Lee Hicks, Vice President of network planning  at Verizon said the carrier is focused on a single core MPLS network supporting wireless, residential and business services that will use NG-PON2 as an access method for all three.  Mr. Hicks made those remarks at ADTRAN Connect 2018 in Huntsville, Alabama.  Hicks said that an important goal is to reduce the cost per bit by 45% while also providing low latency to support services such as augmented and virtual reality and telemedicine, he said.  Speaking about the company’s fiber investment, Hicks said: “This has become the base for what we do in the industry. We are big believers in taking fiber all the way.”

In comparison with other 10 Gbps PON options, Hicks said, “It’s not the easiest to go from GPON to NG-PON2, but it’s the best long-term step.”  NG-PON2 initially will have four wavelengths, each operating at 10 Gbps.   “In the future, we have a roadmap to be able to bond these wavelengths,” Hicks said. “We have a built-in ability to go beyond a 10-Gig to 20-Gig, 30-Gig, even 40-Gig down the road. Today with 1-Gig service becoming common place, it’s only a matter of time before 10-Gig and beyond become important. You need to be thinking about that. We are and we’re trying to pick a platform that could help us do that. Having multiple wavelengths available is important.”

Hicks said that tunable optics for NG-PON2 will allow operators to assign different subscriber types to different wavelengths. Using dynamic load balancing, a service provider could move a data hog to a separate wavelength via a provisioning command to the optical network tuners.  He touted the enhanced reliability that multiple wavelengths and tunable optics will support.  Verizon has demonstrated pulling a fiber off of a PON and having the optical line terminal automatically switch to a backup wavelength within a few seconds. “Having multiple wavelengths available helps when you have to take a PON card out of service,” he said.

NG-PON2 also will enable network operators to load balance traffic, Hicks noted. If one customer on a PON is a wavelength hog, other customers could be moved to a different wavelength.  NG-PON2 equipment currently uses a separate broadband network gateway and gateway router but Verizon is working with Adtran to incorporate BNG functions into the optical line terminal.

“Broadband is no longer a want to service; it’s a have to service.  We’re at 40%, 50% per customer growth in consumption every year. But what’s coming on top of that now is the demand for low latency. Whether it’s augmented reality, virtual reality, or telemedicine, all these things require very low latency. We’re looking for solutions that continue to help with that.

What can we do is simplify our network by driving the costs per bit down,” Hicks said. “We’re very focused on that. We have an internal goal to every year to reduce the cost per bit by 40%. That’s what I charge my team with figuring out how to do, that’s what I charge Adtran and all of our suppliers to do. Our goal is to continue to develop a roadmap on how to reduce the cost per bit so that we can give good value to our customers.  That’s our vision. And so now how do we think about meeting that, especially on a fiber network? We believe that NG-PON2 is the right platform to do that.”

 

Verizon’s Lee Hicks talks about some of the telco’s networking goals at Adtran Connect. (Photo by FierceTelecom)

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Other elements of the Verizon network roadmap:

• The company will consolidate real estate across its wireless, residential and business networks into what Hicks called “shared hub sites” for the “aggregation and service edge.” These could be central offices, points of presence or C-RAN huts, he said.
• Verizon currently has more than 40 platforms and 200,000 network elements, including some that are up to 30 years old, that will be decommissioned.
• The company’s platform “allows us to do circuit emulation” to support customers currently using DS-1 or Sonet services, which will be converted to Ethernet at the central office
• Services such as FiOS, virtual private networks and others will share an uplink
• The company will manage the network using a base network controller (BNC) that will use standard interfaces to an orchestration and abstraction network in place of traditional vendor-specific element management systems

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On Network Automation, Telemetry and Control, Hicks said Verizon is using OpenDaylight for its Base Network Controller (BNC), which is the focal point for gathering streaming telemetry from network elements.

“The model there is we’re going to create standard interfaces to our orchestration and extract the network,” Hicks said. “Southbound from the BNC, we will use industry standards, things like NETCONF and YANG models for provisioning, and then we’ll use OpenFlow to do network control. We’re going to be using this to do telemetry.”

In the past, Hicks said every Verizon service had its own set of network probes to gather data, which was then put into separate data lakes with their own set of analysis tools.

“We’re not going to be buying probes anymore,” Hicks said. “We’re going to be using the intelligence that’s in the network elements themselves and using streaming telemetry to gather all that. We’re going to be bringing it to a single data lake and then doing analytic engines on top of that with closed-loop automation.

“Our vision is on this new network where I have a single data lake, without probes, that I can then do closed-loop automation,” Hicks concluded.

Samsung’s digital city in South Korea showcases many of the perceived benefits of 5G.  Samsung has deployed a 5G hot spot (or hot zone) within its campus to demonstrate how quickly a person in a moving vehicle could download and upload large video files to the network.   The company’s pre-5G standard technology already supports some in-vehicle services, as well as smart city initiatives such as traffic, smart lighting and CCTV, and as it gains widespread coverage, even more innovations will occur.

Sporting venues will likely use 5G hot zones to deliver a new in-stadium fan experience that offers personalized video feeds of a customer’s favorite player to their mobile device. One example of this was the time slice feature that was available for the winter Olympics. Moreover, remote healthcare use cases will get a boost with better bandwidth to enhance the video and enable new use cases such as assisted surgery with augmented and virtual reality.

https://news.samsung.com/global/video-5g-city-samsungs-preview-of-the-5g-era

by Jon Baldry, Director Metro Marketing at Infinera

Fibre to the Home (FTTH) or Building (FTTP) is now a very popular choice for new housing developments and business parks across the globe. Extending broadband availability and raising public expectations provides a major boost for the industry, but there is a greater challenge in regions with a well-established copper or cable infrastructure. Telcos are already stretching DSL technology to discourage customer churn. Cable too has significant territory to defend: it begins with a more powerful offering, but MSOs cannot be complacent.

QoS is the new battle cry, and Distributed Access Architecture (DAA) offers a major challenge to the spread of Fibre to the Home. The migration to DAA is inevitable, but not to be undertaken lightly.  The global advance of FTTH has been dramatic, and it is expected to provide nearly 50% of all broadband subscriptions by 2022. But it is worth noting that this has been driven by exceptional uptake in certain countries, notably the Far East, where the legacy copper and cable infrastructure was less established.

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China accounts for over a third of the global broadband total, and over 70% of those connections are on FTTH. Singapore has 95% FTTH, South Korea over 80% and Hong Kong over 70% according to the Fibre Broadband Association. Compare that with Europe, with its legacy copper and cable infrastructure, where FTTH penetration is barely 10%.

Editor’s Note:  Point Topic said that  in 12 months to the end of Q1 2018, China added nearly 63 million FTTH connections. This figure constituted 80% of global FTTH net adds in the period.

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Fibre still has a long way to go, and installation will take time in the old world with its stricter planning regulations and narrow old-town streets.  What does the world want from broadband?

Expectations are changing rapidly. Optical fibre now delivers about six times the capacity that DSL can manage. There is still huge demand for downloads and streaming video and services like 4K HDTV are pushing demand way beyond the capabilities of current DSL technology. More significantly, in addition to the video demands, users also use a broad range of services such as social media, gaming and potentially, in the not too distant future, virtual or augmented reality where upload speeds and latency become much more important. Here legacy cable delivery does have a distinct disadvantage – although it has accelerated its download speeds to stay around 80% of fibre capacity, cable’s upload speeds are more like one third of what FTTH can offer. Cable was in a strong position in the days of asymmetric Internet usage, but today’s soaring demand for massive bandwidth, fast uploads, low latency and high reliability presents a serious challenge, and the industry is looking to a new Distributed Access Architecture (DAA) to meet this challenge. This is a radical move that will impact the entire system for cable multiple service operators’ (MSOs) optical networks, from “fiber-deep” access networks to support Remote PHY Devices (RPDs) to the need for enormous bandwidth scalability throughout their entire networks.

For a couple of decades cable operators have used Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) to connect the core to the access networks. The fibre carries the data as analogue radio frequency (RF) signals, similar to those in the coaxial access cables, rather than digital packets as in a typical fibre network like FTTH (Fig 1). This analogue infrastructure is expensive to operate and maintain. Digital signals are more tolerant of signal to noise degradation and are therefore less affected by attenuation, whereas analogue signals need a chain of power hungry amplifiers along the route to maintain signal strength and quality. This analogue technology was designed to suit earlier network requirements, which it supported well, but it cannot scale to meet today’s increasing demands.

Figure 1: The Current HFC Access Network 

Note also that each Optical Network Terminal (ONT) typically serves several hundred homes, requiring costly analogue equipment that requires considerable maintenance. With so many subscribers per node, the system struggles to support bursts in demand, slowing down delivery at those most critical times.

The new “fibre deep” approach pushes today’s default packet-based digital fibre technology out closer to the end point (see Figure 2). Replacing analogue channels and the older transmission protocol also frees up spectrum in the remaining shorter coaxial plant for more efficient use of capacity, enabling Full Duplex delivery so that upload speeds will be able to match download speeds. This narrows that gap between FTTH and Cable for interactive gaming, virtual reality and social media purposes – as well as increasing its potential for future Internet of Things (IoT) applications where masses of data may be uploaded from countless small devices.

Note also in Figure 2. below that increasing in the number of nodes closer to the end users means that each one serves around one tenth of the number of subscribers, and this facilitates exceptional interactive services. The cable network has for many years supported on-demand content, and the updated network architecture makes room for more locally stored content. Being closer improves responsiveness and Quality of Service (QoS), especially during peak hours.  These developments will present a serious challenge to the arrival of FTTH providers, who already have to compete against an existing infrastructure and established customer base.

Figure 2: HFC to Distributed Access Architecture (DAA)

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Huge potential versus tricky demands of DAA:

Selecting suitable equipment will no longer be a simple matter of asking a preferred supplier to meet the required performance levels, it will be necessary to look closely at the specifications to see if devices are sufficiently compact and power efficient to optimise scarce secondary hub real estate and to provide additional capabilities that can address the significant operational challenges of managing such a high density aggregation. With a tenfold or so increase in the number of RPDs terminating the DWDM network, installation and operating expenses will soar unless care is taken to choose the most compact, reliable and easy to maintain equipment.

Optical equipment suppliers are aware of these concerns and are rising to the challenge of mass deployment of DAA networks. Great advancements are being made in terms for density, power consumption and addressing the operational challenges of managing potentially 1000s of fibers within a secondary hub rack. What’s more, the industry has been working to bring the International Telecommunications Union’s (ITU) vision of autotuneable WDM-PON optics up to the performance levels required to support the reach and capacity requirements of DAA networks. This eases the pressures of commissioning and maintaining extensive DWDM optical networks by replacing the technicians’ burden of determining and adjusting wavelengths at every installation. Autotuneable technology will automatically select the correct wavelength without any configuration by the remote field engineer enabling them to treat DWDM installations with the same simplicity as grey optics.

These are the sort of challenges that will be faced as MSOs migrate to DAA, and they will need to take a very close look at their choice of equipment and solutions in order to meet the very specific challenges of fibre-deep access networks. However, a successful DAA rollout is not just about what happens in the access network. DAA will also create a surge in bandwidth demand throughout the entire infrastructure – from access through transport to core. Unless steps are taken to reinforce, optimise and automate the entire network capability, the most powerful, responsive and efficient access network could become its own worst enemy.

Conclusions:

Already nearly a half of all US consumers are using streaming video services and 70% “binge watch” TV series, while virtual and enhanced reality services and 4K high definition TV are still poised to go mainstream. So future-proofing a cable MSO’s network means preparing for a highly uncertain future.

Network operators will need help from specialist optical equipment providers to optimise optical transport platforms to their specific needs, creating network architectures that will be highly scaleable, that simplify operations, accelerate the launch of new services, and minimize total cost of ownership. Something that will only be achieved by installing intelligent networks that integrate best-in-class technology and automate a significant proportion of manual operations.

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2Q-2018  for AT&T had 76,000 IP broadband net adds with 23,000 total broadband net adds. That’s the seventh consecutive quarter of broadband growth for AT&T Communications.   About 95% of our consumer broadband base is now on our IP broadband as our transition from DSL is drawing to a close. Our fiber build continues at a fast clip, now passing more than 9 million customer locations, and we expect that this time next year to reach 14 million locations.

This gives us a long runway for broadband growth. We’re doing very well in our fiber markets, including a 246,000 net increase in subs on our fiber network in the second quarter.

Now I’d like to update you on several key initiatives we have underway, so we’ll turn to Slide 17. Evolving our video portfolio is top priority for us. We believe we’re well positioned as our customers move toward a more personalized set of streaming products.

Our new platform was launched in May as the DIRECTV NOW user interface, and it’s now live on all supported device operating systems and has been well received with strong engagement by customers.  It offers a new cloud-based DVR and more robust video-on-demand experience with new pay-per-view options. Over time, it will bring additional advertising and data insight opportunities.  This new video platform gives us flexibility to adapt to the market with new offerings and products. Late in the quarter, we added our third video offering called WatchTV, a small package of 30 live channels and 15,000 on-demand titles.

We include WatchTV in our unlimited, more wireless plans where you can purchase it for $15 a month, making it perfect for customers who want video but not at the cost of a large package.  This complements DIRECTV NOW where we continue to see success in attracting cord cutters and cord severs. And later this year, we will begin testing a premium product extension, which is a streaming product that will give the full DIRECTV experience over any broadband, ours or competitors’.  It will have additional benefits of an improved search and discovery feature and an enhanced user interface. We’re excited that this will complement our top-end product for those who don’t want or can’t have a satellite dish.

Our open-video platform also dovetails nicely with our ongoing focus on driving the industry’s leading cost structure. The new platform is low touch with lower acquisition costs as streaming services becomes a bigger part of our business.

Digital sales are a cost-efficient way of customer engagement, and we’re seeing double-digit growth in our digital sales and service. We’re also seeing operating expense savings from our move to a virtualized software-defined network.

More than 55% of our network functions were virtualized at the end of 2017, and we’re well on our way to meet or exceed our goal of 75% virtualized by 2020. These and other cost management initiatives have helped drive 13 straight quarters of cost reductions in our technology and infrastructure group.

Finally, I’d like to give an update on our FirstNet build and other network investments. Our FirstNet network build is accelerating. We expect to have between 12,000 and 15,000 band 14 sites on air by the end of this year 2018, and we’re ahead of our contractual commitment.  And don’t forget, when we’re putting in equipment for FirstNet, we’re also deploying our AWS and WCS spectrum, utilizing the one touch, one tower approach. This approach allows all customers access to our improved network.  FirstNet also gives us an opportunity to sell to first responders. So far, more than 1,500 public safety agencies across 52 states and territories have joined FirstNet, nearly doubling the network’s adoption since April.

In addition to our efforts with FirstNet, 5G and 5G Evolution work continues its development in several different areas that will pave the way to the next generation of higher speeds for our customers.

We now have 5G Evolution in more than 140 markets, covering nearly 100 million people with theoretical peak speeds of at least 400 megabits per second with plans to cover 400-plus markets by the end of this year.  Our millimeter wave mobile 5G trials are also going well, and we’re on track to launch service in parts of 12 markets by the end of this year.

References:

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4189740-t-inc-t-ceo-randall-stephenson-q2-2018-results-earnings-call-transcript?page=8

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4189949-t-inc-2018-q2-results-earnings-call-slides

Public Wi-Fi can play a key role in driving ubiquitous connectivity and digital inclusion in India, as explored in an Analysys Mason report  – ‘Accelerating connectivity through public Wi-Fi: Early lessons from the railway Wi-Fi project.’

Despite fast increases in number of people connected (316 million at the end of 2017, compared to 200 million the previous year), mobile broadband penetration in India stood at only 31% at the end of 2017, still significantly behind many of India’s peers. The report, prepared through the lens of Google and Railtel Public Wi-Fi project, support the Government’s ambition under the draft NDCP to reach 5 million access points in 2020 and 10 million in 2022, to provide an all-pervasive coverage and internet connectivity, for 600 million Indians.

David Abecassis, partner at Analysys Mason, said: “In the last few years, India has made significant progress in driving mobile data usage, thanks to improved networks, and low cost data. But to really achieve the connected India vision, India will need to further invest in developing public Wi-Fi as a complement to mobile and fiber broadband.”

According to Abecassis, the Google and RailWire project to deploy high speed Wi-Fi across 400 stations has shown that there was a technical and operational solution to providing high-quality public Wi-Fi to millions of Indians nationwide, on affordable terms.

“The success of this rollout and Reliance Jio’s 80,000 public Wi-Fi access points as of mid-2017 provided valuable insights in further developing public Wi-Fi as a service that can truly achieve the Digital India vision,” he added.

The report further outlines an opportunity to develop a wider connectivity ecosystem with Public Wi-Fi as a key component, which can not only benefit users and wireless ISPs, but also telecom service providers, handset manufacturers and venue owners.  ISPs  can benefit by monetizing demand for faster mobile broadband and higher data volumes on their networks, as people get used to fast speeds and ubiquitous connectivity.

Analysis Mason found that around 100 million people would be willing to spend an additional USD 2 to 3 billion per year on handsets and cellular mobile broadband services, as a result of experiencing fast broadband on public Wi-Fi. In addition to driving productivity improvements from high speed Wi-Fi for the overall economy, public Wi-Fi can also translate into tangible benefits to GDP, by around USD 20 billion between 2017-19 and at least  billion per annum thereafter.

References:

http://www.analysysmason.com/Research/Content/Reports/public-wifi-to-enable-40-million-new-users-jul18

Google’s Internet Access for Emerging Markets – Managed WiFi Network for India Railways

4G (LTE and LTE Advanced) speeds have increased all over the world in the last year.  In the U.S., PC Mag wrote:

Peak speeds have jumped from the 200Mbps range to the 300Mbps range, average download speeds have bumped up by 10Mbps or more, and latency has dropped by 10ms. That’s an impressive change in one year, and it continues the trend of improvement that we’ve seen over the past several years of testing.

As we get to a world where we can assume 20Mbps or higher download speeds on 4G in most cities, other questions arise: Where are those speeds most consistent? Where is the network most responsive, especially when you’re downloading pages made of many small files?

Our tests cover data speeds and reliability; we don’t make voice calls. But our awards for data service apply more and more to voice, too. All of the carriers other than Sprint now use voice-over-LTE, piping their voice calls through their data networks. So the reliability of those LTE data networks translates into the reliability of your HD voice calls, as well.

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In Southeast Asia (including Japan, but not China except for Hong Kong), Seoul and Singapore are the fastest 4G cities, according to a regional ranking of major cities from OpenSignal.  An analysis of 12 cities in the region shows that Seoul recorded an average 4G speed of nearly 50Mbps, with Singapore close behind.

Four cities demonstrated 4G speeds of over 25Mbps – Taipei, Tokyo, Yangon and Ho Chi Minh. The latter cities have benefited from having launched 4G just two years ago, which OpenSignal said suggests that they have not yet filled their networks to the extent that speeds have started to decline.

The final six cities examined all had speeds at or below the global average of 16.9Mbps. Hong Kong was highest among this grouping, followed by Kuala Lumpur, Manila, Bangkok, Phnom Penh and Jakarta.

OpenSignal noted that Southeast Asian operators are focusing on improving coverage over speed.   Singapore topped the list for average 4G upload speed at 15.4Mbps, followed by Seoul and Yangon. But the gap between the fastest and slowest upload speed was only around 10Mbps, with even the slowest cities in the region, Phnom Penh and Jakarta, averaging 4G upload speeds of 4.9 Mbps.

As 4G connections are far superior to 3G connections, Southeast Asia’s wireless network operators seem intent on making LTE services accessible to the vast majority of their customers before they turn their attention to raw speed.