanes-equipped SIM cards to gain priority access to Telstra’s 160 MHz of spectrum.

In the US, AT&T created a high priority wireless service using Release 12 features. The system faced an extraordinary test during protests in Washington DC, following the 2017 presidential inauguration.

In his presentation at the IWCE Conference in March, Michael Newburn, Wireless and Radio Solutions Manager, Fairfax County, Virginia, described how the county’s push-totalk terminals operating on AT&T’s Priority Wireless Service continued to operate in the face of intense data congestion.

Fairfax County had implemented a unique land mobile radio (LMR)

34 TMNQUARTERLY

interoperability solution that linked Sonim devices running on AT&T’s Enhanced Push-to-Talk (ePTT) service with Fairfax County’s Project 25 system.

For the inauguration, Fairfax County loaned the Washington DC government 50 devices provisioned with AT&T’s Public Safety Priority Service. Even though citizens struggled to use commercial AT&T data services at the height of the Women’s March on the National Mall, DC city officials reliably used AT&T’s ePTT service to make 1,430 group calls.

available. Operators that engage and win these opportunities stand to gain a competitive advantage over rivals that may not gain the expanded coverage footprint that follows.

As a case in point, in the UK EE is required to address coverage limitations in rural areas and tunnels. The resulting EE footprint can put them ahead of the operator pack.

OPERATOR OPPORTUNITY EMERGES

Operators can ill-afford to sit back and wait for public safety users to arrive. Now is the time for operators to engage with government stakeholders planning the next generation of critical communications capabilities supporting the emergency services mission. Now is the time to work with national regulators to influence the direction of spectrum allocations addressing public protection and disaster relief.

At a time of commoditised mobile best effort data services, now is the right moment to bring to market differentiated mobile data services for businesses that stand to gain from offers that are more than best effort. Operators should look at the prospect for tiered data service offerings promising availability and QoS that assures delivery even when network performance collapses under the crush of demand following major civil emergencies.

Recent incidents around the globe point to the value of getting the right data to the right emergency services worker at the right time. It is, ultimately, a matter of life and death. With the network advancements brought by 3GPP Release 12 and 13, the network operators can be on the proper side of the equation.

Operators deploying 3GPP Release 12 and Release 13 networks have an important opportunity to craft service offers that go beyond “best effort” IP services. With priority access services, operators gain a differentiated offer that solves significant problems for government agencies striving to put expanded data resources in the hands of law enforcement, firefighters and emergency medical personnel.

Moreover, these priority access offers do not need to be restricted to government users. Operators can structure priority service in tiers that enable targeting lowerpriority — but high value — users in the commercial sector such as utilities and transport companies.

While lower-priority than emergency services workers, these customers gain preferential network access over consumer best effort service users.

In nations where the government has a strong commitment to migrate public safety users to mission critical LTE networks, financial incentives or spectrum resources may be

TL:DR

TIME FOR ACTION

Mobile operators have a great opportunity to use new standards to address new markets.

Join the conversation

@TMNmag • Contact: info@the-mobile-network.com

IoT MARKET GUIDE

THE IOT TMN looks at the latest IoT network

NORWAY

and service deployments, from cellular operators and others.

BELGIUM

Orange Proximus Engie

FRANCE

Orange Bouygues SigFox

WHO IS DOING WHAT?

Telia NETHERLANDS

Deutsche Telekom KPN Vodafone

SWEDEN

Tele2 Telenor Telia Three Net1

POLAND

Deutsche Telecom AUSTRIA

Telekom Austria Deutsche Telekom

ESTONIA

Connected Baltics

SLOVAKIA

Deutsche Telecom SimpleCell

BELARUS

IRELAND

Velcom

Vodafone

CROTIA

Deutsche Telekom IoTNet HUNGARY

Deutsche Telecom

CANADA

Bell Telus

SOUTH KOREA

KT LG U+ SKT

USA

AT&T Comcast Sprint T-Mobile Verizon

ITALY

Telecom Italia Unidata NetTrotter

MEXICO

AT&T

CHINA

China Mobile China Telecom China Unicom

TURKEY

Turkcell

AUSTRALIA

UAE

Vivo WND ARGENTINA

Lora

Sigfox

LTE-M

NB-IOT

Velocom

Telstra Thinxtra Vodafone

Etisalat

BRAZIL

GREECE

UK

Deutsche Telecom

BT EE O2 Three Vodafone Arqiva

NEW ZEALAND

Spark Vodafone

SOUTH AFRICA

SPAIN

Orange Telefonica Vodafone Cellnex

JAPAN

KDDI NTT Docomo Softbank

Cell C MTN Telkom Mobile Vodacom Sqwidnet GERMANY

Deutsche Telekom Vodafone Netzikon

SINGAPORE

M1 Singtel Unabiz

IoT Need to know 8 OPERATORS HAVE COMMERCIALLY LAUNCHED NB-IOT NETWORKS

3 OPERATORS HAVE COMMERCIALLY LAUNCHED LTE CAT-M1 NETWORKS

11 TRIALS OF NB-IOT TECHNOLOGY SINCE FEBRUARY 2017

3 TRIALS OF CAT-M1 TECHNOLOGY SINCE FEBRUARY 2017

14 PLANNED NEW NETWORKS USING CAT-M1 OR NB-IOT

TMNQUARTERLY 35

MO BILE NETWORK OPERATORS

IoT MARKET GUIDE

36 TMNQUARTERLY

T-MOBILE VODAFONE Vodafone has been the most vocal advocate of NB-IoT technology — the most advanced cellular IoT specification in terms of 3GPP releases — but suffered in PR terms from what looked like delays in its launches.

However, its Spanish network is now available in Barcelona, Bilbao, Madrid, Malaga, Santander, Seville, Valencia and Zaragoza, and the operator says it now has over 1,000 base stations live.

The operator has also launched services in Ireland. Vodafone New Zealand will pilot the technology “with a select group of business customers in late 2017 before a network rollout in 2018,” while Vodafone Germany is undertaking customer trials including installing smart bins for the Deutsche Bahn.

ORANGE Orange has gone for a dual approach — with a LoRa-based early deployment being backed up by cellular LTE-M. It is less committed to NB-IoT, seeing it as a long term goal. The Orange network based on LoRa technology now covers close to 4,000 towns and industrial sites with quality connectivity inside buildings and below ground. Orange is also preparing to test the interconnection of its LoRa network with that of another European operator by December in the framework of the LoRa Alliance and work on the roaming standards on LoRaWAN networks. The operator will focus its LTE-M efforts in Europe initially and will begin the roll-out this year in Belgium and Spain before expanding across the rest of the company’s European footprint. At the end of last year, KPN claimed the first to start testing LTE-M in Europe, but Orange is on track to become the first commercially-available network.

T-Mobile confirmed it will build a nationwide NB-IoT network next year, and that it will begin testing the technology next month in Las Vegas. The operator added that its first NB-IoT modules will come from Sierra Wireless, Telit and u-blox, and will be available early next year. Interestingly, T-Mobile also said it will build an LTE Cat-M network next year. “T-Mobile confirmed the Un-carrier network will also support Cat-M — another IoT standard for solutions requiring voice support — in 2018,” the operator said in a release.

T-Mobile’s NB-IoT tests in Las Vegas will focus on devices like air quality sensors and streetlights linked to the internet through the new network.

SPRINT While Sprint may not have been a market leader in the early days of the IoT, the segment has become a top priority for the carrier. It expected to complete its deployment of LTE Cat 1 technology across its nationwide network during 2017 and it plans to begin to deploy LTE Cat M in mid-2018, followed by LTE Cat NB1.

VERIZON Verizon will launch the first nationwide commercial 4G LTE Category M1 (or Cat M1) network, which spans 2.4 million square miles. In collaboration with industryleading partners, Verizon has enabled an open ecosystem for Cat M1 that includes infrastructure providers and manufacturers of chipsets, modules and devices. Verizon’s Cat M1 partners include Sequans, Telit, U-Blox, Sierra Wireless, Gemalto, Qualcomm Technologies, and Altair. Its pricing looks interesting: Cat M1 devices can scale on Verizon’s wireless network on data plans that are as low as $2 per month per device, with customized options available for bulk activations and volume purchases.

IoT MARKET GUIDE

CHINA MOBILE

THE THINGS NETWORK

HUAWEI AND THE CITY

China Mobile is trialing NB-IoT to enable smart parking, smart lighting and water quality monitoring in several locations in China. For example, China Mobile and equipment maker Huawei are using NB-IoT to enable drivers to locate vacant spaces in parking lots in the city of Hangzhou. The operator is also working on a similar pilot with ZTE. In the pilots, NB-IoT-connected sensors monitor whether parking spaces are occupied, enabling drivers to use an app to see in real-time where they can park.

Moreover, China Mobile has teamed up with ZTE to use NB-IoT connectivity to enable the remote monitoring of water quality. In this case, the low power wide area technology is used to regularly transmit data on water quality to a public agency. For smart lighting, China Mobile is working with Huawei and Insigma Group to enable the brightness of street lamps to be remotely controlled via an NB-IoT module in the power controller.

In each case, the field trials began in February 2017, following tests in China Mobile’s labs in the second half of 2016. The limited availability of NB-IoT modules means only a small number of connections are involved in each pilot, but China Mobile has now upgraded almost 100 base stations across several cities to support NB-IoT. The pilots are designed to help China Mobile choose the right technologies to meet the connectivity needs of various vertical industries, while building confidence in the maturity of end-to-end NB-IoT solutions. To that end, China Mobile is using the pilots to evaluate both the technical capabilities of NBIoT and potential business models.

In particular, the operator is interested in the performance of NB-IoT in terms of coverage, power consumption, the density of connections and, of course, cost. With respect to coverage, it has already established that NB-IoT can deliver the promised 20dB link budget improvement over GSM.

The Things Network initiative was started back in August’15 in Amsterdam with a simple yet powerful mission to cover the world with an open, crowdsourced Internet of Things data network. One of the key differentiators is that the network is owned and operated by its users. With the involvement of local citizens, companies and universities, the entire city of Amsterdam was covered with this network in less than 6 weeks after which use cases were built on top to create value on the network.

The initiative has now expanded to over 350 cities spread across 80 different countries around the world.

The Things Network uses LoRaWAN™ which is a Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technology intended for wireless battery operated devices using limited bandwidth.

LoRaWAN™ is an ideal option for large scale IoT deployments due to low power consumption and long range connectivity it offers.

Huawei has announced the launch of a “demo city” in Weifang, China, to showcase its narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) smart city applications and OceanConnect IoT platform.

Announced during its annual Huawei Connect conference in Shanghai, Weifang will use Huawei’s city-level IoT platform to access, manage, and collect data from sensory equipment spread across the city in real-time.

Huawei said it has already enabled smart lighting applications across Weifang, using it to monitor the status of street lamps, automatically adjust brightness, and detect faults, with the system designed to save 80 percent of traditional electricity usage and 90 percent of previous maintenance costs.

The Chinese networking giant has also integrated eight services with its NB-IoT network, including a remote-control system, Wi-Fi hotspots, video surveillance.

EVERYNET, UK FOR DIGITAL CATAPULT’S THINGS CONNECTED The initial network consists of 50 Everynet base stations, which makes it the largest LoRaWAN network in the U.K., and is the result of collaboration between U.K. IoT service provider Digital Catapult, British Telecom, Future Cities Catapult, Everynet, Beecham Research, AllThingsTalk, BRE, Imperial College London, Kings College London, UCL, and Queen Mary University of London. Together, they hope to create an IoT incubator program designed to drive smart technology solutions for infrastructure provisioning, traffic and transport services, energy management and environmental sensing.

NON-CELLULAR OPERATORS TMNQUARTERLY 37

MANAGED SERVICES

FR M NETWORK OPS TO DEVOPS You want DevOps? You want DevOps? You can’t handle DevOps. (That’s why we’ll provide the expertise and culture as a managed service, for dollars).

38 TMNQUARTERLY

Telco network managed services have, in the most part, been just that: an outside party has managed the network. There are plenty of examples of this, from vendors directly managing and operating a network on behalf of an operator, to outsourced NetCos — vehicles set up specifically to manage a network, perhaps for more than one operator in a country.

An example of the first would be Ericsson, Nokia or Huawei’s Network managed services departments, providing planning, network integration and then management for operators such as Telia, Telenor, Airtel and others.

An example of the second would be MNBL in the UK, which owns, operates and manages a shared network on behalf of Three and EE. But there is a new opportunity coming in managed services, and that is for the consultants and systems integrators to help telcos in something much more strategic than the mere operation of their networks.

As Accenture somewhat breathlessly puts it in its marketing, “CSPs find themselves on the cusp of becoming digital telcos, capturing the promise of the pervasive network — the increasing ubiquity of connectivity through devices, sensors and the Internet of Things anytime and anywhere. To fully realise this opportunity, however, CSPs must undergo a significant transformation via next-generation platforms and SDN/NFV-powered ecosystems, new consumer-facing services and agile operations.”

It is here that the consultants and SIs see the opportunity — telco after telco has lined up to state that the chief barrier to achieving the transformation to being platform businesses based on SDN-and NFV-enabled networks is not technical, but operational and cultural.

This cuts deep. Telcos simply don’t have enough people used to working, for example, in the field of operational virtual computing environments. TMN heard recently that one operators’ major project to virtualise its core platforms stumbled because its insistence on DIY-ing the management and control of the virtual cloud environments faltered. This insistence was undertaken for the best of reasons — to enable true multi-vendor VNF on-boarding and control. But the telco couldn’t deliver because it didn’t have the internal skills to do so in its networks division. In the end the IT department, used to running workloads on a commercialised virtual environment gained more control, bringing in a more off-the-shelf

MANAGED SERVICES

approach to managing the virtual network infrastructure.

Let’s take another example — the move to DevOps. Telcos know they must initiate innovation and service innovation much quicker.

In fact it goes further than that — they must be able to let others innovate on their platforms. In both these cases they need to move to a development approach that moves faster, breaks down rigid models into a more modular micro-services approach, and lets teams achieve a constant re-iterative means of working.

This is not simple. Accenture says, “With an opportunity to reinvent themselves as digital telcos and platform-powered companies, CSPs must actively pursue this deep and transformative change.

It requires “connecting the dots” across the organization, aligning digital capabilities, simplifying and innovating operations, technology and strategy.”

Several systems integrators, consultancies and the large vendors have realised that this creates an opportunity to provide managed services for SDN and NFV, and the DevOps environment that these networks and the services they provide must exist in.

For example, Accenture’s Next Generation Enterprise Services (NGES) helps CSPs “design, develop, deploy, operationalise, migrate to and take to market next-generation service portfolios”. Its Telco Cloud Platform is a framework for the “Network of the Future” including

architecture and and agile/ DevSecOps Operating Model blueprint. Its Digital Network Transformation Services offers consulting, engineering, deployment, migration, testing and operation services to aid CSPs’ digital network opportunities.

Additionally, this proposed transformation will be taking place alongside, and indeed be enabled by, a move to much greater automation of network process and functions in the network. The management of this shift also presents an opportunity for knowledge experts to provide automation on a managed basis.

For example, Nokia’s AVA is a cloud-based platform that combines big data storage, intelligent analytics and extreme automation. Nokia says that AVA will facilitate a more efficient and faster delivery of Nokia services across the entire network lifecycle. This means Care services, Network implementation, Network Planning and Optimisation and Managed Services are supported, with more to come as Nokia continues to move towards cloud-based delivery of services, artificial intelligence and contextualised delivery.

TL:DR

MIKA AS A SERVICE Nokia created a customised ‘digital assistant’ that will improve telecom operators’ efficiency by providing engineers faster access to critical information. ‘MIKA’ — powered by the Nokia AVA cognitive services platform and available as a service from Nokia — provides voice-dictated automated assistance to reduce time spent searching information resources, enabling operators to focus on key business tasks without being distracted by the complexities of multi-technology network environments.

“They find themselves on the cusp of becoming digital telcos, capturing the promise of the pervasive network .”

TL:DR Managed services providers sense an oportunity to support the cultural shift from NetOps to DevOps.

Join the conversation

@TMNmag • Contact: info@the-mobile-network.com

TMNQUARTERLY 39

3rd

2017世界光纤光缆大会 World Optical Fibre & Cable 2017

翡翠赞助商/ Hosted by

2017年11月1日-3日 中国 武汉 1-3 November 2017 • Hilton Wuhan, China

The premier international event for the optical fibre and cable supply chain

EVENT HIGHLIGHTS

700+

The conference will explore: • Supply and demand updates from the world’s largest preform, optical fibre and communication cable producers • The latest insights on government programmes and economic data from China and other key markets • 5G and FTTH roll out - telecom operators talk about plans for international infrastructure modernisation • Smart homes, cars and cities - discussion of cable implications of increasingly data-heavy lifestyles • Data centres and submarine cable projects – industry trends in major consumption fields • Communication cable design and raw material developments – new designs and supply dynamics • Manufacturing process improvements - taking advantage of increased control, automation and efficiency

ATTENDEES EXPECTED

40+ SPEAKERS

3

FULL DAYS OF NETWORKING

Keynote speakers confirmed:

Zhuang Dan, President, YOFC, China

Gold sponsors

Ge Jun, President, Qian Jianlin, Executive Fiberhome President, Hengtong Telecommunication Group, China Technologies Co., Ltd., China

Xue Chi, President, ZTT, China

Wei Xiao, President, Futong Group, China

Silver sponsors

Bronze sponsor

XYT 鑫友泰

Book now for this essential event www.worldopticalfibreconference.com

#CRUopticalfibre

COUNTRY PROFILE: SINGAPORE

With a government-mandated all-fibre national network, and a commitment to high speed services as an economic driver, Singapore often looks to outsiders like a dream mobile and communications market. TMN looks at the Smart City State.

Singapore’s mobile market has displayed slow growth over the last few years due to a highly mature market with penetration reaching 149% by 2017. However the market over the next five years to 2022 is unlikely to grow much further, according to analyst Budde Research.

The ‘mix’ of mobile services is rapidly changing, with 2G having almost disappeared, 3G numbers

declining and Long Term Evolution (LTE) / 4G service offerings continuing to expand rapidly.

Wireless broadband has seen strong recent growth, increasing to 79.4% of overall broadband subscribers in 2017. Due to a mature and saturated market, market growth is expected to be slow over the next few years with market penetration reaching over 200% in 2018.

Competition is now heating up in Singapore’s mobile market with a fourth provider Australian telco TPG Telecom set to launch services shortly. TPG Telecom has recently won the right to become the city-state’s fourth mobile network operator (MNO), defeating MyRepublic, another operator that has been trying to enter the local market over the past few years. This is likely to see increased pressure on SingTel, Starhub and M1, potentially triggering another price war which is likely to lower ARPUs over the next two years to 2019.

The launch of third generation (4G) services by all three operators and the

subsequent development of this platform has been a transformational move for Singapore’s mobile market and has seen the adoption of new generation services steadily increase.

The eventual launch of 5G services will further this transformation.

A SMART CITY STATE Unusually Singapore’s mobile operators operate in a market where a national fibre network is being built with the intention to deliver at least 1Gbps connectivity to every physical address in the country.

Called the Next Generation Nationwide Broadband Network (Next Gen NBN), this all-fibre wired network is backed by the Infocomm Media Development Authority of Singapore (IMDA), with the aim of transforming Singapore into a competitive, global city powered by an ultra-high-speed infocomm infrastructure.

The vision of the Next Gen NBN is to provide fibre broadband access of 1Gbps and more to all physical TMNQUARTERLY 41

COUNTRY PROFILE: SINGAPORE

In 2017 StarHub launched an innovation and operations centre, Hubtricity, to monitor fixed, mobile and pay TV networks and services.

These offerings will be monitored on how they are performing via customer responses via real-time call centre and social media analytics.

Having such monitoring capabilities allow StarHub to ensure fixes to disruption or dissatisfaction have reflected in customer responses on social media, rather than just trumpet the fact that service has been fixed.

StarHub will not be hogging the insights to itself, sharing it with its partners according to Rod Strother, head of digital transformation, StarHub. “We offer analytics capabilities to companies through Curiosity, StarHub’s Digital and Social Analytics Hub. This is where we gather data from the various social media platforms which can be mined for actionable insights,” said Strother.

“Companies can then leverage on such insights to help with different aspects of their business ranging from reputation management to making decisions around content marketing,” he added.

42 TMNQUARTERLY

addresses across Singapore, including homes, schools, government buildings, businesses, and hospitals.

The government includes high speed mobile and wireless broadband access within its definition of a smart city state — as it pursues a strategy called Smart Nation 2025 — which sees communications infrastructure underpinning its economy, delivery of government services and as a growth engine for innovative tech companies. This strategy also creates opportunity for companies to export to Singapore, especially in areas such as healthcare, transport, green energy and other IoT-based applications.

5G Singapore kick-started development of 5G on a national level when regulator Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) opened up a public consultation during 2017 on the technological and spectrum requirements for 5G. The government lent a further hand when it said that it would allow operators free access to test spectrum for trials of 5G services from 2017-2019. Test spectrum is not expensive per se, but the decision sent a signal that the government is keen to give operators the opportunity to develop potential use cases for 5G.

Singapore’s Minister for Communications and Information Yaacob Ibrahim said in a speech that this would encourage developments of the four technology focus areas IMDA had previously identified as critical in the nation’s digital transformation. The four sectors the government wants to prioritise are artificial intelligence (AI) and data science, cybersecurity, IOT, and immersive media — which includes the sort of experiences enabled by VR/AR. The minister said, “To further multiply the potential of IoT, and to further fuel the digital economy, IMDA will be partnering the industry to develop and put in place key components of future-ready and resilient communications infrastructure that will benefit consumers and businesses across various sectors.”

Interestingly, not all of the Singapore government’s 5G targets are aimed at developing the mobile network.

Infrastructure enhancements included boosting the national broadband network as well as other IoT and sensor networks.

The combination of these approaches, along with the development of a 5G mobile network, is intended to open up opportunities for businesses to develop services based on access to network platforms that can provide real-time analytics enriched by sensor information and high-accuracy location data.

As such, the government is targetting the end goal of 5G — an increase in national productivity — rather than see 5G as an end in its own right.

COUNTRY PROFILE: SINGAPORE

OPERATOR 5G TRIALS M1 announced that it successfully hit a peak transmission speed of 35Gbps at a trial with Chinese telecoms firm Huawei at its main operating centre in Jurong.

“We are looking at different technology options to get very high speeds, and will continue to do trials that help us as we go forward between now and commercial 5G,” said M1 chief operating officer Patrick Scodeller.

Meanwhile, StarHub is working with Huawei and Finnish communications firm Nokia on 5G trials. “We are testing how huge improvements in bandwidth and latency can enable useful applications in augmented reality, e-health, Internet of Things and autonomous driving,” said a StarHub spokesman.

Tay Soo Meng, Group Chief Technology Officer, Singtel, said, “We strive to upgrade our networks with cutting-edge enhancements, constantly offering our customers all the possibilities that technology brings.

Singapore is at the forefront of the most connected cities in the world and now we want to take it to the next level. 5G is very important to the Singtel Group as it will support advanced communication needs. To ensure the Group continues our technology leadership in the mobile communications domain, we are exploring, studying and trialling pre-5G technologies with Ericsson.”

GIGABIT LTE Before 5G, however, operators have been in the vanguard of speeding up LTE networks.

Singtel is enhancing its LTE-Advanced network in phases this year in the run-up to the expected launch of 5G networks in the country by 2020.

It launched 450Mbps speeds across its entire 4G

network for customers with compatible smartphones, and has also announced attaining speeds of up to 1Gbps in a trial of its 4G network with Ericsson.

In July last year, the two companies also completed a live trial of License Assisted Access (LAA) 4G, saying the mobile technology would boost network capacity and speeds indoors and would be rolled out over the next two years, beginning in the first half of 2017.

The network upgrade was achieved by making use of 256 Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) technology, which increases efficient use of spectrum by increasing the number of unique radio waveform shapes to transport a third more data.

“Achieving 1Gbps speeds on our live network marks a significant milestone in our journey to 5G,” Singtel CEO of Consumer Singapore Yuen Kuan Moon said.

Since 21 July 2017, users with Sony Xperia XZ Premium smartphones have been able to enjoy 800Mbps peak speeds at the outdoor areas of Shaw Centre, ION Orchard and Tang Plaza on Orchard Road, Singapore’s prime shopping belt.

Full deployment at Orchard Road, Raffles Place and Clarke Quay is slated for the end of August 2017.

StarHub will be teaming with Chinese telecom giant Huawei for its Gigabit LTE plan, which will see the dup roll out small cell networks throughout the central business district on the island in quarter two of 2017 using Huawei’s LampSite solution.

4.1 MILLION CUSTOMERS

Singtel has unveiled plans to launch a nationwide Internet of Things (IoT) network for enterprise customers. The network will support CAT-M1 and narrowbandIoT (NB-IoT) technologies, supported by its LTE network.

Singtel has been working with companies on IoT solutions for over a year, to test the network before a full scale launch. It will continue to work with businesses, both inside Singapore and international, through its IoT Innovation Lab, run in partnership with Ericsson.

Sigfox, a French low-power network operator, launched its IoT network in Singapore over a year ago, alongside French energy firm ENGIE.

2.75 MILLION CUSTOMERS

1.9 MILLION CUSTOMERS TMNQUARTERLY 43

Enhance

E x r p e e r m i o e t n s c u e C With

Monitoring And Analytics GET IN TOUCH: MARKETING@POLYSTAR.COM

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