Showing posts with label Network Infrastructure. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Network Infrastructure. Show all posts

Friday 9 February 2024

Resilient Timing for Critical National Infrastructure

Critical infrastructure requires precise timing to operate. This reliance makes the infrastructure vulnerable to disruptions in timing that can be either intentional or unintentional. Intentional disruptions can be caused by GNSS jamming or spoofing or network attacks.. Unintentional disruptions are usually caused by equipment failures or acts of nature.

Back in April 2022, Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS) hosted a webinar on this topic, a precursor to the Annual Workshop on Synchronization and Timing Systems (WSTS). The webinar featured top industry experts delivering insight into the latest techniques for adding resilience and robustness to timing infrastructure. It covered the most critical topics in timing resilience, including:

  • Redundancy
  • Holdover
  • Management
  • Monitoring
  • Alternative reference time sources

Examples address networks used for critical industry applications such as:

  • Power grids
  • Telecommunications
  • Finance systems
  • Broadcast/media

The video of the webinar as follows:

Experts participating in the webinar and their presentations are as follows:

Please feel free to share other useful resources on this topic in comments.

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Thursday 6 April 2023

ETSI's Summit on Sustainability: ICT Standards for a Greener World

The ETSI Summit on Sustainability - How ICT developments and standards can enable sustainability and have a positive impact on society, took place on 30 March 2023 and focused on the key role of the ICT industry and related standardization activities to support Green initiatives. The event brought a large and global audience of over 220 stakeholders including operators, solution providers, policy makers and standards bodies or fora working on the topic.

A multitude of presentations including two interactive panel sessions, rhythmed the day and succeeded to make it a highly interactive Summit, pointing out challenges and how ICT can be both the problem and the solution.

The opening session examined the sustainability challenges and global green initiatives from numerous global standards bodies and fora. One of the suggested actions was to adopt ESG (Environmental Social Governance) goals as an integral part of the company’s objectives. Another highlight from the session was the need for standards work on the measuring and reporting of “avoided emissions,” that is being covered by ongoing work in ETSI. Feedback from the audience pointed out that it would be beneficial to further investigate the balance of ICT deployments vs real needs. Do we really need to endlessly deploy new technologies, when exiting ones serve the need?

The following are presentations from the welcome address and session 1:

The second session focused on the role of ICT in sustainability and was animated by two panels. The first one addressed the operators’ objectives and their plans for sustainability. The second one dealt with various initiatives being taken by solutions providers to meet the needs expressed by the operators and society as a whole. Suggested actions emerging from the debate included putting sustainability criteria in the procurement phase towards the vendors and enhance collaboration between operators, to share their common requirements and provide them to the supply chain ecosystem. In an animated exchange between the Panellists and the audience it was highlighted that there is an urgent need to reduce energy consumption, extend the lifecycles of ICT equipment and systematically recycle and repurpose in order to reduce ICT waste.

The following are presentations from session 2:

  • Session 02 - The Role of ICT in Sustainability: The session comprises two interactive panel sessions examining 1) Operators objectives and plans for Sustainability and 2) several initiatives being taken by solutions providers to meet those objectives. Session Chaired by David Boswarthick, ETSI
    • Operators Panel Moderated by Anita Dohler, NGMN Alliance e.V.: The purpose of this panel is to examine what are the sustainability plans, challenges & priorities for Operators
      • Saima Ansari, Deutsche Telekom
      • P. Balaji, Vodafone Idea
      • Marc Grant, AT&T
      • Luca Pesando, TIM
    • Solution Providers Panel Moderated by Joe Barrett, GSA, Global Mobile Suppliers Association - The purpose is to examine what the current solutions and remaining challenges on Sustainability are.

The afternoon opened with an  overview of ETSI, 3GPP and oneM2M activities supporting technologies for sustainability. One of the presentations highlighted that ICT should initially focus its own environmental impacts and consider digital sobriety as it is recognized that the cleanest energy is the one that is not consumed.

The following are presentations from session 3:

The summit concluded with a dynamic exchange around what more telecoms can do to move forward in the right direction. ICT and specifically data centres create a significant carbon footprint, and there was a call to use the ISO Net Zero guidelines in order to develop sustainable strategies. The industry should adopt an eco-design (sustainability by design) approach and seek to have products that are energy efficient, with longer life cycles, recyclable and repairable.

The following are presentations from session 4:

As a conclusion it was agreed that ICT is part of the sustainability problem and must seek to reduce its own emissions, whilst at the same time ICT is certainly part of the solution and should be applied to other domains in order to help them reach their own sustainability goals. As a first step, making ICT more sustainable should be the #01 priority for the industry today and ETSI groups TC EE (environmental engineering), TC ATTM (access, terminal and multiplexing) and ISG OEU (operational energy efficiency for users) are currently providing the standards to enable this transition to greener digital technologies.

Event Wrap-Up / Conclusions is available here.

Should you wish to learn more about the summit, all of the presentations including the conclusion slides are available here.

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Monday 14 December 2020

Huawei's Power Digitalization 2025 Summit


Back in October, Huawei held Better World Summit 2020 (a.k.a. "Win-Win Future" Global Online Summit). The theme of this online summit was "Power Digitalization 2025”. Experts and operators shared their ideas, vision and challenges. The following summary was shared by Huawei:

Today, how should global operators respond to opportunities and challenges brought by changes in the digital world, under the rapid development of digital technology and digital economy.

“Energy, as the foundation of the digital world, has become a key part and an important point of competitiveness in the digital economy.” Zhou Taoyuan, President of Digital Power Product Line, Huawei, pointed out that “The entire industry needs to attach greater importance to energy”

With the rapid development of emerging technologies such as 5G, cloud, AI, big data, and the IoT, a digital transformation has kicked off, opening the digital age where things are sensing, connected, and intelligent, "ubiquitous Connected, omnipresent intelligence" is becoming a reality. This has thrown the development of 5G and big data centers into the spotlight. But at the same time, the large-scale and rapid construction of 5G and data centers have brought huge challenges to energy infrastructure, such as increasing energy consumption, long construction periods, and high operation and maintenance costs.

“Pay-as-you-go model is becoming more popular in many countries, as data center owners are looking to a decrease their investment and turn their Capex into Opex. And that goes also for a number of other services as part of running and maintaining data center.” Lilia Severina,Global Major Accounts Director of Uptime Institute,talked about the insights into data center trends at the meeting. “Existing site energy facility cannot meet the power demands of 5G sites. There is a pressing need for reform and innovation in this area.Digitization,intelligent and integrated 5G power system enable faster, more affordable, and simpler 5G network deployment.” Liu Baochang, Deputy Director of Information Energy Department, China Mobile Group Design Institute Co., Ltd, expressed his opinion on the development trend and insights of site power in the 5G era.

Violaine Petit, Sales and Marketing VP of CRT Informatique, shared an interesting case about building data centers of CRT in a castle.“CRT did not just want to build something regular. We wanted to be different. We also wanted to invest in a meaningful project. Based on our business development and rejuvenating the castle, CRT successfully deployed two data centers in the castle to meet the dynamic digital development requirements of government and enterprise users. It can be said that the castle data center not only expands CRT's business boundary, but also can protects the country's cultural heritage, can be said to be two birds with one stone.”

Today, people lead a convenient life because of development of science and technology, while they also worry about the environment. How do we transit towards a net-zero carbon economy? Alberto Carrillo Pineda, Director of Science Based Targets, CDP, has his own view. “This includes changes in policies, technologies, economic structures and patterns of production and consumption, but the most important thing is that we change the way we live today. One of the changes is energy transition. Transitioning from fossil-based to clean and renewable energy and phasing out CO2 emissions in other parts of our economy.”

Zhou Taoyuan said, “Huawei integrates traditional power technologies and digital technologies to achieve power digitalization. In this way, we can use ‘Bit to manage Watt’, and provide simple, green, smart, and reliable digital power solutions to solve challenges faced by traditional power industry. ”

Fang Liangzhou, the Chief Marketing Officer of Huawei Digital Power Product Line, Huawei, said“Huawei uses a target network architecture to guide the planning, construction, O&M, and operation of digital power infrastructure, driving the rapid development of the digital economy. Concerning site power, Huawei proposes implementing 5G without increasing site power-related OPEX, and aims to reduce costs from three aspects as well as tapping into new sources. As for data centers, Huawei proposes a simple, green, smart, and reliable next-generation data center facility that uses the "four reconstructions" initiative to tackle issues such as long data center construction period, high energy consumption, and challenging O&M.”

In the future, Huawei will keep cooperating with global operators to face the challenges and seize the opportunities brought by the digital world. Huawei aims to inject green power into operators and help them grow business sustainably in the future. 

Surprisingly the only video I could find is on Periscope, embedded in the tweet above. You can jump on to the relevant sessions using the timestamps as follows

0:01:20 1. Opening Speech - Zhou Taoyuan, President of Digital Power Product Line, Huawei

0:07:14 2. Building a Net-zero Emissions Economy - Alberto Carrillo Pineda, Director of Science Based Targets, CDP

0:17:18 3. Trend and Insight of Site Power Facility in 5G era - Liu Baochang, Deputy Director of Information Energy Department, China Mobile Group Design Institute Co., Ltd

0:31:30 4. Perspective and Practice of Lithium Battery Application - José Pedro Nascimento, Network Director, Altice Portugal

0:40:10 5. Network Energy-Efficient Operation in EM Market - Li Yao, Deputy Director of NOC, China Mobile Pakistan

0:51:40 6. Trend and Insight of Data Center Facility - Lilia Severina, Global Major Accounts Director of Uptime Institute

1:10:30 7. Prefabricated Modular Data Center Case Sharing - Operator customers

1:16:20 8. Partnering To Power The Digital Datacenter - Violaine Petit, Sales and Marketing VP of CRT Informatique

1:25:10 9. New Era, New Power. PowerX 2025 Target Network - Dr. Fang Liangzhou, CMO of Digital Power Product Line, Huawei

Let me know what you think.

Monday 23 November 2020

Radio Design Webinar: Optimising Your 700 MHz Deployments

 


Radio Design, the award-winning market leader in the provision of wireless infrastructure sharing solutions and RF filter systems, hosted a webinar last week focused on the deployment of the 700 MHz frequency band. This new 700 MHz spectrum is in great demand across the world, mainly due to its long anticipated use as low band 5G spectrum. The webinar explores the potential of this band, as well as how to prepare for potential challenges when deploying.

For people who are familiar with our trainings, we divide the spectrum into three layers, the coverage layer, the capacity layer and the high-throughput layer. 700 MHz is the most popular coverage layer spectrum worldwide.

The slide above from the webinar talks of the recent Austrian 5G Spectrum auction that we blogged about. See tweet below for details

In the webinar, slides and video embedded below, Radio Design’s founder – Eric Hawthorn – kicks things off by analysing the benefits of deploying the 700 MHz band in the real world, before passing over to Global Engineering Director – Steve Shaw – who explores some of the technical problems which can arise, as well as some of the solutions. Last but not least, COO and co-owner of Keima – Iris Barcia – provides her insight into the benefits of deploying the 700 MHz band.

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Wednesday 27 March 2019

Mobile Network Infrastructure Sharing in Japan over Electric Power Infrastructure

On the 3G4G Small Cells Blog, I have written about the Autralian operator Telstra trialing small cells on Tasmania’s power poles to fix mobile black spots. This looks like a similar initiative in Japan but at a much larger scale.

KDDI have an announcement in Japanese here but Rakuten has one in English:

TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power COmpany) Power Grid, Incorporated, KDDI CORPORATION, SoftBank Corp. and Rakuten Mobile Network, Inc. announced that the four companies have reached an agreement to collaborate on trials of base station site and equipment sharing utilizing TEPCO PG’s utility poles and other electric power infrastructure, ahead of the introduction of 5th generation mobile communications systems (5G) in Japan. The trials are due to be begin in the first half of FY2019.

5G utilizes high frequency bands in order to enable higher speeds and greater capacity. As a result, the number of base stations required for 5G is expected to be larger than for 4G. The growing number of base stations not only creates difficulties in securing installation locations, but also calls for consideration on the impact too many antennas and other equipment might have on the landscape.

TEPCO PG has been working together with KDDI to explore the shared utilization of utility poles and other electric power infrastructure and base station equipment between mobile network operators, and as preparations are now complete, the companies are set to begin the trials using actual equipment.

The trials, which SoftBank and Rakuten Mobile Network are also set to join, aim to verify the feasibility of location and equipment sharing between mobile network operators. Specifically, the trials will evaluate the equipment, layout, workability, serviceability and the level of radio interference resulting from sharing the antenna for base station installations on utility poles. There are also plans to expand the number of companies participating in the trials to include other organizations planning to utilize 5G in the future.

Sharing utility poles among a number of mobile network operators makes it possible to flexibly build out base stations in urban areas and rapidly launch services in rural areas. It is also expected to address the issue of securing locations for base stations and lowers the impact of base station equipment on the landscape.

Through the trials, TEPCO PG, KDDI, SoftBank and Rakuten Mobile Network aim to reduce the infrastructure construction costs and contribute to the smooth nationwide introduction of 5G.

The picture on the top is from KDDI press release, translated using Google Translate.


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Sunday 10 February 2019

Theoretical Throughput Calculation of FDD 5G New Radio (NR)


A nice video by Peter Clarke on 5G NR throughput calculation for FDD. Right now it's only in the video form but will hopefully be available as a tool on his excellent website here. A tool for 4G throughput calculation is available here.




Related Links: