GSMA: Mobile Ecosystem Accounts for 4.4% of Global GDP

The GSMA now estimates that mobile technologies and services accounted for 4.4 per cent of global GDP in 2016, equivalent to around $3.3 trillion of economic value. This is forecast to increase to more than $4.2 trillion by 2020, or 4.9 per cent of projected global GDP, as countries around the world continue to benefit from the improvements in productivity and efficiency made possible by mobile technology. The mobile ecosystem directly and indirectly supported 28.5 million jobs in 2016, a figure expected to increase to 30.9 million by 2020.

Some highlights from the GSMA’s ‘Mobile Economy’ report presented at Mobile World Congress 2017 in Barcelona:

• By the end of 2016 there were 4.8 billion unique mobile subscribers and 7.9 billion SIM connections worldwide. 
• The 5 billion-subscriber milestone will be achieved by mid-year 2017 and will increase to 5.7 billion by the end of the decade. 
• By 2020, almost three-quarters of the world’s population will be subscribed to a mobile service. 
• More than half of connections (55 per cent) were running on mobile broadband (3G/4G) networks, which are forecast to account for almost three-quarters of connections by 2020.
• At the end of 2016, 580 4G (LTE) networks had been launched across 188 countries, providing 4G coverage to approximately 60 per cent of the global population.
• Looking further ahead, the study predicts that the first commercial 5G networks (based on LTE Release 15) will launch in 2019 and will provide coverage to a third of the world’s population by 2025. The number of 5G connections is forecast to reach 1.1 billion by that time.

“Mobile is a global platform that today supports two-thirds of the world’s population, delivering the connectivity and infrastructure that is powering new digital economies and addressing socioeconomic challenges,” said Mats Granryd, Director General of the GSMA. “Our latest Mobile Economy report reveals how the near ubiquity of smartphones and high-speed connectivity is enabling innovation in areas such as artificial intelligence and driving the digital transformation. Mobile operators have invested over a trillion dollars in their networks since 2010 and will invest a further $700 billion over the remainder of the decade as we enter the 5G era.”

http://www.gsma.com/mobileeconomy/.

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Huawei Launches CloudMetro and 100 GBE-enabled NFVI

Huawei has released its advanced CloudMetro platform, designed to help operators accelerate their digital transformation and adopt cloud technology to enable resource pooling and enhanced service agility and automation, and its new 100 Gigabit Ethernet-enabled network functions virtualisation infrastructure (NFVI) solution.

CloudMetro solution

Huawei's CloudMetro solution moves management and service functions to the network cloud engine (NCE) to enable an on-demand, 'Lego'-style service provisioning capability. By introducing service function chains to support on-demand service function selection and deployment, the architecture is designed to reduce trial costs, shorten service time-to-market down to days and address carriers' differentiated service requirements.

The platform offers standard northbound interfaces that are open to third parties, so allowing a wider range of applications to be supported. Huawei also provides lab facilities for remote online integration verification, thereby enabling joint development with partners. Huawei intends to cooperate with industry partners to help deliver mutually beneficial solutions.

Huawei noted that forwarding-control separation allows cloud-based centralised resource control and ondemand dynamic resource scheduling for increased resource utilisation, while unified service management, centralised resource control and flexible resource scheduling across layers, domains and vendors enable selfservice operation and one-touch service provisioning. In addition, the router can be used to construct an E2E, slicing-capable network.

NFVI solution

Huawei also released its 100 Gigabit Ethernet-capable NFVI solution that provides high bandwidth and low latency performance. Based on Huawei's FusionServer E9000 converged architecture blade server, the solution integrates 100 Gigabit Ethernet switch modules and FPGA acceleration cards, NVMe SSDs and the FusionSphere virtualisation platform, which delivers the performance for carrier-class applications.

Huawei noted that to leverage the operational and business advantages of NFV, it believes the NFVI must be able to accommodate increasing east-west traffic within the data centre by providing a high-speed Ethernet fabric capable of supporting high capacity and lower latency between virtual network function (VNF) elements.

The NFVI 100 Gigabit Ethernet solution leverages Huawei's FusionServer E9000 which can support 100 Gbit/s per port for external bandwidth of up to 4 Tbit/s, while providing port forwarding latency of less than 600 ns for the entire chassis. In addition, the network can be managed by the SDN controller, and for applications such as network protocol offload and encryption/decryption the NFVI solution features FPGA acceleration cards and NVMe SSDs to reduce the CPU load.

http://www.huawei.com

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Qualcomm and Mercedes-AMG Test 802.11ad for Racecar Data

Qualcomm and Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport are conducting field trials to test high-speed wireless download of vehicle sensor information utilizing 802.11ad Wi-Fi technology in the 60 GHz band.

Initial testing was conducted during the Formula 1 US Grand Prix in the 2016 season and will be extended during the British Grand Prix in July.  During these field trials, race engineers utilize both 5 GHz 802.11ac and Multi-gigabit 802.11ad Wi-Fi technology, which operates in the millimeter wave (mmWave) 60GHz band, to gather data directly from the Team’s race car while in, or approaching the garage. The handover between the two 802.11 modes are handled automatically as radio conditions dictate throughput performance.  Racecar telemetry data pulled via Wi-Fi using the 5 GHz spectrum included tire data utilizing thermal cameras.

Qualcomm said the goal of the trial is to accelerate how quickly and efficiently data can be pulled from the vehicle, as well as help evaluate vehicle performance under extreme race conditions, helping with quicker assessments and less time in the pit lane.

“Qualcomm Technologies has been leading the way in creating a robust 802.11ad ecosystem, helping industry leaders introduce the first commercial smartphones, access points, notebooks and adapters using our 802.11ad chips.  802.11ad Multi-gigabit Wi-Fi technology can also address the growing need of bandwidth for content-rich applications in homes, offices and cars. We look forward to continuing this trial with the Mercedes-AMG

http://www.qualcomm.com

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Altice's SFR Virtualizes Mobile Core with Cisco and Red Hat OpenStack

SFR, Altice’s French subsidiary, is transforming its mobile packet core infrastructure with an NFV platform architected to support multiple vendors. The solution is based on Red Hat OpenStack Platform, in combination with Cisco networking, virtualization and data center compute solutions.

The companies report that 50 percent of the mobile traffic is already running on its virtualized platform and 80 percent is planned by end of 2017.

“NFV is a reality at SFR,” said Philippe Le May, SFR CTO, Altice Group. “We are focused on innovating faster and taking bold leaps to transform our network operations, providing our customers with experiences beyond mobile that no one else can match.”

“Our strategy is to enable our customers’ success at growing both profits and revenues by connecting new services and virtualized applications to networks and clouds,” said Yves Padrines, vice president, Global Service Provider EMEAR, Cisco.

http://www.cisco.com

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Cisco Powers Jio's All-IP Platform - Fastest Growing Network in the World

Cisco confirmed that it is working with India's Reliance Jio Infocomm (Jio) to further expand Jio’s existing multi-terabit capacity, first All-IP converged network. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Jio's network is the fastest growing in the world.  Within six months of launch, it reached 100 million broadband and VoLTE customers. Since its launch, Jio has accelerated India’s monthly user data consumption 40 times, the highest in the world. With the advanced All-IP network, Jio offers a premium broadband service at U.S. $0.15/GB, making it the most affordable in the world.

The network supports a combination of high-speed data, mobile video, VoLTE, digital commerce, media, cloud, and payment services. The Cisco All-IP network helps Jio to deliver the vision of Digital India and transform the delivery of citizen services from transportation, utilities and financial inclusion to entertainment, agriculture, education, and healthcare in the country.

The Jio All-IP digital platform is built on Cisco’s Open Network Architecture and Cloud Scale Networking technologies featuring IP/MPLS, spanning areas including Data Center, Wi-Fi, Security and Contact Center solutions. Jio has laid more than 185,000 miles (or 300,000 KM) of fiber, and built India’s largest cloud data center to build platforms for applications and vertical solutions.

"We at Jio have been able to fundamentally impact how people leverage technology in their everyday lives by delivering inclusive and affordable broadband across India,” said Mathew Oommen, president, Reliance Jio. “As part of our journey in fulfilling the aspirations of the nation to be a key transformational agent in Digital Adoption and Leadership, Cisco has been a great partner for in building this highly scalable cloud centric All-IP Digital Services Network Platform meeting unprecedented data growth.

“We share the vision with Reliance Jio for an open, programmable infrastructure to simplify, automate and virtualize core network functions in order to digitize faster,” said Yvette Kanouff, senior vice president, general manager, Service Provider Business, Cisco. “This network marks a milestone, transforming the mobility business in India by delivering a broad range of mobile apps and services from one common platform.”

http://www.cisco.com

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Mellanox and ECI partner to deliver virtual CPE platform for NFV

Mellanox Technologies, a supplier of interconnect solutions for data centre servers and storage systems, and 'elastic networking' company ECI have announced the introduction of an advanced virtual CPE (vCPE) platform at the Mobile World Congress 2017.

The joint platform is designed to provide enhanced performance and efficiency and enable service providers to cost-effectively implement network function virtualisation (NFV) deployments. The solution is based on ECI's Mercury NFVi platform and uCPE solution, accelerated by Mellanox's Indigo network processor delivering over 400 Gbit/s of L2-7 packet processing. Compared to un-accelerated platforms, the ECI-Mellanox solution is claimed to deliver more than a 30x performance improvement for virtual router, L4-7 firewall and L7 QoS applications.

The ECI Mercury NFVi platform and uCPE technology converge multiple customer premises networking functions onto an elastic, software-configurable platform, with the uCPE solution enabling service providers to combine networking functions flexibly to create new value-added service mixes.

In addition, the advanced network processing capabilities of Mellanox Indigo constitute an integral part of the NFV Infrastructure to enhance the performance of virtualised network functions, particularly those requiring guaranteed throughput, packet rate, latency and jitter for SLAs.

The companies noted that compared to conventional platforms, the joint ECI-Mellanox solution can enable flexible service creation more cost-effectively together with enhanced infrastructure efficiency and in a more compact footprint.

Separately, Mellanox unveiled the IDG4400 6WIND Network Routing and IPsec platform based on the combination of Indigo and 6WIND's 6WINDGate packet processing software, which includes routing and security features such as IPsec VPNs. The IDG4400 6WIND 1 U platform supports 10/40/100 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity and can deliver sustained rates of up to 180 Gbit/s encryption/decryption while providing IPv4/v6 routing functions at rates up to 400 Gbit/s.

http://www.mellanox.com

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Telefónica Tests LTE-M with Ericsson and Sierra Wireless

Telefónica has completed field testing of CAT-M1 or LTE-M for IoT over its network in Spain in partnership with Ericsson and Sierra Wireless.

The testing showed successful interoperability Sierra Wireless modem, which builds Cat-M1 chipsets in and Ericsson's Packet Core and Radio solutions.

Tests took place within 5TONIC project, the 5G research and innovation open lab of which Ericsson is an active member, founded by Telefónica and IMDEA Networks.

5TONIC Open Lab is an open place where companies and individuals test ideas with different IoT networks, according to their needs; prove concepts, experiment and build initial prototypes that can lead to a commercial offering. This Open Lab would be the first environment providing both NB-IOT and CAT-M1 (LTE-M).

http://www.ericsson.com

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