BT to Offer 300 Mbps by end of 2013

Sometimes slowly, fixed network access speeds are climbing towards a gigabit standard. 

BT now says it will launch a 300-Mbps service in about 50 exchanges by the end of 2013. Those exchanges already have fiber to home networks in place. 

Existing customers on the fiber to home network will also be able to upgrade to the faster speeds by switching to the £50 "Unlimited" package, which comes without any usage limits and is free from traffic management. 

Are Mobile Broadband and Smart Phone Internet Distinct Market Segments?

Strictly speaking, observers consider the use of dongles as "mobile broadband," while use of smart phones for Internet access is considered something else.

In the U.K. market, for example, about five percent of surveyed respondents say they use mobile networks for Internet access to their PCs. 

About 33 percent say they use their smart phones for Internet access. Of course, many smart phones feature personal hotspot features, making the distinction fuzzy, at best. 

But it always is possible to identify "market segments" that some might say are distinct, and others believe are parts of a single market. Are triple-play services a distinct market from the markets for constituent services?

Is business high-speed access a different market from consumer high-speed access? Is 3G data access a different market from 4G data access?

The answers are more difficult because there always are some customers who use their services as though the choices (mobile broadband or smart phone access versus fixed network access, for example) are in fact clear substitutes.

In other words, some consumers make their own decisions about what products are functional substitutes, and which are not, even when regulators and service providers consider the products separate markets. 

Ofcom, for example, does not consider fixed wireless access a functional substitute for fixed high speed access supplied by either cable companies or over BT's network, since Ofcom is largely concerned with wholesale offers. 

And fixed wireless networks are not especially well suited to wide scale wholesale operations, Ofcom believes. "Deployment of broadband services using fixed wireless access so far has been limited to specific geographic areas or specific circumstances," Ofcom says. 

"In the short term, given the costs involved in providing fixed wireless access and the lower quality of the service, it is unlikely that an increase in the price of wholesale broadband products will lead a substantial number of CPs (communications providers) to switch to fixed wireless access at the wholesale level," Ofcom says. 

The point is that although there are reasons to consider mobile broadband as a distinct product from smart phone Internet access, the boundaries are fuzzy, and likely will become more fuzzy, as personal hotspot capabilities obliterate the differences in capability. 

Mobile and Autos are Made for Each Other, But App Providers Will Make Most of the Money

Five years from now, there will be over 60 million connected cars on the road globally, according to estimates from the GSMA.

Car-focused telecom, hardware and software services will drive some 40 billion euros ($51 billion) in annual revenue by 2018, Business Intelligence estimates.

Pandora, for example, is now being used in 2.5 million cars and 100 car models through one of its 23 partnerships with auto brands and eight partnerships with stereo manufacturers.

But some things do not seem to change. As with other ecosystems, ranging from electricity to water to roads, most of the ecosystem revenue is earned by third parties that build their own businesses on top of the infrastructure.

App providers will earn most of the money, a story by now familiar to service providers of all types.

Voice over LTE Getting Traction?

Service providers often face business model issues when transitioning from an older network to a new network, especially when the new networks have to support legacy applications. Consider the case of a telco upgrading its digital subscriber line network to a fiber to home or fiber to neighborhood network.

The business problem often is that capital has to be invested to support applications that offer no incremental value, or little perceived incremental value, over the older network versions. Fiber to the home offers faster speeds than DSL, but many consumers often do not see the need for the higher speeds, initially. Stranded capital results, in other words.

Up to this point, Long Term Evolution support for voice has been a similar case in point. Service providers have been relying on workable 3G voice while using new LTE bandwidth for Internet-based services.

Though there arguably are new features supported by Voice over Long Term Evolution (VoLTE), there have been some technology issues to be overcome. But an equally important issue is that it has not been clear any incremental revenue can be earned by deploying VoLTE.

To be sure, it is simpler, and more elegant, to deliver voice using the same network used for Internet access.

Some also believe VoLTE will offer additional features, compared to legacy forms of mobile voice. What operators are hoping for is that a combination of VoLTE, high definition voice and Rich Communications Suite will create a differentiated voice value proposition.

Also, at some point, supporting voice on LTE networks will allow operators to decommission the 3G networks, freeing up spectrum.

But as a practical matter, lots of mobile service providers have opted to rely on 3G for voice, using 4G primarily for Internet access operations.

"Operators are using another solution called circuit-switched fallback CSFB, and my understanding is that has worked better than operators had dared hope for,” said Mark Newman, chief research officer at Informa Telecoms & Media.

Some argue VoLTE adoption has been slower than anticipated in part because 3G voice still works, and because shifting more data access operations to 4G has the effect of freeing up more bandwidth on the 3G networks as well.

Stéphane Téral, Infonetics Research principal analyst, argues that VoLTE adoption will accelerate now that SK Telecom has shown how well VoLTE works in a national deployment.

Infonetics Research now expects 12 commercial VoLTE networks and eight million VoLTE subscribers by the end of 2013, with about three-quarters of those in Asia Pacific region.

At the same time, any number of observers might say there remains the possibility that over the top mobile voice could have bigger impact.

“While Skype dominates the over-the-top mobile VoIP space, the market is seeing other applications such as Fring, KakaoTalk, Line, Nimbuzz, WeChat and Viber gain in strength,” said  Diane Myers, Infonetics Research principal analyst.

“But the fact remains that most over the top mobile VoIP providers are making very little money per user,” said Myers. “In 2012, the average revenue per user was a meager US$7.13 annually.” That is an unsustainable business model, if not augmented in other ways, she said.

The number of global OTT mobile VoIP subscribers shot up more than 550% in 2012, to over 640 million, and is expected to approach the 1 billion mark in 2013, Infonetics Research estimates.

But Infonetics Research also projects the number of VoLTE subscribers to grow at a 145 percent compound annual growth rate from 2012 to 2017.

U.K. Mobile Ops Get Permission to Refarm 3G Spectrum for 4G

Though it might not have immediate implications, U.K. mobile service providers will be able to “refarm” their 2G and 3G spectrum for Long Term Evolution 4G, without applying for specific permission to do so, under new rules promulgated by regulator Ofcom.

Previously, only EE (and 3, which purchased some spectrum from EE, but has not yet been able to deploy that spectrum) had been given permission to conduct such redeployment operations, though all the major operators won new spectrum in the LTE auctions as well.

Under an Ofcom rule, EE was allowed to repurpose its 1.8GHz GSM frequencies in 2012, allowing EE to launch LTE before its rivals could acquire spectrum and build new networks.

The current 900 MHz and 1800 MHz licenses held by Vodafone and Telefónica

permit the use of 2G and 3G technologies.

The 1800 MHz licences held by EE and 3 now allow use of 4G technologies as well as 2G and 3G.

The new move by Ofcom moves away from the specific licensing rules that specified not only the purposes for which spectrum could be used but also which technologies (air interfaces) could be employed as well.

The new rules are more flexible, and allow carriers to make business choices about how to deploy networks, rather than being restricted to specific network options.

5G Will Quite Different from 4G

Will fifth generation networks be a “network of networks” or “heterogeneous network” rather than a single air interface on the model of 3G or 4G. That would be a big shift.

Traditionally, the difference between one generation of mobile networks and the next has been the air interface protocols. Now Ericsson thinks the key differentiator will be the ability to flexibly operate a virtual network that integrates many different air interfaces, protocols, frequencies and network types.

At least in part, Ericsson takes that view because of some differences between past next generation networks and future networks, namely the differences in speed and spectrum.

In the past, new mobile generations are typically assigned new frequency bands and wider spectral bandwidth per frequency channel (1G up to 30 kHz, 2G up to 200 kHz, 3G up to 5 MHz, and 4G up to 40 MHz).

The problem is that physical availability of spectrum usable for longer-range mobile apps is growing limited. And spectrum means bandwidth. 

At least so far, with the 4G standard calling for peak rates of about 1 Gbps, 5G will have a tough time offering “faster speed” as its distinguishing feature.

That means suppliers will be looking at battery life, coverage and throughput flexibility and the ability to match apps and device requirements in an affordable way.

Some new spectrum will be made available. Spectrum in the 900 MHz, 1800 MHz, 2100 MHz and 2600 MHz bands will be used for new LTE networks and HSPA network capacity upgrades.

LTE deployments using 700 MHz and 800 MHz spectrum will be added as well.

Small cell deployments will play a vital role in high-capacity hotspots, and the spectrum for that could come from the 3500 MHz band, where there is as much as 400 MHz being used for fixed broadband wireless access and satellite services, Nokia Siemens Networks has said.

All of that points up the importance of spectrum sharing and other new methods of creating new bandwidth.

Unlicensed bands such as 5 GHz or 60 GHz will offer additional traffic offload options for best-effort traffic of less critical applications without quality requirements.

The result is that up to 1.5 GHz of spectrum can be made available within this decade, Nokia Siemens Networks believes. At least 1 GHz of that will be traditional exclusive spectrum, while new spectrum-sharing techniques can unlock more spectrum for mobile broadband.

So there are lots of good reasons why Ericsson thinks a 5G network will be quite different from earlier mobile network generations.

In addition to phones and PCs, game controllers, TVs and other devices people use, there will be millions of machine-to-machine devices and sensors also supported by the 5G network. And the point is that no single network is best for all apps and devices.

“The long-term outcome of this trend is what we refer to as 5G: the set of seamlessly integrated radio technologies” that collectively, integrated seamlessly, will represent a fifth generation of wireless networks, Ericsson argues in a white paper.

One huge assumption is that there will be a massive increase in the number of devices that must communicate. In the future, the roughly five billion human-centric connected devices are expected to be surpassed between 10-fold and 100-fold by communicating machines including surveillance cameras, smart-city, smart-home and smart-grid devices, and connected sensors.

So there is a massive scale issue: a transition from five billion devices to 50 billion or perhaps even 500 billion connected devices.

A thousand-fold increase in required bandwidth is the other huge assumption. Beyond 2020, wireless communication systems will have to support more than 1,000 times today’s traffic volume, Ericsson also argues.

But bandwidth requirements will vary. It is possible many M2M apps and devices will not require lots of bandwidth, while consumer apps might require hundreds of megabits and some shared-use locations will require gigabits.

Likewise, latency and reliability requirements will vary as well. So it will make sense to match requirements to network segments and capabilities to match use cases to cost and network requirement parameters.

So 5G might be radically different from earlier generations of mobile networks. First of all, should 5G develop as Ericsson foresees, it will be the first network that actually is a network of networks, not a single air interface. The complexity of such an undertaking also suggests 5G will not arrive in fully-formed fashion as soon as typically is the case for mobile networks, which tend to be replaced about every decade.

Orange Expands "Smart Parking" Effort

Orange has teamed up with Streetline, a U.S.-based company that provides smart parking solutions, to develop a set of connected services embedded in the vehicle or dedicated to drivers. 

With 1,300,000 regulated parking places in France, the smart parking market is very promising," said Nathalie Leboucher, Head of the Smart Cities Programme at Orange.

Parks Associates projects that by 2017, 17.6 million consumers will subscribe to embedded connected vehicle services such as General Motors’ OnStar and Chrysler’s UConnect Access.

The international research firm predicts 47 percent of all new vehicles sold in the U.S. will have embedded mobile communications by 2017.

[FR] Orange Business Services and Streetline... by orange_business