10 white-hot technologies: a survival guide to business network planning

Telecommunications Americas, April, 2005 by Sean Buckley, Bob Wallace

With 10 white-hot technologies sizzling away, the heat is clearly on service providers when it comes to enhancing and transitioning their current infrastructures to form the network of the future. Drawing critical input, analysis and perspective from the industry's top technology minds, we've assembled a survival guide for network operators looking beyond just hanging on--to finding a path to profitability.

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1 OTA: Managing the Experience

Today's wireless network is not just about the call anymore. While voice is still the dominant application, carriers are offering a dizzying array of new data and even video services directly to the handset. With the adoption of increasingly complex data and converged services, ensuring that the services that are accessed by the handsets and devices in the field work properly is of paramount importance. They also need to be upgraded remotely when a new service is introduced.

Enter wireless OTA (over the air) technology. As its name implies, OTA will enable a service provider and its handset partners to send automatic upgrades for the latest application, or even fix potential bugs that might have unintentionally been shipped from the factory to the dealer. To serve this growing demand, an emerging group of vendors, including Bitfone, Innopath (formerly DoOnGo), Intellsync and Red Bend Software are actively pursuing this market opportunity with vigor.

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However, don't think for a minute that this is just a flash in the pan idea set up by a bunch of techno-savvy vendors. OTA has benefits to both service providers and the handset manufacturing industry. Already, a number of major handset manufacturers (LG, Motorola, Sony/Ericsson and Siemens) have begun integrating OTA functions into their latest phones, while European and U.S.-based operators are beginning to use OTA as a service differentiator.

"The firmware over-the-air (FOTA) market has struggled to prove it is more than a nice-to-have, with large deployments limited to Japan and Korea," said Steve Wallage, research director, mobile software, in a 451 Group Impact Report. "However, operators such as Sprint and Orange have now gone public with their support for FOTA updating, and most handset vendors, although not Nokia or Samsung, are signed up with a FOTA vendor.

"It is clear that many European and U.S. operators are going through extensive trials of FOTA updating, driven by more sophisticated terminals, security concerns and 3G," added Wallage.

Sprint PCS, for one, is using OTA for both mass market phone upgrades as well as the foundation for its Sprint Managed Mobility Services offering.

Currently in trials with various enterprise customers, Sprint's managed mobility, which will complement the operator's EVDO network rollout, provides end-to-end management of each device that an enterprise customer would use. Specifically, these services would include remote security, configuration, provisioning, asset and billing management.

2 Copper Pair Bonding: Bigger Bandwidth

During the early days of DSL, the saying "turning copper into gold" was popular. Since then, the notion of turning copper into gold has gone through multiple iterations to increase the rate and reach of DSL. While not entirely a new concept, one area that's gaining momentum is multipair copper bonding.

While it's challenging to get an international standard on anything in place, late last year the ITU in conjunction with ATIS, ratified the G.BOND standard. Simply put, the G.BOND G.998 standard series increases the data rate in proportion to the number of pairs that are bonded. This means that applicable to all DSL technologies, the standard series allows a service provider to multiplex various data streams via ATM transport (G.998.1), Ethernet transport (G.998.2) or TDM (G.998.3) over multiple DSL links. Thus, two bonded lines will double upstream and downstream data rates.

Beyond G.BOND, one of the most anticipated standards is VDSL2. Leveraging the same discrete multitone line coding as VDSL, ADSL2+ and ADSL, VDSL2 will offer a maximum downstream speed of 100 Mbps, while also overcoming the loop length drawbacks of its predecessor.

The proposed VDSL2 standard also wipes out VDSL's shortcomings by broadening the spectrum allocation from 12 MHz to 30 MHz, as well as incorporating Trellis coding and multipair bonding.

As expected, there's no shortage of approaches from the vendor community. Service providers such as SBC and BellSouth have both mandated a FTTN/FTTC architecture for video delivery by utilizing Alcatel's ISAM 7330 product. This device provides a path to VDSL2 as the standard comes online. In addition to Alcatel, there's a growing group of emerging solutions vendors including Actelis, Hatteras and Aktino that are implementing VDSL/VDSL2 and various bonding techniques.

"Although ADSL2+ will be the primary DSL technology for the next two years, VDSL2 is the future of DSL technology," said Matt Davis, director of the Yankee Group's broadband access technologies group. "The jockeying for standards specification among chipset vendors such as Broadcom, Texas Instruments, Centillium, Globespan Conexant and Ikanos Communications, reflects recent investments made in ADSL and VDSL."