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06 n Asia-Pacific issue II 2009
All articles are available for download at www.connect-world.com CONTENTS
Public private partnerships for development
Satellite and wireless - reaching remote regions 4
by David Hartshorn, Secretary General, Global VSAT Forum & Darrell Owen, President,
4 7 10 13 Owen & Owen

Enterprise solutions
The global enterprise ecosystem 7
by Fran Shammo, President of Verizon Business
15 18 21 23 Wireless infrastructure
Wireless infrastructure built to last 10
by Dick Parran, President, Network Solutions Business, ADC

26 28 31 34 Web transitions
Living in a Web-based world 13
by Vikram Saksena, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Tellabs

Innovation and growth

15
38 The end of innovation?
by Karl F. May, President and CEO, OpVista, Inc., Chairman of the Board, Integra5, Inc.

Carrier Ethernet
Carrier Ethernet and the new network 18
by Jeff Reedy, CEO, Overture Networks

Data transport
POTS for data-intensive services 21
by Noam Lotan, President & CEO, MRV Communications Inc.

Network Capacity
Connections Broadband - separating the long distance runners from 23
From the Editor-In-Chief’s desk 2 the sprinters
by Fredric J. Morris
by Hossam Salib, VP of Marketing for Positron Access Solutions/Aktino

Imprint 2 Network upgrade

The ICT relay race 26
Subscription 40 by Cliff Townsend, Vice President, Business Development, Galazar Networks

Advertisements Online video marketing

Mera Systems IFC B2B marketing with video 28
ITU World 2009 3 by Jeff Whatcott, Vice President of Marketing, Brightcove
IBC 2009 6
International Aid & Trade 2009 9 Test equipment
Futurecom 2009 12 Testing the future 31
BBWF Europe 2009 17 by Bahaa Moukadam, Vice President Marketing, Sunrise Telecom
Australia CIO Summit 2009 20
Frost & Sullivan GIL 2009: 25 Supplier services
North America Co-creating the wireless revolution 34
Telecoms Cost Accounting 29 by Sudip Nandy, CEO, Aricent
Submarine Networks World 2009 32
SatCom 2009 LATAM 35 VoIP service and support
Vietnam Computer Electronics 36 Service, support and professional services 38
WorldExpo 2009 by John Lazar, CEO, MetaSwitch
Ericsson IBC
Telefonica OBC

North America issue 2009 n 01

 CONNECTIONS
Connections

A great number of new information and communication technologies leave the labs and
reach the market each year; many are greeted with great expectations. Most, though,
are fated to fill small market niches or succumb to the competition and disappear. Some
become market leaders, disrupt existing technology ecosystems, change the sector, change
businesses and change lives. Which technologies are here to stay? Which ones will lead
the market? Which ones will fill small but important niches? What are the innovations you
believe will fill an important need - no matter what the size?

The theme of this issue of Connect-Word North America 2009 is, New information and
communications technologies - separating the long distance runners from the sprinters

Fredric J. Morris,
Editor-in-Chief,
Connect-World

Editor-in-Chief: Fredric J. Morris fredric.morris@connect-world.com

Publisher: David Nunes david.nunes@connect-world.com

Editorial Department: editorial@connect-world.com

Connect-World is published under licence
by WORLD INFOCOMMS LTD Production Department: production@connect-world.com
Executive Office:
• Global House, 12 Albert Road, Sales Department: sales@connect-world.com
London E16 2DW, United Kingdom
Tel: +44 20 7540 0876 • Fax: +44 20 7474 0090 Administration Department: admin@connect-world.com
email: info@connect-world.com • URL: www.connect-world.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means elec-
tronical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission from the publishers. The content of this publication is based
on best knowledge and information available at the time of publication. No responsibility for any injury, death, loss, damage or delay, however
caused, resulting from the use of the material can be accepted by the publishers or others associated with its preparation. The publishers neither
accept responsibility for, nor necessarily agree with, the views expressed by contributors.

ISSN 1468-0203
02 n North America issue 2009

5_9_
 OCTOBER 5 TH

9 2009
TO TH

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THE MOST
PRODUCTIVE
WEEK...

...OF
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But only if you spend that week at ITU Telecom World 2009. Because no other event offers such a wide range of ideas,
knowledge and experience. No other event gives you direct access to the full cross-section of ICT decision-makers
from government and industry. And no other event will be more essential in helping you plot a strategic course in
the rapidly-evolving ICT industry. In a world where knowledge is currency and meeting the right people is gold,
this global summit is sure to provide you with the best return on investment. Geneva, 5-9 October 2009 – don’t miss it.

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 Public private partnerships for development

Satellite and wireless - reaching remote regions

By David Hartshorn, Secretary General, Global VSAT Forum & Darrell Owen, President, Owen & Owen

The latest generations of satellite and wireless technology can now provide cost-effective
onnectivity in the world’s most remote regions. A joint USAID-Intel project in TaVan, a
small, remote, village in northern Vietnam demonstrated how advanced information and
communication technology (ICT) can ‘leapfrog’ the need for traditional communications
technology and bring connectivity to the most difficult to reach regions. Recently, USAID and
the Global VSAT Forum agreed to a public private partnership (PPP) to cooperate on TaVan-
type development projects.

David Hartshorn is the Secretary General, Global VSAT Forum GVF, the satellite industry’s London-based non-profit international
association. Mr Hartshorn leads the Forum’s global efforts to facilitate the provision of satellite-based communications solutions
throughout the world by working closely with national-, regional- and global-level policy makers. Mr. Hartshorn has worked in the
satellite communications industry for 20 years.. Mr Hartshorn is a Member of the Society of Satellite Professionals International and
an ex-officio Board Member and former Chapter President in London and Denver. He is also a Member of the UN Working Group for
Emergency Telecommunications, the International Telecommunication Union (Rapporteur), Europe’s International Satellite Initiative,
the Satellite Action Plan-Regulatory Working Group, and others.

David Hartshorn has been published in hundreds of editions of magazines, newspapers, and newsletters, and has spoken and chaired at
hundreds of conferences and seminars in every major region of the world.

Darrell Owen is the President of Owen & Owen. He has over 40 years of management experience in the area of Information Technology.
During the last 15 years he has worked with international development including at the U.S. International Development Agency (USAID),
where he was responsible for managing an organization dedicated to the use of ICTs for development. In recent years his focus has been
on extending ICTs into rural areas for achieving socioeconomic benefit; this included working on several of USAID’s Last Mile Initiative
(LMI) projects.

Darrell Owen received a Bachelors in Business Management from Portland State University, Portland, Oregon and earned his Masters
in Telecommunications from George Washington University in Washington DC.

Until recently, profitable communications
networks in remote regions of developing
countries were no more than pretty
PowerPoint presentations. For years,
throughout the entire communications sector,
there was a lot of talk and little action.
This was also largely true throughout the
world; except for corporate networks, where
large businesses with widely dispersed
operations achieved major cost savings and
operational efficiencies by deploying IP-based
satellite networks.
In the pharmaceuticals business, where new
drugs are regularly introduced to hundreds
or thousands of pharmacists, satellite-based
networks enabled companies like Rite-Aid to
simultaneously deliver updates on availability,
how to administer the latest drugs, managing
inventory as a function of shelf life, and so
on.
In the fast food business, where staff churn
rate of 100 per cent per year is common, fast-
food chains needed a way to cost effectively
train a continuous stream of new recruits and
satellite communications, satcom, gave the
chains a way to use their centrally managed
corporate networks to reach a multitude of
widely dispersed sites.
This trend has continued since the 1990s and
the volumes are escalating, and economies of
scale growing as the technology improved;
the satellite industry, as well, has become
more adept at tailoring corporate solutions.
In the public sector, another crucial trend
was underway in parallel: governments and
international organisations were grappling
with ways to cost effectively bridge the
‘digital divide’. National budgets allocated
funds to projects to help fulfil public policy
objectives; improved access to education,
health, e-government and other vital services
were among the first objectives to be
addressed.

04 n North America issue 2009


A few developing nations began large-
scale deployment of satellite-based
communications - China, India and Brazil
were among the first - and they reported their
successes to their neighbours. Word spread
through inter-governmental dialogues like the
World Summit for the Information Society,
WSIS, a UN initiative that got states to agree
on certain principles- and goals for tangible
results - in closing the communications gap in
the developing regions of the world.
The transformation has been dramatic. Today,
the satellite industry’s largest deployments of
bi-directional satellite services are for public-
sector distance learning service in developing
countries. From Mexico’s Enciclomedia
project with more than 60 thousand earth
stations, to a Brazilian university’s Unopar
distance learning program - reaching more
than 120,000 university students via satellite
– to the African Virtual University, which
links more than a dozen universities across
the continent via satellite, distance learning
has emerged as a ‘killer application’.
These programs have done so well that local
satellite service providers are moving to
export the services as a commercial business
- a sure sign of success. Whether it is primary,
secondary or higher education, much of the
curriculum is as applicable in one country as
in another. So the Unopar distance-learning
program is being positioned for delivery
elsewhere in Latin America. Likewise,
Enciclomedia, which also hopes to sell its
services in West Africa at the outer reaches of
its satellite footprint. The Indian government
has also allocated millions of dollars to deliver
satellite-based distance learning programmes,
sustainably, throughout Africa.
New satellite and wireless markets
On the road in Oregon, USA, Darrell Owen,
the project manager for the last mile initiative
(LMI) project in Vietnam, received a call on
his mobile phone from half a world away,
from a colleague in TaVan, a small, remote,
village in northern Vietnam. The call, placed
over a recently installed broadband network,
used several new technologies to connect that
rural location to a driver on the other side of
the world. This call showcased the ability of
advanced information and communication
technology (ICT) to ‘leapfrog’ traditional
technology and bring connectivity to the most
difficult to reach regions of the world.
“Call me back so we can test the quality of
incoming calls - we need to see if the quality
is as good as we were hoping,” the caller said
and gave the local phone number. Returning
the call, Darrell heard the sounds of kids
playing in the background. This was certainly
the first TaVan-to-Oregon phone call ever, but
the quality was excellent.
Mobile payment
Public private partnerships forMobilesystems
With those two phone calls, the joint USAID-
Intel project demonstrated how ICTs could
link even a small, remote rural village like
TaVan to the rest of the world. Beyond the
phone calls, the project also demonstrated
how ICTs could bring services - and socio-
economic opportunity - to rural citizens that
previously lacked services of any kind.
Because of the project, TaVan’s local health
clinic could now access the Ministry of
Health’s website and improve the quality of
health services to local citizens. Teachers and
students at the TaVan primary school were
also able to download educational materials
and community government officials
gained access to national and provincial
information weeks, even months, ahead of
when they would normally receive word
of key initiatives. Farmers got information
about how to improve crop yields and
combat plant diseases. Local citizens could
call friends and relatives throughout Lao Cai
province and e-mail others around the world.
Guesthouse operators began offering their
guests broadband Internet to keep in touch
with their families, send photos of their trip or
even update blogs. More importantly, visitors
stayed in the village longer and brought
additional revenue to the community.
Even more important than the connectivity
and value-added services made available to
those living in TaVan, this demonstration
project also served as part of the technical
assistance (TA) given the Vietnam
Telecommunications Fund (VTF). The VTF
manages Vietnam’s universal service funds
and can make good use of this project as a
model for other villages.
The TaVan project shows that rural
connectivity is not simply a matter of
placing one or two phones in a village,
but should, instead, offer the possibility of
delivering broadband Internet connectivity
to the entire village. Given the success of
the TaVan project, the VTF has incorporated
this approach within its funding priorities. In
just two years the LMI, Last Mile Initiative,
project helped guide the implementation of
VTF projects and its distribution of nearly
US$130 million for rural telecommunication
expansion. This will continue at an estimated
rate of US$70-80 million per year.
Efforts are now underway for a follow-on
Vietnam LMI 2.0 program that will focus
on nation-wide objectives. This will include
supporting the implementation of, potentially,
thousands of commune-level access points
and supporting the development of a wide
range of value-added content and services that
are relevant to rural citizens.
However, the story does not end in Vietnam.
On a recent trip to Washington DC, Darrell
access
development
received an e-mail asking him to get in
contact with David Hartshorn, the General
Director of the Global VSAT Forum (GVF).
David had recently been in Singapore and
heard a presentation about the USAID-
Intel project in TaVan. They subsequently
exchanged e-mails, and since David’s office
was in Washington DC, they got together.
They discussed a possible partnership between
USAID and the Global VSAT Forum to
replicate in other countries the same approach
used in TaVan - delivering Voice over IP,
and a range of Internet-based applications to
entire communities via the latest generation
of lower-cost, higher-capacity satellite
in combination with WiMAX and WiFi
broadband.
Once again, a phone call, but this time
covering just a few short blocks, marked
an important milestone in the effort to
bring connectivity to rural villages; the call
resulted in an expansion of USAID’s entire
telecommunications development portfolio.
The call and the preliminary meeting that
followed led to extensive discussions between
USAID and GVF. Ultimately, USAID and the
GVF defined and put in place an ICT-related
public private partnership (PPP) to work
together on TaVan-type development projects.
The memorandum of understanding (MOU)
was signed in December 2008.
Continuing discussions between USAID’s
ICT Team, GVF and its member companies,
government missions, companies participating
in other USAID projects and NGOs, are
exploring other potential projects for
education, export promotion, health services
and the like.
The MOU makes it possible to expand a
range of USAID’s development initiatives
into underserved rural areas. Frequently,
satellite services are considered too expensive
for many development projects. However,
with the recent lower cost satellite solutions,
coupled with reliable wireless solutions that
can connect multiple locations to a single
VSAT, the equation shifts substantially and
satellite connectivity becomes more viable
and sustainable over the long term.
Satellites can cost effectively deliver value-
added educational, health, agricultural,
business and government services and content
over a single network to virtually any location
on the planet. Satellite-based solutions have
the potential to transform the underserved
regions of the world. n
For additional information, contact the Global
VSAT Forum at david.hartshorn@gvf.org
North America issue 2009 n 05
 Why visit
IBC2009?
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20
 Mobile payment
Mobile
Enterprise systems
access
solutions

The global enterprise ecosystem

by Fran Shammo, President of Verizon Business

Today’s global enterprise is an ecosystem that needs to coordinate with a wide variety of
internal sub-ecosystems, with customers, suppliers and other sector players. A global enterprise
cannot survive without IT and communications systems that effectively interconnect these
related ecosystems to work as one. Secure and expertly tailored solutions on global unified
communications and collaboration platforms will enhance enterprises’ productivity and -
together with the solutions - facilitate telework, reduce travel and energy use, and help
customers do more with less.

Fran Shammo is President of Verizon Business; he came to this role after serving as Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
for Verizon Business. Mr Shammo has more than 24 years of combined financial and operational experience. He has served as President
- West Area for Verizon Wireless, responsible for the company’s operations in the 13 states west of Colorado. Mr Shammo also served
as Vice President and Controller for Verizon Wireless, after holding the same position at Bell Atlantic for five years. Mr Shammo joined
Bell Atlantic Mobile as General Manager for Accounting Operations, and later held a series of positions of increasing responsibility
in finance, mergers and acquisitions, logistics, facilities, regional operations and planning. In addition, Mr Shammo acquired public
accounting, retail experience and tax experience before entering the wireless industry. Mr Shammo also sits on the Board of Micrus
Endovascular Corporation and is Chairman of its Audit Committee.

Fran Shammo holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Accounting from Philadelphia University, a Master’s Degree in Business Administration
from La Salle University, and is a Certified Public Accountant.

Global IT management software company
CA was looking for a way to enable its call-
centre agents to telework and to improve the
productivity and responsiveness of its 12,000
employees in 65 locations in 35 countries.
To accomplish all this, it needed a solution
that encompassed more than its own mobile
and remote employees. It needed a solution
that addressed a wider extended enterprise
that includes global customers, suppliers and
partners.
The answer for CA and a growing number
of business customers was a global unified
communications and collaboration (UC&C)
platform. UC&C is one of those buzzwords
that can mean many things. What’s important
to understand is that it enables any member
of an extended enterprise to use whichever
form of communication - including voice,
– e-mail, instant messaging, and audio and Web
conferencing - is appropriate and effective for
any given external or internal interaction.
Of particular relevance to the theme of
this month’s magazine, UC&C exhibits an
important characteristic of any successful
technological approach. An innovation with
true staying power does not view the customer
in isolation. In the case of a multinational
customer, the prerequisite for success is
addressing the full set of relationships
in which the organization operates. The
terminology used for that set of relationships
is ‘ecosystem’.
The globally extended enterprise, as a
whole, is an ecosystem, and there are sub-
ecosystems within it as well. Every successful
communications technology today and going
forward will be measured on its ability to
address the challenges of operating in those
varied ecosystems.
It is not just multinational corporations that
operate in many ecosystems. Think for a
moment about healthcare. From a consumer
perspective, the healthcare ecosystem
encompasses patients, doctors, hospitals,
clinics, insurance companies, pharmacies,
rehabilitation centres, nursing homes and
visiting nurses, and so on. Education is yet
another distinct ecosystem, while the financial
sector forms yet another.
These ecosystems present opportunities for
individuals, companies and governments
to turn challenges into opportunities.
Innovative solutions enable comprehensive
integration and management of wireless
and wireline technologies, encompassing
both communications and computing (IT)
applications. Healthcare, energy, retail,
finance, education and government all have
distinctive ecosystems. Smart grids, smart
buildings, smart campuses, smart homes are
moving from the drawing boards to becoming
permanent fixtures in our lives.
Global enterprise needs
In the case of the extended enterprise,
customers tell us that a successful
communications and IT solution must meet
six key requirements.
First, the entire extended enterprise must be
connected. This may seem rather obvious
and even simple, but when you factor in
globalization, the economic downturn and the
complexity of the enterprises, the challenges
can appear daunting especially since the

North America issue 2009 n 07

 Enterprise solutions

necessary communications infrastructure can
vary from country to country. Companies
want a consistent communications experience
no matter where their offices are located - and
their employees expect no less.
Global sourcing, emerging markets, industry
consolidation, telecommuting and competition
are all manifestations of globalization, and
as we are all aware, the planetary economy
indeed is more interconnected than ever.
While the slump has added to total cost of
ownership pressures, other longer-term trends
related to enterprise complexity continue
unabated. These trends include convergence
of IT and network infrastructure and
services, the growing challenges of security,
the increased need to meet governmental
compliance, mobility, the adoption of Internet
protocol (IP) which allows for replacement of
separate networks for voice and data, and the
increased number of applications running on
these converged networks.
About 75 per cent of enterprise customers
have moved to IP because of its efficiencies
and additional capabilities. Even more
interestingly, an increasing percentage of IP
customers are asking carriers to manage their
networks and applications for them.
Second, IT and networks must work as one.
Because of convergence, the distinction
between IT and network has blurred. Mere
connectivity is no longer enough. Customers
today view the ability to communicate
globally as integral to their business
operations, and rightfully demand that both
their applications and networks run more
efficiently. They also require that their
applications work reliably no matter if
their offices are located around the block or
around the globe. Enterprises want solutions
that move the needle on their business. They
define value in terms of enabling them to be
more competitive and more nimble in the
marketplace.
Fourth, solutions must enable productivity
and eco-responsibility. As our CA example
shows, business customers increasingly
want help improving employee productivity.
Improved efficiency also helps them go green,
a matter of particular importance in countries
that have adopted carbon-footprint regulatory
requirements. It’s no surprise that telework
is becoming increasingly popular as issues
ranging from last year’s rising fuel prices to
the current economic crisis are causing more
and more businesses to look for ways to
operate more efficiently at a lower cost.
In its Telework Trendlines™ 2009 report, the
HR association WorldatWork found that the
total number of U.S. teleworkers - employees,
contractors and business owners - has risen
17 per cent, from 28.7 million in 2006 to 33.7
million in 2008. Chuck Wilsker, president of
the Telework Coalition, said that the volume
of employer inquiries his organization
receives has tripled in the past two years and
that “mainstreaming telework will enable
employers to control costs and provide the
foundation for employment stability and
future growth”.
Fifth, solutions must help customers do more
with less. As the complexity of services
increases and, particularly in this economy,
IT staffs are hard pressed. Users need help to
enable their IT departments to optimize their
time and control their overall costs. Managed
services continue to grow in popularity as IT
departments can choose what and when to
out-task to a third-party provider, enabling
them to focus on more critical tasks.
Last, solutions must be expertly tailored. The
focus on providing solutions for customers
operating in complex ecosystems puts a
premium on professional IT consulting. The
days of selling ala carte point services off
the shelf are over. The days of one-shoe fits
are long gone. The technologies that last are
those tailored to the individual customer’s
ecosystems. That requires the expertise to
provide comprehensive professional IT
consulting services.
In the case of multinational corporations,
those professional services must run the
gamut from designing networks to improving
application performance to safeguarding
critical company assets.
Communications companies that truly take
the time to learn and understand not only the
customer’s business, but also the ecosystems
in which they operate, will create enormous
opportunities for their customers and for
themselves. The innovative technologies that
enable customers to more effectively and
efficiently operate in these various ecosystems
will lead the market. Some will fill small but
important niches.
No matter the customer’s size, all the
marketing ‘marathoners’ will go the distance
by using technology as a means to the real
ends: developing tailored solutions that meet
the complex set of needs that arise from
ecosystems. n

Third, security must be built in. Because

the enterprise extends beyond employees
and across time zones, security becomes
more challenging. Customers require that
their data and their identities are secure.
All this means that security solutions must
now encompass safeguarding all end points,
servers, applications, users and of course,
their networks. Security needs to be an
integral part of any communication solution.
Enterprises should ensure a comprehensive
security strategy is in place -- complete
with the appropriate processes and controls
to succeed in ensuring the safety of data,
networks and users.

08 n North America issue 2009

 2009 International Aid & Trade Event
Procurement & Logistics
Getting the right equipment to the right place at the right time

The Ronald Reagan Building & International Trade Center,

Washington D.C., USA

In partnership with:

6-9 July 2009

INTERNATIONAL AID & TRADE IS THE FORUM FOR HUMANITARIAN RELIEF PROFESSIONALS
Take part in one of the biggest trade fairs for humanitarian relief professionals in the world. This is the opportunity to raise awareness of your
organization and network with key international aid, humanitarian relief and development stakeholders.

WHY PARTICIPATE IN INTERNATIONAL AID & TRADE 2009

� Now in partnership with InterAction, the largest alliance of US based international development and humanitarian organizations;
� Procurement and logistics professionals meet providers of goods and services, over 1500 attendees;
� Interactive round-table discussions engaging high calibre stakeholders from NGO, UN, government and commercial sectors;
� Cement relationships and build new partnerships;
� Discuss your solutions and opinions to shape the provision of humanitarian relief;
� Interact informally at the networking reception and VIP dinner (by invite only).

WHO WILL ATTEND?

Attendees span government departments, NGOs and aid agencies, UN organisations and businesses, small, medium and large...
• Procurement Managers, Coordinators and Logisticians: building • Policy Makers: global decision makers play a critical role in
relationships face-to-face. Whether talking to existing suppliers, directing multilateral humanitarian efforts. International Aid & Trade
or meeting and greeting new potential partners, the event offers enables policy makers to increase their understanding of the
an invaluable audience that will contribute to effective practical implications of the decisions they take.
procurement practice. • Suppliers of Products and Services: showcasing products and
• Project Managers: will benefit from gaining direct contact with services to attendees and fellow exhibitors to network, build
providers of goods and services being used on a day-to-day partnerships and create effective supply chains for improved
basis. humanitarian relief, international aid and long term development.

WORKSHOPS
Workshop sessions consist of interactive roundtable discussions between stakeholders from NGO, government and UN organizations, as
well as two or three representatives from the corporate sector. Each roundtable discussion will be hosted by an organization taking the
opportunity to help shape the agenda of that session. The workshops are specifically designed to improve coordination and understanding
between business, the UN, aid agencies and NGOs, resulting in increased efficiency in the way problems are addressed, solutions are
designed and distributed and contracts are agreed.
Sessions will focus on the procurement and logistics elements and are likely to include:
• Effective transport systems • Development from disaster relief;
(especially in light of increasing fuel costs); • Sphere standards;
• Security of aid workers; • Stockpiling, pre-positioning and local purchasing;
• Disaster communications - advance warning and emergency • Aid provision in hostile environments;
alert systems; • Legal barriers to aid provision including customs,
• Changes under the Obama Administration; visa and immigration laws;
• Cohesive working and the role of the military in humanitarian • Effective raising and use of funds;
assistance; • The food crisis and aid issues.

I S T E R
REG
E
For more information contact:

R E
Sula Bruce, Director Taina Alexander, Program Manager

F
International Aid & Trade: InterAction
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7871 0188 or Tel: +1 202 667 8227 or

www.aidandtrade.org
Email: sbruce@aidandtrade.org Email: talexander@interaction.org
www.aidandtrade.org www.interaction.org
North America issue 2009 n 09
 Wireless infrastructure

Wireless infrastructure built to last

by Dick Parran, President, Network Solutions Business, ADC

Wireless carriers face significant challenges that affect their ability to deliver new services
profitably and remain competitive. Competition - with many global markets nearly saturated -
is fierce and rapid growth in developing nations is forcing carriers to build new infrastructure
quickly and cost effectively. Demand for new services, higher bandwidth, and better quality
- and the migration to 3G and 4G networks they call for is forcing major changes to network
infrastructure. Radio access networks must evolve cost effectively to remain competitive.

Richard (Dick) Parran Jr. is the President of ADC’s Network Solutions Business Unit; he is responsible for the growth and development of
the company’s global wireless coverage and capacity business. Mr Parran served previously as President of ADC’s Professional Services
Business Unit that helps network operators plan, deploy and maintain their networks. Before that, he was Vice President of Business
Development responsible for leading the company’s mergers and acquisitions, divestitures and venture capital investment activities.
Prior to joining ADC, Mr Parran, a 25-year veteran of the telecommunications industry, held a number of management positions with
companies such as Paragon Cable and Centel Corporation.

Mr Parran holds an MBA from the University of Chicago, and a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from Duke
University. He serves on the Board of Visitors at Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering and is a board member of the ADC
Foundation.

Today’s infrastructure for tomorrow’s servic-
es?
Radio infrastructure is in flux. W-CDMA,
HSPA, and WiMAX deployments have
begun in earnest, and LTE is on the horizon.
These services tax existing macro cell sites
as never before. Traditionally, macro wireless
networks have relied on large, ‘boomer’
towers that provide blanket coverage.
However, this approach to delivering wireless
signals is difficult to sustain in the 3G and 4G
environments. There are several issues:
• Insufficient coverage - 3G and 4G
networks commonly operate at frequencies
above 2GHz, which attenuate much more
quickly than the lower frequencies used in 2G
networks. In traditional macro networks, there
are ‘shadow’ areas where signals can’t reach,
such as urban canyons where buildings block
signals from the nearest tower, the interiors
of buildings where building materials block
signals and dense public facilities such as
subways, airports, stadiums, and arenas.
Relatively weak signals in these shadow
areas, coupled with higher bandwidth needed
for new services, makes it more important
than ever to find ways to improve coverage.
• Shrinking capacity - A legacy cell
designed only to provide voice services at
lower frequency bands can only provide
today’s new data services within smaller
areas, creating a need for a more and smaller
cells.
• Expansion difficulties - Large BTS (base
transceiver station)/cell site deployments are
costly, making traditional network expansion
expensive. Even when providers are willing
to invest in new macro cell sites, local
governments in urban as well as residential
areas are increasingly reluctant to allow
unfettered deployment of large cell sites due
to aesthetic and health concerns. Carriers
must find new ways to deliver service in
underserved areas.
• Rising OPEX (operational expense) costs
- High fuel prices and higher numbers of
distributed cell sites are making it difficult for
carriers to rein in the cost of maintaining their
macro BTS deployments.
• Poor flexibility - It can be difficult to
retrofit existing cell sites to deliver new
protocols and services. In addition, adding
new protocols and services to existing cells
while maintaining service for legacy services
creates a challenge for network planning and
efficient radio utilization.
• Insufficient and expensive backhaul
capacity - Typically, macro cellular sites rely
on T1/E1 lines operating at 1.5/2.0 Mbps. To
support higher bandwidth and new services,
carriers have been required to continue
adding new lines, often by leasing them from
competitors. Carriers must find new ways to
reduce backhaul costs, which now typically
represent more than 30 per cent of OPEX.

10 n North America issue 2009


Addressing these challenges requires more
than point products - it requires new thinking
about the overall RAN infrastructure.
The new wireless infrastructure
While macro networks have sufficed for
legacy wireless networks, today’s challenges
require a new type of infrastructure that
offers better coverage and capacity, easier
and more cost-effective expansion as needs
change, more flexibility to accommodate
new protocols and services, and improved
backhaul capacity.
Rather than thinking exclusively in terms of
macro cells, carriers will need to supplement
existing macro assets with microcells for
spot coverage in urban shadows as well as
inside buildings, subways, tunnels, and other
structures. This new microcellular RAN will
enhance legacy macro network infrastructure
with distributed antenna systems (DAS),
picocells, microcells, and femtocells.
In order to provide cost-effective links to
these systems from existing cell tower base
stations (BTS) or base station hotels, these
new products will rely on IP transport via
fibre links when available, or via microwave
and millimetre wave radios when fibre
transport is impractical due to cost or local
zoning issues.
Let us look at how this type of infrastructure
addresses key service delivery challenges as
the world migrates to 3G and 4G services.
Coverage and capacity
Since macro network signals alone can’t
provide adequate service within structures or
in areas where the macro signal is blocked
by buildings or terrain, carriers will use
remote radio systems, distributed antenna
systems (DAS), and small BTS (picocells and
femtocells) to provide coverage and capacity.
Micro cellular network equipment lets
carriers eliminate coverage gaps in the macro
network with equipment that is cost-effective,
easy to deploy, and easy to maintain.
Carriers can use distributed radios anywhere
coverage is needed, thereby working around
traditional obstructions, eliminating shadow
areas in networks, and improving customer
satisfaction.
Expansion
Microcellular base station solutions allow
an operator to add capacity in the network
exactly where needed, and at far lower cost
than expanding the macro BTS network.
This not only saves money in covering
building interiors or other problem spots in
the network, but it also saves money by off-
loading the macro network, thereby delaying
or reducing capex (capital expense) spending
on macro network capacity expansion. We
have seen some of these deployments already
in public facilities such as airports, subways,
and highway tunnels, but we can expect the
trend to continue into commercial buildings.
Flexibility
As wireless technology continues to evolve,
carriers will want to deploy equipment
that, with upgrades, can accommodate new
services and protocols. The simplest way to
provide this flexibility is to enable centrally
re-configurable Radio Access Network (RAN)
systems, so a change made at a central point
can affect hundreds of cell sites, rather than
deploying service personnel to reconfigure
individual cell sites. BTS can be deployed in
the central Base Station Hotel, but carriers
will want to deploy DAS that are protocol
agnostic to protect these investments over
the long haul and greatly minimize truck rolls
and forklift upgrades. Software-defined radios
will also play a key role in providing protocol
flexibility.
Backhaul
Broadband wireless will bring huge increases
in backhaul requirements, and carriers
will move away from circuit-switched T1
lines to more cost-effective and scalable
Ethernet-based solutions. The small BTS
units deployed on site in many locations
will leverage existing wireline Ethernet
connections, while others will use microwave
and millimetre wave antenna systems. The
key requirement here is that the system should
be scalable to provide more backhaul capacity
as the market evolves.
CAPEX reduction
Microcellular networks can offer significant
savings compared with a traditional
macro BTS deployment by reducing site
development expenditures and maximizing
radio utilization:
• Smaller BTS and localized antenna
systems use lower-cost real estate to cover
macro and in-building networks; and
• Small remote radio solutions can be
deployed almost anywhere: on the sides of
buildings, on utility poles, on overhead lines,
and on or under street fixtures. In addition,
a single remote radio can support multiple
bands and protocols, further reducing site
development expenditures and accelerating
time to market.
Mobile payment
Wireless Mobilesystems
access
infrastructure
OPEX reduction
With IP-connected micro cellular solutions,
carriers can reduce OPEX in a number of
ways:
• Indoor and outdoor DAS products
promote centralization of BTS radio capacity,
which results in increased trunking efficiency
and decreased backhaul cost;
• A centralized BTS approach enables
infrastructure sharing, lowering ongoing
lease costs, technician travel/fuel costs, site
maintenance/upgrade costs, and heating and
cooling costs;
• The use of IP backhaul provides
tremendous on-going OPEX savings—as
much as a 75 per cent reduction in costs
as compared to traditional E1/T1 backhaul
techniques;
• In many cases, an operator can actually
leverage ‘free’ IP-backhaul already in place
at an enterprise location by connecting an
IP-fed picocell to an existing DSL modem or
corporate LAN; and
• Indoor DAS products feature extensive
end-to-end alarming and remote maintenance
capabilities, including full SNMP support that
reduces life cycle costs.
Business improvements
Beyond solving operational challenges, a
micro cellular network infrastructure will
improve the business case for many wireless
carriers in several ways:
• It improves customer satisfaction and
reduces churn;
• It enables much faster deployment,
allowing carriers to scale coverage, capacity,
and services in days or weeks as opposed to
months or years;
• It allows carriers to help enterprise
customers standardize on reliable, low-cost
wireless infrastructure, further cementing
carrier relationships; and
• It improves the carrier’s long-term
business case by extending use of the network
through future protocol upgrades without
major RAN upgrades.
In an environment where mobile subscribers
demand new services and competition
is tougher than ever, wireless carriers
must evolve their infrastructure to gain
flexibility and performance while reducing
costs. By adopting microcellular network
infrastructure, mobile operators can maximize
their investments in existing macro network
infrastructure while cost effectively evolving
their networks to support future service
offerings. n
North America issue 2009 n 11
C

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12 n North America issue 2009

 Mobile payment
Mobile
Web systems
access
transitions

Living in a Web-based world

By Vikram Saksena, Executive Vice President and CTO, Tellabs

Innovations such as the Internet, smartphones, cloud computing, and convergence are
changing our world. The Internet’s evolution from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 gave us access to
the world and to a world of information and social interaction. Web 3.0 - just starting -
will personalise services to match our needs and resolve tasks ‘intelligently’ through the
‘semantic Web’. Cloud computing, smartphones and the convergence of services and devices
will bring these Web services to everyone everywhere and wherever and whenever needed.

Dr. Vikram Saksena is the Executive Vice President and CTO of Tellabs; he is responsibility for Tellabs’ technology strategy and business
development. Previously, Mr Saksena served as chief technology officer for Sonus Network. Before Sonus, Saksena spent 16 years at
AT&T building the company’s data network services, software and network infrastructure for Frame Relay, ATM and IP. Prior to AT&T,
he served as chief technology officer and Vice President of Engineering of two start-up companies, MaxComm Technologies and Narad
Networks. He also holds more than 15 patents in telecommunications and data networking and is a senior member of the IEEE.

Vikram Saksena holds a Bachelors of Science degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology; and a Master of
Science degree and PhD. in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois.

Communications technologies and humans
have always had a push-pull relationship.
Someone comes up with a desire for a new
way to communicate, an ‘if-we-could-
only-do-this’ idea which eventually pushes
researchers into inventing the necessary
tools and technology. Alternatively, a
technology emerges from a laboratory,
tasking its inventors with creating a market
by persuading people of the technology’s
usefulness. Regardless of who starts the
process, some technologies never quite take
off, finding a home only in niche markets
or even winding up in oblivion. Others,
however, make a dramatic and lasting impact
on the world, embraced first by early adopters
and ultimately reaching critical mass, at
which point they become essential elements
of our professional and personal lives. As
those technologies continue to evolve, their
ability to add value to our lives evolves,
too. Four such technologies are the Internet,
smartphones, cloud computing, and the
convergence of networks, devices, services
and users.
First, the Internet has radically altered the
world and continues to shape and re-shape
it. Its first iteration, Web 1.0, functioned as
an information catalogue, and Google was
the poster child to organize that information
around search technology. Web 1.0 put
practically any piece of information, no
matter how esoteric, at the fingertips of every
Internet user.
Then came Web 2.0, with its emphasis on
social interactions. Facebook emerged as
the poster child, along with MySpace, blogs,
wikis and Twitter, and each platform gives
people a place to come together and share
thoughts, ideas and interests. Web 2.0 has
humanized the Internet, effectively erasing
geographic boundaries and creating global
communities that could not otherwise exist,
because of members’ physical distance
from one another. Essentially, Web 2.0
makes the world anyone’s oyster, giving
people everywhere the opportunity to make
connections and friends around the globe,
to learn about other countries, cultures and
politics and, in the process, to promote
international respect and cooperation.
The next stage of the Internet’s evolution,
already underway, is Web 3.0, which will
have the intelligence to personalize services
for individual users, thus simplifying their
lives. In other words, Web 3.0 will function
as a personal assistant for users. Elementary
forms of such personalization already exist;
for example, Amazon.com today uses
information about a given customer’s previous
purchases to make recommendations for
additional products that customer may like.
Although no single company has emerged yet

North America issue 2009 n 13

 Web transitions
to define this space, the appearance of a poster
child to make Web 3.0 a widespread reality is
only a matter of time. Meanwhile, Webs 1.0
and 2.0 continue to evolve as well, with each
continuing to enhance its value for users.
Smart devices for a personalized world
A second big technology centres on the
Internet’s expansion into the mobile world,
via the Apple iPhone and similar intelligent
devices from such companies as Google,
Blackberry and Nokia. Armed with an
intelligent device, be it mobile or fixed, a
user simply ‘visits’ an online application
store and downloads the application he or she
wants. Before the mobile world embraced the
Internet model, network operators determined
which applications would be available to
users. Now, IP technology has opened up the
network, allowing Internet companies and
third parties to develop applications and make
them readily available to anyone who wants
them and has an intelligent device to retrieve
it. The interaction between the intelligent
device and the application store - with the
network providing the high-speed connectivity
and quality of service - effectively enables
individual users to choose from a broad array
of applications, in addition to those available
from the network operator.
Furthermore, the combination of a
personalized application domain with a
personal intelligent device, which the user
can customize to his/her preferences, actually
brings Web 3.0 closer. Put another way,
the true personalization that defines Web
3.0 requires a personal, mobile device or
smartphone.
Cloud computing - a ‘just-in-time’ infrastruc-
ture
The data centre, which consists of an IT
infrastructure plus applications, has been the
cornerstone of the business world during the
last two or three decades - and a millstone
around the corporate neck as well. Because
each company needs a set of applications to
run the business, it obviously must invest in
the infrastructure to run those applications
- a data centre with hardware, software and
network connectivity. In addition to the
upfront cost of creating the data centre, a
company also has to shoulder the ongoing
operational expenditures of continuously
right-sizing the underlying infrastructure as
the organization grows and changes. The data
centre is an expensive but necessary evil;
what the company really cares about are the
mission-critical applications running in the
data centre.
14 n North America issue 2009
Ideally, each organization would like to create
an environment in which it creates and runs
its applications, while someone else takes
care of everything underneath. That wish
has triggered an evolution, which began
with the outsourcing of data-centre chores to
service providers that hosted corporate Web
sites. Although the service provider hosts a
company’s servers and storage, the company
continues to pay, in one way or another, for
all the hardware, software, and components
running its applications.
With the recent emergence of cloud
computing, that evolution now has accelerated
toward the ideal business environment. By
virtualizing the data centre, cloud computing
allows businesses to create the necessary
infrastructure on the fly. Rather than buying
physical hardware, software, storage and
connectivity, companies now can purchase
all those capabilities from the cloud provider,
when and where they need it, with zero
upfront investment. They pay only for the
infrastructure they use, when they use it,
which means they can now access and pay for
a ‘just-in-time’ infrastructure.
In addition to no longer being saddled with
stranded infrastructure, which handles peak
loads and then is idle the rest of the time,
companies now are freed from worrying about
technology-upgrade cycles and changing
software. The cloud provider takes care of all
of that, leaving organizations to focus only on
those all-important applications necessary to
running the business.
Reduced costs and headaches are not the only
benefits of cloud computing. Virtualizing
the data centre also gives businesses much
more flexibility to react to changing market
conditions. For example, say the applications
run by a particular company historically have
been related to processing of documents -
manipulating them, storing them, perhaps
converting them to multiple formats. Over
time, that company is adopting image
processing, video processing and more
complex data-mining applications. Previously,
the company’s agility depended on how
quickly it could upgrade its data centre to
handle these new requirements. Upgrading, of
course, meant going through budget approval,
purchasing hardware and software, installing
it and training employees on how to use it-all
before the company can actually put the new
application into operation and benefit from it.
Contrast that with the cloud-computing
world, in which the company simply goes
to the cloud provider and, through a fast
point-and-click process, instantly creates
an infrastructure for video processing-the
cloud provider already has all the underlying
infrastructure components for delivering the
application. In the real world, that means a
company can react to changing conditions
and requirements almost instantaneously, with
not only just-in-time infrastructure, but just-
in-time capabilities, too. Cloud computing
is the least-cost route to speed and flexibility
that businesses have never had before - and
it removes that data - centre millstone from
around their corporate necks.
Converged services - bringing users together
Today, a particular communications service is
tied to a particular network and to a particular
device. That means that when a subscriber
signs up for IPTV service, he can only get that
service on his home TV, not on his computer
or his mobile smartphone. To obtain that
same service on one or both of those other
devices, he will have to sign up for separate
versions of the service, which, in turn, are not
available on his TV. Everyone functions in
rigid communications silos that are not suited
to the ways people live and work.
Convergence is flattening those silos, making
it possible for users to obtain a given service
on any device, anywhere they happen to be
at the moment. In the not-so-distant future,
people will get the services they want, when
and where they want them, on any device they
want to use, thus eliminating the complex,
expensive duplication of services and bills.
For example, a user will be able to stream
content between a mobile phone and a TV
set. Today, mobile phones have cameras but,
when users capture video on their phones,
they can either see it on their phones or send
it to other users who can watch it on their
phones; the service is restricted to mobile
phones. Convergence, however, will enable a
user at a soccer game to capture the game on
their video phone and stream it to their home
TV, where family members can also watch
the game - in real time. Just as the cell phone
made it unnecessary to use a fixed location to
make and receive calls, convergence will free
people from depending on specific networks
and specific devices when they want to use
specific communications services.
Some communications technologies clearly
have restricted usefulness and therefore
have limited lifespans. However, when a
technology - or set of technologies - simplifies
life and work, brings people together in
common interests, personalizes their options
and simultaneously gives them the freedom
to move around, then that technology delivers
unlimited value. It becomes part of our human
experience. n
 Mobile payment
Mobile
Innovation andsystems
access
growth

The end of innovation?

by Karl F. May, President and CEO, OpVista, Inc., Chairman of the Board, Integra5, Inc.

Growing demand for bandwidth - driven by video, mobility and application and device
convergence - are fuelling the need for network transformation. The growth of online
and mobile access to television and music, of social networking and Internet information
searches and services are creating demands for bandwidth that operators are hard pressed
to economically meet. This offers great opportunities, but the economic environment and
shrinking sources of funding are slowing innovation and the transformation of ideas into
product and commercial successes.

Karl May is CEO and President of OpVista, Inc, as well as Chairman of Integra5, Inc. OpVista manufactures 40 Gigabit optical
networking solutions. Mr May previously served in leadership and executive roles at Silicon Graphics, Bay Networks (later acquired
by Nortel Networks, merged with BarcoNet and acquired by Scientific-Atlanta), and AP Engines. Mr May was an early pioneer in both
interactive television - he worked on the Time Warner Full Service Network and NTT’s Zoetrope service - and the cable modem, leading
Bay Network’s business delivering broadband solutions to cable operators throughout the world.

Mr May writes and speaks frequently on broadband and media applications. Trained as an engineer, Karl May started his career at
Hewlett-Packard.

This decade has been both generous and cruel
to all links in the communications value chain.
In North America, the Telecom Act of 1996
paved the way for broad innovation among
carriers and service providers. Broad adoption
of the Internet and subsequent enhancements
of the cable modem and DSL stimulated tens
of billions of dollars in investment and seeded
innovation in communications technology
like no other period in history.
Venture capital flourished, providing the
capital to develop competitive local exchange
carriers (CLEC’s) and, as well, the technology
companies building routers, switches, and
other new communications technology. The
crash of the technology boom in 2001/02
and the current broad economic downturn,
however, have clouded the horizon for new
ventures. Innovation - the germination of
new ideas - will undoubtedly continue, but
converting innovative ideas into robust
companies will become an even greater
challenge.
The computer and communications
technology segments are far from mature;
nevertheless, the environment for new ideas
and technologies is temporarily unreceptive
given today’s dismal economic environment.
Consumer behaviour has undergone
significant change since 2000. Yahoo! and
Google have organized information and made
it much more accessible to the masses. Apple
Computer’s iPod products and iTunes’ service
have revolutionized the way people purchase
and consume music. Programmes once
delivered exclusively to televisions, are now
available online through Hulu and iTunes
and are increasingly viewed on computers
and hand-held devices. The rise of social
networking sites - Facebook and LinkedIn
come to mind - may ultimately eliminate the
need for humans to talk to each other. If those
sites fail, the volume of SMS message traffic
between mobile phones, and now televisions,
will surely seal the deal.
There are three broad areas of technological
innovation that will feed the growth in
demand for the services outlined above:
bandwidth, mobility, and application and
device convergence. In 1998, a vision of the
Home of the Future was created in a lower

North America issue 2009 n 15

 Innovation and growth
Manhattan loft that was transformed into a
broadband-enabled residence. The Home of
the Future used a cable modem, with fast,
always-on Internet access, a synchronized
calendar with a display integrated into a
mirror in the bathroom, connected computers
and small displays connected wirelessly with
a technology that was later to become a basis
for WiFi. There was even a small camera for
video conferencing attached to a personal
computer.
While none of that seems remarkable today, in
1998, most homes had a single telephone line,
dial-up modems with a maximum bandwidth
of 56 kilobits per second were the hot Internet
access technology and mobile phones were
somewhat of a luxury. In just over a decade,
many of the futuristic concepts presented in
the Home of the Future are commonly found
in homes throughout the developed world.
By some estimates, there has been a sixty-fold
increase in access bandwidth to the home.
That growth was driven by broadband data
services. Today, many pundits are predicting
a further ten- to twenty-fold increase in access
bandwidth driven by video and that, in turn,
will drive yet another network transformation.
Video demands a different set of network
behaviours compared to traditional IP
networks; video needs long session, has less
‘bursty’ traffic, and will tax existing networks.
There are already companies emerging with
products that address these requirements. If
they execute well, they have the opportunity
to challenge the router incumbents
significantly.
A natural corollary to the type of traffic and
service traversing networks is the increase
in volume that will result from the growth
of video. Carriers and network operators
will come under pressure to upgrade the
bandwidth in their networks at an increasing
pace. I have seen customers quadruple the
aggregate bandwidth on their networks in
less than two years; video is always the main
driver.
Migration from 10G to 40G and ultimately
100G networks will continue apace and it
will be incumbent on vendors to make the
transition between technologies as seamless
as possible. Operating expenses, including co-
location, power, and cooling, will become an
ever greater focus as ‘green’ becomes a more
pervasive mandate among carriers. Low cost,
high performance, low power, high flexibility
- companies delivering network infrastructure
solutions with these goals in mind will win
out in the marketplace
16 n North America issue 2009
Mobile phones have also become ubiquitous.
There are few people over the age of 13
and under 80 who do not have a mobile
phone. AT&T, one of the largest North
American mobile operators, reports 79
million subscribers to its service in the United
States. In the current economic climate, one
surprising statistic has confounded pundits:
smartphones, the high-function, high-end
devices such as the iPhone and Blackberry,
have thrived. On airplanes and trains, taxicabs
and park benches, more mobile phone owners
are consuming rich media - video, music,
messaging, and playing games. In the same
quarterly release, AT&T reported a decline in
residential landline revenue, driven, in part,
by consumer turning off their home phones
and maintaining only a mobile phone. The
contemplated 4G or LTE mobile build-outs
in the coming few years will only increase
aggregate network bandwidth requirements.
As mobile phones, computers and, perhaps,
television set-top boxes approach each
other in processing power and functionality;
consumers will expect applications to
converge. For today’s savvy tech consumer,
every application on the computer should be
available on the phone. My instant messaging
service should continue to deliver messages
to me if I move from my computer to my
phone, and vice versa. My Blackberry or
iPhone should be as capable of displaying
a presentation to a customer or colleague as
my computer is, and airport security would
be easier if I only had my phone. While
travelling, I would like to receive e-mail
confirmations on my phone of all of the
transactions I make along the way - hotel bill,
Starbucks coffee, taxi fare. Reconciling these
with an expense reporting application back at
the office would eliminate paper receipts and
improve efficiency.
Social networking applications, pioneered
by MySpace and Facebook, will no doubt
lead the way in multi-platform application
convergence. By their very nature, users
will want to network with friends whether
sitting at the computer doing work, with the
phone on a train, or in front of the television
watching a reality show. Sharing experiences,
- with Twitter being, perhaps, the real-time
equivalent of this phenomenon - continues
to be a major goal of younger, tech savvy
consumers. One should expect to see rich
opportunities to develop new applications
that enable sharing, and continue the virtuous
cycle of bandwidth growth.
Continued bandwidth growth and network
transformation driven by video, mobility, and
application convergence give entrepreneurs
great opportunities to mine. Although
innovation will continue, the next several
years will present significant challenges
transforming ideas into products, companies,
and commercial successes. The traditional
funding source for innovative ideas - venture
capital - is undergoing its own very significant
transformation. The traditional sources of
capital for venture firms are pulling back
or even eliminating their emphasis on risk
capital. Fewer venture capital firms will
receive fewer dollars, and fewer ideas will
receive financing. Some very compelling
ideas will simply die away. The current
environment will test entrepreneurs and
investors like no other in the past 30 years.
Let us all hope that we can continue to fund
the best ideas and entrepreneurs, and forestall
the end of innovation. n
Connect-World is
celebrating its 12th
anniversary
Through the years, Connect-
World’s authors told of the rise
of mobile, of fibre, of wireless
and of broadband; they told of
the dot.com meltdown, of
digital inclusion and conver-
gence, of standards and break-
throughs, the rise of IP and
the fall of switching and of the
regulatory turnaround.
In every issue of Connect-World
heads of state, ministers and
W
regulators, heads of
B
international institutions and
u
leaders of industry speak of
what the ICT revolution, as it p
happens, means to the people
in their regions of the world.
www.connect-world.com B
D
R
E
P
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PROMOTIONAL FEATURE
 Carrier Ethernet

Carrier Ethernet and the new network

by Jeff Reedy, CEO, Overture Networks

Telecommunications networks are shifting from circuit switching to packet switching. This
will let operators handle growing volumes of voice, image and data traffic on the same
network, thereby reducing capital, operational expenses and simplify the network’s operation,
maintenance and provisioning. In the past, operators retrofitted legacy voice networks with
fibre optics and SONET/SDH protocols, but these networks cannot handle the growth of IP
traffic. Carrier Ethernet based architectures are designed for IP-based traffic, offer gigabit
speeds and can easily grow.

Jeff Reedy is the CEO of Overture Networks, a provider of carrier Ethernet edge and aggregation solutions for business services and
mobile backhaul. Prior to Overture, Mr Reedy was VP of Engineering of Larscom Incorporated, a network access equipment company.
Mr Reedy joined Larscom when they acquired T3 Technologies, a start-up he co-founded. Mr Reedy began his career at Bell Laboratories
designing packet switching hardware. He holds two patents.

Jeff Reedy earned a BS in electrical engineering and computer science from Duke University and a MSEE from Stanford University.

The telecommunications industry is in the
midst of the largest transformation in history.
The transition from circuit switching to packet
switching has a game-changing impact upon
network design and operation. At the centre
of this transformation is a technology called
Carrier Ethernet. Some telecom carriers may
view Carrier Ethernet as just another service
or interface they must add to their basket of
network offerings. Others with a long-term
view correctly see Carrier Ethernet as a
fundamental new building block in network
infrastructure that enables service providers to
offer all of their key services at lower costs.
Why Carrier Ethernet?
Most people know Ethernet as a local area
networking technology used in the office to
connect computers to servers and printers and
as the connection at home from the PC to the
cable or DSL modem. Since the late 1990s
telecom service providers and networking
equipment vendors have been adapting
Ethernet technology for metropolitan and
wide area networks by making it more
reliable, scaleable, manageable and suitable
for offering multiple data, voice and video
services to business customers.
Why Carrier Ethernet?
Over the past two decades, service providers
around the world have retrofitted their legacy
voice-centric networks to carry increasing
amounts of data by adding the speed of fibre
optics and the SONET/SDH protocols. While
these technologies brought great value to the
older network as traffic from data services
grew, they are proving to be inadequate
today as service providers are seeing Internet
Protocol (IP) traffic dwarf the traditional
voice traffic on their networks. This has driven
the need for a fundamental change. Carrier
Ethernet is the natural delivery mechanism for
IP-based data, voice and video applications. It
provides speeds from one megabit per second
(Mb/s) to over one gigabit per second (Gb/s),
and if more bandwidth is needed, it is a very
quick process to ratchet up the data rate.
This need for speed and flexibility touches
both traditional business services and
mobile backhaul. As companies increase
their dependence on Internet and intranet
communications, and as computing resources
move to data centres and hosting sites,
the network must become the enabler, not
the choke point, for new ways to conduct
business. In mobile communications, third
generation (3G) and fourth generation (4G)
applications on the mobile handset is driving
a ten-fold increase in the bandwidth required
for backhaul from the cell-tower to the mobile
switching office.
The long term
It might be tempting to treat Carrier Ethernet
as just another protocol or service offering
one needs to add to the existing network.
Operators do, in fact, leverage their existing

18 n North America issue 2009


copper and fibre assets to reach customer
locations with Carrier Ethernet services,
because connecting to only some of their
sites is not acceptable. Despite the growth
of Carrier Ethernet, other services such
Frame Relay, private line, TDM, voice and
IP continue to dwarf Ethernet connections
today, as shown in Figure 1. Even as Ethernet
takes a greater slice of the pie, these legacy
services will continue to provide the majority
of business connections for some time.
Still, operators are beginning to embrace
the notion of using Ethernet as a unifying
network technology as advances in silicon
technology continue to drive down the cost
per bit in packet systems. Because business
connections converge at aggregation points
in the network, such as a co-location facility
or central office, service providers are able
to address the challenges posed by growing
Ethernet Services while maintaining support
for existing business connections.
Figure 1. Business Connections in the U.S.
Ideally, carriers would prefer to implement
a new integrated architecture that converges
all of their services using Ethernet-based
technology to drive economies in switching
and aggregation before hitting the network
core. This architecture needs to provide
quality of service across different physical
media, it needs to support high levels of
resiliency for non-stop operation, and it needs
to support end-to-end service manageability
to enable the service level agreements that
businesses demand. This requires a new type
of aggregation solution in the network.
To date there have been two approaches
to aggregation. On one hand, there have
been point products that focus on a single
technology or service. These point products
do not scale, so they eventually reach their
limits. Additionally, if there are different
point products for different technologies,
the operator ends up with a management
nightmare. The other approach has been
the big-iron multi-service edge/switch/
router solution that offers every interface
and protocol conceivable and can support
thousands of customer connections. However,
the big-iron solution has high start-up costs,
carries the weight of many unnecessary
features and has proven too complex and
too costly to deploy in a wide-scale network
footprint. What is needed is an in-between
solution that combines the cost-effective pay-
as-you-grow approach with the scalability of
the big-iron and is optimized to bridge the
circuit and packet worlds and modernizes the
central office while enabling the operator to
reduce costs significantly.
Fortunately, service providers are receiving
plenty of help from networking equipment
companies and they are proactively driving
requirements to advance the state of the art.
In addition, service providers, enterprises and
equipment vendors are all working together in
standards bodies such as the MEF (formerly
known as the Metro Ethernet Forum) to define
feature requirements and interoperability
standards that ensure networks provide the
reach, scale and manageability required for
a truly universal infrastructure and set of
services.
Mobile backhaul conundrum
In many ways, the cell tower is like a business
location. There are a range of services and
protocols that need support and a constantly
growing need for bandwidth. The second-
generation systems (2G, 2.5G) prevalent today
provide the basic voice communications for
the cell phone. third Generation (3G) systems
provide the data capabilities popular today,
and fourth Generation (4G) systems will
provide even greater data, voice and video
capabilities. Whereas T1 and E1 connections
were adequate for the earlier, voice-centric
systems, the bandwidth requirements for
4G dictate a high-speed Ethernet connection
between the cell-tower and mobile switching
office.
Figure 2. Mobile Applications Driving Backhaul Bandwidth
Varying adoption rates of the newer
technologies and a wide range of older
handsets still in operation will force these
different mobile technologies to coexist
for some time. The service provider faces
Mobile payment
MobileEthernet
Carrier systems
access
the problem of supporting legacy traffic
and interfaces while providing high-speed
connectivity for new services. As with
networks built to deliver business services,
it may be tempting to address the issue
incrementally either by adding Ethernet to
existing transport devices or by building
an overlay network, but these shortsighted
solutions can be costly.
Adding Ethernet to existing transport systems
will support legacy services and high-speed
connections for 4G at the cell tower, but the
traffic is still backhauled and aggregated on
circuits to get back to the mobile switching
office. This results in inefficiencies, stranded
capacity and continued investment in legacy
multiplexers and cross-connects that inhibits
network scaling as packet traffic increases. On
the other hand, building an overlay network to
focus just on the high-speed 4G needs is even
more costly since the connection to the cell
tower is not shared so parallel transport and
aggregation systems need to be constructed.
Service providers that take the long view
realize that the ideal solution is to construct
a network optimized for the next generation
packet services that can support legacy traffic.
This can be done using a technique called
‘pseudowire’ which ‘tunnels’ the legacy traffic
over the Carrier Ethernet packet network.
Once legacy traffic is transformed into
packets, it can be aggregated and transported
along with the 4G packet traffic, taking
advantage of the continually decreasing cost
per bit provided by Carrier Ethernet systems.
Pseudowire technology has evolved from first
generation, proprietary, implementations to
second generation standards-based solutions.
The MEF created a set of compliance tests
called MEF-18 so that carriers can verify
that their solutions meet the stringent latency
and jitter specifications required for circuit
transport over Ethernet. Using MEF-18
compliant equipment, carriers can construct a
low-cost, multi-service network that will meet
all their mobile backhaul needs today and in
the future.
Carrier Ethernet is at the centre of the
unprecedented transformation - from circuit to
packet - of the telecommunications network.
The applications and needs of the end user
continue to expand at extraordinary rates yet
the demand for quality remains high. Network
designers and operators that use Carrier
Ethernet strategically as the cornerstone of the
new network benefit from increased revenues
and lower costs and have, as well, the basis
for building and maintaining a competitive
edge for many years to come. n
North America issue 2009 n 19
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20 n North America issue 2009
 Mobile payment
Mobile
Data systems
access
transport

POTS for data-intensive services

by Noam Lotan, President & CEO, MRV Communications Inc.

‘POTS’, the old acronym for plain old telephone service has a new meaning - packet optical
transport services. The growth of POTS is driven by the insatiable demand for broadband-
dependent content-rich, multimedia applications such as entertainment and video services
and the operating companies’ need to upgrade network capacity without cutting too heavily
into profits. POTS enhances capacity and efficiency and, unlike traditional SONET/SDH
networks, POTS not only handles10G Ethernet, but can be dynamically and remotely
reconfigured to meet user needs.

Noam Lotan is the President and CEO of MRV Communications. Until assuming his current post, Mr Lotan was MRV’s Chief Financial
Officer. Earlier, Mr Lotan served as Managing Director of Fibronics (UK) Ltd, a manufacturer of fibre optic communication networks;
later when purchased by MRV, Mr Lotan assumed the post of Director of European Operations for Fibronics. Mr Lotan held a variety of
sales and marketing positions with Fibronics and Hewlett-Packard. He is also a Director for Capstone Turbine Corporation,

Noam Lotan holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology and a
Master’s degree in Business Administration from INSEAD, the European Institute of Business Administration, Fontainebleau, France.

In the telecommunications industry, the
acronym POTS will soon no longer conjure
memories of ‘Plain Old Telephone Service’
and voice-only networks of the past. The
new POTS stands for packet optical transport
services, a new class of data-aware optical
networking equipment. Although it may take
time for the migration from today’s SONET/
SDH networks to POTS networks, industry
analysts agree that POTS will be a necessary
component for the high-bandwidth, high-
quality and cost-effective networks of the
video and real-time data era that we are now
living in.
Over the past decade, demand for data
services has increased with the explosion
of technologies such as DSL, fibre optic
access and broadband wireless networks.
Additionally, today’s mobile phones are
now handling as much data as PCs had in
the past, with the ability to process voice,
data and video. To handle the demands of
these services, all of these technologies
require a network infrastructure that delivers
high performance and has the provisioning
flexibility operators need.
Today’s optical backbone networks rely on
SONET/SDH to transport high-speed data.
However, the explosion of data services is
beyond what these circuit-switched networks
can cost-effectively deliver. This results in
considerably higher capital and operational
expenses for service providers when compared
to the scalability and cost effectiveness of
Internet Protocol (IP) networks. SONET/
SDH is a less cost-effective solution because
it cannot provision maximized bandwidth
and cannot be scaled to fit changing network
demands.
Enter POTS - the combination of packet
and optical. While is the exact definition
of POTS is still being worked out and the
equipment and vendor taxonomies are still
in flux, product and technology definitions
are generally known. The benefits of these
networks, however, are well known, and are
driving network growth even though service
providers must be very choosy about their
CAPEX spending.
According to a report by Heavy Reading, the
POTS market should grow from its current
small base to reach US$2.8 billion in sales
in 2012 according to forecasts that assume

North America issue 2009 n 21

 Data transport
“From IPTV to mobile TV to YouTube! carriers are being called on to deliver more real-time
video than ever before. POTS is very useful in the deployment of content-rich, multimedia
applications such as entertainment and video services delivered through the Internet or
mobile network.”
a modest annual growth rate of 4.8 per cent
CAGR (compound annual growth rate) for
worldwide optical transport revenue. The
report also indicated that the move from
SONET/SDH would continue, and that it
would decline at a rapid pace.
Why POTS?
As innovative consumer services increase
demands on telecom networks, operators
will look for solutions that meet these new
demands while maintaining cost-effective
operations. One area where this is most
pronounced is in the area of video and
entertainment delivery. From IPTV to mobile
TV to YouTube! carriers are being called on
to deliver more real-time video than ever
before. POTS is very useful in the deployment
of content-rich, multimedia applications such
as entertainment and video services delivered
through the Internet or mobile network.
One issue with these services is the need for
high quality, uninterrupted data speeds. With
POTS, the optical transport can handle high-
speed data transfer rates providing the highest
quality available for these services. POTS
enhances the backhaul capacity, efficiency
and service delivery of the network.
POTS also enhances services within the
mobile network. POTS will provide a smooth
transition for the telecom operators who are
upgrading their backhaul networks to support
the move to 4G/LTE services. POTS allows
for greater flexibility and reliability for mobile
traffic, by offering a solution that allows for
scaling of bandwidth when necessary.
Many operators now offer triple play services
such as Internet, TV and phone, and POTS
can provide the operational consistency and
efficiency these bundled services require.
POTS supports the full-rate packet traffic
needed for high-speed Internet and video
services.
A secondary benefit of POTS that goes beyond
high-speed data networking is the service
provisioning flexibility and speed provided by
these networks. In a SONET network, service
provisioning can take weeks or months
because site visits have to be scheduled and
changes to network cabling - ranging from
laying new cable to reconfiguring cabling in
22 n North America issue 2009
wiring closets and switching centres - may be
required.
The ability to offer services on demand,
or even temporary services, is one of the
requirements of the new world of data
networking. Customers may want high-speed
data services for a short period, like during
a big promotion on their Website, or during
parts of the day when they know they need
higher bandwidth, like overnight backups.
Business users, in particular, expect the carrier
to be able to deploy new services in a matter
of hours or days.
POTS network technologies
POTS is a new category of optical transport
system; it is based on three key optical
technologies: generalized multi-protocol label
switching (GMPLS), wavelength division
multiplexing (WDM) and reconfigurable
optical add-drop multiplexer (ROADM).
POTS also supports Layer 2-4 connection-
oriented Ethernet switching support in a
single chassis. Some systems also provide
SONET/SDH ADM connectivity for legacy
network interconnect. That is a tall order
because it combines legacy network support
with support for several still evolving
technologies.
GMPLS is the latest version of the MPLS
protocol that is very widely used in networks
today to provide quality of service. With
GMPLS, however, equipment manufacturers
can completely separate the control and data
planes of a network switch/ router to support
network switching for time, wavelength,
and space switching as well as for packet
switching. With GMPLS, a switch can map
packets to light waves and deliver flexible
switching on layer 2, 3 or 4 of the IP protocol
stack, enabling a seamless interconnection
and convergence of new and legacy networks.
WDM is today’s state of the art technology
for high-speed optical networks; it currently
provides speeds of 40Gbps and speeds of
up to 100Gbps are on the horizon. WDM
multiplexes multiple optical carrier signals
on a single optical fibre by using different
wavelengths to carry each signal. This
multiplies capacity and enables bidirectional
communications over a single strand of fibre.
ROADM is a key optical technology for
POTS; it offers a cost-effective way to
remotely add or drop a service to meet
customer demand without manually changing
the cabling. ROADM is an optical add-drop
multiplexer that remotely switches WDM
traffic at the wavelength layer so individual,
or multiple, data channels (wavelengths) can
be added and/or dropped from a transport
fibre at each node.
Putting it together
What does a POTS network look like after
putting together all of these technologies?
The POTS network starts at the edge IP
demarcation switches. Ideally, these offer
up to 10G Ethernet switching for customer
networks and comprehensive operations,
administration and maintenance (OAM) to
reduce operations costs. These ‘demarc’
switches need flexible connectivity to the
carrier network, via either WDM or 10Gbps
IP switching.
Aggregation switches are the next key point,
because this is where a lot of intelligence
for making service-provisioning decisions
is located. The ideal aggregation switch will
have IP switching to connect to the demarc
switches and, connecting to the carrier, will
have WDM connectivity with GMPLS for the
service provisioning flexibility.
At the transport part of the network, data is
fed into a POTS-enabled WDM platform
where the ROADM capability delivers the
flexibility to reconfigure services at each hub
of a long-distance transport ring. So with
ROADM technology, the carrier is able to
redeploy the physical interconnection from a
central management location.
Looking forward to POTS
Today’s service providers are faced with the
task of expanding their networks to provide
advanced data services while maintaining
the quality of service demanded by users.
POTS allows network operators to evolve
their networks easily to deliver new services.
With POTS technology, operators can
maintain the operational consistency and
efficiency required to maintain services while
staying ahead of the demand for advancing
technologies. n
 Mobile Network
payment
Mobilesystems
access
Capacity

Broadband - separating the long distance runners

from the sprinters
by Hossam Salib, VP of Marketing for Positron Access Solutions/Aktino

Demand for broadband has run ahead of both wired and wireless network capacity and left
many operators with little, if any, excess capacity. Operators must either invest heavily in
fibre cabling or meet consumer demand by upgrading their existing copper-wired networks.
The new MIMO (multiple input, multiple output) over DMT (Discrete Multitone) copper-
bonded solutions are relatively inexpensive and provides a return on investment within12 to
24 months by using the existing copper infrastructure to provide fibre-like bandwidth and
reliability.

Hossam Salib is the VP of Marketing for Aktino, a Positron Access Solutions division, a developer of carrier MIMO over DMT bonded
copper solutions; he has over 20 years of experience in product management, and the marketing and development of complex systems
and silicon products. Throughout the years, Mr Salib headed a product management organization at ADC, worked with key carriers
including AT&T, Qwest and France Telecom, was the Senior Director of Engineering at PairGain and worked at Rockwell designing
electronic modules and ASICs.

Hossam Salib received his B.S degree in Electrical Engineering from Polytechnic University of New York.

The proliferation of multimedia applications,
ubiquitous handheld devices and the ever-
growing mobile workforce has created
an insatiable demand for highly reliable
access bandwidth. The empirical data also
suggests that more bandwidth is required
for traffic towards the consumer rather than
towards the service provider. Residential
and business users spend most of their time
accessing e-mails, presentations, videos and
music rather than generating and uploading
information back on to the network.
This rapid increase in bandwidth demand has
drained the excess capacity on both wireline
and wireless networks. Telecom service
providers realise that current networks must
be upgraded to meet the demands of their
customers. However, today’s service providers
face two critical challenges building up their
capacity and remaining competitive:
• Multiple cable system operators (MSOs)
already provide up to 150 Mbps downstream
and 20 Mbps upstream on their existing cable
network. This allows them to address the
bandwidth needs with low incremental capital
expense (CAPEX);
• The recessive economic market conditions
and resulting loss in revenue has forced many
service providers to cut their CAPEX; and
Competitive pressures drive carriers to
deliver services in a timely manner and meet
stringent service-level agreements (SLAs).
Additionally, reduced CAPEX budgets force
carriers to deliver services using their existing
network infrastructure rather than building a
new network.
Addressing the problem
Over the past 15 years, carriers have deployed
a significant amount of fibre in the access
and transport networks. However, copper
still connects most businesses and homes
worldwide. Fibre is the ultimate solution
to meet current and future bandwidth
requirements; it will eventually be deployed
everywhere. Unfortunately, the significant
upfront cost and longer time fibre takes to
generate a return on investment keeps telecom
service provider from deploying fibre everywhere.

North America issue 2009 n 23

 Network Capacity
In contrast, bonded copper solutions
require significantly less capital initially,
enabling a payback in 12 to 24 months.
This lets providers leverage their existing
copper infrastructure and provide fibre-like
bandwidth. Telecom service providers prefer
the low CAPEX solution using their existing
copper infrastructure provides, but also like
the high bandwidth and reliability of fibre.
Can telecom service providers win the
broadband race by offering high bandwidth
with high reliability without spending
a significant amount of money on fibre
deployments? Can carriers run, and win,
the long-term race rather than trying to be
sprinters and running out of cash before
building a solid customer base? The answer
lies in being able to use new and innovative
technology to bridge the fibre deployment
gap.
New Innovative Technology - MIMO over
DMT
The new MIMO (multiple input, multiple
output) over DMT (Discrete Multitone)
copper bonded solutions require significantly
less capital and enables a return on investment
of 12 to 24 months. This gives providers
an opportunity to leverage their existing
copper infrastructure to provide fibre-like
bandwidth and reliability, with the scalability
and flexibility required to meet the demand
for advanced services. As a result, many are
using bonded copper until fibre build-outs can
be justified financially.
MIMO itself has roots as a wireless solution,
since interference has always been a
consideration. It dovetails perfectly with
DMT, which significantly improves the
spectral compatibility between symmetric
and asymmetric services. As a combined
approach, this technology delivers the high
rates and long reach carriers seek, with a level
of reliability that rivals fibre.
As illustrated below, Wireline and Wireless
MIMO applications provide significant
bandwidth gains and better reach to allow
providers to offer these new services
ubiquitously.
The chart below illustrates the performance of
MIMO over DMT copper bonded solutions.
• MIMO over DMT symmetric rate
performance (in red) is typically double or
more than that of legacy technologies (in
pink) at any given reach; and
• MIMO over DMT asymmetric
downstream (in blue and black) is five to ten
times more than that of legacy technologies.
24 n North America issue 2009
For example, at 2 Km, legacy technologies
can deliver eight to 20 Mbps to a business or
a cell site. MIMO over DMT can deliver up
to 100 Mbps in the downstream direction on
the same number of copper pairs.
This technology enables service providers
to benefit from the following three main
applications:
Wireless backhaul
The demand for backhaul bandwidth to cell
sites has increased because many customers
are replacing their landlines with mobile
phones. In addition, many are opting to use
high bandwidth wireless devices such as smart
phones for their e-mails, Internet, music and
videos, which rapidly use up the providers’
backhaul bandwidth. This situation, coupled
with intense competition and price pressure in
the marketplace, has created a great sense of
urgency to find fast, cost-effective solutions
such as bonded copper. MIMO over DMT
bonded copper allows carriers to provide
up to 100 Mbps Ethernet backhaul to cell
sites versus eight to 20 Mbps with legacy
technologies.
DSLAM backhaul
To expand high-speed broadband services to
homes, providers need to deploy DSLAMs
(Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplexer)
closer to homes. This allows technologies
like ADSL2 (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber
Line) and VDSL2 (Very High Bitrate Digital
Subscriber Line) to deliver 25 to 50 Mbps to
homes. As compared to cell sites, many of
these DSLAMs will connect to copper and re-
ceive only the limited bandwidth that legacy
technologies can provide. MIMO over DMT
provides up to ten times more bandwidth over
legacy copper technologies.
Business Ethernet services
Business Ethernet services have traditionally
started with bandwidth levels as low as
two Mbps. Recent increases in demand for
bandwidth by businesses, schools, hospitals
and banks have raised the service level
requirements from two Mbps to about 10 to
50 Mbps. These services are traditionally
symmetric, but a new wave of applications
is driving more downstream requirements for
services like DIA (Dedicated Internet Access).
MIMO over DMT is the only technology that
meets both requirements.
It is also worth noting that very recent moves
toward asymmetric transmission not only
help carriers handle the high-bandwidth
applications mentioned above, but also enable
even higher per-pair bandwidth rates - nearly
double the already impressive bandwidth per-
pair made possible by symmetric MIMO over
DMT technology. While Ethernet services
are traditionally symmetric, many emerging
applications use significant downstream
bandwidth and very little upstream
bandwidth.
With an asymmetric approach, service
providers can configure the upstream and
downstream flows in order to tailor bandwidth
to the precise needs of their customers and
their own backhaul demands. In addition
to the flexibility of this approach, the
‘unbalanced’ bandwidth enables carriers to
achieve bandwidths as high as 13 Mbps per
copper pair up to 2 Km.
In a challenging era, as telecommunications
use grows rapidly around the world, telecom
service providers who are able to meet the
increasing demands of high bandwidth by
leveraging low cost methods to offer higher
speed broadband services, will be at a distinct
advantage. The race is on; providers must
deploy the most cost-effective solution to
obtain high bandwidth, high reliability and
flexibility. Fibre deployment prevails where
the business case is justified and funds are
available, but for the majority of existing
networks that utilize copper, MIMO over
DMT provides an affordable fibre-like
solution using an economical copper-based
technology.
In times where it is important to be cost-
conscious, providers need to consider all
of their options before investing heavily in
expensive technologies. The provider who
selects technologies that work best with their
existing networks and meets the demand for
bandwidth at the lowest cost will win the
race. n
 GIL 2009: North America
Phoenix, Arizona
September 2009
Growth, Innovation & Leadership:
A Frost & Sullivan Global Congress on Corporate Growth
GIL 2009: Asia Pacific GIL 2009: China GIL 2009: Europe
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Shanghai, China London, UK

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Bangalore, India Sao Palo, Brazil Dubai, UAE

Frost & Sullivan’s premier client event GIL – Growth, Innovation and Leadership supports senior
executives in their efforts to accelerate the growth rates of their companies.

Each year, thousands of CEOs and their growth teams return to engage in this global community
to explore actionable strategies, solutions, and growth processes that they can put to work in
building a solid Growth Acceleration System.

GIL 2009: North America is a "must attend" for any organisation seeking fresh perspectives, new
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Register Today!
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Capturing innovative ideas for growth.

North America issue 2009 n 25

 Network upgrade

The ICT relay race

by Cliff Townsend, Vice President, Business Development, Galazar Networks

To compete effectively, network operators must constantly upgrade their networks to handle
rising volumes, steadily mounting bandwidth requirements and increasingly demanding
applications and content. Operators rely on network equipment providers (NEPs) not only
for faster, better, more cost-effective equipment, but also for the knowhow to get it running,
and stay running, smoothly. To provide better functionality at lower cost, NEPs increasingly
depend upon network semiconductor providers (NSPs) to design these functions in ever more
complex, sophisticated and lower-cost chips.

Cliff Townsend is the Vice President of Business Development at Galazar Networks. Previously, Mr Townsend established and
oversaw Galazar’s sales, marketing and operations teams. Mr Townsend has held a variety of senior engineering and business roles at
telecommunication technology companies such as Nortel Networks, Skystone Systems, Cisco Systems, and Innovance Networks.

Cliff Townsend holds a BE in Engineering Physics from the University of Saskatchewan and an MBA from Queen’s School of Business.

The race to deliver new information and
communication technologies has not been
an individual sport for decades. The AT&T
divestiture in the early 80s began to change
process the communications industry from a
vertically integrated model to a value chain
with many highly specialized members.
That process continues to evolve the way
information and communication technologies
(ICTs) are delivered and is causing a dramatic
imbalance between value creation and profit
margins.
Fast-forward to the present. Network
operators provide the services and plan the
network evolution. They rely on network
equipment providers (NEPs) to supply
platforms with the right characteristics when
they need them. NEPs draw on contract
manufacturers (CMs) for platform assembly
and on component and module suppliers for
platform features. Component and module
manufactures in turn draw on their own CMs.
This model is much more complex and open
to competitive forces.
The margin necessary for survival varies
significantly for different members.
Organizations that bulked up during the
boom have infrastructure costs that are out
of line with a stable market, let alone today’s
economic environment. In order to survive
they must extract margin from other members
in the value chain that they inhabit. A good
example is the thin margin that the suppliers
of optical modules receive compared with the
margin some NEPs receive for reselling the
same modules.

Before divestiture, a single entity planned the
network, defined the products necessary to
build it, did the R&D and manufactured the
products needed to turn the plan into reality.
In a monopolistic model like this, the entire
organization knows precisely what product
characteristics are needed (quality, features,
price) and when. It is also easy to maintain a
profitable business.
Competition is good - right? It drives
innovation and keeps costs down. The
problem is that post-bubble competition
continues to influence the profit margin of
the NEPs. They in turn are passing the pain
on to their suppliers; contract manufacturers,
component and module suppliers. The
entire value chain is under severe stress and
members are competing horizontally and
vertically for the margin they need to survive.
Evolve or perish. The value chain for
communication technologies continues to
evolve and so must its members. We have
seen consolidation and restructuring aimed
at adjusting the financial characteristics of
larger organizations for better alignment with
the industry. Time will tell if this evolutionary
branch can support sustainable organizations
in the long-term, and it is certainly creating
short-term uncertainty.

26 n North America issue 2009


Another evolutionary branch is spawning
smaller, more focused organizations that
create value within their own segment of the
supply chain. This model is less encumbered
by overbuilt infrastructure and is, therefore,
able to maximize the relative investment in
innovation. A specific example is the value
chain that includes suppliers of integrated
circuits for complex networking functions -
network semiconductor providers (NSPs).
NSPs have grown to fill the market need
for effective, highly integrated solutions
to complex communications networking
functions. Some were created by the
divestiture of the semiconductor divisions at
many of the large NEPs (e.g. Lucent - Agere).
Others have grown organically with venture
financing. The challenge for NSPs is to get
the product characteristics right (features,
price, quality) and to hit the market window.
Market timing is a growing challenge.
Predictions this year at OFC/NFOEC 2009
(Optical Fiber Communication Conference
and Exposition/National Fiber Optic
Engineers Conference) were for annual
network traffic growth ranging from >50 per
cent for wireline to >100 per cent for wireless.
At that rate of growth it’s difficult - some
say impossible - to avoid a limited supply
situation. NEPs face a difficult decision
when developing new products. Should they
shorten the development cycle or increase the
designed capacity? How many NEP CFOs
feel comfortable investing in a development
program today that yields a 10x performance
improvement to full field deployment in less
than four years?
Quality is usually the first victim of aggressive
product developments. After all, you can set
premium prices if you are well ahead of your
competition; you can hold the market with
your product footprint (NEP or NSP) as you
address the quality shortfalls. Unfortunately,
network cost must ultimately increase to
cover product upgrades and dependable
service is often unacceptably delayed.
Features are also commonly traded-off to
gain time. You can often get a product into
dependable service with an acceptably
reduced feature set and a solid plan for
upgrade. The ultimate platform for this
approach would offer field-provisionable
hardware and software for the complex
networking features. Components exist today
in the form of FPGAs (field-programmable
gate array semiconductors) that can
partially satisfy this approach within the
limits imposed by technology and cost.
Unfortunately, you cannot download FPGA
resources or microprocessor memory when
new network features exceed their hard limits.
Again, network cost must increase to cover
unanticipated upgrades and intended features
are often unacceptably delayed.
Price is the elephant under the table.
Consumers have become accustomed to
getting more for less when it comes to
communication technology, so they expect
network operators to increase bandwidth
without increasing service fees. NEPs,
therefore, are pressured to supply equipment
that meets increasing bandwidth demands at a
declining price - by some estimates you need
four times the bandwidth at less than twice
the price. The question is - who is making the
investments required to achieve these gains?
For one, the NSPs are. Moore’s law predicts
a semiconductor technology platform that
can satisfy the growing demands for network
bandwidth, give or take a bit. NSPs are
exploiting that semiconductor platform to
deliver increasingly complex networking
functions. The good ones are evolving their
development techniques to reduce their costs
and improving their support infrastructure to
improve their NEP customers’ development
cycle. The result is an overall reduction in
development costs and development time for
new communication products.
How does it work? Refer to the standard
development process; the exploration phase
identifies the appropriate product, the planning
phase assures a deterministic downstream
process, the development phase produces the
intended product, the validation phase assures
that product characteristics are aligned with
the intent and the production phase delivers
it to the market. To be successful NSPs
need to embrace many of the characteristics
typically associated with NEPs within their
development process.
First, the NSP has to understand the market
need. It is not good enough to listen to any one
member of the value chain, and the listener is
just as important as the speaker. That leads
to the first important characteristic for an
effective NSP; the team must be comprised
of people with direct experience and contacts
within the downstream value chain. That
gives the NSP the ability to appreciate the
subtleties of network needs and provides them
with a virtual consultancy of contacts within
the industry. That often resolves the question
of which products to develop.
Apart from good execution during the
planning and development phases, the next
significant requirement is a network approach
to product validation. For this, the NEP must
validate their ICs (integrated circuits) within
Mobile payment
Mobileupgrade
Network systems
access
a representative hardware and software
platform using realistic network scenarios.
Without this platform, only a limited set of
configurations can be exercised and only
in a static environment. With the flexibility
enabled by this platform, an automated
validation process can exercise various and
dynamic network scenarios around the clock.
That solves the requirement for delivering a
quality product.
Extending the NSPs definition of the
validated product to include the IC abstraction
software allows NEPs to quickly integrate
pre-validated functions into their network
equipment. This makes it possible for NEPs
to integrate new equipment into networks
quickly by minimizing their development and
validation time associated with the functions
provided by the NSPs’ ICs and software. That
solves the requirement for delivering new
networking products at the appropriate time.
If an NSP can deliver the right product
with good quality at the right time, what is
left? The elephant - price. Most NEPs have
developed their own ICs in the past and
their CFOs know that they cost 0.2 cents per
pico-hectare. That is the cost of goods that
NEPs traditionally used for calculating their
equipment cost. Along comes an NSP pricing
a similar IC at two cents per pico-hectare and
it looks like an order of magnitude increase
in the NEP’s cost of goods. The fixed cost
associated with the IC development that
was previously buried in the equipment’s
development cost is now exposed in the
COGs.
There is the imbalance between value creation
and profit margins. IC development costs
have migrated from NEPs to NSPs along with
the responsibility for network level features,
quality and market timing. Margins, however,
are harder to let go. Many NSPs have
established effective processes to innovate
and deliver the functions required to meet
the network growth demands. All they need
in order to continue their contribution to the
success of the value chain is their fair share of
margin to fund their investments.
The message is simple; the excesses of the
telecommunications boom are long over and
nobody is approving investments without
a solid business case. For a healthy value
chain, each member must remain viable.
Otherwise, the components, modules and
networking equipment necessary to sustain
the predicted growth will not emerge. Like a
relay race, each member must make a clean
transfer, adding value as the information and
communication technology moves up the
value chain toward the consumer. n
North America issue 2009 n 27
 Online video marketing

B2B marketing with video

by Jeff Whatcott, Vice President of Marketing, Brightcove

Video is a critical tool for online business-to-business marketing. According to some analysts,
online video is second only to word-of-mouth for its ability to influence the purchasing process.
Marketers use video at each stage of the customer lifecycle. They use it to influence branding
and awareness; to build consumers’ interest and lead them to consider a product or service; it
gives potential buyers the facts needed to evaluate a purchase; and, post-purchase, information
and content helps to cement customer loyalty.

Jeff Whatcott is the Vice President of Marketing at Brightcove. Prior to joining Brightcove Mr Whatcott launched Acquia, a commercial
open source start-up, where he continues as an advisor. Prior to Acquia, Mr Whatcott served as Vice President of Marketing and Business
Development at Adobe’s Enterprise Business Unit. Prior to Adobe, Mr Whatcott held a variety of senior product leadership positions at
Macromedia and Allaire.

Jeff Whatcott holds a Bachelor of Science degree in economics and Master of Business Administration, both from Brigham Young
University.

The video imperative
In the last few years, online video has
emerged as a critical element of online
communication and marketing strategies for
business-to-business marketers. When today’s
business customers visit a website, they
expect to find video - if it is not there, they
notice that something is missing.
Worldwide there are 452 million broadband
subscribers and almost every business has
a high-speed connection to the Internet.
Broadband has made the delivery of video
across the Web possible, and more than 80 per
cent of Internet users now watch online video
regularly.
According to MarketingSherpa, online video
is second only to word-of-mouth for its ability
to influence decision-makers at every stage of
the purchasing process. No marketing effort is
compete without incorporating online video to
drive awareness, leads, customer acquisition
and loyalty.
Strategic use of online video
Marketers are applying video at each stage
of the customer lifecycle; it has become a
key part of the overall marketing mix. While
every business organizes the lifecycle in
different ways, the process generally includes
stages at which marketers need to deploy
tactics to address their customers’ needs and
move them through to the next stage.
Branding and awareness
Prospects in the branding and awareness stage
are becoming familiar with your industry and
learning about the key players. Online video
drives branding and awareness by capturing
and engaging your audience. With its rich
storytelling capabilities, video is one of the
most effective brand-building mediums
available for advertising, viral marketing and
corporate communications campaigns.
Unlike static banner ads, video ads embedded
in Web pages or in online video content
engage viewers with deeper and richer
messages that leave a lasting impression. They
can introduce your products and company
to prospects in ways that are impossible
with traditional banner ads. Online video
can also reach customers in highly effective
and efficient ways that are different from
traditional media.
DuPont was able to reach key influencers
and bloggers using online video to raise
awareness of DuPont contributions and
build brand value. They created a series of
compelling short videos about their products
and scientific innovations drawing on content
from their video archive combined with
commentary from a popular blogger. The
videos were hosted on a DuPont site and
distributed to select blogs.
The award-winning video campaign was
a marketing success. During a relatively
short period, the campaign drove two
million impressions, 60,000 video streams,
and achieved an average time spent on site
of eight minutes. Ninety three per cent of
viewers said they learned something new, and
61 per cent said they would tell someone else
about the videos.
Interest and consideration
Prospects in the Interest and Consideration
stage of the customer lifecycle need to be
hooked by the benefits of your product and
presented a clear value proposition that drives
them to evaluate more deeply.
Online video gives you a way to draw users
into your content and bring your products
and services to life. On-demand product
tours that give the visitor control of in-depth

28 n North America issue 2009

 Researched & Produced By:

O tte
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Sunday 25th – Thursday 29th October 2009 • Mövenpick Hotel, Dubai, U.A.E.

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North America issue 2009 n 29
 Online video marketing
information are among the most popular types
of video content. Beyond communicating the
value proposition, video product tours can
utilize in-depth video analytics that will give
you insights into which parts of your pitch
are resonating the most with prospect and
customers.
In addition to product tours, Marketers are
incorporating video customer testimonials
and introductions to features directly on their
website. These short, high-impact videos
help to capture customer attention and spark
deeper engagement.
Podcasting is one of the most popular
approaches to recurring communication
with prospects and customers. According to
MarketingSherpa, 78 per cent of the business
technology executives surveyed said that on
more than one occasion, they have listened to
a technology-related podcast.
Evaluation
At the evaluation stage, customers are ready
to dive more deeply into their assessment of
your product. They are looking for validation
and trying to understand if the product can be
applied to meet their needs.
During the evaluation stage, online video can
help tell your story more effectively. Longer-
form video presentations that present product
functionality, describe benefits, and show
products being used are a compelling way to
help customers understand and evaluate your
products. The latest online video technology
offers full-screen HD presentations for a rich
and immersive experience.
At this stage, customer case studies are
excellent ways to persuade prospective buyers
of the value of your offering. Traditional
written case studies are often dry and fail to
connect with buyers at both an intellectual
and emotional level. With video, you can
bring your case studies to life and let your
existing customers sell your products and
services for you.
Loyalty
Because existing customers are worth a great
deal, savvy marketers continue to invest in the
customer relationship after purchase. Video
plays into customer loyalty and on-going
engagement in a variety of ways. Whether the
application is product information, training,
on-going thought leadership, or strategic
business content, video offers a compelling
way to maintain customer loyalty.
30 n North America issue 2009
One of Adobe’s most powerful tactics for
building loyalty among its most influential
customers is their annual user conference,
Adobe Max. Each year, Max brings together
thousands of Adobe users with hundreds of
sessions and presentations, but Adobe realized
that once a year was not enough. The demand
for sessions outpaced the capacity at the live
event, so they developed an online video
version of the conference that presents content
from the conference sessions as well as other
sessions produced throughout the year.
Companies also use video for recurring
podcasts to customers, as content in customer
newsletters, and as the foundation for
delivering on-demand, online training and
information. Sun Microsystems has done this
with Channel Sun, with its information about
Sun products.
Production, publishing and analytics
With a strategy in place and a plan for using
video you need to address the challenges of
creating, publishing and monitoring your
video.
Production
The first challenge is creating content. Video
content can be more difficult to create than
written content, but can have higher impact.
The production process will vary depending
on your resources and strategy.
Generally, content produced for awareness
and interest should have the highest
production costs since you are establishing
your brand. Often the most expensive content
is video advertising, which is also the shortest.
Podcasting, though, can be inexpensive and
quick to produce.
As customers move into the evaluation and
then loyalty stages, they are more interested in
the depth of the information than the quality
of the production, so your focus can shift and
you can take advantage of other content such
as sessions from conferences and seminars.
Publishing
As the online video market has matured, a
new class of on-demand systems has emerged
called online video platforms (OVP). An OVP
provides all the capabilities you need for man-
aging, publishing, distributing and tracking
online video.
The online video platform should have the
following capabilities:
- Easily upload and manage online video
content;
- Create and publish video players, customized
to the specific needs of your site;
- Enable viral sharing and distribution to build
a community around your content;
- Provide ‘analytics’ to monitor and optimize
video initiatives; and
- Deliver a high quality, high reliability, user
experience.
OVPs significantly cut start-up costs, reduce
total cost of ownership, and accelerate time
to market for your online video initiatives.
They can offer advanced functionality that
facilitates customizing the player experience
to cleanly integrate it with your branded
destinations and sites.
Analytics
Like all modern e-marketing strategies,
analytics should be a part of any online video
program. Most marketers are already using
an online analytics platform like Omniture
or Google Analytics, so the best strategy is to
hook your video platform into your existing
analytics system. Most platforms provide
their own analytics, and advanced systems
can provide direct integrations with third
party analytics systems.
Getting started
The growth of online video has been
explosive and marketers are taking advantage
of this medium to leapfrog their competition
to break through the clutter and connect with
prospects and customers.
With the cost of video production at an all-
time low and clearly established success
stories from leading marketers, more and
more companies are bringing online video
into their marketing mix at all stages in the
customer lifecycle.
Getting started
• Identify stages in your customer lifecycle
where you can apply video;
• Choose one of the tactics and focus upon
executing it well;
• Hire a video production company who
can partner with you to create content;
• Produce your first video content and
publish it with an online video platform; and
• Monitor the success of your first initiative
and use the insight to plan your next. n
 Mobile payment
Mobile
Test systems
access
equipment

Testing the future

by Bahaa Moukadam, Vice President Marketing, Sunrise Telecom

Test equipment, after years without fundamental change, is evolving rapidly to keep up with
advances in network technology and to help manufacturers and network operators deliver
the next generation of network services. The coming generation of test equipment will
be standards-based, small, handheld, software-driven, field reconfigurable devices - easy
to use, but capable of performing complex tests and resolving complex problems - if not
immediately, by communicating the test results instantly to headquarters for more advanced
diagnostics and technical support.

Bahaa Moukadam is Sunrise Telecom’s Vice President of Marketing. Throughout his two decades of experience in the industry, he
has held key roles in executive management, product management, marketing, business development and engineering. Mr Moukadam
worked as the Vice President of Next Generation Networks at Spirent Communications after the company acquired Netcom Systems,
where he headed product marketing. Prior to Spirent, Mr Moukadam worked at Hewlett Packard (now Agilent), Wandel & Goltermann
Technologies (now JDSU), and Telex Computer Products.

Bahaa Moukadam holds a master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Kansas and a bachelor’s degree in Electrical
Engineering from the University of Missouri.

Test equipment must evolve continuously
to stay one step ahead of the technologies
it’s designed to test. Except for becoming
smaller and better integrated, test equipment
has not changed fundamentally in 20 years.
In the next five years, test equipment will
undergo a major transformation into a full-
featured appliance, sophisticated and elegant,
yet rugged and intuitive. It will appear
simple to the user, but will execute complex
measurements that drive, coordinate and
apply ‘judgement’ to a host of activities
and processes. This transformation in test
equipment - the advancing technologies, the
changing workforce and growing consumer
expectations - will accompany and mark a
turning point in the delivery of how we live,
work and play in the future.
Home of the future
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates’ 2007
prediction of a “connected experience 24
hours a day” is becoming a reality as homes
become not only connected, but highly
integrated. Gates envisioned home networks
with PCs, music players, game consoles,
and media centres linked to one another
and the Internet. In this home, TV screens
throughout the house would allow people to
stay connected, for example, to their football
games as they move from room to room,
without missing a single play, or to project
movies in their children’s room and download
them to their cars before driving to see the
grandparents. This vision, according to Parks
Associates, will become a reality within the
next 10 years.
Higher bandwidth and a more robust
foundation for wireless technologies will
support a new definition of on-demand
services. In the next five years, on-demand
will be defined as delivering whatever
consumers want (voice, video, music, books,
photo libraries, TV, movies, and so on.), when
they want it, where they want it (inside or
outside the home), and how they want it (cell

North America issue 2009 n 31

 Book early
and Save up
to SGD705
before 24 July 2009

Key speakers
1 – 3 September 2009, Grand Hyatt, Singapore

William So
President
China Unicom (Europe)
Operations, UK
Undersea
intelligence

Fiona Beck
President & CEO
Southern Cross Cables,
Bermuda
Joanne J Negron
Chief Executive Officer
Triton Telecom, Cobian
International Group, USA
Opportunity, innovation and strategy for operators,
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phone, notebook, high-definition TV, PC,
media player, and so on.).
In the past five years, the nature of the hybrid/
fibre coax (HFC) network has undergone
significant changes, from analogue to mostly
digital. In the future, multi-system operators
(MSOs) will use an all packet-based IP
network to stream only the data desired by
each individual, at the time they want it and to
the device and location they choose: a genuine
on-demand experience. This will radically
change the broadcast model used today with
HFC networks, where customers pick and
choose from an enormous range of options, to
a narrowcast downstream on demand model,
where data is transmitted only to a specific list
of recipients. This will allow MSOs to adjust
their compression and channel utilization for
more efficient and dynamic networks.
For test equipment manufacturers, these
changes require the development of test
appliances that intelligently and quickly
aid in rolling out and maintaining advanced
services. Test appliances will be smarter and
able to anticipate potential problems for a
number of constantly changing scenarios.
Unlike analogue networks, where technicians
needed only a signal level meter (SLM)
and television set to troubleshoot the entire
network when customers reported ‘snowy’
pictures, test appliances will have to execute
a host of complex tests to resolve issues. In
fact, in digital networks, the very nature of the
problem has changed from snowy pictures to
either pixilated or tiled images, or a complete
loss of picture. In digital networks, changes in
network performance levels can go virtually
undetected until the picture fails.
Today’s test appliances let technicians take
measurements and solve basic problems
quickly and seamlessly, in much the same
way as using an SLM, but on extremely
complex systems. While performing highly
sophisticated tests, these appliances will be
increasingly intuitive and easier to use by
technicians of varying skill and experience
levels, from the installer running wires
to a home, to service technicians, and to
technicians troubleshooting and fixing
problems. When issues cannot be solved
simply, test appliances will transmit relevant
information to more experienced technicians
who can resolve the problem and send back
a solution.
To maintain service levels in the future,
every field technician will need the ability to
make accurate measurements of the network
performance wherever they are, collect the
data and transmit it instantaneously to the
55 PM
network operations centre for analysis and
action. This constant vigilance requires test
appliances that both perform sophisticated
tests and serve as communication tools.
Built-in 3G wireless communication
interfaces will transform test appliances into
workforce productivity tools. As tests are
completed, the equipment will send the results
to a central server for data analysis, collection
and trending. Every technician will have
instant access to real-time and historical data
that will speed troubleshooting by providing
step-by-step, online help. Web-based tools
will provide a macro-view of the street and
neighbourhood, allowing technicians to
ascertain whether a problem is in the network
or at the premise before going on-site. Using
IM (instant messaging) or other built-in
communications interfaces, technicians will
communicate via voice, e-mail and other
means, eliminating the need to carry PCs, cell
phones or other gadgets.
Work orders outlining the next day’s
assignment, transmitted overnight to the
appliance while the technician sleeps, will
eliminate the need for daily trips to the central
station. GPS systems will identify the fastest
routes, help avoid construction and traffic
delays, and enable supervisors to quickly
locate personnel with supplies or specialized
expertise and dispatch them to new locations,
streamlining operations and saving truck
rolls. To improve performance, managers will
be able to analyze metrics like time per site,
tests performed, signature capture, and end-
of-testing timestamps.
Mobile payment
Mobile
Test systems
access
equipment
However, discussion of the future of test
equipment would not be complete without
addressing the move toward environmentally
friendly testing. The most obvious and
simplest change service providers can make is
to equip field technicians with energy efficient
vehicles, including hybrids and electric
vehicles. In addition, innovative, energy
efficient solutions that take advantage of the
newest technologies to optimize efficiency
will become a de facto part of every field
technician’s arsenal.
In the near future, stand-alone test sets will
virtually disappear from the field. Test sets will
become increasingly modular and software
driven, so that an initial hardware investment
can adapt to a variety of test requirements and
evolve with telecommunications technology
and applications. This will eliminate the need
to replace outdated equipment, reducing waste
not only for service providers, but in the
manufacturing process as well. In addition,
mobile test sets will make use of greener,
rechargeable and longer lasting batteries,
which may eventually even be replenished
using solar power, reducing reliance on fossil
fuels and further reducing environmental
impact. Optimizing energy efficiency will help
telecom suppliers reduce their environmental
footprint, cut costs and make communications
more affordable for everyone.
Test appliance design will evolve to help
MSOs control capital expenses. Modular
test appliances built on open systems will
lower costs and ensure that technicians have
access to best-in-class solutions. Smaller
and designed to mimic the look and feel of
common handheld devices, the appliances will
be customized seamlessly while maintaining
a standard, intuitive user interface, reducing
training costs and improving productivity.
The continuous speed of technology evolution
is a constant challenge for test equipment
manufacturers. By designing a new generation
of test appliances, test companies will help
MSOs deliver the home of the future. n
Palm-sized test appliances are increasingly
feature laden and easy-to-use.
North America issue 2009 n 33
 Supplier services

Co-creating the wireless revolution

By Sudip Nandy, CEO, Aricent

Rapidly growing voice and data traffic, and the race to rollout new infrastructure and services,
place demands upon mobile operators and suppliers that few can meet. Few have the expertise
to create a compelling user experience, build the infrastructure to deliver it and develop the
administrative and operational systems to manage it. Traditional outsourced implementation
services are fragmented and ‘siloed’. Suppliers that combine deep, sector-wide, knowledge
with technological competence are needed to help operators migrate to the new operational
environment.

Sudip Nandy is Aricent’s CEO. Prior to joining Aricent, Mr Nandy was President of Wipro’s technology, media and telecom business
unit. Mr Nandy has been an active member of the Institute of Directors; and is an active participant in the Global Executive Forum of
the Economist Intelligence Unit.

Mr Nandy holds a Bachelors Degree in Physics with Honours from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur and a degree in
Electrical Technology and Electronics from the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. He also has an MBA from the Indian Institute
of Management in Ahmedabad.

Service providers today are grappling with a
situation where their voice revenues fell by
three per cent last year, while mobile data
usage continues to rise - up 20 per cent last
year alone. This represents a clear indication
that legacy voice and SMS are no longer a
sustainable growth engine and that service
providers need to be prepared to handle
massive demands on their data networks.
At the macro level, the telecoms industry
is somewhat insulated from the tumultuous
economic times of late. While some operators
and vendors have undoubtedly fallen on
harder times, others are reporting significant
growth. The continued rapid growth in
access to mobile data is closing the consumer
adoption divide across all ages, geographies
and cultures. This bright spot in demand for
telecommunications and networking services
presents not only great opportunity, but also
significant challenge.
All this points to the fact that we are
witnessing the dawn of the era of rich mobile
value added services (MVAS). The mobile
phone will replace the computer as a central
piece in daily life, marking an era driven by
comfort, ease of use and most importantly
- the overall user experience. The winners
here will be those who are able to overcome
the multitude of interoperability, design
and development challenges to deliver a
seamlessly integrated, useful and accessible
service to the end user.
The changing landscape
The world of wireless communications is
going through unprecedented change. Massive
advances in mobile phones, combined with
users’ higher expectations, have shifted
the competitive landscape for device
manufacturers from hardware to software.
Growth in high bandwidth multimedia traffic
like YouTube is outstripping mobile network
capacity, and driving equipment manufactures
to develop new wireless infrastructure using

34 n North America issue 2009

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36 n North America issue 2009

emerging technologies such as femtocells,
WiMAX and LTE. All of this change is having
an impact on network operators, as they must
evolve their operational and business systems
to increase efficiency, improve service
delivery and lower costs.
While the wireless revolution is broad and
encompasses a virtually unlimited number
of challenges, three common themes have
emerged garnering the majority of the
investment and strategic focus of application,
infrastructure and service providers:
• Creating a compelling user experience
- The phenomenal success of the iPhone
illustrates the fact that user experience trumps
technology and cost for winning customers.
Increasingly, software and applications are
becoming key differentiating factors;
• Developing new wireless infrastructure
- The existing mobile infrastructure was
engineered and deployed long before iPhones
and social media sites such as YouTube, and is
not well suited for real time mobile broadband
services. New machinery is required; and
• Evolving operational and billing systems
- to thrive in the wireless revolution, service
providers must re-engineer operational
processes and business systems, integrate
new tools, add significant new resources, and
acquire the appropriate expertise.
This onslaught of new devices, technologies,
services, standards and more, along with
the associated integration complexity has
created a significant need within application,
infrastructure and service providers for
comprehensive communications technologies,
solutions and expertise.
Owning the user experience
Making a success of innovative new mobile
user interfaces not only requires a broad
understanding of user behaviour, but also a
deep understanding of the complete mobile
ecosystem. The increasing adoption of smart
phones, combined with a variety of user
interfaces (visual, aural, touch), requires
sophisticated software capabilities to
differentiate service provider offerings to end
subscribers. A plethora of hardware options
and multiple operating systems (Symbian,
Android, Windows Mobile, LiMO etc.) make
developing new devices a very expensive
and arduous task. Significant investment in
R&D, testing and certification and backend
integration with operational and business
systems is required.
Taming wireless complexity
Explosive subscriber growth, the mass
market adoption of smartphones and the
surge in high-bandwidth and delay sensitive
video traffic - like YouTube - is quickly
outstripping mobile operators’ network
capacity. As a result, operators are putting
tremendous pressure on equipment vendors
to deliver new products with increased scale,
performance and functionality. To compete
effectively, wireless infrastructure providers
must navigate a highly complex set of new
technologies by increasing and optimizing
R&D investments.
Operational and business systems
Wireless service providers are under enormous
competitive pressures today to reduce costs,
deliver and monetize new multimedia services
and integrate new broadband wireless access
technologies. To achieve these critical
business imperatives, existing operational and
business systems need to be evolved. Systems
and processes should be re-designed for better
efficiency, new tools integrated and additional
expertise added to ensure a competitive
wireless subscriber experience.
The challenges faced by equipment
manufacturers, device manufacturers and
service providers can be categorized as
creating compelling user experiences, driving
product development in a rapidly evolving
environment and deploying operational and
business systems evolution to support new
services. This is driving the need for a new
kind of strategic supplier that provides services
around the complete mobile ecosystem - from
semiconductors, to UI design, to backend
billing systems. A supplier is needed that
combines the strengths of independent
global innovation and design division, with
communications design and engineering
services capabilities, bringing together the
complete value chain of operators, equipment
manufacturers and handset vendors to address
these complexities.
Co-creation
The traditional industry model of outsourced
implementation and in-house innovation is
ill-suited to meet the competing challenges
of lowering costs and complexity while
delivering the advances required to succeed
in this ‘age of the user experience’. The lines
between in-house and outsourced activities are
blurring as companies now require strategic
suppliers to deliver deep communications
Mobile payment
Mobileservices
Supplier systems
access
expertise with a breadth of services ranging
from product/service innovation and design to
integration, implementation, and support.
These new requirements are a poor fit
with the ‘mile wide inch deep’ multi-
industry outsourcing approach offering
silos of implementation-only activities
such as technology or testing. Equipment
manufacturers and service providers need a
new type of ’DNA’ in their strategic suppliers
that offer deep overall, sector-wide, expertise.
More importantly, strategic suppliers need
to be able to provide everything from
innovation and technology to integration
and support - and exclusively focus on the
communications industry. That way, they can
partner with customers to co-create innovative
communications products and services.
Historically, outsourcing engagements have
been for implementation only and companies
hired outsourcing firms to handle aspects of
the development process that required only
limited skills and basic processes. However,
in today’s market, successful companies need
much more from their strategic suppliers.
They want innovation and implementation
partners who can help with every phase of
the product and service lifecycle, from the
user experience and technology feasibility to
development, testing and rollout. Rather than
turning to suppliers simply to reduce costs
or to speed up a specific phase of a product
development cycle, equipment manufacturers
and service providers can also get help at the
‘bar napkin’ phase - when brainstorming and
sketching new ideas.
This powerful combination of deep sector-
wide expertise, innovation and services is
becoming a best practice for equipment
makers and service providers in a world where
rapid innovation, complexity management,
and cost containment are requirements for
success. As a result, the trillion dollar ‘one-
size-fits-all’ services market is segmenting
into several, large strategic supplier segments
with much more industry-specific orientation.
Given its sheer size and the magnitude of
change, the communications industry will be
one of the world’s most dynamic industrial
segments during the next decade. n
North America issue 2009 n 37
 VoIP service and support

Service, support and professional services

By John Lazar, CEO, MetaSwitch

The advantages VoIP are well known, but businesses often find it difficult to take full advantage
of all that VoIP can offer. The complexity of the technology, the variety of equipment, the number
of vendors involved and powerful applications that change the way business is conducted all
make it difficult for the operator to effectively support companies making the move to VoIP.
The growth of VoIP will depend upon the sector’s ability to build top-notch, professional,
customer service and support teams.

John Lazar is MetaSwitch’s CEO; he joined the company as a software engineer and worked in several of the company’s divisions
covering both communication/networking and Internet applications.

John Lazar graduated from the University of Oxford, United Kingdom, with an MSc in Computation and a DPhil in History.

North American service providers, from small customer’s needs and focus upon them by business, but preparing a team to meet the full
to large, no longer wonder if they will use offering them many levels of support and range of challenges they are likely to face on
VoIP, but rather when. They are faced with an professional services based on the customer’s a day-to-day basis is a difficult task. Vendors
almost overwhelming number of choices with specific needs. The effective customer support must recruit the most talented people they can
regards to vendors, solutions, security issues, and professional services for a diverse group find and train them rigorously to ensure that
network roadmap options and more. Because of customers is vital to developing a successful they can respond rapidly and appropriately, to
VoIP networks are inherently more complex
than legacy networks, service providers
are also struggling with complex network
management requirements. In addition to the
realm of choices and network complexities,
service providers are also facing uncertain
economic times and the impact this is having
on many of the large established vendors in
the VoIP market is yet another challenge.
Competitive vendors with alternative
solutions, however, can rise to the occasion
and take advantage of the changing market
by offering customer support and professional
services, thereby not only ensuring a space
for their equipment in a service provider’s
network, but also securing an advisory and
network management role moving forward.

Recruit the best

Many of today’s successful technology

companies give high priority to their

38 n North America issue 2009


whatever problems their customers encounter.
Vendors should look not only at experience,
background and knowledge, but also for
candidates who are able, flexible and highly
enthusiastic, because these are the candidates
that are most likely to succeed.
Nevertheless, even the best recruits can fail
unless adequately trained. Of course, many
vendors’ support and professional services
groups spend a great deal of time at their
respective headquarters being fed information
through a fire hose, but companies also
need to back that up with practical hands-
on training on an ongoing basis. Classroom
and formal training alone are not enough.
The informal mentoring that takes place on
the job is an essential, highly effective, part
of developing successful and productive
talent. Support team members also need to
know they can rely on their managers and
teammates for help and can ask for their
assistance when necessary - this is just as
important as training.
While recruiting and training are invaluable
ways to ensure quality, assigning each
customer a dedicated support provider is
also essential to developing quality support
services. Promising customers that when they
call the help desk they will get someone they
know - someone who knows their problems,
understands their network, understands their
deployment, and understands the challenges
they face - sets a vendor apart from the
competitors.
Flexibility and partnerships
Because of the broad customer base, the
varying constituencies and different cultures
that many vendors have to deal with today,
they must focus on flexibility and tailoring
their customer support and professional
services to meet each customer’s requirements
- whatever they may be. A rigid support menu
does not always work, so support and services
teams have to adapt to each customer’s
Mobile
VoIP payment
Mobile
service andsystems
Regulatory access
support
affairs
procedures and cultures and respond to them
appropriately.
Flexibility is especially important while
operators are deploying VoIP next-generation
networks. VoIP networks are inherently more
flexible - and in some respects more complex
- than static legacy networks because they
are packet-based and voice is just one part of
the traffic that is moving on the network. The
simplest problem, such as a crackling line, is and, powered by an applications server, give
an order of magnitude more difficult to solve subscribers a simple way to access features.
on a VoIP network than on a TDM network. Tools like this that give subscribers greater
Therefore vendors must focus on not only control of their own telephony and messaging
providing customers with an excellent set services are increasingly important to service
of network management tools (see image of providers. These tools also reduce the number
MetaView), but on developing a team that can of calls to the service provider’s help desk,
create reliable, well-designed network and, which helps cut operational expenses.
when problems occur, can move quickly to
solve them. Maintaining your reputation
Today’s networks are characterized by the Surveying customers and responding to
complexity and variety of the equipment their feedback is another important aspect of
they are built from. Inevitably, the equipment customer service and support. Regular surveys
comes from a number of vendors so building of customer service and technology trends
partnerships with other equipment vendors and challenges give vendors a benchmark
is essential. When customers have problems, to follow for on-going success. ‘Word-of-
pinpointing the specific piece of equipment mouth’ - customer opinion - can make or
responsible - and the actual problem, all the break a company’s reputation and is critical to
vendor can work together in partnership to building its income. When a customer loves
resolve the problems efficiently (see photo of his/her supplier’s support service and speaks
Interop Lab). highly of it in public, it gives the supplier’s
reputation a highly effective and credible
Empower the end user boost and helps bring new business.
Equipment vendors need to consider the Although the use of VoIP is growing
current economic environment when throughout the world, it has taken longer
supporting customers. Today, service than it might have taken had high-level
providers not only need to consider how to support been more widely available to help
drive revenues with specific service offerings, customers make better, more profitable, use
but also how they provide those services of the advantages VoIP brings. High-quality
while concurrently reducing expenditures. customer support and professional services
are vital to VoIP’s continuing growth and the
Given the intense competition, equipment sector’s success. n
vendors must not only develop and support
reliable networks and services, but also
offer their customers the means to create
and package sticky services for their own
range of subscribers and give the subscribers
greater control over the services they use.
Knowledgeable subscribers do not want
to call a help desk to change a service or a
setting; they want to make their own changes
from any device - their PCs, televisions,
iPhones, or even SIP phones.
Consequently, vendors are increasingly
offering integrated, cross-platform subscriber
interfaces - customer interface portals - that
enable access to key telephony and messaging
applications from anywhere and from any
type of device (see image of CommPortal).
These interface portals are invaluable; they
can be designed to reflect a customers’ brand
North America issue 2009 n 39
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40 n North America issue 2009

 I WANT TO TAKE
THE LAST FIVE MINUTES
OF THE GAME WITH ME
What does it take to be a Televisionary?
A deep understanding of what people want and need.
An ability and expertise in making television more
individual and more personal. As a global leader
in TV technologies, multimedia infrastructure and
services, Ericsson is uniquely positioned to enable
The Individual Television Experience.

Are you my Televisionary?

To find out what it takes to be a Televisionary for

your customers, go to www.ericsson.com/televisionary

North America issue 2009 n 41

42 n North America issue 2009