Huawei Raises the Optical Stakes

BRUSSELS — Broadband World Forum Yoorup 2008 — Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. put its emphasis on platform capacity here in Brussels as it unveiled two new optical products and a GPON prototype that marked out its fiber access platform roadmap.

The bigger of the two new optical boxes, the OptiX OSN 8800, is something of a monster — a 1.28 Tbit/s DWDM switch that integrates 100 Gbit/s, 40 Gbit/s, ROADM, OTN (optical transport network) switching, and GMPLS (Generalized MPLS) and ASON (automatically switched optical network) control plane capabilities all in one. (An espresso-making function is believed to be on the product roadmap.)

The move pulls Huawei, which announced its 100 Gbit/s prototype in July, closer to some of its optical rivals such as Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU – message board), Nokia Siemens Networks , and Nortel Networks Ltd. (NYSE/Toronto: NT – message board), which have been regarded as more advanced in optical developments than the Chinese vendor. (See Huawei Touts 100G WDM, Verizon Goes Long(er) With 100-Gig, and Heavy Reading Homes In on Huawei.)

The company also unveiled a network edge optical aggregation box (in one- or two-rack-unit models), the OptiX OSN 1800, handling traffic from 2 Mbit/s to 10 Gbit/s.

Taking PON to the next level
Huawei also bigged up its role in the emerging GPON market by announcing a next-generation product prototype and talking about its FTTH success with some major European Tier 1 carriers.

The Chinese vendor claims its prototype is the “world’s first standard 10 Gbit/s GPON system” compliant with specifications from the Full Service Access Network (FSAN) group and built using commercial off-the-shelf components, with data rates of 10 Gbit/s downstream and 2.5 Gbit/s upstream. That, says Huawei’s VP of marketing Daniel Tang, would enable 100 Mbit/s broadband per user on a fiber shared by 64 end users.

The move clearly pitches Huawei up against AlcaLu and Ericsson, both of which have touted their own 10 Gbit/s GPON developments already this year. (See WDM-PON Faces 10G Challenge and GPON Gets a 10G Look.)

There is, though, no current timescale for when this development might be commercially available, and the technology has not yet been trialed by any potential customers.

But it’s not as if Huawei is short of European operators that might want to put the technology through its paces. The vendor is already working with Telefónica SA (NYSE: TEF – message board) on its fiber access service rollout, which is at its early stages in a few cities in Spain, and is also working with Telecom Italia SpA (NYSE: TI – message board) on its NGN2 FTTH and FTTB (fiber-to-the-building) developments. (See TI Uses Huawei for NGN.)

The vendor also says it’s engaged with Deutsche Telekom AG (NYSE: DT – message board), but Edward Zhou, director of European marketing, says it can’t currently talk in any detail about its fiber access engagement with the German incumbent.

And what of other next-generation broadband access developments? Will Huawei be joining the growing list of vendors developing WDM-PON systems? (See ADVA Unleashes WDM-PON, FT Lauds WDM-PON’s Potential, Nortel JV Buys WDM-PON Specialist, and Ericsson Joins Cost-Cutting WDM-PON Team.)

Tang says it’s “on the radar, we’re looking into it. We’re researching all the key technology threads to see which ones make commercial sense.”

Zhou adds that Huawei’s main aim is to ensure that its access platform is ready to accommodate any technology developments. “WDM-PON is just another way to get to the customer. The platform is the most important thing, not the interface,” he notes.

Nokia Siemens Dumps on GPON

BRUSSELS — Broadband World Forum Europe 2008 — Having decided to pull out of the GPON market, Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) is now taking very public pot shots at the passive optical access technology, claiming that it’s uneconomic to deploy and will be redundant by the time residential fiber access is widely deployed. (See ‘Run Away!’ Nokia Siemens Retreats From GPON and Nokia Siemens Confirms PON Plans .)

Outlining the company’s fixed broadband access strategy in Brussels this week, NSN’s chief technical officer Stephan Scholz told journalists and analysts that VDSL2 technology is mature enough to rival GPON in terms of bandwidth capabilities, and that GPON will be an outdated technology by the time fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) becomes a mass market in four or five years’ time.

By that time, carriers will be able to migrate straight to next-generation PON technology, namely wavelength division multiplexing-passive optical network (WDM-PON), making GPON redundant, believes NSN.

That’s why NSN is focusing on developing what it calls next-generation optical access (NGOA) technology, and has ditched its previous GPON approach. “We don’t believe we would have been able to get our investments back on GPON because we see there is a delay in GPON rollout… The current turmoil in the financial markets could further delay GPON,” stated Scholz.

Instead, NSN says “technology tricks” enable VDSL2 to deliver downstream bandwidth of up to 100 Mbit/s over 1 kilometer, which, believes NSN, is more than enough bandwidth to cope with any service mix likely to be offered in the near future.

When asked about the “tricks,” Scholz said that didn’t mean NSN was looking to introduce proprietary enhancements to VDSL2. Instead, he said NSN is working with chip vendors to introduce ways to reduce crosstalk on copper access lines, using technology such as dynamic spectrum management (DSM).

Scholz also claimed, using statistics gleaned from a recent report published by the Broadband Stakeholder Group (BSG) in the U.K., that deploying a fiber-to-the-curb/VDSL2 access network in Europe costs, on average about 20 percent of a GPON deployment covering the same market, while point-to-point active Ethernet access costs even more to deploy than GPON. (See Report: UK FTTH Would Cost $50B.)

However, the BSG’s report was focused on potential U.K. costs, and while NSN is happy to use that as representative of any European market, an analyst who contributed work to the BSG report told Light Reading he was uncomfortable with the way the report’s findings had been used in NSN’s presentation.

So is NSN’s position credible?

Well, it’s “not ridiculous,” says Heavy Reading chief analyst Graham Finnie. “GPON has made little progress outside the U.S., even though it is supposed to be a global technology. EPON has dominated in Asia/Pacific, and in Europe much of the fiber access is point-to-point.” (See FTTH Technology Fracas Continues.)

Adds Finnie, “some European incumbents have committed to GPON, but it’s going slowly, and it’s possible that in a few years the industry might move on to another technology.” (See FT Fleshes Out FTTH .)

However, ongoing GPON developments have to be considered, especially 10-Gig GPON, notes Finnie. If that development becomes viable then “that will get GPON through a few more years.” (See Huawei Raises the Optical Stakes and WDM-PON Faces 10G Challenge.)

Overall, NSN “has a point, but there is a strong argument to say that GPON will be widely deployed globally, including in Europe, the Middle East, and in emerging markets, particularly China, which will be the big one,” adds the analyst.

Finnie also questions NSN’s claims that VDSL2 is capable of 100 Mbit/s downstream in commercial deployments. “There is no evidence that VDSL2 can achieve that sort of bandwidth,” says the Heavy Reading man.

Not surprisingly, the GPON camp is dismissive of NSN’s claims. “There are so many ways in which they [NSN] are wrong,” says Marcus Weldon, CTO of Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU – message board)’s Fixed Access Division.

“Carriers need to find the services to justify the investment in GPON, sure, but Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ – message board) has found this with its triple-play offer, with quite straightforward video services,” continues Weldon. “And GPON always makes sense in greenfield deployments — even the MSOs agree on that,” he adds. (See Verizon Leads the Great 100-Mbit/s Bandwidth Race.)

Studi: SMS Lebih Populer daripada Telepon

Mana yang lebih Anda suka? Menyampaikan pesan lewat layanan pesan singkat (SMS) atau telepon? Sebuah penelitian menunjukkan bahwa ternyata SMS lebih populer daripada telepon.

Hal ini terungkap dari penelitian yang dilakukan Nielsen Mobile. Lembaga survei ini mengungkapkan bahwa rata-rata pengguna ponsel di Amerika berkirim 357 sms setiap bulan, dan hanya menerima atau melakukan panggilan telepon sebanyak 204 kali per bulan.

Menurut seorang profesor telekomunikasi, Rob Frieden, berkirim sms akan menjadi pilihan yang tepat saat kita berada di tempat di mana orang-orang tidak ingin terganggu dengan suara percakapan. Selain itu kerahasiaan isi pesan juga akan lebih terjaga saat kita ber-sms daripada melakukan panggilan telepon.

Namun, dikutip detikINET dari Collegian, Jumat (26/9/2008), ada juga orang yang lebih memilih telepon saat membutuhkan jawaban segera. Sementara itu, kalangan pelajar sedikit demi sedikit juga mulai meninggalkan penggunaan telepon kabel konvensional.

Combining Telco Services: The Network Service Broker Opportunity

It has become clear that there is a need to find a way to speed up the process for new services and delivery. Operators have recognized they need to reuse services in order to accomplish this. These same operators are interested in new service creation and delivery architectures that support the assembly of telecom products from reusable service components. This has been part of the rationale for investments in session description protocols (SDPs) and IP Multimedia Subsystems (IMS). One of the first problems operators face in trying to understand what they need to accelerate the creation and delivery of telecom products from reusable service components and how different vendors’ products can help them, is the confusing range of terms in this area. Many terms are used fairly interchangeably to describe technology. It is important for operators and vendors to understand the differences between the technologies in order to effectively create new products. Vendors suggest that successful services that begin life as mash-ups may be re-implemented using service brokering technology for performance, maintenance, and scaleability purposes. Service brokering is an alternative approach to mash-ups for building services (products) from combinations of other services/products, and network service brokering can accommodate network protocol latencies and other carrier-grade concerns while supporting fast and flexible product assembly. Vendors and standards bodies should work toward an agreed and adopted definition of the Service Capability Interaction Manager (SCIM), unambiguous roles for applications, and a standard way of expressing service interactions between network and the IT/Web services broker domain. Since inter-domain interactions are supported by non-standard interaction scripting languages and interfaces, operators should recognize that there will be a trade-off between becoming locked into a network service broker vendor’s proprietary, combinatorial service interaction environment, and the flexibility and richness of the interactions they will be able to orchestrate between any IT and/or network application. This report examines current definitions of the service broker and the way service brokering differs from the IT paradigm of service orchestration. It discusses various approaches to service brokering at different levels of the network architecture and how these can be mapped onto vendor products at this stage in the market. Finally, this report also examines future trends for service brokering versus service orchestration and discusses the relationship between service brokering and “mash-ups” in the Web 2.0 domain. Combining Telco Services: The Network Service Broker Opportunity provides critical insight and analysis for a range of industry participants, including: Operators who are interested in new service creation and delivery architectures that support the assembly of telecom products from reusable service components Network service broker vendors needing independent analysis of the market opportunity for their technologies, and the likely pace of adoption Investors seeking guidance on the size of the market opportunity for suppliers in the network service broker segment, and on the likely market leaders in this emerging sector

Halal Bihalal

Day 1 at office, menarik sekali, pagi2 dah pada ngumpul untuk acara yang ditunggu2 tiap tahun, halal bihalal. Luar biasa ya, tradisi ini emang cuman ada di Indonesia kali ya, sangat bermanfaat dan menyenangkan ketemu dengan teman-teman sejawat, yang ga pernah disangka-sangka muncul didepan kita berjabat tangan dan bercanda gurau. Kadang acara semacam ini emang yang ditunggu-tunggu, entah sekedar melepas kerinduan, mencari informasi maupun sekedar basa-basi.

Yang menarik dari kegiatan halal bihalal dikantor pagi ini adalah orangnya kok cuman sedikit ya, berkurang dari tahun lalu, kayaknya sich masih pada cuti atau memanjangkan cuti karena terjebak macet or males untuk balik mengikuti arus balik. But anyway, seneng deh tadi ketemu dengan para Big Boss, sempet ketawa ketiwi gitu deh, tapi ya yang enak lagi dikasih snack booo….dari Prima Rasa lagi…..

Mudah-mudahan hari pertama masuk kantor lagi setelah lebaran menjadi awal yang baik untuk kita semua, sukses selalu.

Regards dari pojok Gerlong.