Telecom New Zealand CEO to Stay till DeMerger Complete

Dr Paul Reynolds has committed to lead Telecom New Zealand through the process of demerging Chorus and the establishment of New Telecom as an independent company. The company's Board of Directors is expected begin a search process during 2012 to identify Paul Reynolds' replacement, who will lead the company during financial year 2012/13 and beyond.
http://www.telecom-media.co.nz

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Freescale Samples its OorIQ Qonverge for Femtos and Picocells

Freescale Semiconductor has begun sampling the first versions of its QorIQ Qonverge multimode platform for picocell and femtocell base stations.


Freescale's QorIQ Qonverge scalable line of processors is built on the same architecture that spans from small- to large-cell base stations. The first of these devices, the PSC9130/31 femtocell SoCs (for eight to 16 simultaneous users) and PSC9132 picocell/enterprise SoC devices (for up to 100 simultaneous users)support a range of air interfaces, including LTE (FDD/TDD), WCDMA (HSPA+), WiMAX, UMTS and CDMA. The devices also incorporate glueless RFIC communication and antennae interfaces, eliminating the need for additional chips (such as FPGAs) and ultimately reducing board space and cost. The ultra-integrated PSC913x family also provides support for GPS synchronization and 2G/3G sniffing in a single device.


The QorIQ Qonverge processors combine multiple Power Architecture cores and high-performance StarCore DSPs with a MAPLE multimode baseband accelerator, packet processing acceleration engines, interconnect fabric and next-node process technology. Freescale said one its QorIQ Qonverge advantages is the ability to offload offload Layer 2 processing and above to MPU cores instead of DSP cores, delivering significant efficiency advantages. Freescale plans to introduce portfolio members targeting larger cell (metro and macro) base stations built in 28-nm process technology later this year.


"Availability of the first QorIQ Qonverge products is a milestone for the wireless industry, which is in dire need of innovative new solutions to address challenging power requirements and exploding demand for additional bandwidth," said Scott Aylor, director and general manager of Freescale's Wireless Access Division. "Freescale's QorIQ Qonverge portfolio offers unprecedented scalability and software compatibility, giving customers flexibility, reduced cost and design-time savings as they move up to larger capacity systems." http://www.freescale.com/qoriqqonverge

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Bytemobile Unveils Adaptive Traffic Management Platform

Bytemobile introduced its T3000 Adaptive Traffic Management System for ensuring quality of experience (QoE) in mobile networks.


The T3100 Adaptive Traffic Manager, which is the first product in a series, is an in-line platform designed to automatically adapt and manage all mobile IP traffic based on real-time network conditions. The NEBS Level 3-compliant platform integrates a combination of network elements for caching, load balancing, deep packet inspection (DPI), web and video optimization, policy control, and analytics. It is designed to be deployed in the core of mobile networks, between the RAN and the Internet.


Bytemobile said a key advantage of deploying its T3100 is that it creates a content-aware control point between the Internet and the mobile network, while eliminating the need for external DPI or dedicated load balancing traffic management solutions.


Key capabilities include:

• Global Traffic Management -- includes deep packet inspection (DPI) at all layers of traffic (2-7), and load balancing and traffic steering for both upstream and downstream traffic.



• Smart Caching improves the overall subscriber experience under network load by caching the most popular content in real time, closer to the edge of the access network. Smart caching also supports a distributed caching architecture that aligns with operators' evolving content delivery network (CDN) strategies.



• Network and Application Intelligence> -- provides operators with QoE metrics based on subscriber intelligence, by offering insight into when and where a subscriber experiences service levels ranging from poor to excellent, based on cell, access or core network conditions. The T3000 system also gives operators a comprehensive view across geographies to compare and report different mobile data usage patterns for measurement, benchmarking and maximizing efficiency of network resources.

"We built the T3000 Series to solve a fundamental problem in mobile networks. The increasingly bandwidth-hungry video, applications and rich multimedia content traversing 3G and 4G radio access networks today have become too complex for existing traffic management solutions," said Chris Koopmans, vice president of products at Bytemobile. "While today's solutions are focused on three standard levels of traffic management, the T3100 – as the industry's first Adaptive Traffic Manager – can detect and react to network conditions in the cell, radio access network (RAN) and core in milliseconds. With intelligence that spans seven dimensions of traffic control and unparalleled control functions to inspect data traffic at all layers of the network, the T3100 measures each subscribers QoE in real time, enabling operators to dynamically adjust traffic flows to maximize the user experience." http://www.bytemobile.com

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VMware and Cisco Show VXLAN

Cisco and VMware demonstrated Virtual Extensible Local Area Network (VXLAN), a new technology which the companies are positioning as "the next major step in the path towards logical, virtual networks that can be created on-demand."


Cisco says VXLAN will scale to meet the millions of logical networks required to run applications in the cloud with efficient utilization of network resources. This compares with existing IEEE 802.1Q VLANs which use a 12-bit VLAN identifier, which hinders the scalability of cloud networks beyond 4K VLANs. VXLAN will offer a network encapsulation technique with segment identifiers for creating millions of logical networks. This is accomplished using a MAC in User Datagram Protocol (MAC-in-UDP) encapsulation technique.


VXLAN will also support applications running in hybrid clouds where compute capacity is delivered from pools of resources that may span across private and public clouds.


The demonstration occurred at this week's VMworld 2011 show in Las Vegas.

• Multiple other vendors are also supporting VXLAN, which has been submitted for standardization at Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). A draft of the VXLAN specification is available on the IETF site.

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Ericsson's North American Analyst Forum

by James E. Carroll
Ericsson hosted an all-day North American Analyst Forum in San Jose, California to discuss key industry trends and the company's strategic positioning. Speakers included Håkan Eriksson , Group Chief Technology Officer and President of Ericsson Silicon Valley; Martin Ljungberg, Jan Häglund, Jan Ögren, Stefan Hedelius, Todd Ashton, Björn Ekelund, and Mats Norin. The presentation materials are online.


Some highlights from the event:

• About 85% of the world's population is covered by 2G networks and 35% covered by 3G networks.



• GSM subscriptions will start to decline in 2013 as the number of HSPA and LTE subscribers accelerate.



• LTE is expected to reach 35% of the global population in 2016, while HSPA reaches about 80%.



• LTE-Advanced testing underway in Kista, Sweden is achieving 1 Gbps peaking rates using 8x8 MIMO with most locations in the town achieving 300 Mbps or more.



• Ericsson expects operators will deploy heterogeneous networks with a mix or macro, pico, femto and Wi-Fi technologies.



• In the home, Wi-Fi is better than femtos.



• Picocells are better than Wi-Fi for local capacity coverage.



• Ericsson sees the Cloud business as a major opportunity.



• Software defined networking offers great potential to break up the old routing paradigm into a new, virtualized network built on standard components and interfaces. This could enable a decoupling of services from infrastructure.



• Ericsson sees significant efficiency gains coming from Coordinated multipoint (CoMP) technologies, especially in the uplink.



• Coverage and speed are clear differentiators for mobile operators.



• Once subscription growth rate tapers off, service differentiation will be the key to success for mobile operators.



• Ericsson confirms Smart Services Router (SSR) on track for delivery in Q4.



• Ericsson plans to release smaller, 6-slot and 10-slot versions of Smart Services Router in 2012. The SSR will offer a capacity of 16 Tbps per system and feature 20 slots with 400 Gbps full-duplex capacity each. The Smart Services Router (SSR) is being positioned as a "multi-application" platform for advanced services on both fixed access and broadband wireless access. Specific blades will deliver processing power for applications, including: video (caching), mobility (mobile gateway), business and residential services with powerful DPI and policy enforcement.



• Expect more innovation in MPLS-based mobile backhaul, packet+optical+microwave.



• Some carriers in SE Asia already using advanced policy control for Facebook on a per minute basis.



• Ericsson now ranks No.8 in IT services (IBM, HP, Fujitsu, CSC, Accenture, Capgemini, Hitachi, Ericsson...)



• Ericsson is managing networks that serve 800 million subscribers worldwide.



• Of the outsourced networks that Ericsson operates, 50% of nodes are non-Ericsson boxes.



• Ericsson is looking forward to its pending acquisition of Telcordia.



• By 2015, About 54% of total handsets will be smartphones.



• ST-Ericsson's HSPA+ sales increased 20% sequentially in Q2.



• ST-Ericsson is now sampling its M7400 modem chip, which support LTE FDD/TDD, HSPA+ and TD. It is an 8 band radio solution with VoLTE support.



• Ericsson is holding to its forecast of 50 billion connected devices in 2020.



• For M2M, HSPA modules are cheap compared to LTE module pricing. Also, LTE data plan pricing is much more than HSPA.

• In addition, David Small, CTO of Verizon Wireless, presented at the event. Some highlights from his presentation:
  
  
• The Verizon Wireless LTE footprint now covers 161 million people in its footprint. This will increase to 185 million by the end of the year.



• The network uses a multivendor approach. For the RAN, Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson are the key suppliers. For the Enhanced Packet core, vendors include Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco/Starent, and Ericsson. For IMS, key vendors include Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, NSN and Tekelec.



• The LTE is delivering on all of the performance metrics it promised.



• Verizon Wireless is committed to ecosystem innovation and now has Innovations Centers in San Francisco and Waltham, MA., along with a 4G Venture Forum in New Jersey to help fund new ideas.

http://www.ericsson.com http://bit.ly/qfZId2

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Qualcomm Advances LTE TDD in India

Qualcomm, in collaboration with Huawei, ZTE, Quanta and BandRich, announced the launch of LTE TDD multi-mode devices based on its MDM9x00 chipsets. The partnerships are aimed at commercialization of LTE TDD in concert with 3G to enable seamless mobile broadband experience for Indian consumers.


"Qualcomm is pleased to collaborate with Huawei, ZTE, Quanta and BandRich for the launch of LTE TDD multimode devices based on our MDM9x00 chipsets in India," said Avneesh Agrawal, senior vice president of Qualcomm and president of Qualcomm India and South Asia. "The announcement of multi-mode LTE TDD devices today is a significant milestone for the commercialization and deployment of LTE in concert with 3G for Indian BWA operators." http://www.qualcomm.com

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Qualcomm Atheros Ships Bluetooth 4.0 + HS

Qualcomm Atheros introduced a Bluetooth 4.0 + HS chip for laptops and other computing devices and confirmed Acer as its first customer.


The new Qualcomm Atheros chip enables laptops to detect and connect wirelessly with Bluetooth low energy (LE) devices such as those for proximity detection and health monitoring.


The Bluetooth 4.0 + HS supports data transfer speeds of up to 24 Mbps, whereby the Bluetooth link is used for negotiation and pair establishment and the high data rate traffic is carried over a co-located 802.11g link (the "+HS" portion).

Qualcomm Atheros noted that Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) will lead to new applications beyond the typical point-to-point uses, such as phone-to-headset. For examples, laptop users might have a Bluetooth key-fob device that automatically logs-in to their notebook when they get near, and then logs them off when they walk away. A laptop might use Bluetooth to send time sync signals to alarm clocks inside the home. Or the laptop might use Bluetooth to command lost items inside the home to emit "find me" chimes. Bluetooth 4.0 laptops can also now be used to track battery power levels for a whole range of consumer electronic devices inside the home. http://www.qca.qualcomm.com

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New Zealand Approves Telecom's Structural Separation Plan

The government of New Zealand approved Telecom New Zealand's plan to split its assets after structural separation. Telecom New Zealand's stock holders must vote on the plan.


Under the arrangement, Telecom's network arm (the New Chorus) will be the main provider of fixed-line telecommunications infrastructure and will be prohibited from offering retail services. The New Telecom will be a retail service provider and will compete on an even playing field with all other retailers.


"Should Telecom's shareholders vote in favour of the demerger, Telecom will be the first telecommunications company of its size to undergo voluntary structural separation," stated Steven Joyce, Minister for Communications and Information Technology.

• Earlier this year, Telecom New Zealand submitted its offer to Crown Fibre Holdings (CFH) to participate in the nation's new, open-access, fibre-to-the-home network. Under the proposal, Telecom would structurally separate its access business and physical infrastructure.



• The government of New Zealand has established Crown Fibre Holdings Limited (CFH) to manage its $1.5 billion investment in Ultra-Fast Broadband infrastructure with the goal of bringing Ultra-Fast Broadband to 75 percent of New Zealanders over ten years.



• On 24 May 2011, the Government announced that Chorus was chosen as the Crown’s UFB partner in 24 out of the 33 regions, which represents around 70% of the UFB coverage area. The separation of Telecom’s retail business (New Telecom) from its wholesale / infrastructure business (New Chorus) is a prerequisite for Telecom to participate in the New Zealand Government’s UFB Initiative.

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NEC and Cisco Partner on LTE

NEC and Cisco announced a strategic relationship focused on commercial LTE networks for service providers.


The partnership combines NEC's wireless network equipment (eNodeB), NEC's mobile backhaul solutions and Cisco's Mobile Internet network equipment ASR5000.


The companies have completed network verifications in a variety of environments.


"NEC offers a variety of wireless base stations that support cells ranging from macro cells to small cells," said Nobuyuki Yanaginuma, Associate Senior Vice President of NEC. "The company adopts new and advanced technologies, such as miniaturization using the world's highest level of amplifier efficiency, low power consumption developments, and Self-Organized Networks (SON), which enable base stations to be constructed and operated efficiently. The combination of Cisco and NEC's strengths will enable the provision of competitive LTE systems and contribute to the construction, service launch and expansion of commercial LTE networks for telecom operators." http://www.nec.com/lte/http://www.cisco.com

• NEC serves as the lead contractor for NTT DOCOMO's commercial LTE network. NEC has also shipped commercial wireless base stations for KDDI and announced LTE field trials with SingTel and Telefonica.



• In December 2009, Cisco acquired Starent Networks, a supplier of IP based mobile infrastructure solutions targeting mobile and converged carriers.



• Verizon Wireless is using the Cisco/Starent platform in the packet core of its LTE network.

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