Commsday magazine 2

March 2011 • Published by Decisive • A CommsDay publication

The rise and rise of the data centre Egypt turns off the Net A conversation with Vint Cerf Wireless needs fixed: they are friends not foes Has HD Voice’s day come?

LTE hits its tipping point – but is it enough?

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AD SIZE FULL PAGE 10.87”w x 21”h AD SIZE 10.87”w x 21”h FULL PAGE AD SIZE 10.87”w x 21”h

JUNOS IS JUNOS IS A NETWORK A NETWORK JUNOS IS MANAGER’S MANAGER’S A NETWORK DREAM WITH DREAM WITH MANAGER’S COMMON COMMON DREAM WITH FEATURES FEATURES COMMON THAT RUN THAT RUN FEATURES ACROSS ACROSS THAT RUN PLATFORMS. PLATFORMS. ACROSS IF YOU ARE IF YOU ARE PLATFORMS. PLANNING TO PLANNING TO IF YOU ARE MIGRATE TO MIGRATE TO PLANNING TO JUNIPER, BE JUNIPER, BE MIGRATE TO PREPARED PREPARED JUNIPER, FOR ZEROBE FOR ZERO PREPARED DEFECTS. DEFECTS. FOR ZERO Scotty Bevill, DEFECTS. Scotty Lead ITBevill, Program ®

®

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JUNIPER JUNIPER JUNIPER GETS IT. IT. GETS GETS IT. SOFTWARE SOFTWARE SOFTWARE IS THE THE KEY, KEY, IS IS THE KEY, NOT CLOSED NOT CLOSED NOT CLOSED BOXES. BOXES. Elisabeth Rainge, IDC BOXES. Elisabeth Rainge, IDC

®

Lead IT Program Manager, Scotty Bevill, Manager, Intermatic Lead IT Program Intermatic Manager, Intermatic

JUNIPER CAPTURES JUNIPER CAPTURES INCREASING SHARE INCREASING SHARE IN ROUTERS SINCE JUNIPER CAPTURES IN ROUTERS SINCE 2006.

INCREASING SHARE 2006.

IN ROUTERS SINCE Dell’Oro Reports Dell’Oro 2006. Reports

Dell’Oro Reports

JUNIPER IS IS JUNIPER JUNIPER IS SHOWING SHOWING SHOWING IT’S GOT GOT THE THE IT’S IT’S GOTTO THE GOODS TO GOODS GOODS DELIVER.TO DELIVER. The VAR Guy DELIVER. The VAR Guy ™ ™

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Elisabeth Rainge, IDC

JUNOS SPACE IS A JUNOS SPACE IS A GROUND-BREAKING GROUND-BREAKING JUNOS SPACE IS A NETWORK APPLICATION NETWORK APPLICATION GROUND-BREAKING PLATFORM: SIMPLE PLATFORM: SIMPLE NETWORK APPLICATION SMART AND OPEN. SMART AND OPEN. PLATFORM: SIMPLE Brendan Hannigan, Q1 Labs SMART OPEN.Q1 BrendanAND Hannigan, Labs Brendan Hannigan, Q1 Labs

JUNIPER’S T4000 T4000 JUNIPER’S SETS A A NEW NEW STANDARD JUNIPER’S T4000 SETS STANDARD FOR CORE CORE ROUTING AT SETS A NEW STANDARD FOR ROUTING AT 240 GBPS GBPS PER SLOT.AT FOR CORE PER ROUTING 240 SLOT. Ray Mota, Ph.D., Managing Partner ACG Research 240 GBPS PER SLOT. Ray Mota, Ph.D., Managing Partner ACG Research Ray Mota, Ph.D., Managing Partner ACG Research

The world is ready for The world is ready for The world is ready for a new new network. aa network. new network.

It’s official. Analysts, customers, independent reviews and industry experts agree, the timetime has It’s official. Analysts,It’s customers, independent reviewsreviews and industry experts agree, official. Analysts, customers, independent and industry experts agree, thethe time has has come for come for a new approach to networking.

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The birthday of aanswer network to revolution. silicon—delivering unprecedented world’s fastest router.

The birthday of a network revolution. silicon—delivering unprecedented The world’s fastest router.

One year ago, Juniper Networks stood on advances in performance and power By 2014, 90% of all Internet traffic will be One year ago, Juniper Networks stood on advances in performance and power By 2014, 90% of all Internet traffic will be the revolution. floor of the New York Stockrevolution.

Exchange, consumption. video.

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Juniper.net

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MECHANICAL Black

Is HD voice the canary in the coalmine?

L

eftfield predictions aren’t our usual habit at CommsDay but of late we haven’t been able to help wondering if mobile HD voice may prove to be the canary in the coalmine of where future telecom revenues will come from.

HD voice is what it sounds like: a premium-quality voice service designed to create brand and price differentiation over standard halfcodec compressed mobile offerings.

It is currently being deployed in about 15 networks, mainly in Europe with the promise of several more to come. At least six handset manufacturers including market leader Nokia are supporting the platform.

On paper, HD voice seems like a good idea. Mobile operators have deployed compression and coding on voice service in an effort to conserve precious bandwidth. By any objective standard, mobile voice is a pretty lousy product compared to the standards set by, say, FM radio.

But with the rise of new platforms that make much more efficient use of spectrum and the decline in the ARPUs from standard voice and data products, carriers now have an incentive to create a premium product.

History doesn’t necessarily augur well for HD voice, however.

Consumers have shown an amazingly passive acceptance of reduced audio quality in return for lower prices and convenience. The acceptance of best effort VoIP ahead of circuit switched PSTN service is testament to that.

An even better example is the ready acceptance with which people prefer MP3s and AACencoded songs, even though they contain approximately 90% less information than CD-quality WAV files. Premium audio formats such as SACD and DVD 5.1 are either stillborn or remain highly niche.

The one recent example of mass acceptance of a superior audio product is that of Skype.

This is because Skype is generally employed over multi-megabit broadband connections and uses a wideband audio codec considerably superior to that used in most standard phone environments.

But Skype makes a bad “control” because it is free: it is unclear how many of its users value it for its superior audio quality.

Certainly it provides us with no evidence that there is an increased willingness to pay for premium voice.

HD voice could well fizzle out and become a mere lame attempt to contrive a revenue grab that noone wants.

But to my mind, it represents hope for a future of a healthy telecom sector currently beset by declining margins and incentives to invest.

After all, what is the raison d’etre of many of the high speed HFC, FTTN and FTTH networks going in across the world?

To facilitate high-definition video conferencing, we are told, which in turn is thought to justify the speculative investments behind their deployments because it will create untold new applications and arouse new willingness to pay for additional services.

I would posit, in return, that given the primacy of voice communications per se, if an attempt to market a premium offering for voice over the world’s most ubiquitous communications networks fails, then so to will the idea that average Joes and Josephines will readily take to fibre-enabled HD videoconferencing with any degree of vigour or enthusiasm.

Grahame Lynch, CommsDay founder

ABOUT COMMSDAY MAGAZINE Mail: PO Box A191 Sydney South NSW 1235 AUSTRALIA. Fax: +612 9261 5434 Internet: www.commsday.com COMPLIMENTARY FOR ALL COMMSDAY READERS AND CUSTOMERS. For special subscription arrangements, contact Sally Lloyd at sally@commsdaymail.com. Published up to 6 times annually. Editorial inquiries email Petroc Wilton at petroc@commsdaymail.com CONTRIBUTIONS ARE WELCOME WRITERS: Petroc Wilton, Tony Chan, Bill Bennett, Miro Sandev, William van Hefner, Grahame Lynch, Dave Burstein, Richard Chirgwin, Bob Fonow ADVERTISING INQUIRIES: Sally Lloyd at sally@commsdaymail.com EVENT SPONSORSHIP: Veronica Kennedy-Good at veronica@mindsharecomms.com.au ALL CONTENTS OF THIS PUBLICATION ARE COPYRIGHT. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED CommsDay is published by Decisive Publishing, 4/276 Pitt St, Sydney, Australia 2000 ACN 13 065 084 960

Connecting Communities ExECutivE Summary

‘The full value of broadband includes outcomes around an educated citizenship, an informed democracy, cultural understanding, community and inclusion, social capital, resilience and trust.’

UK Broadband Stakeholders’ Group [Ref. 1]

‘Talking to a doctor on screen? Just the same as being in room with them. Better, I felt I had more time with the consultant in Aberdeen than if I’d gone there.’

Tele-health patient [Ref. 2]

’Communities and citizens that lack high speed broadband access are at a deficit in comparison to their peers.’

London School of Economics [Ref. 3]

‘We need to make sure that people aren’t left behind as more and more services move online.’

David Cameron, UK Prime Minister [Ref. 4]

Citizenship in the era of high speed broadband Connecting Communities is an independent review of the impact of broadband on communities in Britain and its implications for australia. Commissioned

by Huawei australia and undertaken by former uK government advisor Dr tim Williams, the report is for non-techies by a non-techie. Fast broadband and its impact are too significant to be left to geeks and engineers.

1.

the report celebrates what people and communities do with broadband but focuses on two key uK agendas with relevance for australia.

2.

3.

One is digital inclusion. the second is how ever-faster broadband is improving public service outcomes and the relationship between citizens and governments. the report shows the advantages and necessity in the modern world of a national broadband network with sufficient bandwidth. it is about citizenship for all in the digital era as it moves to highspeed broadband.

the report identifies significant benefits of ever faster broadband for uK communities: 4.

In health: tele-health is saving lives now in remote

communities in Scotland.

In the care of the elderly: telecare is now enabling

1.7 millions to stay in their communities, lead independent and sociable lives, making huge savings – and strengthening family cohesion.

In the environment: tele-conferencing and related

home-working are already reducing emissions and congestion – and supporting greater community involvement.

In education: results improved by two grades and

hard to reach kids got switched on – especially if they

2

CONNECTING COMMUNITIES | THE IMPACT OF BROADBAND ON COMMUNITIES IN THE UK AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR AUSTRALIA

had access to devices at home and school. Education is being transformed.

Older, disabled, the isolated: all report improved

well being from tele-care and greater connectivity, speaking to long-lost friends and family on Skype, getting involved in communities on-line.

Public service efficiencies: the digitisation of x

rays is saving money and lives; in Wales 22 local authorities and all public services are sharing one network, saving millions, improving quality; NHC Choices, a Facebook for health advice got 20 million hits in the severe 2010 winter, saving the NHS £44 million; a whole education service has enabled parents to apply for schoolplaces online, reducing costs, and disagreements.

Public servants and politicians: are having to be

more responsive, more immediately because of the instantaneous interactivity of fast broadband – and this is empowering people (and different kinds of people) too busy, too private or too remote to go to face to face meetings. the report concludes that as bandwidth and speed increase such benefits will also increase.

UK Political Consensus 5. these benefits bring political consensus in the uK – the most active on-line population in Europe – in support of ‘superfast broadband’. Communities without it – particularly in remote areas – are vigorously campaigning for it to come faster. they don’t wish to be left behind.

the new government wants to complete the uK ‘superfast’ broadband network faster than planned as one of its ‘top priorities’. Previously two thirds of the uK population were to access broadband speeds at home of 50+ megabites per second (mbps) by 2014.

6.

7. the government is working with campaigning communities and companies like Bt to reach that ‘final third’ quicker. it sees in local campaigns an example of its ‘Big Society‘ where communities take more responsibility to solve problems – and it sees superfast broadband as strengthening those communities. it’s not hard to see why.

However, ten million Brits are not online. the report highlights efforts to ‘digitally include’ those experiencing 8.

multiple deprivation, lacking skills or confidence to explore new media or living in remote locations.

Digital divides and future public services 9. this digital divide raises urgent questions about how public services, which in England already provide 90% of services online and which government wants to become ‘digital by default’, are able to engage and serve citizens equally. in the end fast broadband isn’t about technology, pipes in the dirt, downloading Spotify or dating online. it’s about citizenship in the networked nation.

too much of the broadband debate has been on costs per metre and lengths of fibre when the real goal must be use by people. the report agrees with academics from Queensland university of technology that ‘a pre requisite for inclusion is access but the use and exploitation of networks also requires specific skills, literacies, information and knowledge’. the building of a ‘network’ is essential but the real prize is a networked society. that requires a national commitment to digital inclusion.

10.

Implications and recommendations for Australia: ensuring a bigger legacy 11. this moment of fast broadband is transformational for australia, with more far reaching potential for reducing the ‘tyranny of distance’ geographically and socially than the uK. the report suggests that if the investment is significant so is the return, for the nation and not just treasury, for people not just plumbing. the dangers of a divided society with differential access to modern public services and bandwidth needs to be avoided.

the great news for australia? the lesson and warning from Britain is that you cannot build a networked society without a national broadband network of sufficient bandwidth. australia’s building one.

12.

13. Further good news: the many digital inclusion initiatives underway throughout australia, and community activity on which to build, remains stronger here than in Britain. But some are facing acute challenges in indigenous communities and others.

CONNECTING COMMUNITIES ExECUTIvE SUMMARy

3

the challenge is one of focus and coordination – and enthusing the nation as a whole about the possibilities as well as the necessity of fast broadband.

Recommendations include: Establish a formal national survey into current

patterns of broadband use by individuals and diverse communities Appointment of a National Digital Champion

by government – a distinguished lay enthusiast drawn from outside politics and the industry to help galvanise enthusiasm A network of local and sector digital

champions Set a target for all to be digitally literate by

2020 and establish the duty to draw up a digital participation plan by all public service providers Legislate so that the regulator ACMA (the

Australian Communications and Media Authority) has a duty to promote digital inclusion All public agencies to review how new

broadband capacity can transform the design and delivery of services and the process of engagement National and state summits of third sector

organisations to share best-practice and agree on plans of action for digital inclusion A national annual digital participation week

with national awards Concession Passes for over 65s Establish a national helpline to support those

that are having difficulty accessing the internet Facilitate a volunteering program so that young

people and other volunteers can “buddy-up” with the elderly online Government to commit to open source

principles and sharing data

4

CONNECTING COMMUNITIES | THE IMPACT OF BROADBAND ON COMMUNITIES IN THE UK AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR AUSTRALIA

INSIDE THIS ISSUE

COVER STORY 13 Has LTE reached its tipping point?

By Petroc Wilton + 17 Why LTE won’t be enough + the reason femtocells are wrong

By Tony Chan FEATURE ARTICLES 21 The country that turned off the Internet

By Miro Sandev 24The rise and rise of the data centre

By Geoff Long 26 A far-out conversation with Vint Cerf

By Miro Sandev 26 Telstra’s recovery

By Telstra Wholesale (advertorial) OPINION COLUMNS 03 Is HD voice the canary in the coalmine?

By Grahame Lynch 09 Why America will never get an NBN

By William van Hefner 29 Is Telecom NZ up to its old tricks

By Bill Bennett 38 Why wireless & fixed are friends and not foes

By David Burstein

Cover by Peter Darby

T EL S T R A W HOLES A LE CONNEC T S PEOPLE A ND ORGA NIS AT IONS. We are commi t ted to del i ver ing s olu tions tha t mee t our cus tomer s’ cha lleng e s and ena ble them to succeed in Aus tra l ia ’s dyna mic telecommunica tions ma r k e t .

T EL S T R AW HOL ESA L E.COM

WILLIAM VAN HEFNER

Why America will never have an NBN .

P

resident of the United States, Barack Obama, made a surprise pitch to the U.S. House as well as to the American public two weeks ago when he announced plans to expand the reach of broadband service into the homes of 98% of all Americans.

Although the project he proposes would use wireless technology exclusively, it begs to question why the United States has not followed Australia and other countries when it comes to completely overhauling and upgrading its Internet infrastructure.

While NBN style projects may become a reality in countries such as Australia, the odds of a government takeover of the Internet in the United States lie somewhere between slim and none. For those of you unfamiliar with the situation, here are a few of the many reasons why an NBN is not coming to America anytime soon.

After spending billions of dollars in “broadband stimulus funds” last year, the net effect on the U.S. Economy has been close to zero. The myth of broadband magically igniting economic prosperity in rural areas simply doesn't reflect recent experience.

When it comes to passing laws, our elected officials are far less concerned with their constituent's “wish lists” than the demands of the country's top lobbying groups. Billions of dollars spent on lobbying by mega carriers buys much more influence than the votes of a few rural Americans.

A Pew Study conducted in 2009 showed that 47.2% of Ameri-

cans (who don't have it) simply don't want internet access. With life expectancy at an all-time high, a large percentage of Americans are simply too old to care about broadband. Who wants to pay for something they don't want or understand?

Americans don’t trust their government when it comes to spending money, and they trust government contractors even less. In a country famous for paying private contractors $4,000 for a hammer and $20,000 for a toilet seat, most would conclude that a paltry $10 billion would simply buy us a dysfunctional wireless bridge to nowhere.

Former U.S. President Ronald Reagan once remarked, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help.” This quote is not very far from the truth in today’s political climate. Americans may occasionally complain about their Internet service, but few would trust the government to do a better job running it.

The United States has more fiberoptic backbone capacity than it can currently utilize. Any capacity problems we have are with the “last mile”, which is a matter of simple consumer economics.

If it makes no sense for private industry to build fiber to the doorstep in a given area, why would it make any economic sense for government to do so?

Although current U.S. broadband speeds may seem slow compared to many other nations, the majority of Americans I know are

relatively content with the speeds they are getting. Most would not willingly pay more money for more bandwidth than they can use.

When it comes right down to it, the U.S. economy is in poor shape right now. The necessity of (faster) broadband just isn't as high a priority as paying for groceries, utilities, rent, etc. Any government or private business holding out their hand for more money is fighting a very uphill battle at the moment.

Services such as broadband, cable TV, wireless phones, etc. are still viewed as non-essentials by many here, especially those old enough to remember life before the Internet. While Americans may be more apt to trust the government to run essential dayto-day services (i.e. water and sewer, roadways, law enforcement, etc.) their attitude towards consumer services such as broadband is more along the lines of, “if it ain’t broke, don't fix it”, especially if “fixing” it costs them more money than they are already paying.

Most Americans would assume that greater government control over our telecom infrastructure would likely lead to less personal privacy and compromised security of our private data.

With an extension of the USA Patriot Act likely to be signed into law, it would be difficult to find flaws with such a presumption.

William van Hefner is a California based correspondent for CommsDay

A Point of Inflection – and New Era of Networking Zooming graphs are getting a lot of attention - often with an accompanying headline about “a point of inflection”. But connecting ever more things and achieving ever faster speeds are not so much signs of what is important, as what must become largely routine. Customers get faster speeds yet pay less with every passing year. They get more gigabytes as well and also pay less over time. More things are indeed connected, but at ever lower revenue per device. The end customer is delighted to be ever better connected, while typically paying no more.

Operators, on the other hand, have been observing these trends building like storm clouds over the past decade or so, and are now seeing relatively flat revenues. This has occurred as networks have been able to progressively deliver more through successive generations of technology with competition and regulation conspiring to pass the performance and price benefits to customers.

These dramatic changes can distract us from other important changes. The fact that social networks are now larger than any operator network is a compelling sign of times to come and the changing industry landscape. It’s now the people and the businesses that they interact with who are networked, rather than devices and places. And these new networks like LinkedIn are built quite independently of access network providers. Devices and places do have network connections, but the new “networks” exist in a different plane and have more in common with cloud services and the operator’s core networks than access networks.

The servers in the operators cloud or core can define the experience on the customers palm-top.

Or at least they define the operator’s part of it – if any. This is perhaps the real point of inflection: from being 100% of the users’ experience of communicating on traditional phones just a few years ago, to potentially disappearing and being replaced by others in just a few more years. This “point of inflection” graph shows the ‘button share” of the Telco – a new Key Performance Indicator that most operators wont want to let slip to zero.

So beware of focusing only on those zooming graphs, they emphasize one kind of inflection – the rapid change in scale - but can distract us from a more important change – the change to a different kind of networking. Operators and their suppliers will need to focus on a different set of assets and infrastructure to ensure that there is a new point of inflection as they stop the erosion of their share of the customer experience. Please join us at the Comms Day Summit, 29 March 2011 where Nokia Siemens Networks Managing Director, Kalevi Kostiainen, will discuss more.

www.unite.nokiasiemensnetworks.com Copyright 2011. Nokia Siemens Networks. All rights reserved

BILL BENNETT

Telecom NZ up to old tricks? .

T

elecom NZ issued a media statement saying it could not complete structural separation of the business into two entities by its original target date of June 2011.

The company said it will announce a new timetable when it signs a UFB contract with Crown Fibre Holdings.

The announcement seems reasonable enough. CFH was late naming the companies it was negotiating with. This leaves Telecom NZ less time to complete a complex and time consuming process.

Nobody ever said separation would be easy.

Yet immediately after the announcement a number of tweets circulated suggesting Telecom NZ was once again “gaming the system”. I contacted some of the tweeters – who each said there comments should not be taken at face value.

However, I had off the record conversations with industry insiders who expressed more general cynicism about Telecom NZ’s move.

So is the company up to its old tricks? The answer is: possibly, but probably not. That we even need

to ask this question suggests there is still much distrust of Telecom NZ in the wider NZ telecommunications sector. That’s not entirely without justification.

Telecom NZ isn’t the only telecommunications company with a long track record of gaming the system. It joined forces with rival Vodafone to lead governments and regulators a merry dance over mobile termination rates for the best part of a decade.

Every New Zealand CommsDay reader could find other examples of companies carefully pushing the rules to the limit to squeeze advantages – and profits. They all do it.

But nothing compares with the former state-owned monopoly’s ability and willingness to push the regulatory game to the limit. A quick Google search, restricted to just New Zealand pages, for the term “Telecom gaming commerce commission" turns up 13,100 results.

The practice is mainly associated with former Telecom NZ CEO Theresa Gattung.

Some argue Telecom NZ’s trickery is now history, that it belongs to an earlier era, a different man-

agement team and so on. It’s certainly true the company engages in less regulatory game-playing than in the past. And that may be, in part, down to management style.

However, we shouldn’t forget the regulations surrounding Telecom NZ have been repeatedly tightened over the past decade.

And then there are the 2006 amendments to the Telecommunications Act while, among other matters, set out operational separation and attempted to reduce the scope for gaming.

In Telecom NZ’s defence it should be said managers are only doing what they are paid to do: maximise the company’s performance by whatever legal means they have to hand. Gaming the system is as much part of capitalism as making a profit and out-smarting competitors.

But things have changed. Today, almost every word coming from Telecom NZ is treated with suspicion by professional and amateur Telecom NZ-watchers who scrutinised for hidden meanings. If Telecom NZ is really gaming the system, we’ll know for sure soon enough.

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Has LTE reached its tipping point?

Recent announcements show that LTE has reached prime time. Petroc Wilton examines whether LTE is a quantum shift or merely an incremental upgrade

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he mobile data boom is well and truly here, with profound social and economic effects across the globe.

In developing economies like India, Indonesia and the Pacific Islands, mobile broadband is connecting communities long hamstrung by limited or non-existent fixed infrastructure; in more developed telecoms markets such as Australia it’s the standout item on major carriers’ results briefings, with strong growth far outstripping that in fixed-line data and voice portfolios. Cisco’s latest Visual Networking Index forecast a 26-fold explosion in global mobile data traffic between 2010 and 2015, which would put the monthly activity at 6.3 exabytes by 2015; these are staggering numbers, representing a projected 92% CAGR. In this context it’s not hard to understand the excitement around Long Term Evolution, the latest standard in mobile telecoms networks. Frequently marketed as a 4G technology, LTE offers a step up in peak speeds and spectral efficiency from 3G. Both factors are important for carriers, challenged to support increasingly bandwidth-hungry applications across a proliferation of mobile devices while keeping control of their costs per bit. But while the first commercial LTE networks are already operational, the pressing question now is: how long before the technology really hits the mainstream?

There’s no doubt that LTE has

already made a significant impact on the telco industry. The global market for deploying LTE networks has been estimated to be around US$10 billion by 2014, while the January 2011 update to the Global mobile Suppliers Association’s ‘Evolution to LTE’ report shows 180 operators in 70 countries currently investing in the technology; 128 firm operator commitments to deploy commercial systems in 52 countries; and 52 ‘pre-commitment’ trials in a further 18 countries. 17 operators have deployed commercial networks; 64 such networks are forecast to be in operation by the end of next year. And based on operator commitments within six and twelve months of first commercial deployments, the GSA has dubbed LTE “the fastest developing mobile communications system technology ever,” outstripping HSDPA, HSUPA and HSPA+.

Ericsson, for one, is keen to stress that the LTE difference goes beyond a speed advantage. (The vendor firmly established its LTE credentials when, alongside Huawei, it was selected in early 2009 by Swedish operator TeliaSonera to build the first commercial networks using the standard.)

“LTE is highly spectrally efficient … it is very flexible and runs on a wide variety of spectral bands… [and] it can be deployed on a carrier band as small as 1.7MHz, up to blocks of 5MHz, 10MHz or 20MHz,” said Ericsson ANZ strategic marketing manager Warren Chaisatien. “LTE will bring a lot

of Opex savings, primarily through intelligence in the network… the network can self-configure, manage and optimise, hence reducing the need for the large number of engineers required to run the 2G/3G networks we have today. Also, LTE is all-IP and it has a very flat architecture – only two tiers, the access and the core. That opens up a whole world of opportunities and new services from a carrier perspective.”

It’s interesting to note that some of the first carriers to deploy the technology commercially have emphasised quite different aspects of it. TeliaSonera, according to Chaisatien, has been pushing the speed advantage of LTE, trumpeting peak speeds between 40 and 50Mbps in an initial release phase using 10MHz of spectrum; with another 10MHz added in a second phase, that peak data rate went up to 80-100Mbps. Coming from another direction is Verizon, which made headlines at the end of last year with a large-scale initial rollout covering about a third of the total US population. More conservative when it comes to brandishing top-end data rates, the carrier offers actual enduser speeds of 5-12Mbps (2-5Mbps upstream) on a fully loaded network, on plans priced more cheaply than comparable 3G contracts.

“Verizon is positioning [itself] quite differently – looking to leverage the power of IP/IMS to differentiate itself,” commented Chaisatien. A Vodafone rollout in Germany, meanwhile, has initially

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emphasised the use of LTE to fill coverage gaps, with the carrier’s LTE license agreement stipulating the technology must be deployed to rural and regional underserved areas first – though the whole country is expected to be covered by the end of this year.

Recent US reports that the FCC has mandated LTE for the proposed wireless public safety network can only add to the standard’s credibility. And there’s an upgrade path in the wings, too; LTE’s next iteration, LTE Advanced, is expected in some quarters to deliver peak download speeds of 3Gbps and half that for uplink, using technologies like carrier aggregation and multiantenna transmission.

Deloitte, however, has issued a note of caution on LTE’s shortterm prospects. The professional services firm expects increasingly ubiquitous free Wi-Fi networks to shoulder a share of the bandwidth burden in many developed economies – and also anticipates that established 3G operators will be slow to transition. “In 2011 the deployment of LTE wireless networks will fall short of industry expectations due to the continuing viability of the latest 3G wireless technology,” said the professional services firm in its ‘Technology, Media and Telecommunications Predictions 2011’. “Many commentators expected widespread rollouts to have happened by now; however, Deloitte expects that fewer than 30 LTE carriers in six countries will offer commercial service by the end of 2011. While a few of the world’s largest carriers will likely deploy LTE, most networks will stick with transition technologies for the next year… providers that do have a need for LTE need it a lot, and they need it now: the big question is how large that group really is.”

Echoing Deloitte’s comments, a recent In-Stat report found that while LTE was driving new growth in the macro base station market,

WCDMA/HSPA/HSPA+ base stations were still forecast to account for the largest revenue segment through 2013 – and that mobile operators were increasingly expecting base stations to offer multi-radio support, allowing the use of both LTE and older standards.

Certainly, operators with significant 3G assets will want to wring as much value out of them as possible and will not be keen on ripand-replace strategies.

But as the In-Stat results hint, LTE has another key advantage – today’s hardware makes it eminently possible to deploy LTE alongside, and integrated with, existing 3G networks. And that can make for surprisingly fast deployment timeframes.

Nowhere has this been more clearly illustrated than in Australia over the last few weeks. 3G mobile broadband enjoys a particularly high penetration in the country,

and dominant carrier Telstra has headlined two years running at Mobile World Congress with world-first 3G network upgrades, announcing new maximum speeds of 21Mbps in 2009 and then 42Mbps in 2010 using HSPA+ dual carrier tech. But the company triggered a media storm at MWC 2011 with news, not of its latest HSPA+ milestone, but of an LTE blitz; the firm aims to have deployed LTE in the CBDs of all of the nation’s capitals by year’s end, using 1800Mhz spectrum and dual-mode devices to run simultaneously with its 3G network in the 850MHz band.

Though Telstra had been trialling LTE for several months prior to the announcement, the sheer aggressive speed of its planned deployment – barely over nine months – took the local market by storm.

Australian competitors SingTel Optus and VHA had not committed to their own rollout timeframes at the time of going to press, but both were quick to respond with discussions of their own trials and spectrum assets, and it seems a safe bet that both will want to lock down deployment strategies soon to avoid losing ground to Telstra.

When an operator like Telstra – which has ploughed so much effort and funding into establishing impeccable 3G credentials and an associated asset base – chooses to turn around and commit to an LTE footprint in under a year, it sends a very definite signal.

LTE may be an iterative improvement on 3G rather than a quantum shift, and it will naturally gain traction at varying rates in different geographies. But with frontrunners like TeliaSonera paving the way, and especially with 3G stalwarts like Verizon and now Telstra committing to extensive deployments on lightning-quick timeframes, LTE is a technology that has demonstrably passed the tipping point.

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Why LTE simply isn’t enough LTE alone won’t be enough to prepare the mobile sector for an expected deluge in data demand over the coming years says Telstra CTO Hugh Bradlow. Tony Chan reports

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he efficiency gains of LTE and even LTE-Advanced won’t be enough on its own to help the industry meet the estimated doubling and tripling of mobile data traffic on an annual basis, says Hugh Bradlow, CTO of Telstra Corporation.

Presenting at the “Network Breaking Point” symposium at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona recently, Bradlow cited new spectrum and more sophisticated management of traffic as critical factors, in parallel to the spectrum efficiency gains of LTE to help operators meet the expected traffic deluge.

Despite the many advances introduced with GSM, EDGE, WCDMA, HSPA and now LTE, the best that technology can offer is between 1.5 bits to 2 bits per hertz of spectrum, which falls far short of existing demand projections, according to Bradlow.

“There are those that believe that technology will save us. We have seen significant improvements in spectrum efficiency over the years. And certainly, LTE does yield technology advances,” he said. “It does increase spectral efficiency relative to HSPA+, but not dramatically, it is not in the order of magnitude of improvement, it is about a 30%-60% improvement. So for those who believe that LTE is the saviour in terms of that metric of traffic demand, they are probably deluding themselves. It’s just not going to yield that level of efficiency.”

So how can operators meet the

projected increase in data traffic?

For Bradlow, the key advantage of LTE in helping operators keep up with the projected traffic growth is the new spectrum it opens up for operators.

“LTE does yield technology advances, but the most important factor is that it opens up new spectrum bands,” he said, pointing to the emergence of the 700MHz digital dividend band, the refarming of 1800MHz for LTE – which Telstra announced it plans to do for its LTE network scheduled for launch before end-2011, as well as

new slots in the 2500MHz and TDD bands in the 2300MHz as potential new spectrum for the mobile industry.

The only problem with new spectrum is the fact each individual regions have their own plans with little coordination globally, he added.

“The bad side is that we are seeing an increasing fragmentation of spectrum bands. So if you look at the 700MHz band digital dividend, there are two America band plans, there’s an European band plan, and we are actually working

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a fourth plan, the Asia Pacific band plan, and the number of band plans is much more than what I’ve indicated – the Japanese have just launched the 1500MHz band,” he said. “That’s going to mean coming up with handsets that will be both roaming capable and work efficiently in the home country will be a challenge for the vendors.”

Another way operators can further improve efficiencies on their network is through traffic management, he asserted.

By introducing policy controls and quality of service features in mobile networks, mobile operators will have some control over traffic management, allowing them to keep their network running for high priority traffic even during times of congestion.

“People are going to have to start realising that they are going to have to pay to achieve the service that they want,” he said. “So if you want best-effort traffic, you are going to suffer delays in the face of QoS as you go forward.”

One case in point is the use of Telstra’s network for public safety agencies, he pointed out. While there is always the option of the agencies building their own network – such as trunk radio infrastructure in the past – Bradlow notes that the use of the public cellular network is becoming increasingly popular.

“The complete sharing of the network is sort of becoming the defacto use, because the actual people in the field are using their mobile phones as often as they are using their trunk radio systems.

There is a fair amount of reality in recognising, that if you are going to do that, you’ve got to introduce quality of service, because you have to be able to guarantee that the public safety agencies a level of service in an emergency situation and at the same time, not shut off the rest of the network,” he said.

“The debate we are having with our public safety agencies is we are

saying if you want us to guarantee an SLA in that environment, then you invest extra capex into our network and we will use that capacity when you don’t require it, but that way, when you do require it, we can guarantee the capacity and we can also keep our normal level of service going on.”

Beyond pure data traffic, Bradlow also pointed out that mobile networks are also being swamped

from another type of traffic – signalling.

“There is more than one constraint on the network – and the second dimension is about signalling traffic,” he said, highlighting the potential impact of billions of M2M devices on mobile networks.

“We see the network being stretch in more than one direction, so to manage demand, we are going to have to meet both directions.”

IN THE WORDS OF HUGH BRADLOW

Why femtocells are an admission of defeat "User-deployed femto cells are an admission of defeat because what they say is ‘I have a poorly managed and poorly defined network and I’m going to get the user to pay to fill in the capacity and coverage that I haven’t been able to deliver to you.’

From our perspective, in terms of macro coverage, we have indoor coverage which is extremely good, so we see very little need to fill in gaps.

And in terms of capacity, it turns out that roughly 80% of the network traffic is generated by laptops and tablets anyhow and those devices, everyone offloads to Wi-Fi anyhow when they go home or into their office. So the amount of offload you get from femto cells is actually minimal. We’ve actually done a study on that and we believe it is an insignificant amount of offload you achieve relative to what you are getting from Wi-Fi anyhow.

There is another style of femto cell and that is something that we are very interested in, and that’s operator deployed femto cells. These are managed as part of your network deployment and band plan and have the potential to yield significant amount of network cost reduction, particularly when deployed as part of a planned network roll out with the macro, micro and femto layers.

That is very important – if you have user deployed femtos, there is an excellent chance that you’ll get holes in your macro layer if you deployed in the same frequency that your macro layer is deployed at. If you then deployed in the same frequency, then you get significant waste of bandwidth from that femto cell usage.

Femto cells, I just fail to see the value. They generate a tremendous amount of attention in Barcelona every year, but it’s going to take a lot more than that to get us excited about it."

row’s consumer will expect For operators, this means vast numbers o rrow’s consumer will expect connectivity in The potential applications are limitless. ctivity in virtually every device they new business opportunities. But as more lly every use. By 2020 almost For operators,and this means numbers n By 2020 device almostthey everything – from connections higher vast traffic lead of to as to – toothbrushes – toothbrushes will become – increased revenue streams, new challenges thing from cameras to business opportunities.

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More new challenges will arise in the consumers want, management and traffic profiling. of these La Fira. Join what the ideasthey generation at ericsson.com for all the major highlights of MWCAll 2011 ctivity will lead to February. improved trends lie atfunctionality, the heart of our business.

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Turning off the network The recent political impasse in Egypt demonstrated the tremendous power of the state to disrupt telecommunications. Miro Sandev reports

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elcos are discovering the hard way that whilst politically unstable markets may offer untold opportunities, having a local presence can often mean being lassoed into precarious geo-political situations that test the mettle of even the most experienced reputation managers.

As the widespread, unilateral connectivity blackouts in Egypt testify, telecom firmly remains a very sensitive sector to be operating in. While positive sentiments abound for the contribution network providers have made to the explosion of transparency and connectedness in these areas, they continue to face tough reputational challenges when operating in such environments.

Last year, 28-year-old Egyptian Khalid Saeed was sitting unsuspectingly in an internet café in the Mediterranean port city of Alexandria. Suddenly, two police officers stormed the establishment, violently dragged him out of the café and into the doorway of a nearby building. Photographs of Saeed’s shattered face began to surface on social networking sites after his death on June 6, sparking widespread outrage and creating a funnel for the voluminous outpouring of citizen discontent. Saeed became somewhat of a martyr, his brutal death representing what critics labelled the bitter sideeffects of Hosni Mubarak’s rule.

His name was repeatedly invoked on websites calling for widespread protests to coincide with Egypt’s national Police Day; “We are all

Khalid Saeed” one of them read.

The powerful citizen mobilisation through social media that Egypt witnessed on sites like these was clearly read as a potent threat by the government. For a country that allegedly treats its communications policy and its covert surveillance policy as one and the same, it is understandable why that degree of openness would be worrisome.

One senior Australian telecom executive said that a submarine cable contractor had told him at the Pacific Telecommunications Council that the government was refusing to allow new submarine cables passing through their territory (virtually every cable heading West to Europe) to be brought into service until they have been bugged.

As protest efforts began to reach a critical mass, the Mubarak regime stepped up from simply tapping communications infrastructure to coercing providers into wholesale shut downs and later even into disseminating the government’s anti-democratic propa-

ganda.

On January 27, Egypt’s four main ISPs – Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt (which owns 45% of Vodafone Egypt) and Etisalat Misr – simultaneously cut off international access to their customers in an unprecedented move that left no valid paths by which the rest of the world could continue to exchange Internet traffic with the providers. The action purportedly came at the behest of Egyptian authorities, using emergency powers.

The following day Vodafone put out a release saying that “All mobile operators in Egypt have been instructed to suspend services in selected areas. Under Egyptian legislation the authorities have the right to issue such an order and we are obliged to comply with it.

The Egyptian authorities will be clarifying the situation in due course.”

“It has been clear to us that there were no legal or practical options open to Vodafone, or any of the mobile operators in Egypt, but to comply with the demands

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of the authorities,” the company later said on its website. “We would like to make it clear that the authorities in Egypt have the technical capability to close our network, and if they had done so it would have taken much longer to restore services to our customers.

Moreover, our other priority is the safety of our employees and any actions we take in Egypt will be judged in light of their continuing wellbeing.”

By the start of the following week, the last remaining provider Noor Group was also offline and mobile phone networks had suffered severe disruption. Ironically, the communications clamp-down only seemed to strengthen the protestors’ steely resolve as online activists Telecomix began attempting to circumvent the internet block by establishing external dialup lines into Egypt.

Meanwhile, the Anonymous activist group started circulating information on communication options, including ham radio and one French ISP chipped in by offering free internet connections into the country.

The Internet blockade was seen as so audacious that Google, Facebook and Twitter all broke with the typical response of corporate silence to strongly condemn the action. “Although the turmoil in Egypt is a matter for the Egyptian people and their government to resolve, limiting internet access for millions of people is a matter of concern for the global community,” said Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes.

Google and Twitter went even further as they teamed up to create the “Speak to Tweet” service allowing citizens to circumvent the blackout and stay up to date on Twitter coverage. Google said the service, which turns voice messages into “tweets”, was aimed at “helping people in Egypt stay connected at this very difficult time.”

The search giant also launched a “crisis response” page featuring

links to the service, as well as Citizen-Tube, emergency telephone numbers and maps of where protests had taken place within Egypt.

Internet services were eventually restored on 2 February.

Some mobile operators appeared more reluctant to openly defy the Egyptian government as it emerged authorities had used emergency powers to instruct local network operators - including Vodafone, Etisalat and France Telecom SA’s Mobinil service – to disseminate pro-Mubarak SMS texts.

AAP reported that a text message received by one of its reporters in Egypt appealed to the country's “honest and loyal men to confront the traitors and criminals and protect our people and honor.” Another urged Egyptians

Vodafone Egypt “not only betrayed those who buy and use its phones but reveals a shocking disregard for freedom of speech by one of the world's leading telecommunications companies.” to attend a pro-Mubarak rally in Cairo. The first was reportedly marked as coming from “Vodafone.”

Vodafone Egypt said the authorities had used carriers to push propaganda since the protests began on 25 January. “These messages are not scripted by any of the mobile network operators and we do not have the ability to respond to the authorities on their content,” Vodafone Egypt said in a statement. “Vodafone Group has protested to the authorities that the current situation regarding these messages is unacceptable.”

Bloomberg reported that it had obtained the following message sent on Vodafone’s network on Feb 1: “The Armed Forces urge Egypt’s loyal men to confront the traitors and the criminals and to

protect our families, our honour and our precious Egypt.”

“Messages with army endorsement concerning national security and general safety were the only messages processed by Mobinil,” France Telecom reportedly said in a statement. “France Telecom strongly disapproves of any message of a political nature that runs against the neutrality principle which defines our role as a network operator.”

Several powerful governments have condemned the Mubarak regime’s use of emergency powers.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague issued a statement calling the “abuse” of Internet and mobile-phone networks “unacceptable and disturbing.” US State Department officials expressed their concern, as did President Barack Obama, who said in an interview there needed to be mechanisms that “allow people to express legitimate grievances.”

Mubarak, however, was not the only one to draw criticism following the incidents, as human rights organisation Amnesty International took aim at Vodafone for what it said was an abandonment of its commitment to the principles of freedom of speech.

“Vodafone’s willingness to close down its network is simply beyond belief,” Amnesty general secretary Salil Shetty told the German business paper Handelsblatt.

She said the move by Vodafone Egypt “not only betrayed those who buy and use its phones but reveals a shocking disregard for freedom of speech by one of the world's leading telecommunications companies.”

As more pro-democracy protests are expected to erupt in neighbouring Syria and also Yemen, operators working in markets such as these would benefit from closely studying the developments in Egypt. The episode lies as testament to the perils of operating in politically charged environments.

Data centre rising The Australian data centre market sees a mass of new capacity coming online to meet pent up demand. Geoff Long takes a look

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here was a time not so long ago when the only people setting foot in data centres were engineers, technicians and other assorted geeks. Today, you're likely to find politicians and dignitaries sipping champagne and even sake at their well-celebrated “openings”.

When wholesale provider Vocus opened its data centre in Sydney in December, shadow communications minister Malcolm Turnbull did the official opening honours, while a few weeks earlier across in Perth, Fujitsu celebrated the opening of its multi-million dollar 8000 sq meter data centre with a sake ceremony for gathered dignitaries from Japan and Australia.

And when HP announced its A$100 million next generation data centre facility in Western Sydney earlier this month, communications minister Stephen Conroy was centre stage.

It seems the data centre suddenly has pulling power.

And there's plenty more to come. Macquarie Telecom is on track for the opening of its second data centre, the Intellicentre 2, in Sydney later this year, while we're also this year likely to see the initial facility from the much talked about NextDC, the data centre startup headed by Pipe Networks co-founder Bevan Slattery.

NextDC is flush with funds from its recent ASX-listing and has already secured sites for its data centres in Melbourne and Brisbane.

Add in plans from the likes of Indian outsourcer Wipro and a

$500 million commitment for a series of data centres in all major capitals from local conglomerate Leighton Contractors, and the scene is set for a mass of capacity to come online soon. From famine to feast in just a few short years.

Some would say the coming capacity boost is long overdue.

The GFC put large projects like data centres on hold due to a lack of available funds, and many in the industry suggest we're only now starting to catch up with demand. Others warn of a coming glut of data centre space if all of the various mooted projects go ahead. But the problem with trying to assess supply and demand is that not all data centres are equal.

Brian Evans, an independent consultant who has advised companies on both sides of the supply and demand curve, says there is a real shortage of high-density data capacity out there, with the drive for increased virtualisation and consolidation as well as video content exasperating the situation.

“Demand for high-density is going up but the supply hasn't caught up because there's a much longer cycle there and the GFC curtailed many company's ability to get the necessary investment,” he said.

David Scott, Emerson Network Power Australia MD, is also at the coal face of data centre construction and doesn't subscribe to the coming glut theory. He said Emerson is currently working on a dozen or so data centre projects and notes that most of the large data centres are in the process of

or planning to expand.

“There's a mixture of projects out there but the trend is definitely towards high-density racks, and with that comes a need for more cooling. We strongly believe in the trend towards more energyefficient data centres because of the saving in operating expenses,” Scott said.

Scott sees the demand not just here in Australia but throughout Asia. “You'd have to say that across the board there is a lot of pent up demand, with a lot of companies having put their plans on ice because of the financial situation. But the demand out there means there is really no choice [but to expand],” he suggests.

Emerson publishes its bi-annual Market Pulse survey for data centre markets, with the most recent report showing a clear increase in the overall data centre project pipeline for the first time since 2008 across the Asia Pacific region.

The report notes that the design and construction segment of the survey is a bellwether for any upturn, and it points to a rise in projects forecast by over 30 percent, and an eight percent growth of projects scheduled for deployment within six months.

Scott also points to another trend the company has seen across its operations globally – telcos interested in containerised data centres (see also sidebar on “Podsized start-ups”). “It would be new to Australia but it's happening in

other parts of the world, particularly in Europe,” Scott said. “The telco community is definitely interested because of their size and the fact that they can be engineered to their exact requirements.”

Scott said the company was already in talks with a major telco here on containerised data centres and is likely to bring its products to Australia for the first time this year as a result of the interest.

A Coming Bubble?

At the other end of the scale, Macquarie Telecom is building a second Sydney data centre this year with an investment of more than $60 million.

The company says high demand for its managed services offerings are behind the need for a new centre. In fact, Macquarie recently announced higher than expected earnings which were due in part to a better performance from its hosting business, with a strong outlook for its cloud service offerings.

With such a strong showing, you'd expect Aidan Tudehope, the company's MD for the hosting business, to be bullish on the prospects for the data centre market overall.

However, Tudehope warns that

a lot of the data centres being built are nothing more than “conditioned real-estate” and suggests that the market for basic colocation services could be a bubble in the making.

“There is a real risk that you could end up having a glut of new facilities coming online.

Things like cloud computing don't reside in your average data centre and in many cases you've got these 'real estate' players just beating the drum. You have to realise that colocation is not an

Tudehope warns that a lot of the data centres being built are nothing more than “conditioned real-estate” end-to-end solution, it's just reconditioned real-estate,” he said, noting that like the real-estate market there is a real risk that it could go from boom to bust.

And for evidence of what can happen if data centres expand too quickly, you just have to look at the UK market, where significant

discounting on colocation hosting deals is driving prices down with a glut of capacity available.

In an interview with Computing magazine in the UK, Tim Anker, the founder of Colocation Exchange, which brokers deals between corporate customers and data centres around Europe, said that while demand was still strong, the supposed supply shortage is often a beat up.

“Back in 2007, London was pretty much sold out and pricing went through the roof.” “ Now analysts are being really bullish about the cloud and saying that existing colocation facilities will be unable to cope with demand, but if you know the industry, you know that is a bit of a scare story,” Anker said in the interview.

And the thing that brought the over-supply on was major data centre operators building new capacity and new entrants into the market in a period of around two years – something eerily similar to the situation in Australia right now.

Whether that leads to a similar over-supply, only time will tell.

DATA CENTRE IN A POD Far away from the glitzy data centre launches complete with champagne and the obligatory politicians on the East coast, a start-up has risen in the West that offers its own take on providing a data centre environment for cloud computing. Red Cloud data centres, launched in late 2010, is a Western Australian company that will use its own “pods” – essentially a data centre in a shipping container – to provide cloud services to SMEs and the many mining companies operating in the state.

Red Cloud MD Carl Woodbridge said that Western Australia, like the rest of the country, had a shortage of good data centre space, despite the recent opening of Fujitsu's multi-million dollar, 8000 sq metre Tier 3 data centre in Perth three months ago. The Fujitsu data centre will host major customers like anchor tenant Bankwest, but that still leaves a gaping hole in the market for SMEs, according to Woodbridge.

“A lot of the existing data centres here are ageing and not suitable for cloud computing, so we saw an opportunity to provide services by moving to so-called pod data centres, which can be up and running more rapidly and can be set up in different sizes to cater for a range of uses,” Woodbridge explained.

The start-up is at the end phase of a series of technical trials that have been looking at modular data centres from a range of providers as well as doing testing on software for billing and so on.

While GreenEdge is not the first company to put a data centre in a shipping container – both Google and Sun Microsystems were the frontrunners, but others have since followed – it wants to differentiate itself by focussing on demand for high-density capacity.

Lex Brasell, who came up with the product design and who is now the company’s technical director, said the containerised data centre can be set up and connected in around half an hour after being delivered on site, while different configurations can be achieved by combining containers.

A far-out chat with Vint Cerf One of the founding fathers of the Internet recently took time to discuss the next step in the reach of networks: space. Miro Sandev reports

O

ne of the creators of the Internet, Vinton Cerf, is now working as Google’s Internet Evangelist. On a recent visit to Sydney, where he addressed the Internet Society of Australia, Cerf took some time out to speak to CommsDay about the future of the humble experiment, which has now evolved into the most powerful transformative technology the world has ever witnessed.

Cerf is a member of the InterPlaNet (IPN) Special Interest Group, tasked with the oversight of the interplanetary internet project which aims to one day create a “stable interplanetary backbone” using a set of high-capacity network traffic hubs with wireless links. For the moment though, Cerf said the focus is on properly testing the interplanetary protocols already developed, in space.

“We have at least 2, maybe a 3rd box now, on board the International Space Station with the interplanetary protocols on board,” he said. “We would like to make those accessible to the [space station] crew. We are planning to reupload the interplanetary protocols to the EPOXI Deep Impact Spacecraft – the one that just rendezvoused with the Hartley 2.”

The Hartley 2 Comet was the target of a flyby by the Deep Impact spacecraft, as part of

the EPOXI mission, on November 4, 2010, which was able to approach within 700 km of Hartley as part of its extended mission.

“So it has completed that rendezvous. The next thing is to upload the most recent versions of the protocols to that spacecraft and then start to carry out what I would call an ‘interplanetary distance testing’ of the protocols, which we successfully undertook in 2009. We also have a very experimental implementation of the protocols running on Android – there is some work to be done to make that more solid – as it is sort of an experiment,” he added.

Cerf played a central role in the development of the first commercial email system connected to the net (MCI Mail) and the group he is a member of – the IPNSIG believes that it can take the type of non-interactive security technologies developed for email and adapt

them for use in the IPN. “The security mechanisms implemented in the IPN cannot assume that they can interact with their peers in an on-line, interactive fashion. Rather, they have to operate in the IPNs “pony-express” model of operation. This is quite analogous to the way in which email security operates,” the SIG says on its website.

Cerf is also hopeful the interplanetary protocols being developed now will contribute to the wider space exploration effort. “I have this fantasy of being able to sit with my mobile and send a message which gets relayed by way of the [International] Space Station, to the EPOXI spacecraft, to Mars and back to Earth,” Cerf mused.

“By the end of 2011 we might get close to being able to do something that looks like that. There are some launches of spacecrafts

scheduled in the latter part of 2011 to Mars – in particular the Mars Science Laboratory – that will probably have some of the protocols on board.”

Meanwhile, Cerf was visibly excited when speaking about the possibilities for coordination among the various spacecraft involved in planned return missions, which he said would require local networking.

“There are some spacecraft that are planned for later in the decade that are intended to be part of a sample return mission,” he said.

“This is incredibly ambitious because you send a [Mars] rover or two; it samples things and sticks them in a container and then another mission lands and finds the container and puts it up into orbit,” he added. “ And then another mission comes and picks it up from orbit and brings it back to Earth; and if they all work we will end up with samples that came from Mars”.

“Part of the thesis behind this whole inter-planetary thing has

been that not only do we need to do interplanetary communications but we need to have capability in coordinating locally without having to go all the way back to Earth

We need to have capability in coordinating locally without having to go all the way back to Earth every time.” every time.”

If all of this seems like farfetched techno- utopianism one is relieved to know that Cerf and the SIG team are well aware of the formidable challenges associated with the IPN project.

One of the major difficulties for even the most preliminary grasp at an interplanetary internet is the frequent interruption to connections between traffic hubs that occurs as a result of planetary rotation or orbital motion taking a transmitting entity out of line-ofsight to the receiving entity.

“The challenge in the earlier planetary protocols is variable la-

tency because of the distances; they’re depending on where the plants are in their orbits and the disruption caused by planetary motion, whether it’s an orbital satellite or rotation of the planet,” Cerf explained.

“So those delay and disruption properties are what has driven the design of the inter-planetary network,” he continued. “What I would love to do, and what we haven’t yet been able to do, is to get an optical test going, where we could be transmitting at a 100Mbs instead of 100Kbs. At least one mission got scrubbed, a couple of years ago, [that] would have had laser on board so I’m still pushing for getting a laser on board something, so we can do some serious bandwidth testing.”

NASA scientists are studying designs for a “Mars network” of multiple orbiting relay satellites which would be launched over a period of years, later to be replenished by fresh launches as older satellites’ orbits decay. So Cerf may get his laser after all.

29/30 March 2011, Four Seasons Hotel, Sydney

CommsDay Summit 2011 PLATINUM SPONSOR Australia’s premier telecommunications conference returns for 2011 with its best line-up yet of influential Australian and international speakers.

This year’s CommsDay Summit also features two specialist streams targeting NBN & backhaul discussions as well as an in-depth look at wireless and mobile markets. With keynotes from Australia’s top carrier CEOs and regulators, as well as the CEO of the carrier operating Singapore’s NBN, CommsDay Summit 2011 is shaping up as a don’t miss event.

SPEAKERS INCLUDE

GOLD SPONSORS

Telstra chief executive officer David Thodey

NBN Co chief executive officer Mike Quigley

Australian Communications & Media Authority chair Chris Chapman

Shadow communications minister Malcolm Turnbull

Optus managing director, wholesale & satellite Vicki Brady

AAPT chief executive officer Paul Broad

Nucleus Connect (Singapore NBN) chief executive officer David Storrie

Macquarie Telecom chief executive officer David Tudehope

Vividwireless CEO Martin Mercer

Internode MD Simon Hackett

NTT Australia MD Yoshimasa Hashimoto

Comms Alliance CEO John Stanton

AMTA CEO Chris Althaus

Allegro Telecom managing director David Waldie

Orcon NZ CEO Scott Bartlett

Vocus CEO James Spenceley

Telsyte analyst Foad Fadaghi

Nearly 40 top Australian & international speakers EARLY BIRD REGISTRATIONS CommsDay has grandfathered last year’s pricing, with two days registration inclusive of lunches and drinks for just A$997+GST. Two days registration + an official dinner pass cost A$1155+GST. Register online at http://tinyurl.com/yasfb64 COMMUNICATIONS DAY 2 August 2010 Page 11

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The line-up TUESDAY MARCH 29 2011 9am Telstra chief executive officer David Thodey 9.25am NBN Co chief executive officer Mike Quigley 9.50am Macquarie Telecom CEO David Tudehope 10.15am Nucleus Connect (Singapore NBN) CEO David Storrie INTERNATIONAL SPEAKER 10.40am Morning tea sponsored by Hatteras Networks 11am Communications Alliance CEO John Stanton 11.25 Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman Simon Cohen 11.45 Vocus Communications CEO James Spenceley 12.10pm Optus managing director, wholesale & satellite, Vicki Brady 12.35 Nokia Siemens Networks ANZ CEO Kalevi Kostiainen 1pm Lunch sponsored by Nokia Siemens Networks

AFTERNOON STREAMED SESSIONS 2-5pm WIRELESS AGE: FROM 3G TO LTE 2pm Vividwireless CEO Martin Mercer 2.25 Qualcomm president SEA/South Pacific John Stefanac INTERNATIONAL SPEAKER 2.45 AMTA CEO Chris Althaus 3.05 Allegro CEO David Waldie 3.25 Afternoon tea 3.40 Tellabs’ Michael O’Malley INTERNATIONAL SPEAKER 4.00 Polyfone Telecom CEO Paul Wallace 4.20 Panel session: Qualcomm’s John Stefanac, BigAir’s Jason Ashton, Ovum analyst Nicole McCormick & Huawei’s devices marketing manager Mark Treadwell GIGABIT FUTURES: BACKHAUL, STORAGE & FIBRE ACCESS 2pm Internode managing director Simon Hackett 2.25pm Ciena chief technology officer Steve Alexander INTERNATIONAL SPEAKER 2.50 NEXTDC CEO Bevan Slattery 3.10 Adtran international business development VP Mike Martin INTERNATIONAL SPEAKER 3.30 Afternoon tea 3.45 Huawei chief technology officer Peter Rossi 4.05 Vertel CEO Andrew Findlay 4.25 PANEL SESSION: Ciena CTO Steve Alexander, Huawei Australia CTO Peter Rossi, Ovum analyst David Kennedy, Optus’ Maha Krishnapillai and Hatteras Networks Asia Pacific MD Graeme Bellis 5.00 DRINKS 7.00 COMMSDAY SUMMIT DINNER SPONSORED BY VOCUS COMMUNICATIONS

WEDNESDAY MARCH 30 2011 9.00 AAPT chief executive officer Paul Broad 9.25 Shadow communications minister Malcolm Turnbull 9.50 Publicani director Dr Tim Williams INTERNATIONAL SPEAKER 10.15 Telstra Wholesale GMD TBA 10.40 MORNING TEA sponsored by Hatteras Networks 11.00am Australian Communications and Media Authority chair Chris Chapman GOLD SPONSORS 11.30am Pipe Networks chief executive officer Jason Sinclair INTERNATIONAL SPEAKER 11.50am Ericsson Silicon Valley director, IP technology Matthew Smith 12.10pm Tata Consultancy Services deputy head, telecom business unit N Sivasamben INTERNATIONAL SPEAKER 12.35pm Juniper Networks speaker TBA 1.00pm LUNCH sponsored by Juniper Networks 2pm NTT Australia managing director Yohsimasa Hashimoto 2.20pm Pitney Bowes Business Insight strategic industry manager—telecommunications—APAC Johann Ginger 2.40pm Internet NZ policy director Jordan Carter INTERNATIONAL SPEAKER 3.00pm Orcon (NZ) CEO Scott Bartlett INTERNATIONAL SPEAKER 3.20pm Amdocs speaker TBC 3.40pm AFTERNOON TEA 3.55pm Tellabs’ Ashley Halford INTERNATIONAL SPEAKER CLOSING KEYNOTES 4.15pm Telsyte research director Foad Fadaghi 4.35pm Communications Chambers founder Robert Kenny 5.00pm NEXTDC CEO Bevan Slattery 5.25pm CLOSING DRINKS sponsored by NEXTDC

INTERNATIONAL SPEAKER

Telstra steps up crisis management A special editorial feature from

I

t has often been said around Telstra that you see the true colour of Telstra people’s character when there is a crisis like fires, flooding and natural disaster – and in the past three months Australia has been hit hard.

Australians across the world would be aware of extensive flooding in Western Victoria, Southern Queensland and Northern New South Wales in January this year and further devastation caused by the Tropical Cyclone Yasi in Northern Queensland which struck on 2 February, and fires in Western Australia.

In the week after Cyclone Yasi hit North Queensland Telstra crews, together with the local power provider and emergency services worked tirelessly to restore 220 mobile towers, more than 88,000 landlines and more than 29,000 ADSL services.

While the individual efforts of Telstra people on the ground was amazing – with examples of Telstra technicians using their ingenuity, local smarts and industry connections with our suppliers to keep the network operating – people in the back-end of the company also clicked into gear and delivered for customers.

Whether they were retail consumers, government and enterprise organisations, or wholesale carriers and service providers, the business rallied hard to ensure that people and businesses knew as much about the impacts on the network as the company could provide.

Daily Crisis Management Meetings In what resembled a war room approach to managing the floods and Cyclone Yasi and the impact on the network, a team of more than 60 people representing all of the different parts of the business met every day from early January until early February.

To obtain a complete picture of what was happening to the nation’s network this core team received and analysed data on the condition of the infrastructure, weather forecasts, status of exchange service areas, fault volumes, employee impacts, property impacts, updates from the Global Operations Centre and the Major Incident Management Group.

This team also received information from emergency services and disaster response agencies, chari-

ties and State and Federal Government agencies and compiled all of this information into a single daily update the rest of the business.

Daily reporting provided the number of exchanges in “red zones” which could not be accessed; “amber zones” which were damaged but Telstra people could access, as well as maps showing where mobile infrastructure was damaged and when it was restored.

This information was then fanned through the entire business: to account management teams, employees via front of house and the corporate intranet and out to wholesale customers who could use the information to manage their own end-users.

Following any crisis the immediate focus was on ensuring that our network infrastructure and ser-

vices were restored as rapidly as possible.

This included re-deploying over 100 extra technicians, installing Cells on Wheels (COWs), Mobile Exchanges on Wheels (MEOW) and distributing Telstra Emergency Communications Kits (TECKs) to name just a few of the recovery initiatives.

Leader of the emergency response and recovery effort in Queensland, Telstra Operations Northern Director, John Parkin, liaised with local emergency services and State Government authorities.

He constantly fed through criti-

cal communication data to the public on the status of the network and provided radio updates for local ABC radio and video updates and blogs on the Telstra site, while out on the road visiting the worst affected areas.

The road to recovery In all affected regions Telstra initiated a recovery plan which has seen its technicians prioritise on getting customers re-connected either with temporary services or arranging call diversions in the immediate aftermath of the floods.

Outages across the flooded and cyclone damaged sites were re-

stored as soon as possible and sites affected by mains power outages were restored with portable generators once flooding subsided and access was possible.

The focus for Telstra during February in Victoria is to continue to restore telephone and internet services to homes and businesses and as part of the Recovery Plan technicians will repair damage caused to the infrastructure, particularly underground cables.

In Queensland, in the wake of Tropical Cyclone Yasi, a longer term recovery effort is expected to take months.

Special assistance to Telstra Wholesale customers At the height of the crisis Telstra Wholesale reported to its customers every day with information about the status of exchange areas, staffing impacts in flood and cyclone affected areas, restoration times and information on how to report faults.

After the Victorian Bushfires disaster is February 2009, Telstra established a ‘render assistance’ process for customers to request network capacity from Telstra Wholesale in the event that their own networks were damaged.

Some excellent work went into fulfilling unique customer requests that connected some of the emergency services in the affected areas.

Telstra Wholesale Executive Director of Operations and Systems, Andrew Zawartko, and his team played a key role in co-ordinating Telstra Wholesale’s activities with the rest of the company and worked to manage Carrier Relationships during this difficult period.

“Telstra Wholesale has rallied throughout these crises and has been able to respond to our wholesale customers effectively,” Mr Zawartko said.

“This meant keeping customers updated and this would not have been possible without amazing collaboration between Telstra’s Network and IT Operations, Service Delivery and Network Construction teams who worked in partnership with Telstra Wholesale to deliver critical services for all our customers.”

Mobile technology is transforming the way we all live, learn, work and play.

ONE BIG IDEA. UNLIMITED POSSIBILITIES. As the world leader in 3G and next-gen mobile technologies, Qualcomm is focused on one big idea — accelerating mobility around the globe. qualcomm.com

qualcomm.com/blog Š 2011 Qualcomm Incorporated. All Rights Reserved.

Qualcomm is a publicly traded company on the NASDAQ Stock Market under the ticker symbol QCOM.

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@qualcomm

DAVE BURSTEIN

Wireless & fixed: friends not foes .

T

he best engineers on the planet are coming to the same conclusion: a hybrid 4G/ WiFi/landline network is the way to meet mobile demand.

Folks like John Donovan of AT&T and Masayoshi Son of Softbank in Japan had this vision around 2007-2008. As the iPhone/iPad/Android made the coming demand clear, networks planners around the world evolved similar strategies.

4G gives wide coverage but is limited in capacity. WiFi actually provides far more capacity, because the range of perhaps 100 meters means the spectrum can be reused thousands of times in a major city. (China Mobile is putting 20,000 WiFi hotspots across Beijing.) A network builder tells me "WiFi is a solution to off load 'portable' traffic where possible and rely on 3G/4G for 'mobile' traffic." Femtos and perhaps small cells will play a significant part.

Landlines effectively have 10x the capacity of a similar wireless network and are already ubiquitous from both telco and cable. A top engineer tells me "The general rule is the quicker you can get the byte of information onto a hard facility (copper, fiber) the cheaper it is to operate the network." Randall Stephenson of AT&T explains “You're always going to have to have a fixed line capability to offload this traffic.”

LTE networks are proving out remarkably well and the engineers building them are excited. Verizon is consistently getting the 5-12 megabits expected with low latency. Telia customers in Sweden are often seeing 15 and even 20

meg. The cost per bit is 60% to 90% lower than 3G and the capacity easily 10 times the older generation. For now, there’s enough LTE capacity Verizon is launching their network without caps and Clearwire Wimax is also uncapped.

Millions of light and rural users will save money using LTE to replace DSL and cable.

Verizon will begin switching to LTE Advanced in 2013, but at some point and in some places will face limits. The first choke point is crowds: we're about to have the first Superbowl with 10,000 iPhones with video cameras in stands. AT&T put WiFi in Times Square before New Year's Eve and the results were good.

So cell tower 3G/4G ideally is supplemented with local WiFi/ femto. Cell towers cover large areas, allowing comprehensive coverage except for a few dead spots.

They offer limited bandwidth over that entire area, with a network like Verizon's LTE offering perhaps 35 megabits to share. WiFi is much lower power, limiting range to a typical 100 meters or so, less with obstructions. Within that range, the capacity is high; 3x3 MIMO 802.11N can carry 100's of megabits in a small area. Locally, 802.11 uses spectrum more efficiently, incorporated a limited set of "spread-spectrum" type features.

WiFi was in few phones two years ago because it ran down batteries too quickly and cost too much. Moore's Law now enables low power, low cost WiFi. The latest chips from RALINK/ Trendchip, for example, cost less than $5. Off mode power consumption is 0.012 mw, transmit

power is 19dBm, and the chips are 5 to 7 mm square. Easily 3/4ths of the phones sold by a carrier like Verizon will soon have WiFi as do just about all tablets. As Qualcomm, Broadcom and others include WiFi on their primary cellphones chips it will become ubiquitous.

Whether cell site or home WiFi, the data moves as quickly as possible to landlines. A neighborhood with 200 homes has typically a gigabit worth of copper for DSL. Cable is shared, but almost always has shared capacity. Once you get to the local exchange, there's fiber to the core with essentially unlimited capacity, usually inexpensive.

Incumbents like AT&T recognize the landline network gives them a crucial edge for the profitable wireless business. AT&T five years ago declared "we are a wireless company," and held back on fiber investments. But as mobile data demand developed, even "a wireless company" discovered how crucial the landlines are.

Deep thinkers, like MIT's David Reed, are looking at spread spectrum and other network architectures that overcome congestion problems up to far beyond the likely demand for decades.

Carriers are choosing different strategies to get from where they are today to triple networks.

For example, Vodafone, Europe's largest wireless company, is adding millions of DSL customers through unbundling and giving them femto+WiFi gateways. bought a wireless Dave Burstein is editor of Fast Net News and DSL Prime

Talk Satellite is convening a one-day forum of world satellite and wireless leaders on the 1 March 2011 at the M Hotel, Singapore. The aim is to identify and initiate needed dialogue for the development of satellite as the primary delivery of backhaul service. The Asia-Pacific Satellite Backhaul Forum, will provide a uniquely inclusive forum to address issues of urgent concern to governments, operators, and enterprise entities.

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