The impending EU roaming legislation will likely affect operators from 2015

Starting this week, European operators are looking at the development of a coherent strategy to prepare for the arrival of roaming MVNOs in 2014. From May 14 to June 3, the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC) is holding a public consultation on draft guidelines in relation to regulated retail roaming services.

The latest set of regulation proposals, if implemented, will bring fundamental change to the structure of the European roaming market, requiring European mobile network operators to open their networks to providers of voice and data roaming services acting as MVNOs, from July 2014.

The new Roaming Regulation includes a provision to allow retail customers to request roaming services from a separate roaming provider than the one providing their domestic mobile services – a process known as decoupling. In particular, domestic providers are required to enable their customers to access regulated voice, SMS and data roaming services provided as a bundle from any alternative roaming provider. Domestic and alternative roaming providers must also allow their retail customers to access local data roaming services provided directly on a visited network – known as decoupling in the visited country.

Two types of decoupling models are considered in the regulation. For the first type of decoupling, where regulated voice, SMS and data roaming services are provided as a bundle, the Single-IMSI solution has been chosen. Under the Single-IMSI proposal the separate sale of roaming services is technically still provided by the domestic provider , which serves as the host mobile network operator to the alternative roaming provider. The separate sale of roaming services is provided on a wholesale basis to the alternative roaming provider, which resells the services to the roaming customer at the retail level. This basic option of resale of retail roaming services does not allow the alternative roaming provider to control which visited networks are to be used in preference to others.

For the second type of decoupling – data roaming services provided directly on a visited network – the basic requirements are the implementation and activation of the processing of data roaming traffic in the visited network and the requirement not to prevent the manual or automatic selection of a visited network.

Paul Lambert, Senior Analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media, said that based on past experience with roaming-regulation proposals, operators should expect the roaming market to change as of July 2014 in the ways described.

But he notes that although the proposals lay the foundation for an intensifying of competition in the European roaming market, there is at present little appetite – if any – among telecoms and non-telecoms firms to enter the market as roaming MVNOs. “Although this is likely to change as July 2014 nears – presuming the regulation in its current form comes into effect – European operators’ roaming revenues don’t look set to be eroded by new roaming MVNOs until 2015 at the earliest,” he said.

The main strategic choice operators face is whether to actively recruit roaming MVNOs for voice and/or data services, or simply comply with the bare-minimum requirements of the regulation.

“Operators have to decide if they see a benefit in extending their reach into other European markets by setting up their own roaming MVNOs.
“Given the strong likelihood that the regulation will come into effect in its current form, operators should seriously consider whether their roaming interests will be best served by actively pursuing agreements with the companies that would most benefit from entering the European roaming market as MVNOs,” Lambert added.

Vodafone will piggyback on Deutsche Telekom’s network

Vodafone Germany on Thursday announced a deal with local fixed line operator Deutsche Telekom that will see Vodafone offering high speed fixed line broadband and IPTV nationwide.

The next generation network access contract will see Vodafone initially use DT’s VDSL network under a bespoke Layer 3 IP bitstream agreement. Vodafone will be able to offer its customers connection speeds of up to 50Mbps from the outset, rising to 100Mbps once DT has deployed vectoring technology. Vodafone’s will also offer on-demand and broadcast IPTV services.

Going forward, the two companies have agreed that a more advanced Layer 2 (Ethernet-based) bitstream product will be made available from 2016, which will allow an even greater level of differentiation and control over the design and delivery of the services that Vodafone offers to consumers and enterprise customers.

Vodafone Group Chief Executive for Northern and Central Europe, Philipp Humm, said: “Our agreement with Deutsche Telekom will greatly enhance our ability to offer our German customers a range of competitive, high-speed broadband and TV services, in addition to our industry-leading mobile services, in line with our broader Europe-wide strategy.”

BBM is going cross platform

Canadian firm BlackBerry (formerly known as RIM) plans to make its popular BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) application available on iOS and Android platforms later this year.

In the first version of multi-platform BBM, iOS and Android users will get access to instant messaging; multi-person chat; voice note sharing; and BlackBerry Groups of up to 30 people able to share calendars, photos and files.

BlackBerry claims more than 60 million monthly active BBM users of which more than 51 million are daily active users connecting with friends or colleagues an average of one and a half hours every day. The firm said that BBM users send and receive more than ten billion messages each day, which is nearly twice as many messages per user per day as compared to other mobile messaging apps and almost half of BBM messages are opened within 20 seconds of being received.

In a bid to turn BBM into a more social platform, BlackBerry also announced BBM Channels, designed to allow users to connect with businesses, brands, celebrities and groups.

Pending approval from Google Play and the Apple App Store, BBM should be available on other platforms later this summer and will be updated to include BBM Channels as well as voice and video chatting for iOS and Android later this year.

Andrew Bocking, EVP, software product management and ecosystem, at BlackBerry, said: “For BlackBerry, messaging and collaboration are inseparable from the mobile experience, and the time is definitely right for BBM to become a multi-platform mobile service. BBM has always been one of the most engaging services for BlackBerry customers, enabling them to easily connect while maintaining a valued level of personal privacy.”

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The Big Three are looking to create interoperability between OSS

The three biggest infrastructure players, Nokia Siemens Networks, Ericsson and Huawei, this week signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to collaborate with a view to reducing Operations Support Systems (OSS) integration costs for carriers and enabling shorter time-to-market for new services.

The OSS interoperability initiative (OSSii) is designed to facilitate multi-vendor interoperability ‘up front’ between the OSS products of all three vendors, simplifying operations, reducing the overall integration costs as well as speeding up the time it takes to roll out new services.

The reciprocal agreement will cover fault, performance, configuration and basic network event and trace management for the northbound interfaces from Radio Access, Circuit Core and Packet Core network management systems. Under the terms of the agreement, the signing parties are committing to bilateral cross licensing agreements for multi-vendor network management.

Cross-licensing and interoperability testing is also open for other third-party OSS vendors to participate in by joining the OSSii.

“The OSS marketplace is a patchwork of standards and proprietary interfaces that are controlled by the IPR owners. With cross-license agreements, we want to help operators take full advantage of the best available products in our industry,” said Peter Patomella, head of operations support systems (OSS) business at Nokia Siemens Networks. “Openness and fairness have been the guiding principles in the agreement of the OSS Interoperability Initiative.”

The OSSii portal can be found here

The submarine network extends around the Caribbean

UK-based Cable & Wireless Communications Plc (CWC) on Tuesday entered into a strategic alliance with the Caribbean’s Columbus Networks, to form a joint venture to provide wholesale bandwidth capacity in the Caribbean and Americas Region.

The venture will be called CNL-CWC Networks and in addition, CWC Wholesale Solutions, a subsidiary of CWC has entered into a separate services agreement with Columbus Networks under which Columbus will provide certain operation and monitoring services to the firm.

Between them, CWC and Columbus operate sub-sea cable networks in the Caribbean and Central American region of approximately 42,000 kilometres with connectivity to 42 countries. The joint venture company will serve as the sales agent of both for international wholesale capacity but Columbus will be the managing partner with a 72.5 per cent share. CWC Wholesale Solutions will provide support and management resources.

The companies said that demand for data capacity is growing rapidly in the Caribbean and Americas region, driven by the increasing availability of, and consumer demand for, mobile data and fixed broadband services. The interconnected networks will enable more self-healing fibre optic rings with a future planned migration to a fully meshed network environment that will significantly improve the region’s access to international capacity and better meet the increasing demands for reliability and performance, the companies said.

” In the coming months, customers will begin to enjoy much greater route choice, improved reliability and higher performance as the joint venture rolls out innovative, new service offerings spanning clear channel services, IP transit, carrier Ethernet and carrier MPLS,” said Paul Scott, president of Columbus Networks.

The Broadband World Forum is taking place on the 22nd – 24th October 2013 at the RAI Exhibition and Convention Centre, Amsterdam. Click here to pre-register for the event.

Vodafone enters carrier services market

One week after announcing a group carrier services director, UK-based carrier Vodafone has launched a carrier services business unit, formed out of the acquisition of Cable & Wireless Worldwide in 2012.

The new unit within Vodafone Group Enterprise, dubbed Vodafone Carrier Services, combines the carrier services of Vodafone’s operating companies and CWW into one integrated global carrier business, delivering economies of scale and giving CSPs a single interface to Vodafone, with cost savings and efficiencies for both parties when buying and selling.

The business already has more than 1,000 customers and partners around the world, the company said.

Last week, the operator announced that telecommunications services provider ACN Europe’s CEO Brian Fitzpatrick has joined Vodafone as group carrier services director, reporting to Nick Jeffery, group enterprise director.

Fitzpatrick said: “The industry needs to work together to solve the commercial, operational and technical challenges of delivering end-to-end telecoms services. Vodafone Carrier Services aims to promote collaboration in the global telecoms industry – bringing together carriers and service providers from the fixed and mobile worlds to deliver new services and drive innovation.”

The Broadband World Forum is taking place on the 22nd – 24th October 2013 at the RAI Exhibition and Convention Centre, Amsterdam. Click here to pre-register for the event.

Raspberry Pi core network

The industry’s march toward commodity hardware continued apace this week, as system integrator and small cell specialist Quortus squeezed a core network with full GSM, 3G and LTE support onto a Raspberry Pi.

The company said that its aim is to take mobile core network functionality and distil it in to an application that can be run on commodity hardware, instead of the expensive heavy iron infrastructure currently used. Quortus’ flagship product, SoftCore, placed a core network with full GSM, 3G and LTE support in an application with as small a footprint as possible, in this case, the $35 Raspberry Pi.

The software mobile core application turned the Raspberry Pi into a fully functioning 3G and 4G network core and by adding a regular residential femtocell created a complete mobile network able to fully support voice calls, SMS and data over 3G and LTE.

The caveat is that this project isn’t necessarily immediately suitable for commercial use. “But it goes some way to illustrate how our software can be used to lower the costs of network deployments and can be installed on low-cost, non-proprietary hardware or even to enable a ‘virtual core’ model where an operator or MVNO can have its core network hosted by a third party,” the company said.

This is not the first such attempt to make use of a Raspberry Pi in a mobile network. Earlier this year telecoms consultancy PA Consulting crammed a GSM cellular basestation onto the three inch device.

The LTE World Summit, the premier 4G event for the telecoms industry, is taking place on the 24^th-26^th June 2013, at the Amsterdam RAI, Netherlands. Click here to download a brochure for the event.

Hadoop is breaking through in Big Data

Cloud and Big Data specialist Cloudera has announced the availability of its first developer kit, catering to Apache’s open source software framework Hadoop (CDH). Cloudera has been a champion of Hadoop development, and the kit is designed to help developers to build apps in Hadoop environments faster and more easily than ever before.

Hadoop was initially inspired by papers from Google outlining its approach to handling an avalanche of data, and has since become the de facto approach for storing, processing and analyzing hundreds of terabytes, and even petabytes of data. It’s certainly causing a stir in the industry, by making compute and analytics processes on very large amounts of data not just possible but even relatively simple.

The framework is being rapidly embraced by the enterprise for its ability to capture and manage Big Data, German service provider Deutsche Telekom embraced Big Data wholeheartedly with one of Europe’s largest Hadoop clusters, but the process of building and managing Hadoop environments remains complicated and time-consuming for many developers without specialised training.

In a bid to help organisations unlock the value of their data for actionable insights and competitive advantage, the kit includes a collection of API libraries, tools, example code and documentation that help simplify the most common tasks when working with Apache Hadoop.

“At Cloudera we are not just Hadoop providers; we’re also consumers who know first-hand the challenges developers can face when working with Hadoop,” said Eric Sammer, engineering manager, Cloudera. “The new Cloudera Development Kit is one of the many ways we’re sharing our deep expertise with the community. First-time Hadoop programmers will find that CDK walks them through each step of the process, enabling them to get up and running on the platform quickly, while more-experienced developers will appreciate the flexibility of CDK to swap out different components for a completely customized experience. By making Hadoop more accessible, we are excited to help an even broader range of organizations get more value out of their data.”

https://github.com/cloudera/cdk

Ubuntu on smartphones

US open source house Canonical, the developer behind the popular and user-friendly Ubuntu Linux distribution hinted that the smartphone version of the OS, Ubuntu Touch, may be ready for release in the summer or autumn.

The company revealed in January that it had a version of its operating system for smartphones ready to deploy for carrier testing, but said this week that it will have a version ready for day-to-day usage by the end of May.

Rick Spencer, VP of Ubuntu Engineering, said: “We should drive as hard as we can to making it so that we can use our phones with Ubuntu Touch as our real daily phones as soon as possible. Really eat our own dogfood, so to speak. So, we committed our teams to making it so that by end of May, the phone images will be usable as our daily phones.”

What this means is that the Ubuntu Touch installation will be stable enough for every day usage to make and receive phone calls and SMS; web browsing; wifi; importing and editing of contacts; and a fully working proximity sensor.

Come May, Spencer expects development to really take off, ticking off other missing features as it goes. “Of course, there will be a lot missing. Off the bat, I can thinking of things like the ability to find and install new apps, hardware not working on certain reference hardware (camera on Nexus 7 for example?), lots of missing features in existing apps, etc… However, in my experience, progress accelerates when people are using, in addition to building, software.”