Hyperoptic has received an equity investment of £50m from currency speculator billionaire George Soros

UK start up wholesale fibre provider Hyperoptic has received an equity investment of £50m from currency speculator billionaire George Soros. The firm said the funding will enable it to meet its plans to reach more than 500,000 UK homes with its 1Gbps fibre broadband within the next five years. The investment is led by Quantum Strategic Partners, Soros’ private investment vehicle.

In September 2011, Hyperoptic delivered a 1Gbps symmetrical residential broadband service in the UK, which it claimed is 83 times faster than the current national average. The firm recently announced that it had connected more than 20,000 homes in London. The company now aims to bring its FTTH technology to ten additional UK cities by the end of the year, with locations to be prioritised based on consumer demand.

The firm added that it will soon expand to provide broadband to business and commercial premises, as well as developing new products such as IPTV and cloud computing offerings for its consumer customers.

As part of the investment, three additional non-executive directors will join Hyperoptic’s board to oversee the company’s rapid expansion.

“Today’s investment is a resounding vote of confidence in both our business model and the bright prospects for FTTH technology in the UK,” said Boris Ivanovic, chairman and co-founder of Hyperoptic.

“As momentum continues to build for ‘smart cities’ and an increasingly technology-fuelled economy and society, the need to future proof our infrastructure has become absolutely critical and Hyperoptic will play a key role in doing just that.”

BSkyB has signed a £49m backhaul network capacity deal with Virgin Media Business

UK fixed line operator BSkyB has signed a £49m backhaul network capacity deal with wholesale provider Virgin Media Business. Under the terms of the contract, Virgin Media Business’ network will connect around a third of Sky’s unbundled local exchanges with Sky’s own wholly owned nationwide broadband network.

The five year contract will see the core of the network in place by the end of 2013, said Virgin Media Business, delivering speeds of up to 10Gbps.

“As we see traffic on our network grow significantly year-on-year, this agreement provides us with the capacity we need to keep innovating for customers and as such are committed to maintaining our high-capacity network,”  said Mohamed Hammady, director of Sky Network Services at BSkyB.

Tony Grace, managing director, Virgin Media Business added: “Whilst we’re concentrating on developing better services for the public in our consumer division, we also believe that our high capacity network is ideally placed to provide the underlying infrastructure that can help other providers with their backhaul capacity needs.”

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.

BitTorrent usage is dropping in the US as consumer switch to paid services, report claims

The amount of traffic generated in the US by BitTorrent, the file sharing internet protocol , has dropped significantly of late, according to a report from policy control company Sandvine.

Over the past six months BitTorrent accounted for 9.2 per cent of peak-period traffic, down from 11.3 per cent in 2012 and 17.2 per cent in 2011, the report said. Sandvine attributes the drop in the usage of the file sharing protocol to the increasing availability of subscriber-based, paid-for, on-demand content from applications such as Netflix. Indeed, online video service Netflix maintained a 29 per cent peak-period traffic share in the US, ahead of YouTube, which climbs to 15.4 per cent compared to 13.8 per cent in 2012.

“We believe as more over-the-top Real-Time Entertainment sources are made available to subscribers in the future, the rate of decline in share will begin to accelerate,” the report claims.

The report’s author also said that the decline in BitTorrent usage was foreseen and that it had previously predicted that by 2015 BitTorrent usage would drop to less than ten per cent in North America, a figure it said has now already come to pass.

However, in the Asia Pacific region, where applications such as Netflix are less entrenched, BitTorrent sits at the top spot for peak period internet traffic usage.

As far as Europe is concerned, BitTorrent peak period traffic share remained high at 40.63 per cent, but the report believes that like the US, its days of traffic domination are on the wane. “Subscribers are likely using applications like BitTorrent to procure audio and video content not available in their region,” said the report. “We believe that Filesharing’s share of traffic may have finally reached its peak in terms of traffic share and will begin to experience a steady and significant decline, as paid OTT video services continue to expand their availability throughout the region.”

In a 2011 interview with Telecoms.com, BitTorrent CEO Eric Klinker said that ISPs should be incentivising consumers to use the protocol. “It is very network friendly, and represents an instance where applications, user and network provider all work together to solve the problem [of network congestion].”

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.

Point Topic estimates the total cost at €80bn

Providing super-fast broadband to the whole of the European Union could be much less expensive than previously thought, according to UK research firm Point Topic, which estimates that the whole economic area could be served for €80bn – less than a third of the €270bn estimated by the European Commission in its Digital Agenda.

Defined as delivering at least 30Mbps of data downstream, super-fast broadband services have long been championed by EC Commissioner Neelie Kroes, who has taken on the mission of ensuring that all EU households can access these speeds by 2020.

However, both operators and national governments have balked at the cost, so it will come as welcome news to many that the cost may be much lower.

The main reason for Point Topic’s reduced estimate is that super-fast networks have already covered about half of European homes, using a variety of technologies in addition to expensive fibre-to-the-home (FTTH), such as cable and copper-based VDSL, which Point Topic has used as the main connection method in urban areas in its models.

Of the €80bn total, around two-thirds (or €52bn) will be needed to hook up the areas of lowest population density, defined as having less than 100 people per square kilometre.

Tim Johnson, lead author of the report, said: “Most of that amount will have to be funded by the taxpayer in one way or another,” says Johnson, “and we think that’s about as much as they will stand for. But we think that a large proportion of rural Europe will get wired up on that basis.”

Orange Tunisie and Tunisiana will deploy submarine cable connecting Tunisia to Europe

Two of Tunisia’s mobile operators have signed a deal with with backbone operator and cloud services provider Interoute for the deployment of a submarine cable connecting Tunisia to Europe.

Orange Tunisie and Tunisiana, which is 90 per cent owned by Qatari group Ooredoo, will deploy a private submarine cable, called Didon, which will cover nearly 170km. It will connect to the city of Kélibia, Tunisia to Interoute’s pan European fiber optic network, via its landing station in Mazara del Vallo, Siciliy, Italy.

The cable is planned to be in place by April 2014 and its capacity will begin at 100GBps at launch with an aim to reach 8Tbps, per operator. According to Interoute, the cable will act as a force for social development and economic growth for the country.

“The Didon cable will provide increased capacity and better service to the seven million consumers and businesses that rely on Tunisiana,” said Ken Campbell, CEO of Tunisiana. “This investment is also a testament to our belief in the potential for growth in Tunisia as a hub for the region.”

Didier Charvet, CEO of Orange Tunisie added: “This investment is also a proof that Orange Tunisie believes in the development of the ICT sector and e-services in Tunisia.”

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 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.”

Jürgen Hase, head of DT’s M2M Competence Centre

System availability, customer data management and a global footprint are the three most important aspects for an operator to prioritise when devising its M2M offering to enterprises, according to Jürgen Hase, vice president M2M competence center at Deutsche Telekom.

Speaking at TM Forum Management World in Nice, Hase stressed that it is vital that when serving enterprises, operators ensure there are never any outages that affect their M2M services.

“If I’m using my own handset and there is an outage and I do not have connectivity, it’s not such a bad thing, I can survive,” he explained.

“However in the enterprise sector, M2M services must be totally integrated in the customers’ processes. If a photocopy firm wants to bill its clients and relies on M2M services to monitor how much they are using, if the system goes down, it’s a huge problem.”

The second most important aspect, which is tied to the first, is customer data management. Enterprise customers rely on the data that operators collect for them through their M2M offerings. Failure to manage that data correctly can lead to lost revenue and can impact SLA agreements, which would also be costly for operators, he cautioned.

And thirdly, a global footprint, either directly or through partnerships, is essential as operators need to be able to follow their customers as they do business around the world.

Hase added that it is for these reasons, Deutsche Telekom decided to decouple its M2M competence center unit from the rest of the business, to create a “company within a company” and a “one stop shop for SMEs”. He added that SMEs represent the “low-hanging fruits” for operator M2M services.

“SMEs are fast, agile, they have high ambitions and want to realise them today. There is a small company that we work with in Germany that specialises in solar panels. They wanted to set up and remotely monitor 500,000 solar panels, and for that to happen within six months. With a large enterprise, they are often still writing their proposals to define what they want after six months.”

But this is now changing and enterprise specific technologies are evolving as the need to retain these high value customers becomes stronger.

How are offices connected?

Mobile coverage in the enterprise has not traditionally been the domain of mobile operators. First of all, mobile operators only deploy coverage technologies in an office if a client is of significant importance and even then, only when the client signs a multi year contract and can demonstrate that it has major coverage problems. However this is not without good reason: traditional technologies to cover large areas have been very expensive and laborious to install.

Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS) have been the technology of choice for mobile operators in advanced markets. A controller is typically installed in a server room and fibre is deployed throughout the office to connect various units that act as cellular access points. A degree of control may be exercised by the enterprise IT department over the DAS installation, but the operator usually maintains, supports and controls the network. The fact that fibre needs to be deployed makes DAS a complex, time consuming, potentially disruptive and expensive exercise.

Not all is lost for DAS

Although an older technology, DAS is still deployed in large buildings due to planning departments being familiar with the intricacies of deployment. There is also another major reason for deploying DAS instead of any other indoor coverage technology: neutral host. Contrary to small cells, DAS allows multiple carriers to coexist in a deployment, but only when a third party facilitates the operation and maintenance. For example, AT&T deploys DAS in large buildings and then hands over control to AT&T Towers which acts as a third party to connect AT&T’s competitor.
Neutral host brings two formidable advantages for DAS: the operator can share the cost while the enterprise client is not restricted to a single operator and can enjoy superior coverage from a plethora of networks.

What can small cells offer?

A next generation of small cells is now being deployed, targeting enterprise buildings in particular. Two vendors stand out, although more are expected to join as the fight for enterprise connectivity escalates:

• Cisco’s strength in enterprise wifi and its acquisition of Ubiquisys signals that the networking vendor has serious plans for the enterprise area.
• Spidercloud offers a small cell system (controller and access points) tailored specifically for enterprise locations. There are already examples of enterprise deployments with this system, but operators may not necessarily be willing to publicise them openly.

Infrastructure vendors are also working towards neutral host small cells, although the business model and funding scheme is still unclear. Similar to DAS, a third party will need to manage the network, especially since small cells may be tightly integrated with a specific operator network. This may be an area of opportunity for Small Cells As a Service (SCaaS) providers, namely Virgin Media, CloudBerry, Colt and ClearSky.

Compared to DAS, enterprise small cells can offer a few advantages which may prove to be critical, even compared with wifi.

• Small cells allow advanced functionality to help ease IT challenges. For example, integration with IP-PBX and Unified Communications may be enabled by enterprise small cells while the IT department can retain control of these services. Contrary to wifi, these value added services do not require an additional client on the mobile device.
• Small cells create a secure, operator controlled network that does not require additional authentication for employees.
• Small cells can use existing enterprise Ethernet networks for connecting the access points to the controller. Operators report that the cost to cover an office with small cells is roughly half that of DAS.

There are also hybrid technologies, including Huawei’s LampSite which includes a central node, remote hubs (rHub) placed in each floor and distributed units (pRRU) which communicate with the hub via Ethernet. The communication between the central node and the hub is via a fibre connection.

Wifi with your small cells?

Although wifi and small cells typically cater for different use cases, the popularity of smartphones and tablets is somewhat blurring the line between them. However, both have a part to play for enterprise connectivity.
Wifi is already widely deployed in the enterprise and handled by the IT department, contrary to small cells which are still in an early stage and controlled by both the operator and the IT office. It is here that operators may have an opportunity, especially since wifi and small cells (in higher bands) are similar in nature and require comparable planning.
An enterprise small cell may include wifi functionality which may not be necessarily switched on. A mobile operator may alleviate the risk and cost of maintaining the wifi network for enterprise IT departments and offer both wifi and small cell services (with some degree of control exercised by the IT office).
Several enterprise IT directors claim that they would rather buy a guest wifi service from the operator rather than offer their own, especially when the guest traffic uses operator-controlled transport (operator Carrier Ethernet). Secure wifi access for employees may be a more complex issue to detangle from the IT department, but the business case may be lucrative for new buildings, when an operator can provide both wifi and small cell services as a managed service.

What are the pain points of enterprise IT?

Heads of enterprise IT are faced with several challenges a selection of which is presented below.

• Bring your own device (BYOD): This increasing trend is causing challenges for enterprise IT, even though it allows employees to be more productive. As this trend increases, enterprise connectivity will require expanded multi-operator coverage in the enterprise, not necessarily single-operator.
• Security: An increasing concern for IT officers, especially as more devices and services rely on the network to operate. Managed enterprise connectivity (SLA-bound) may alleviate some concerns for the enterprise, especially when the operator provides the transport network as well.

It’s a complex world

Enterprise connectivity is likely to remain a fragmented and complex environment where one size will not fit all. DAS, small cells, carrier wifi and repeaters are all expected to play a major part in providing enterprise services, especially as operators compete to retain high value clients.
Mobile operators are very well placed to take advantage of these needs and become a wireless connectivity provider for the enterprise, whether this is wifi or cellular. Advances in technology certainly allow them to do so in a cost effective manner while offering new value added services.

Pierre François Dubois, VP product development, Technocentre, Orange, France

Pierre François Dubois, VP product development, Technocentre, Orange, France is speaking on ‘Maximising the benefits of LTE with RCS’ on Day One of the LTE World Summit, the premier 4G event for the telecoms industry, is taking place on the 24th-26th June 2013, at the Amsterdam RAI, Netherlands. Ahead of the show we speak to him about how RCS will both benefit consumers and help to maximise operator revenue.

Your talk is on maximising the benefits of RCS and VoLTE for the customer. However, consumers already have effective voice and OTT apps. Can you highlight what the benefits of using these will be?

There are three key benefits for customers. Firstly, RCS will be adopted by all mobile operators, which means that everyone’s friends will have access to a rich and reliable set of services. They will not need to be invited and then download an app – it will just be there. Secondly, RCS also provides a fantastic eco-system for app developers, as well as providing them a massive audience for their apps and services. Customers will therefore be able to enhance their lives with all sorts of fun and productivity applications with real-time sharing. Thirdly, VoLTE completes the picture by transferring voice communications to IP thus ensuring that all the RCS sharing and communications features can be done simultaneously with voice and video calls, and all at Telco quality. The combination of RCS, LTE and VoLTE means that customers will have no reason to go elsewhere for the social or business communications.

How can operators make best use of RCS services to increase revenues?

Market research tells us that customers are happy to buy extra data bundles for services which add value to their lives. This is what we already do with specific applications like Deezer or Orange consumer cloud. Mobile data usage will therefore drive revenues in the future. With this objective in mind, RCS provides a core set of IP based communication services and APIs that are designed to stimulate data usage and this is why RCS APIs are important for our future. For example, video applications can leverage these APIs for the benefits of both parties. Social networks can also contribute to this objective, but I believe MNOs must have their own growth engine to better control their business model.

Will VoLTE be an upsell to consumers or will it just be a transparent service for consumers with a transition that occurs in the background.

VoLTE will simply replace circuit switched voice and, whilst it certainly brings a better experience, I don’t believe it will be an upsell to consumers. VoIP and RCS over LTE together will provide a great customer experience with many added-value applications and together drive data usage and revenues.

What do you think will be the most critical development in LTE over the next six to 12 months?

I think that until recently, most MNOs have worked on RCS, LTE and VoLTE projects with different timelines. Nevertheless we need to anticipate, not only technically, the fact that we are migrating to IP communications. I foresee two important challenges:

• RCS over LTE with seamless switching  and continuity of sessions when switching between 4G/3G/Wifi/2G
• Convergence between RCS and VoLTE as a consistent service platform. Orange strongly supports the initiative launched recently by the GSMA to address this point.

Please tell me why coming to the LTE World Summit is so important for yourself and for Orange and why it’s a great event.

LTE is a true revolution for our industry. It is always difficult to guess what will come out of a revolution and in our case a lot of uncertainties remain for the future of our business model. I think this event is a unique opportunity to share possible scenarios both on technical and marketing aspects with experts in our industry. As it takes place in Europe, where competition is very fierce, I expect the presentation and the debates to help us better shape the future.

Michele Zarri, head of international standardisation and IP management, Deutsche Telekom, UK

Michele Zarri, head of international standardisation and IP management, Deutsche Telekom, UK, is speaking on VoLTE vs OTT Voice on Day Two of the LTE World Summit, taking place on the 24th-26th June 2013, at the Amsterdam RAI, Netherlands. Speaking ahead of the show, Zarri explains why he feels the operator provided voice services will still offer benefits to consumers over OTT VoIP applications.

What is your timeline for VoLTE and what benefits will it bring?

Early versions of VoLTE have already been launched in some markets such as Korea and Hong Kong. Operators are currently focussing on deploying LTE, but deployment of IMS platforms, accelerated by the desire to launch Joyn, is taking place simultaneously. Additionally, given the availability of devices compliant to the GSMA’s IR.92 standard, expected during the course of 2013, there is no technical impediment to launching VoLTE. As a consequence I expect to see commercial services rolled out by the end of this year (2013) in most developed markets with international roaming launched within two years after that.

From an operator point of view, the main benefit of VoLTE is being able to provide the voice service natively over the packet switched access, while avoiding disruption to back-office processes. This removes the last constraint justifying the running of circuit-switched networks; therefore achieving the objective of moving fully to the more efficient packet-switched access.

What appeal will VoLTE have to consumers over and above their favourite OTT apps?

Today customers are already replacing the mobile operators offered voice service with their favourite OTT application. The reasons why OTT apps have not been adopted in large scale therefore is not the availability of broadband mobile access, but due rather to the benefits offered by operator-supplied voice. Such advantages will not be lost in the migration to VoLTE. What I am thinking of is reach (call and be called by anyone), security (a trusted relationship with the operator and strong encryption), privacy (user data is safe with an operator), familiar interface (voice client is natively integrated in the handset), seamless user experience (use of phone numbers, set of supplementary services), predictability (well-known charging scheme) and, last but not least, quality, as the network is configured to prioritise voice traffic over other types of traffic.

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.

Will VoLTE sound significantly better than current voice calls?

Calls between two VoLTE users will use the HD voice codec, resulting in a far superior experience. In fact HD Voice is already available over 3G networks, therefore in time the vast majority of the mobile to mobile calls will enjoy the benefits of such a codec. Fast forwarding a few years, as IMS allows the device of the caller and of the called party to negotiate the codec used, it is imaginable that new and more powerful codecs will be introduced and used for Voice over IMS calls.

Why was VoLTE not baked into LTE from initial launch of the technology?

The goal of 3GPP when developing LTE was primarily to create a radio technology that could meet the IMT‑advanced requirements issued by ITU, therefore the service layer was not in focus. Furthermore, in 2008, when the LTE specifications were released, IMS was already a three-year old technology and earmarked as the means to create voice services over a packet switched access. In fact, you will notice that no service except connectivity was, to use your expression, baked into LTE, though the low-latency target and support for guaranteed bit-rate were evidently tailored for the support of voice and other multimedia services.

Is any kind of VoLTE launch practical without SRVCC widely implemented?  (In a network without SRVCC implemented, please explain what happens when a VoLTE call is made to a handset that goes out of LTE coverage?)

Indeed SRVCC will be important functionality in the early days of VoLTE due to the expected patchy LTE coverage. However, when operators start rolling out voice over HSPA, which has also been profiled in GSMA, the occurrence of SRVCC events will become much less frequent, since the far more efficient packet switched handover will be used instead to move from LTE to 3G. Other positive aspects are that field tests by Deutsche Telekom have shown that the predicted long interruption of the service in case of SRVCC have been overestimated.

As a VoLTE call would fail when the handset goes out of coverage, operators are unlikely to deploy VoLTE until SRVCC is available and will instead rely on CS Fallback, whereby the handset moves to a legacy access technology prior setting up a call.

Do you believe that RCS services can genuinely help the industry compete with OTT?

Contrary to this widespread misconception, competing with OTT is not the goal of Deutsche Telekom. Arrogant as it may sound, Deutsche Telekom will not lower its standards to those of some of the OTT offers currently available to consumers. The goal of RCSe is instead to offer an integrated and secure service for which there is demand in the market, adding all the benefits described above for VoLTE as well as other specific ones. RCS will also show that even traditional mobile operators can offer innovative services. For example, Joyn is a product based on the RCS-e standard and provided by the mobile operator community. The next version of RCS will be fully supported by IMS, bringing additional benefits for the consumer.