Redefining the wireless Quality of Experience (QoE) with LTE

Ken Wirth, President 4G/LTE Networks of Alcatel-Lucent showed us the following video in the LTE World Summit 2010. Its been available on Youtube for quite some time but I missed it before:

LTE Demos at CES 2010 from Alcatel Lucent

Vodafone Access Gateway (VAG) femtocell setup

I blogged about ALU and Vodafone Femto earlier. Here is an Interesting Video showing unboxing, setting up and using the Femtocell.

Improved LTE backhaul via Alcatel-Lucent's 10G GPON

“The PON vendor landscape got interesting in the fourth quarter of 2008, with Alcatel-Lucent, Motorola, and Tellabs each grabbing 10% of worldwide revenue share, behind perennial leader Mitsubishi and the now number-two player, Fiberhome. In the fast-growing GPON segment, front-runner Alcatel-Lucent is being seriously challenged by Motorola, which increased its quarterly GPON revenue share 5 points in 4Q08. Meanwhile, the EPON segment, long dominated by Mitsubishi and Hitachi, is seeing some action as Sumitomo, Fiberhome, and Dasan Networks all moved up.” - Jeff Heynen, Directing Analyst, Broadband and Video, Infonetics Research

I have blogged a bit about GPON and Backhaul before. Click on the links if you havent seen the posts before.

During this year's Broadband World Forum Europe, Alcatel-Lucent not only shows that it masters next-generation wireline and wireless access. The company also highlights that Long Term Evolution (LTE) and next-generation passive optical networking (PON) technologies converge seamlessly for a smooth delivery of the most demanding, high-speed broadband services.

The live demonstration in Alcatel-Lucent's Paris demo center shows LTE's capability to deal with multiple concurrent video streams and fast channel change - and is complemented by a high-capacity 10G GPON backhaul solution for future-safe backhaul via fiber.

Alcatel-Lucent is at the forefront of developing cutting-edge technologies long before they are standardized. Even though the 10G GPON standards are still being ratified, Alcatel-Lucent shows it is ready - when needed - to meet the request for higher capacities in its customers' access networks.

Alcatel-Lucent is engaged in over 95 FTTH projects around the world, over 80 of which are with GPON (as-of Q2, 2009). In Gartner's latest FTTH Magic Quadrant assessment, Alcatel-Lucent was positioned in the leaders quadrant for the fiber-to-the-home space.

Alcatel-Lucent is also opening up details of its optical management and control interfaces (OMCIs) in a bid to help create a true multi-vendor gigabit passive optical networking (GPON) infrastructure.

Announced at this year's Broadband World Forum Europe in Paris, the first version of the OMCI Interoperability Implementer's Guide is aimed at helping other optical network terminal vendors integrate their hardware with Alcatel-Lucent's.

LTE Buzz from Alcatel Lucent

Alcatel-Lucent has produced a LTE Widget that provides real-time LTE news and information direct on your PC. Very useful if you want to keep a watch on breaking news and information. The widget can be downloaded from their website here.

Greener Base stations are must for the future

Its while now since the launch of the femtocell, the small box in the home that links to the broadband network and provides a mini base station for 3G phones to improve coverage and provide some interesting new services.

UK certainly is positioned well in femtocells which are lead by two companies - ip.access in Cambridge and Ubiquisys in Swindon, UK. PicoChip in Bath is another company which is providing silicon for the vast majority of the 3G femtocell rollouts.

But there is now significant competition, both from new divisions of companies such as Pirelli, established telecoms companies such as Sagem and Alcatel-Lucent (who have joined together to provide the Vodafone femtocell) and large players such as Huawei of China which ships equipment to 60m broadband subscribers and is a major supplier to the Chinese mobile operators.

However there is new factor which start to develop from the past year or so, i.e the factor of energy costs. It’s not a secret for anybody how energy process has soared in the past few years and now the telecoms are getting affected by this as well. Energy costs, both to build and run mobile networks, are getting increasingly important. Operators use a phenomenal amount of power, 400GW - or 200,000 tons of carbon - and over half of this is on the radio access. While this seems a lot, this equates to 25kg per user, or the same as an hour's drive on the motorway.

There is now research in place in order to study the whole energy chain, from the carbon cost of building the base stations, macrocells and femtocells, to the running costs.

In my view after looking at the femtocells especially at the Green Radio at the Wireless2.0 conference in Bristol recently, it's not clear whether femtocells are a lower energy solution, even though they provide a way of filling in the network at lower cost for the operators. Having a mini base station in your home obviously brings the access point closer for the mobile phone and hence the power consumed may be less. Bit how much of this is true I don’t know.

There is no doubt that energy factor is going to have a significant impact on the design and manufacture of femtocells and traditional mobile phone cells. If, as expected, the market takes off with millions of devices, this is going to have a huge energy cost.

As mentioned by Nick Flaherty in his blog that the carbon emission will also be a challenge for the home grown suppliers to provide low energy solutions, both in operations and also in the manufacturing to provide truly green radio. And this will help the UK expertise and innovation drive green radio technologies and processes into the industry.

There is no choice for the companies to look for the alternative and green solution. As costs of deploying solar and wind power falls and energy costs rise, carriers have started looking toward green cell sites.

Once such company who is taking a lead in this prospect is Alcatel-Lucent. It’s planning to have alternative energy-powered cellsites matches that of electrically powered cell sites, which could prompt a new wave of solar-and wind-powered base stations, even in areas where an electrical connection is available. In my opinion there is no other way round as the cost of traditional energy is increasing manifolds (together with carbon emission), the price of green technology falls and networks become more efficient, using alternative energy to provide all or part of the energy at cell sites is becoming less prohibitive

Alcatel-Lucent has been working with alternative energy in wireless for five years, but it has deployed only 300 sites, mainly in Africa and the Middle East until now, which rely entirely on alternate fuels. But in the last year especially after the recent recession the alternative energy solution become a priority which resulted in a surge in interest in those technologies.

Every body in this credit crunch are finding means to cur the cost and the operators are looking to avoid the enormous costs of transporting diesel to their remote cell.

The recession has certainly given some momentum to the alternative energy cell sites and there is no doubt acceleration towards this genuine cause.

This is purely simple Economics as Electricity is a large part of an operator’s operational budget as it feeds massive quantities of power to a highly distributed network of cell sites to support not just the base station power amplifiers and radios on-site but also the air-conditioning units necessary to power them. The increase in energy costs is being largely offset with the increased power efficiencies of most vendors’ equipment. The huge site cabinets are now getting replaced with compact modular base stations, which not only consume less power but also require far less cooling. The current generation of equipment has cut power consumption between one-third and one-half. Many new radio systems also are coming equipped with energy-saving software, which powers down the base station during non-peak hours or when relatively few customers are on the cell.

Current economic climate and energy efficiency factor will definitely serve to promote green energy sooner rather than push it off to a later date. Furthermore as the market for alternative energy solutions grows in other industries the cost of the technology goes down for telecom, sending the price of solar panels and wind turbines down. Combining the above trend together with regulatory and political environments the alternative energy solution is imminently favorable as a green solution.

Nortel Acquisition and Ericsson Gameplan

Bankruptcy courts in Canada and the United States unanimously approved Nortel Networks Corp.'s request to sell its main wireless business to Swedish rival LM Ericsson.

The US$1.13-billion sale will deliver to the Swedish telecom firm Toronto-based Nortel's CDMA, or code division multiple-access technology, an older system, but one still widely deployed by mobile-phone carriers. CDMA is expected to continue to be in use in developing markets like Asia for the next several years.

However, the most lucrative portion of the sale, analysts say, comes in Nortel's long-term-evolution technology, or LTE. Nortel said it has spent as much as US$200-million annually developing the next-generation wireless gear that is expected to become the global standard in the future.

"Nortel still owns all of the LTE patents," Nortel counsel Derrick Tay said in court. Mr. Tay said Nortel owned some 5,500 patents. Of those, 600 were being "transferred" to Ericsson while none of the LTE intellectual property was being sold. Instead, Nortel will be licensing them to Ericsson, he said.

I am curious as to what does it mean by licensing the LTE patents considering the fact that Nortel is bankrupt. If the license period is something like say 99 years then it shouldnt really matter for Ericsson. I am not sure just making a guess.

Lynnette Luna, Fierce Wireless has a very interesting take on this:

Ericsson and Nokia, once the staunchest opponents of CDMA technology, found themselves in a bidding war for bankrupt Nortel's CDMA assets. The war ended on Friday with Ericsson on top and willing to pay $1.13 billion for most of Nortel's CDMA and LTE assets.

Ericsson had tried to make a go of it in the North American CDMA market following its purchase of Qualcomm's infrastructure business that was part of its IPR settlement with Qualcomm in 1999. It subsequently ended the business after failing to penetrate this market since Qualcomm didn't have much of an installed base. Nokia, now Nokia Siemens Networks, never tried to play in the North American CDMA market, and thus has a weak North American market share overall at around 5.5 percent.

However, Ericsson this year has made significant headway into the U.S. market, scoring a big LTE deal with Verizon--at the expense of Nortel--and winning a $5 billion CDMA outsourcing agreement with Sprint Nextel. Did it really need to spend $1.13 billion to gain more market share?

The answer is yes. Despite winning these two U.S. deals, the biggest criticism of Ericsson has been its lack of CDMA expertise--whether managing a network or migrating CDMA operators to LTE. Now it has both. Given the fact that Nortel's CDMA gear is in a significant portion of CDMA networks operating around the world, Ericsson now has a great story to tell. It needs that CDMA expertise to migrate customers from CDMA to LTE--especially since voice traffic will continue to run over CDMA networks while data gets routed over LTE for the foreseeable future.

For Ericsson, it's no longer about getting a foot in the door. It's about crushing the competition. Ericsson is looking forward to a future when both WCDMA and CDMA operators look to it to help them migrate to LTE. But as Ericsson CEO Carl-Henric Svanberg said on the conference call this morning, "CDMA will be the first markets to migrate to LTE so therefore it is important to us."

Meanwhile, a deal like this could be the nail in the coffin for some vendors. It's certainly not good news for NSN, which would have boosted its North American market share to 30 percent had it won the assets. And Chinese vendors ZTE and Huawei have been trying hard to make inroads into the North American market through CDMA. This deal certainly hampers those efforts.

And Alcatel-Lucent just saw its major competitor become significantly stronger. Alcatel-Lucent was the vendor with the better CDMA-to-LTE conversion story while Nortel was stuck in bankruptcy limbo.

Of course, it's not just about getting a stronger foothold in LTE. Nortel's CDMA business is a money-maker, and Ericsson executives on the call this morning said they believe the unit will continue to be profitable for the next few years as operators keep investing in their CDMA networks. There are actually operators looking to deploy CDMA EV-DO Rev. B. And don't forget the services market, a major growth engine for Ericsson. Ericsson said the deal will be earnings per share accretive within the first year.