Month: April 2019
San Diego and Verizon in deal to deploy small cells for 4G-LTE to be upgraded to 5G
Verizon and the city of San Diego, CA have announced a partnership under which the U.S.’ #1 wireless telco will invest upward of $100 million to deploy as many as 200 energy-efficient light poles that host small cells for 5G wireless, as well as providing the police with 500 smartphones and the fire and rescue department with 50 tablets. The city, in exchange, will ensure a streamlined process for approval of small cells and fiber optic links.
San Diego has pledged to streamline the permitting process for rolling out mobile network “small cells” in a deal with Verizon that could help lay the foundation for bringing 5G technology to the city. Mayor Kevin Faulconer announced the deal in a news conference Monday on Harbor Island. Verizon will spend more than $100 million to install up to 200 power efficient light poles with small cell wireless network gear to improve cellular coverage.
“Verizon is a partner in our effort to enhance wireless capability and lay the groundwork for the future of 5G wireless,” said Faulconer. “This agreement is going to increase services and expand our smart cities capabilities, at no additional costs to taxpayers.”
Small cells — about the size of a pizza box — contain lower power radios and antennas. They add density to the cellular network to boost range and increase the number of smartphone/ endpoint users who can then gain high speed connections to the Internet. This is done via frequency reuse– small cells in one area of town may use the same frequency bands as other small cells in a different part of the city. Small cells are expected to be a key component of high speed 5G mobile networks, which have just begun rolling out in a few cities in the U.S. and South Korea. They have to be mounted on city owned polls or like infrastructure. “Most of these small cells essentially they are on poles, and they blend into the areas to provide that coverage, as well as capacity,” said Ed Chan, Verizon’s senior vice president of engineering.
Verizon plans to install 4G LTE small cells in San Diego under the new program, said Chan. These small cells can be upgraded to 5G technology — either through software updates or the addition of 5G radio equipment. 5G networks aim to deliver speeds 10 times faster than current 4G technologies, with imperceptible transmission delays. They are expected to help power ubiquitous mobile video, self-driving cars, smart cities infrastructure and connected health care devices.
Verizon deployed its first pre-standard mobile 5G networks last week in neighborhoods in Chicago and Minneapolis. It expects to expand to 30 additional cities U.S. by year end. The telco hasn’t named the next 30 cities to get 5G. Chan said to stay tuned. “This will definitely create the foundation to get to 5G” in San Diego, he said.
The city and Verizon have been talking for several months about ways to speed up the permitting process for small cells and fiber optic links. Plans include updating some building codes and allowing “master permits” where the installation of several, similarly designed small cell street-light poles in a neighborhood would fall under one permit, said Ron Villa, assistant chief operating officer with the city.
“We are doing a pilot in Mission Valley where they can permit a whole area all at once, and they don’t have to go through individual permits,” said Villa. “It will be to the advantage of other carriers as well. If we can get this to work, there will be other carriers that will be welcome” to use the streamlined permitting process.
Verizon is providing poles with street lights and will cover installation costs, said Villa. The company will own the poles. In the future, it will provide analysis of traffic patterns and other data to bolster San Diego’s smart cities capabilities.
“From smart streetlights on Mira Mesa Boulevard to weather-based irrigation controllers in Clairemont, innovation is shaping how we are living and working in District 6,” said Council member Chris Cate. “San Diego’s partnership with Verizon will not only benefit San Diegans today, it will help all future generations.”
References:
2019 Open Network Summit: AT&T Virtualizes its Network; Deploys White Boxes in Toronto and London; 400G and Open ROADM
Last week at the 2019 Open Network Summit, AT&T announced that its white box switch/routers, which interconnect compute servers in the network cloud, are live and carrying 5G traffic. This is part of the company’s push to virtualize its network, which at the end of 2018 had 65% virtualized network functions. AT&T’s goal is to virtualize 75 percent of its core network functions by 2020. “This year (2019) our goal is to get to 70 percent,” Fuetsch said in his Thursday morning keynote. “Why not faster progress this year? We left all the hard stuff for last.”
AT&T CTO Andre Fuetsch during his keynote address at 2019 Open Network Summit
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Sidebar: AT&T 5G White Boxes
The radio access network (RAN) includes radios on towers, small cells and other types of equipment that traditionally “were specialized, expensive devices sold by a small number of (wireless network equipment) vendors,” said Fuetsch in a blog post. Those vendors “dictated costs, technical capabilities and upgrade schedules. They controlled the hardware and the software.”
This status quo no longer makes sense, now that carriers are deploying 5G wireless, which will support higher speeds and lower latency, Fuetsch argues. Wireless network traffic is expected to skyrocket, but carriers cannot afford to increase the price of service commensurately.
AT&T previously released specifications for a white box router for use in its 5G network and invited vendors to submit proposals to build the router. Feutsch’s blog post notes that the company is working on additional hardware specs with the O-RAN Alliance, an industry group focused on defining 5G white box requirements.
The other AT&T 5G white box initiative highlighted in Fuetsch’s blog post is something he calls the “network cloud white box,” which he said is now live in the AT&T network and carrying 5G traffic. This device would be a switch that would interconnect servers in the edge data centers that AT&T is establishing to support low-latency 5G wireless applications. Some of these applications need more processing power than end-user devices can support, which dictates a cloud approach. But the cloud resources must be located near the end-user to provide low latency.
The servers in the edge data centers are powered by the ONAP open source network operating system that AT&T played a key role in developing. The white box deployment uses a software stack that will be part of the open source Disaggregated Network Operating System (DANOS) Project, and AT&T plans to introduce its code contribution to the community soon
Also in the blog post, Fuetsch noted that AT&T has deployed white boxes in Toronto and London to support internet service for business customers and that the company plans to offer the devices in 76 countries by the end of the year. In addition, he said AT&T is working on technology that would enable a single fiber optic wavelength to carry 400 Gbps. For its 400G deployment, AT&T expects to use Open ROADM optical networking for interoperability, to achieve more competition, mix and match between vendors, and lower the barrier to entry for startup vendors, Fuetsch said.
“These white boxes and open source routing software that we’re deploying, the cell site router initiative that we’re putting in is going to 65,000 (domestic) cell sites over the coming years,” Fuetsch said.
AT&T contributed its white box specs to the Open Compute Project last year, which led to the development of the cell site router gateway that it’s showing at ONS this week. AT&T is demonstrating a white box router gateway from UfiSpace that was developed via the OCP specifications.
Fuetsch said AT&T planned to update 65,000 cell tower sites with the UfiSpace white boxes. While he didn’t provide a timeline, he said those efforts were ramping up this year.
“This is a hardware box that is based on Broadcom’s Qumran chipset, and it’s basically a cell site router that is a hardened for extreme environmental conditions,” Fuetsch said. “So think like negative 40 Celsius up to 65 degrees Celsius operating ranges. It’s also a box that basically can support interfaces from as low as 100 megs all the way up to 100 gig for both supporting our radio based RAN units as well as our backhaul needs.”
While AT&T hasn’t said which vendors it’s using for the internet white boxes, AT&T is running its Vyatta software stack on them, which Fuetsch said AT&T still planned to contribute into the Linux Foundation’s DANOS community at some point this year. These open, white box systems allow AT&T to run 10 times as much traffic as the proprietary routers it previously bought at the same price. Fuetsch declined to give a time frame for when a majority of AT&T’s network might operate on open source-based hardware, but said certain aspects of it will in the coming years.
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Regarding AT&T’s motivations for open source, Fuetsch identified security, freedom of choice, flexibility, and interoperability. “As we shift from a hardware-centric network to a more software-centric network we needed a way to get our software to become more open, more flexible. We also were looking for software that’s more secure. Open source is inherently more secure because you have more eyeballs on it,” he said.
“We believe that not only having more open reference designs on the hardware level but also having more open source based projects in that ecosystem will drive more innovation, more economic solutions, more competition, thus a better experience and products and services for our customers,” he said. “Open source has really become a major foundation to a lot of our major network initiatives.”
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AT&T’s Network by the Numbers:
• 214 Countries & territories
• 1.1M+ Global fiber route miles
• 253 Petabytes per day
“5G” Deployment:
• 12 5G US cities launched (with pre-IMT 2020 standard, 3GPP Release 15 NR, NSA implementation)
• 9 additional 5G US cities coming soon
• Nationwide 5G early 2020 (IMT 2020 won’t be completed by then)
In the next 5 years [Source: Cisco Visual Networking Index Forecast & Trends 2/27/19]:
• 3x Increase global IP traffic
• 7x Increase mobile IP Traffic
• 71% Traffic from wireless devices
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References:
https://about.att.com/story/2019/open_networking_summit_2019.html
https://about.att.com/innovationblog/2019/04/open_source_and_white_box.html
https://events.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Fuetsch-ONS-2019-keynote-FINAL.pdf
IHS Markit: Enterprise Data Center SDN savings yet to be realized
by Josh Bancroft, IHS Markit Analyst
IHS Markit recently surveyed 100 North American enterprises that are evaluating or implementing software-defined networking (SDN) for the data center by 2020. Respondents currently evaluating SDN expect that it will drive operational- and capital-expenditure decreases at a faster pace than what has been experienced by those already deploying SDN.
“Migrating to SDN means deploying new equipment, upgrading existing equipment, and training IT staff, which requires investment,” said Josh Bancroft, senior analyst, cloud and data center research, IHS Markit. “Those evaluating SDN need to adjust their expectations that savings might not be felt immediately, but instead might happen over a longer period of time.”
The 2018 “Data Center SDN Strategies North American Enterprise Survey” indicated that the transition to live SDN deployment is well underway. By the end of 2019, 74 percent of respondents will be in production trials, and 36 percent will be in live production, up from 38 percent and 20 percent, respectively, in 2018. Enhancements have been made by vendors, including integrating network analytics to improve application performance and security. Doing so will encourage enterprises to deploy SDN, since improved application performance and improved security were two of the top drivers for deploying SDN. Other top deployment drivers for SDN included; decreased operating costs, simplified network provisioning and improved management capability.
In the IHS Markit survey, Cisco, VMware, and Dell EMC were identified as the SDN hardware and software manufacturers with which respondents were most familiar.
Following are some additional highlights from the survey:
- Top deployment barriers among the respondents were the interruption of critical network operations (30 percent), interoperability with existing network equipment (29 percent) and lack of trained staff (29 percent)
- Less than half (48 percent) of respondents expect capital expenditures (capex) to increase again in the second year of deployment. However, capex increased in the second year for 61 percent of those who have deployed SDN, which suggests those evaluating deployment should adjust their expectations.
- Nearly one-third (31 percent) of respondents chose automated disaster recovery as the top use case for capex reduction, while 35 percent selected automated provisioning as the top use case for operating expenditure (opex) reduction, and 30 percent chose automation for application deployment as the top use case for employee productivity.
- By 2020, 83 percent of respondents will be in live production with data center SDN.
Data Center SDN Strategies North American Enterprise Survey
This IHS Markit survey analyzes the trends and assesses the needs of enterprises deploying SDN in their data centers. The study probes issues defining how the enterprise market will evolve with data center SDN, including deployment drivers and barriers, rollout plans, applications, use cases, vendors installed and under evaluation, top rated vendors, and more.
IHS Markit: Huawei Led Global 4G LTE Infrastructure Market which totalled $22.9B in 2018; China CAPEX bottoms out
By Stéphane Téral, director, IHS Markit
Key information from China released over the past two weeks indicate that China’s 4G LTE capital expenditures (capex) totaled $17.3 billion in 2018, which is 8.5 percent above the initial plan. Among the three Chinese service providers – China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom – China Mobile was responsible for much of the increase in plan, spending $1.5 billion more than its initial plan released in March 2018.
With this hike in China’s capex, along with solid sustained infrastructure spending in Europe, Middle East, Africa and various countries in Asia, global 4G LTE infrastructure revenue was $22.9 billion in 2018.
Huawei finished 2018 with 31 percent market share in the global mobile infrastructure market, which includes 2G, 3G and 4G hardware macrocell networks. Huawei was followed by Ericsson with 27 percent and Nokia with 22 percent.
As always, March is an important month in China, as it is punctuated by full-year financial results and the release of guidance for the full calendar year from China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom. Given the magnitude of telecom capex in China, everyone involved in the telecom ecosystem pays attention to what the three service providers say, particularly their plans for the year.
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On April 1, 2019 Mr Teral wrote: Capex in China has bottomed out; 5G produces a 3% YoY increase!
O-RAN Alliance and Linux Foundation form O-RAN Open Source Community; Open Networking Assessment and Telcos
On April 2nd, the O-RAN Alliance and the Linux Foundation jointly announced the creation of the O-RAN Software Community (O-RAN SC). The O-RAN SC will provide open software aligned with the O-RAN Alliance’s open architecture. As a new open source community under the Linux Foundation, the O-RAN SC is sponsored by the O-RAN Alliance, and together they will develop open source software enabling modular, open, intelligent, efficient, and agile disaggregated radio access networks. The initial set of software projects may include: near-real-time RAN intelligent controller (nRT RIC), non-real-time RAN intelligent controller (NRT RIC), cloudification and virtualization platforms, open central unit (O-CU), open distributed unit (O-DU), and a test and integration effort to provide a working reference implementation. Working with other adjacent open source networking communities, the O-RAN SC will enable collaborative development across the full operator network stack.
Background: The telecom industry is experiencing a profound transformation and 5G is expected to radically change how we live, work, and play. This means it’s critical to make network infrastructure commercially available as quickly as possible to ensure business success for operators. It’s time to turn to open source, as it is one of the most efficient ways to accelerate product development in a collaborative and cost-efficient way.
“This collaboration between the O-RAN Alliance and the Linux Foundation is a tremendous accomplishment that represents the culmination of years of thoughtful innovation around the next generation of networks,” said Andre Fuetsch, Chairman of the O-RAN Alliance, and President of AT&T Labs and Chief Technology Officer at AT&T. “The launch of the O-RAN SC marks the next phase of that innovation, where the benefits of disaggregated and software-centric platforms will move out to the edge of the network. This new open source community will be critical if 5G is to reach its full potential.”
“We are really excited to see the establishment of the O-RAN Open Source Community,” said Chih-Lin I, chief scientist of China Mobile, co-chair of the O-RAN Technical Steering Committee and member of the Executive Committee of the O-RAN Alliance. “The O-RAN Alliance is aiming at building an ‘Open’ and ‘Smart’ Radio Access Network for future wireless systems. From day one, the Alliance has embraced open source as one of the most powerful means to achieve its vision. The O-RAN Open Source Community is the fruit of a yearlong extensive deliberation between the O-RAN Alliance and the Linux Foundation. We believe that the power of open source will further the momentum and accelerate the development, test, commercialization and deployment of O-RAN solutions.”
“We are excited to collaborate with O-RAN Alliance in bringing communities together to create software for this important access area of Telecommunications,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Edge & IOT, the Linux Foundation. “This step towards execution marks another major milestone in networking partnerships across standards and open source organizations.”
About O-RAN Alliance
The O-RAN Alliance is a world-wide, carrier-led effort to drive new levels of openness in the radio access network of next generation wireless systems. Future RANs will be built on a foundation of virtualized network elements, white-box hardware and standardized interfaces that fully embrace O-RAN’s core principles of intelligence and openness. An ecosystem of innovative new products is already emerging that will form the underpinnings of the multi-vendor, interoperable, autonomous RAN, envisioned by many in the past, but only now enabled by the global industry-wide vision, commitment and leadership of O-RAN Alliance members and contributors.
More information about O-RAN can be found at www.o-ran.org.
About the Linux Foundation
Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation’s projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more. The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information please visit us at www.linuxfoundation.org.
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Assessment of Open Networking:
While Open Source Software (e.g. ONAP from ONF, Sonic from OCP) and Hardware (from OCP, TIP, Open RAN consortiums, ONF, etc) for networking is advancing rapidly, Open Networking via SDN, NFV, SD-WAN is really a euphemism for closed networking. That’s because almost all such “Open Networks” are proprietary to either the service provider (e.g. Amazon, Google, AT&T, etc) or SD-WAN vendor (many).
Some hyper-scale cloud providers (e.g. Microsoft) use a mix of open source software and purpose built proprietary software. Others (like Amazon and Google) use only their own (proprietary) software. Open Networking hasn’t much of an impact on the enterprise network yet, because of complex support and training issues. It seems like the main beneficiary of open networking will be Facebook (which started the OCP and TIP) and global telcos/ISPs (e.g. Yahoo Japan).
Telco Focused Open Source Projects:
Telcos such as AT&T, Verizon, China Mobile, DTK, and others have embraced open source technologies to move faster into the future. And LF Networking is at the heart of this transformation. AT&T seems to be the leading open source software telco. The company contributed their own software on virtual networks as ONAP to the Linux Foundation. The project is now being used by in production by other companies, and AT&T in return is benefiting from the work the competitors are doing to improve the code base.
AT&T also led the effort on Project CORD (Central Office Rearchitected as a Data center). CORD combines NFV, SDN, and the elasticity of commodity clouds to bring data center economics and cloud agility to the Telco Central Office. CORD lets the network operator manage their Central Offices using declarative modeling languages for agile, real-time configuration of new customer services. Major service providers like AT&T, SK Telecom, Verizon, China Unicom and NTT Communications are already supporting CORD.
AT&T contributed to the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) work on multi-gigabit PON virtual optical line termination hardware abstraction (VOLTHA), which is an open source software stack for PON networks. ONF is now working on integrating the ONAP operating system with multi-gigabit passive optical networks. ONAP was created by the merger of the Open ECOMP platform created by AT&T Labs with a similar, preexisting open source development project.
AT&T and the ONF will build on ongoing field trials of XGS-PON technology designed to support speeds up to 10 Gbps. The current XGS-PON trial is testing multi-gigabit high-speed internet traffic and providing AT&T DirecTV NOW video to trial participants. “Collaboration and openness across AT&T, the ONF and VOLTHA teams will be key to bringing this 10 Gbps broadband network to customers faster,” said Igal Elbaz, AT&T senior vice president of wireless network architecture and design, in the press release. “Now that we’ve proven the viability of open access technology in our trials, we can start the integration with our operations and management automation platform – ONAP.
ONF also provides a variety of Reference Designs, which are are “blueprints” developed by ONF’s Operator members to address specific use cases for the emerging edge cloud. Each Reference Design is backed by specific network operator partner(s) who plan to deploy these designs into their production networks and will include participation from invited supply chain partners sharing the vision and demonstrating active investment in building open source solutions.
The Telecom Infra Project aims to collaborate on building new technologies, examining new business approaches, and spurring investment in the telecom space. TIP Project Groups are divided into three strategic networks areas that collectively make up an end-to-end network: Access, Backhaul, and Core and Management. TIP members include operators, suppliers, developers, systems integrators, startups, and other entities that have joined TIP to build new technologies and develop innovative approaches for deploying telecom network infrastructure. Most telco members are outside the U.S. However, Century Link, Cox Communications, Sprint, and Windstream are U.S. based members. Representatives from Deutsche Telekom, BT, Vodafone, and Telefonica are on the TIP Board of Directors.
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References:
https://techblog.comsoc.org/category/open-source-telecom-software/
AT&T, ONF Collaborate on Virtualized Multi-Gigabit PON Service Automation
Dialog Axiata launches mobile 5G pilot network in Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka’s largest mobile network operator by subscribers, Dialog Axiata has launched what it says is South Asia’s first “fully standards based 5G” pilot service in collaboration with Huawei. Of course, that’s impossible because the IMT 2020 5G recommendations for ITU-R and ITU-T won’t be completed till the end of 2020 or later.
The successful demonstration used Huawei-based RAN and core network with the most current 5G non-standalone architecture (from 3GPP Release 15) to transmit data to a 5G smartphone. The mobile network operator claims it is South Asia’s first pilot mobile 5G service.
Dialog Axiata group chief executive Supun Weerasinghe said the trial marks another step towards the operator’s introduction of 5G in the region. The operator has to date upgraded over 20% of its base stations to support Massive MIMO technology, giving them 5G ready status.
“The success of South Asia’s first demonstration of a mobile 5G service is yet another milestone following our launch of a fully functional pre-commercial 5G network and builds on our significant investments into high speed broadband network infrastructure in Sri Lanka, Dialog will continue to deliver on its promise of delivering The Future.Today. by leveraging the unique capabilities of 5G technology, to spearhead the country’s transformation into a regional technology hub,” he said.
Dialog Axiata launched its pre-commercial 5G network at the end of last year, demonstrating South Asia’s first fully functional and “standards compliant 5G” transmission using commercial grade base stations. Unveiled at the end of December 2018, the cellco’s pre-commercial trial was fulfilled via a partnership with the industry watchdog the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission of Sri Lanka (TRCSL), which is making available 3.5GHz band spectrum to pilot 5G. In the trials, Dialog reportedly achieved data speeds of more than 2 Gbps in a live setting.
To date Dialog has since then upgraded over 20% of its expansive base station network to a “5G Ready Status” by deploying Massive MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) technology. The same infrastructure will transmit 5G speeds upon the licensing of commercial 5G spectrum in Sri Lanka, enabling the delivery of nationwide 5G coverage.
References:
https://www.telecomasia.net/content/dialog-axiata-announces-5g-pilot-service