Sprint Nextel has blamed delays by equipment vendors stifling the rollout of its Network Vision project

US operator Sprint Nextel has blamed delays caused by equipment vendors for stifling the rollout of its Network Vision project, in a filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission. As a result, the operator said that it had been forced to revise its plans to bring 12,000 multi-mode base stations on-air by the end of 2012, pushing the deadline back to 1Q13.

Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent and Samsung all supply equipment to Sprint as part of its Network Vision project.

“The deployment of multi-mode technology is project managed by Sprint but dependent upon three primary OEMs, each of which has responsibility for a geographical territory across the United States,” Sprint explained in the filing.

“We have recently experienced delays with vendor execution, backhaul connectivity delays, shortages in equipment such as fiber cable and antennas, as well as other regulatory and environmental issues.”

The operator added that the delays have caused an increase in depreciation to existing Nextel and Sprint assets.

Sprint said it expects to recover from the delays and is still forecasting to have the majority of its sites on-air by the end of 2013. Its Network Vision LTE network deployment is now expected to be completed by the middle of 2014.

The LTE North America conference is taking place on the 21st-22nd November 2013, in Dallas, Texas, USA. Click here NOW to download a brochure for the event.

Ren Zhengfei pledged Huawei’s commitment to contributing to New Zealand’s digital economy

The CEO of Chinese vendor Huawei has spoken to the media at a press event in New Zealand. During his visit Ren Zhengfei pledged Huawei’s commitment to contributing to New Zealand’s digital economy. He also addressed comments from the US House Intelligence Committee claiming that the vendor is not to be trusted.

Last month Huawei won a contract to build Telecom New Zealand’s LTE network, which is expected to go live in October this year.  The vendor has also been selected as a core supplier for New Zealand’s Ultra-Fast Broadband (UFB) initiative.

“New Zealand is one of Huawei’s most important strategic markets and is very valuable to us,” he said. “Huawei has been selected to help build a 4G/LTE and the UFB network in New Zealand. We will continue to deploy world-class, advanced communications technologies here, delivering the safest, most advanced networks for the nation.”

Commenting on accusations from the US House Intelligence Committee, which warned the nation’s telecoms operators not to trust ZTE and Huawei, Ren voiced his confidence that none of Huawei’s staff would engage in spying, even if asked to by Chinese security agencies. He added that the vendor is not in a position to collect operators’ network data in the US in any case.

“Huawei equipment is almost non-existent in networks currently running in the US,” he said. “We have never sold any key equipment to major US carriers, nor have we sold any equipment to any US government agency. Huawei has no connection to the cyber security issues the US has encountered in the past, current and future.”

According to news agency The Associated Press, he also refused to allow photos at the event, international media were barred and Ren declined an interview with the agency.

Huawei said that it employs 120 people in New Zealand, 90 per cent of whom were hired locally. Over the last three years, Huawei’s total direct investment in New Zealand was NZ$139m. The vendor added that it intends to employ more staff and increase its investments in New Zealand in the future.

Incoming CEO Brian Krzanich

Chip maker Intel has named COO Brian Krzanich as the successor to CEO Paul Otellini. Krzanich will assume his new role on May 16, 2013. In addition, Renée James has been appointed as president of Intel and will assume her role on the same day.

In November last year, Otellini announced his intention to retire after nearly 40 years at the firm. According to Intel, his replacement, Krzanich, had been responsible for leading more than 50,000 of Intel’s 105,000 employees across various business divisions.

Andy Bryant, chairman of Intel said Krzanich will be tasked with leading the firm as it looks to “define and invent the next generation of technology that will shape the future of computing”.

“His track record of execution and strategic leadership, combined with his open-minded approach to problem solving has earned him the respect of employees, customers and partners worldwide. He has the right combination of knowledge, depth and experience to lead the company during this period of rapid technology and industry change.”

According to Intel, incoming president James’ knowledge spans hardware, security, software and services, which she developed through other leadership positions at Intel. She also currently serves on the board of directors of Vodafone Group and VMware.

Ericsson has agreed to divest its power cable operation to Danish cable manufacturer NKT Cables for SEK250m ($38.4m).

Swedish kit vendor Ericsson has agreed to divest its power cable operation to Danish cable manufacturer NKT Cables for SEK250m ($38.4m).

However, Ericsson believes the transaction will generate a net loss of approximately SEK100m and negatively impact the operating income of its Networks business unit in 3Q13.

Ericsson said that its power cable operation has the potential to realise greater leverage and scale within NKT Cables, where it will be a core business. The move sees 320 Ericsson staff, primarily based in Sweden, transferred to the Danish firm. NKT Cables will also take over one of Ericsson’s factories in Sweden.

The transaction is subject to relevant regulatory approvals and is expected to close during the beginning of the third quarter of 2013.

Telekom Austria has deployed a converged voice network using technology provided by Chinese kit vendor ZTE. The group has also built a commercial 100G transport network in Central and Eastern Europe

Operator group Telekom Austria has deployed a converged voice network to replace its existing mobile core for its northern operational markets in Austria, Slovenia and Liechtenstein.

Chinese kit vendor ZTE supplied Telekom with a circuit switched/IP multimedia subsystem (CS/IMS) converged voice network, which was implemented by local system integrator Kapsch CarrierCom.

The converged voice solutions provided to Telekom Austria Group are based on a cloud solution to help the operator reduce total cost of ownership. The IMS network will support various scenarios including RCSe and VoLTE and will help Telekom Austria to increase its network capacity and enable rapid growth of the operator’s customer base, according to ZTE.

“The new ZTE CS/IMS network opens up the future for Telekom Austria Group,” said Hans Pichler, CTO of Telekom Austria Group. “It will enable us to easily expand our business while giving our customers the best possible experience of the latest fixed and mobile communication services.”

The group has also built a commercial 100 gigabit transport network in Central and Eastern Europe, the first section of which, from Zagreb to Osijek and Ilok in Croatia, is already in operation. The network is being built to satisfy the ever increasing demand for high-speed services in Central and Eastern Europe and to meet customer demands even more effectively in the region.

“With this important technology upgrade the Telekom Austria Group will be able to offer redundant high speed data highways to all major cities in the CEE area,” said Darko Parun, project leader and director of group access and transport at Telekom Austria Group.

Vipnet, the Croatian subsidiary of the Telekom Austria Group, has already implemented a 100G transmission capacity by upgrading the transmission capacities, based on the existing Alcatel-Lucent 100G platform. The group said that the upgrade allows a tenfold increase in capacity on its Croatian network. It added that throughout its entire network footprint, capacities will be expanded to 100G.

By the end of the 2Q13, the route between Frankfurt, Germany and Sofia, Bulgaria will see the first 100G services operational. Throughout the remainder of 2013 Vienna, Belgrade, Zagreb, Bucharest, Budapest, Ivancice and Salzburg will also be connected with 100G networks.

The WDM and Next Generation Optical Networking event takes place in Monaco, 17th – 20th June. For more information click here.

Broadband speeds continue to soar in the UAE

Du, one of the two major telcos in the United Arab Emirates, has awarded a contract to Alcatel-Lucent to build the second phase of its high-speed 100G coherent optical transport network throughout the country.

The new optical transport network is expected to dramatically boost the speed and capacity of Du’s existing network, and support surging demand for cloud, video and other data-intensive applications.

The solutions being supplied to Du include Alca-Lu’s soft decision forward error correction technology, described as capable of extending the reach of 100G signals to much longer, more usable distances.

There were just over 1 million broadband subscribers in the UAE by the end of September 2012, with Du accounting for 136,000 of them and rival Etisalat taking the rest, according to Informa Telecoms & Media.

Expect Labs’ technology allows devices and applications to continuously pay attention to user behavior in order to better anticipate information that the user needs.

Telefónica, Intel and Samsung have invested undisclosed amounts in San Francisco start-up Expect Labs. The start-up is developing a platform to power a “new generation of intelligent digital assistants”, and has already benefitted from investments from Google and venture capital firm Greylock.

Expect Labs’ technology allows devices and applications to monitor to user behavior in order to better anticipate information that the user needs. According to the firm, its platform can model the context of user interactions in real-time, and proactively find information before the user needs to search for it.

Tracy Isacke, head of Telefónica Digital Ventures, said the operator group sees potential for Expect Labs’ technology across all areas of its business. She added that the firm’s investment opens the door to collaboration between Telefónica and Expect Labs’ technical teams.

Samsung’s Venture Investment Corporation (SVIC) added that it expects  to empower Expect Labs to enable new types of intelligent, voice-driven and context aware behavior across smartphones, tablets and smart TVs.

“Expect Labs has taken a unique approach to modeling context using sensor signals, such as GPS and audio, that are available in the new generation of computing devices, “ said Brannon Lacey, principal at SVIC  “We think this approach is an important step toward creating a new layer of application and device intelligence.”

And Intel’s global investment organisation, Intel Capital, added that it has been investing in making devices more intelligent and context-aware. It is now looking to help create new types of user interfaces driven by voice, touch, and gesture.

“In just a few years, we will live in a world where the connected devices all around us will know who we are, understand what we say, and be far more capable of interpreting our intentions and anticipating our needs, “ added Timothy Tuttle, Expect Labs CEO and founder.

Cloud computing is the most important and sustainable revenue opportunity since voice, says Gallo

The good news for carriers is that cloud computing is the most important and sustainable revenue opportunity since voice. Not only that, by delivering next generation IT through the next generation network (NGN), carriers could become the leading channel in the cloud computing business, with unique competences and valuable assets.

Carriers are in a unique position to take some strong decisions about leading the cloud market so businesses will follow them – instead of following pure IT players which do not provide, as of today, a whole, end-to-end business solution.

Firstly, we need to forget talking about the ‘classical’ concepts of Software as a Service, Platform as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service, Public Cloud, Private Cloud, Hybrid Cloud, or whatever new cloud deployment model someone might be thinking about right now. We need to start thinking about ‘Carrier Cloud’.

What is needed is a cloud concept where we do not consider technology silos or deployment model silos, but a concept where we think about services that will solve business needs for different customer segmentations and verticals. Essentially, it means there is no need to internally create or deploy cloud services. The Carrier Cloud concept refers to the capability of providing many state-of-the-art ‘actionable’ cloud services to customers, without the need to make huge investments in time and money, in order to make those cloud services available to customers.

Hide the Technical Complexities

In an economic environment where a recession is hitting all kinds of businesses and organisations hard, there is a strong and urgent need for new ways of doing things. And there is a demand for allowing businesses to focus on their core business, and outsource IT and even business processes.

To solve this issue, carriers can create their own cloud services offering and marketplace for their customers, and populate them with third-party services, often with degrees of customisation for each carrier. However, the services are ultimately provisioned by different service providers.

That is the same way carriers have succeeded in their respective markets for many years; hiding technical complexities from customers as much as possible and delivering service guarantee and quality. And all of that at a monthly fee from the lowest level consumer with a pre-paid mobile phone, to the largest organisations. Furthermore, designing services offerings for each customer segment or business vertical, not a ‘one size fits all’ approach.

For a carrier, it takes an average of 12 to 18 months to create and deploy a new service if deployed from scratch. In a carrier cloud model, new services (several of them at the same time) can be deployed in as quickly as six weeks, with minimum investments (CAPEX) and almost no ongoing maintenance costs (OPEX).

Most of the leading services will be coming from specialised third parties with the added value provided by the carrier. These include features such as single point of purchasing, monthly fees, single monthly invoices, end-to-end SLAs, end-to-end security, full carrier infrastructure availability and carrier customer care services.

Telefonica’s Aplicateca

One early example of a carrier cloud solution is Telefonica’s Aplicateca business applications store for SMEs, provided by NEC. It’s a globally scalable cloud service that provides additional ‘Over the Top’ revenues. This multi-tenancy platform allows multiple business customers to subscribe to and use a variety of applications and services on the same infrastructure. Those customers can access all of the applications and services they wish by using just one window.

Since the launch of Aplicateca, end users have been eagerly utilising a variety of applications such as CRM, billing, video-conferencing, GPS tracking and fleet management applications at low monthly fees. And they have enjoyed finding their requests for new applications being addressed quickly. It has evolved into a strategic channel to quickly launch and commercialise Telefonica and its parties’ services for SMEs with an end-to-end support scheme.

Telefonica has already launched Aplicateca service in Spain, Argentina and other markets with a strategic goal to continue deploying this business model in the medium term in the most relevant operators and markets where Telefonica is present.

Enhancing the IT Department

But whose responsibility is it, when it comes to getting the best out of the cloud? Can the enterprise IT manager basically sit back and let the cloud service provider take care of everything? Or do they then risk taking their eyes off the ball and perhaps even the possibility of becoming redundant?

It’s the service provider that should provide it. IT managers will have to manage the service, not the resources, delivery process etc.  IT managers will be much more business oriented, and will be able to add more value from a business strategy perspective, helping to improve business processes instead of managing IT operations and resources.

In fact, this does not mean a reduction in IT resources at all, but rather it will enhance IT’s position within the organisation, allowing it to fully integrate with the business, strategy and business efficiencies. IT will become more relevant for the business and the IT productivity and efficiency will increase.

Manuel Gallo

But IT will no longer be the team of technicians who should make things happen, provide support to internal users and be the ones to blame for a system failure. IT will be more of a business technology consulting department, providing the right advice about how the technology can help the business, without the psychological barrier of ‘if I propose something, I will personally have to do it’. In this way, IT will become more powerful.

So far, cloud has been perceived as a property of the IT Industry. Some carriers are not diving fast enough into the cloud business. The notion has been that, even if the cloud is one of their biggest potential sources of revenue in the near future, it is always related to IT and that the carriers are not IT companies. This perception needs to change.

As soon as we all realise that cloud is not about IT, and instead on how to deliver IT services or how to allow for business process outsourcing (BPO) using existing Telco assets, the ‘real’ cloud will start to emerge.

When using a new smartphone, everybody is thinking much more about the smartphone vendor than about the services or the carrier infrastructure behind it. But it is the carriers that deliver millions of smartphones to the market every month – not Nokia, Apple, Sony, RIM, Samsung or other technology vendors.

Carriers made it possible for mobile phones and will make it possible for cloud services, taking the position they deserve in the cloud market: the leading position.

Manuel Gallo, Director of Strategy & Business Development – EMEA Cloud Competence Centre, NEC Europe Ltd.

Liverpool FC has deployed a wifi network in the Centenary Stand of its Anfield stadium

Liverpool FC, a team that dominated English football in the 1970s and 1980s, is looking to become a champion of mobile internet service provision.

The club has recently deployed a wifi network in the Centenary Stand of its Anfield stadium, to allow fans an easier and more reliable method to access match information as well as wider online content. Telecoms.com caught up with Andrew Robinson, Liverpool FC’s (LFC) head of digital media and tech, to find out more.

Robinson explains that the club used technology from wifi network specialist Xirrus for the pilot project. Xirrus provided a number of its Wireless Array access points, each of which allows over 1,000 wireless users to connect to its wifi networks. But before they could be deployed it was necessary for LFC to upgrade its core backbone infrastructure.

“The network infrastructure in the stadium was not as up to date as it might be,” Robinson explains. “This is because Liverpool FC has been in a ‘do we or don’t we?’ situation regarding a move to a new stadium. But when we decided to install a wifi network we had to do some work on core infrastructure.”

Robinson said that the network offers full wifi coverage across the centenary stand and the club has built a user experience layer, to promote content the club believes will get fans excited.

“We’ve made the solution quite open from day one, we’re not controlling exactly where people can go, the standard “bad content” locking aside, but we’ve populated the experience layer with match stats, a range of food and drink offers, the ability to tap into social media and the ability to place bets on the game with our partner Paddy Power. The challenge now is to monitor how good the experience is and improve it accordingly.”

Robinson acknowledges that building a wifi network is not the only way to improve fans’ access to the web from the stadium. He reveals that the club has considered capitalising on the existing relationships it has with mobile operators to enhance cellular coverage within the stadium.

“We’ve talked to a range of operators about a range of solutions and we’ve worked with mobile operators all around the world on content distribution,” he says.

“From a network perspective, we looked at the potential to enhance the cellular coverage at the ground as well to provide better voice and data services within the stadium, but there were issues in terms of the dense space within the stadium, the power requirements, other priorities and projects. It’s not something we’ll necessarily rule out.”

Robinson added that wifi was more attractive as the club had been looking to improve data connectivity within the stadium, rather than voice. In addition, offload to wifi should free up capacity on the cellular network, making it easier for fans to use it for core communication services.

Access to the wifi network will initially be free for fans in the Centenary stand, although  this does not necessarily mean the club will not charge for wifi access in the future. In fact, Robinson says the club may build in functionality such as a direct micropayment linked to ticket types.

“If you take video replays as an example, there may be a layer in the service to charge extra for that, and differentiate between general access and restricted access.”

Robinson acknowledges that Xirrus was attractive because it was one of the more cost effective solutions on the market but he adds that another benefit the firm offers is the way the network pushes a lot of the technology to the array itself, meaning the club can minimise cable runs. Robinson explains that as Anfield is not a modern stadium, he faced many challenges with space and complexity. Therefore, the ability to minimise cable runs reduces installation costs.

The club also hopes to drive improvements in its customer relationships. “The beauty of this kind of project is that you can gain benefits in all sorts of areas,” Robinson says. “The starting point is the fans; we get data we didn’t have, particularly from those in the hospitality areas, as we don’t always know who those people are.”

And, even if the wifi remains free of charge to fans, it is hoped that it could drive spend in other areas. “Wifi connectivity could also mean people arriving at the ground earlier and if they arrive earlier, there’s potential that they’ll consume more food and drink, especially as there is an incentive through the special offers within the application layer we’ve created. There’s also exposure for our partners and sponsors, and then there’s future potential with micropayment transactions.”

Perhaps more than anything, though, wifi is just a hygiene factor for today’s sports crowds.“Wifi is increasing becoming commodity – people expect it,” says Robinson. “Not providing wifi is not going to make people stop going to Anfield, but people increasingly just expect these sorts of things, it is just part of their in-venue experience.”

He addresses the threat of operators becoming bit pipes but believes there is lots of value in operators consolidating data to create new business models.