Airtel chooses Ericsson or Rwanda project

Bharti Airtel has launched its operation in Rwanda, opting to partner with Ericsson for the deployment, rather than Nokia Siemens, with which it announced a multi-market African partnership in October last year.

Ericsson will manage Airtel’s Rwandan network from end-to-end, including providing OSS/BSS solutions and managed services.Last year the Indian-headquartered carrier struck a partnership with NSN to expand, plan and operate its mobile networks in  Madagascar, Malawi, Congo Brazzaville, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.

Airtel said that it took just 83 days to build its new network from scratch, claiming it represents the fastest Greenfield launch in history of Sub-Saharan Africa. The Indian operator has also pledged to invest $100m over the next three years, taking its reach in Africa to 17 markets.

Rwandan Prime Minister Dr Pierre Damien Habumuremyi said that the government is looking to partner with the private sector to provide “good quality, accessible and affordable telecommunications services”.

“We are especially excited about the prospect of connecting Rwanda with the rest of the East African region and, indeed, with the rest of Africa. As Rwandans begin engaging in business ventures and looking for regional partners, telecommunications companies – like Airtel – that are able to provide access to a pan-African wireless network, become a crucial part of expansion,” he said.

Manoj Kohli, CEO at Bharti Airtel added that Rwanda represents “an extremely promising market” for the carrier.

According to Informa’s WCIS, mobile penetration in the country was at 41.49 per cent at the end of 2011. According to the World Bank, each 10 per cent of broadband penetration results in a 1.3 per per cent increase in per capita GDP growth in developing countries.

Airtel was awarded the license by the Rwanda Utilities Regulatory Agency (RURA) last year to operate 2G and 3G GSM mobile services.

3 Italia's network will be LTE flavoured at some point this year

Europe will soon gain another LTE network after 3 Italia announced that it has signed an agreement with Ericsson that will see the vendor upgrade the operator’s network to LTE offering speeds up to a theoretical limit of 100Mbps. The operator said the upgrade would be ready for a commercial launch in 2012, but did not give an exact time frame.

The upgrade would also deliver support for HSPA at up to 42Mbps, which 3 Italia said would be ready by the end of March 2012.

Vincenzo Novari, 3 Italia’s CEO, said in a statement that: “We are taking another step toward meeting the demand for mobile broadband connectivity and services from Italian consumers and enterprises. We are making HSPA+ coverage available on the entire nationwide network from the end of March and will launch LTE services already in 2012. Our network will become even more efficient at handling data traffic, ensuring a better quality of experience for our customers.”

3 Italia has been working with Ericsson since 2001, when the operator first rolled out its 3G network. The partnership extended to managed services on 2005 and a deal to extend its network to upgrade its WCDMA/HSPA network was entered into in 2009.

In the Italian spectrum auction last year, 3 Italia won two 10MHz blocks of FDD spectrum in the 2.6GHz range, 30MHz of 2.6GHz TDD spectrum and 2 x 15MHz in 1.8GHz. It missed out on the more attractive 800MHz frequencies however after it did not bid.

Ericsson triples uplink capacity in HSPA networks

Ericsson claims to have developed a solution that triples uplink capacity in HSPA networks, allowing operators with a large number of users to offer high uplink data speeds. The news comes hot on the heels of an announcement from Nokia-Siemens Networks, which has claimed it has developed a new solution to double throughput and data speeds for users at the edge of a small cell.

Using Ericsson’s receiver technology, Ericsson Interference Suppression, along with 4-antenna radio base stations, the Swedish vendor performed a demonstration last month. It showed that over-the-air uplink throughput for simultaneously active devices in a cell was increased from around 4Mbps to more than 12Mbps.

Interference Suppression is a base station receiver technology for WCDMA/HSPA that improves uplink speeds by increasing the network capacity. This is done by using software algorithms in the base station that reduce the negative effects of uplink interference that is today the bottleneck in many HSPA networks.

Ericsson said the gains were further enhanced by the use of base stations configured with four antennas per cell. This combination delivers a leap in end user experience and uplink capacity.

“We have proven that Ericsson’s unique Interference Suppression is a giant leap forward and it will be the new reference for WCDMA uplink performance for years to come,” said Nils Viklund, Director WCDMA RAN at Ericsson. “This can even be further enhanced by combining it with multi-receive antenna technologies. Because these technologies work with existing devices, operators that implement them will instantly benefit from the attractive gain.”

Earlier this week, NSN announced that it was launching a solution aimed at doubling mobile broadband speeds for consumers at the edge of a base station cell, by allowing devices to connect with a second base station that serves a neighbouring cell. Both Ericsson’s and NSN’s technologies will be on show next week at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Hans Vestberg, CEO, Ericsson

The owners of handset joint venture Sony Ericsson are to part company, with Japanese electronics firm Sony acquiring the 50 per cent share of the JV held by Sweden’s Ericsson for €1.05bn. The announcement comes ten years after the formation of Sony Ericsson, which saw two struggling handset units combined in the hope of marrying Sony’s consumer electronics expertise and Ericsson’s telecoms experience.

Sony Ericsson has endured mixed fortunes over the past decade and a repositioning in early 2010, together with a commitment to the Android OS in the high end was the latest in a line of strategic overhauls designed to secure a consistent and improved performance. Earlier this month the firm reported net profit of zero for the third quarter of 2011, down from the €49.9m it made for the same period in 2010, but up from a loss of €50m for the second quarter of this year. Such ups and downs have typified its performance.

Ericsson’s commitment to the JV has long been questioned and Sony’s move earlier this year to release two Android tablets under its solo brand hinted that it might be preparing to go it alone.

Still, there are some that find today’s development surprising, given that there were rumours not so long ago that Sony was looking for a way out of the JV, as its consumer electronics business suffered and mobile phones were not considered a core opportunity. Informa analyst Dave McQueen suggests that Sony may see value in creating a unified experience across its device range, incorporating TV, Blu-ray, PlayStation 3, tablets and mobile devices, as part of a wider connected home strategy whilst also leveraging on its music, video and film assets to create rich content ecosystem.

Ericsson’s announcement supported this suggestion. A shift in the nature of the handset space to content and service-oriented smartphones meant that “the synergies for Ericsson in having both a world leading technology and telecoms services portfolio and a handset operation are decreasing, “the Swedish firm said.

As part of the deal, Sony will gain an intellectual property portfolio of five patent families, and a “broad IP cross-licensing agreement. The Japanese firm believes it will be able to better position handsets as part of its wider product portfolio, said chairman and CEO Howard Stringer.

“With a vibrant smartphone business and by gaining access to important strategic IP, notably a broad cross-license agreement, our four-screen strategy is in place. We can more rapidly and more widely offer consumers smartphones, laptops, tablets and televisions that seamlessly connect with one another and open up new worlds of online entertainment,” Stringer said.”

“We will now enhance our focus on enabling connectivity for all devices, using our R&D and industry leading patent portfolio to realize a truly connected world” said Hans Vestberg, president and CEO of Ericsson.

The deal is expected to close in January 2012.

Ericsson's sevice allows consumers to pay for services whilst in an app with no credit card

Swedish vendor Ericsson has launched an in-application payment service targeted at operators that want to allow consumers to complete purchases without having to leave a game or application. Consumers will be able to buy goods and services with just one click, whilst remaining in the app.

The service is based on Ericsson’s IPX service platform which is integrated by over 120 operators. It requires no credit card, allowing users to charge purchases straight to their bill, with the company saying that simplifying the payment service to the consumer should result in increasing numbers opting to purchase goods or services from their phones.

Research firm Ovum projects that revenues from paid mobile apps will top $3.7bn in 2011 and expects this to increase to $7.7bn in 2016.

“People are spending increasing amounts of time and money on applications,” said Adam Kerr, head of Ericsson’s M Commerce business. “But in order to reach these kinds of numbers it has to be easy for the consumer.”

The in-app payment service allows retailers to flexibly offer a range of payment models, such as allowing consumers to try before they buy as well as rental and subscription models.

The model can be applied to game levels, maps, and digital content such as music, books and other in-application assets, said Ericsson.

Jean-Noel Georges, global program director for ICT – smart cards group at consultancy Frost & Sullivan, explained that Ericsson’s launch is not the first time that an in-application payment service has been released. Google revealed similar solutions for the game and entertainment market in January 2011 and in-app purchases have been available via Apple’s App Store since October 2009, and since September 2010 from the BlackBerry Application World.

“But for the first time, and based on a strategic platform approach, Ericsson is providing a range of payment solutions for better end-user consumer experience across several countries,” said Georges.

“According to the company, rental subscription, try-before-you-buy, embedded application, in-game economies and other business models are supported. The limit between virtual and physical world is much more complex. This is why physical shops are also promoting physical goods across the digital world. And as a reverse process, virtual goods as weapon for game or access to the next game level could be purchased by using “real” money across this platform.”

“And to be able to capture all kind of possible revenues, virtual money is also available for really small amounts such as cents transaction.”

Johan Wibergh, executive vice president and head of business unit networks at Ericsson speaking at the Broadband World Forum in Paris

Current networks are not up to the challenge of meeting the pressure of the future networked society and will need to be replaced, Johan Wibergh, executive vice president and head of business unit networks at Ericsson has said.

Wibergh, making his comments at the opening keynote speech at the Broadband World Forum in Paris, said that Ericsson expects up to 50 billion devices to be connected to the internet by 2020 and that it would be necessary to move to a fourth generation network to be able to deliver the services required.

“Today’s networks are not up to it, they won’t scale. We will need to move to fourth generation of IP networks.”

Wibergh said that the 4GIP network, as he described it, will have to seamlessly integrate between HSPA, LTE and wifi and be much simpler in its architecture.  He stated that the emphasis will need to be on lowering the cost per bit in order to enable the network to scale. “We need to bring the internet to five billion people and it won’t happen unless we simplify things,” he said.

He also noted that networks would have to realise the potential of cloud services. “There are enormous possibilities around cloud, but it’s not easy to get working—this is the task we have ahead of us in the coming years.”

More content like this in the broadband zone

This year's awards will again take place during a river cruise through Paris on the Bateau Diamant

As the clock ticks down to the Broadband InfoVision Awards ceremony, to be held in Paris in two months’ time, we continue our series of previews of the different awards categories and their shortlisted entries. This month is the turn of Category Two – Broadband Access Network Technologies and Services (Fixed).

Proceeding in alphabetical order, the Alcatel-Lucent 5060 IP Border Controller-4 (IBC-4) has been nominated for its ability to help service providers address the critical challenge of ensuring service availability, security and quality whilst keeping costs and risks in check. The 5060 IP Border Controller-4 has been designed from the ground up for all IP communications, and provides a wealth of security mechanisms and key features, such as IPv4/IPv6 interworking and policy management interfaces.

US firm ASSIA has been nominated for its DSL Expresse software, which optimises the operating parameters for each DSL line and provides detailed line-level and network-level diagnostics for both the copper plant and DSL service. The solution can scale to over 20mn lines, and is compatible with ADSL1, ADSL2/2+ and VDSL DSLAMS, as well as pair-bonded deployments.

Ericsson‘s EDA 1500 GPON Optical Line Terminal has reached the shortlist after impressing judges with its ability to facilitate the transition from copper-based networks to fibre delivered all the way to the home. The EDA 1500 GPON solution supports a complete suite of open access features, as well as featuring a 16 ports GPON board, and offers features designed to ensure low cost of ownership, such as simple speed click provisioning and optical fault monitoring.

Huawei has been nominated for its Single Backhaul@FMC solution, which delivers an end-to-end solution for mobile broadband and fixed mobile convergence. Its unique features include the ability to facilitate any connection between a range of services, including LTE and 2G/3G services. It provides comprehensive Quality of Service capabilities, and provides high levels of security by providing access authentication and service isolation, as well as IPsec-GW redundancy methods.

Finally, ZTE has been shortlisted for its VDSL2 vectoring solution, based on system-level vectoring, which increases bandwidth further than traditional VDSL2 or board-level vectoring solutions, and enables all users to connect to different line cards in a DSLAM, meaning that they can benefit from interference cancellation. By increasing the reach from the cabinet to the home or premises, system-level vectoring can also offer higher coverage than a traditional VDSL2 solution and reduces an operator’s need to deploy additional street cabinets.

The Broadband InfoVision Awards will be held in Paris on September 27th during a Gala Dinner Presentation aboard a river cruise on the Seine, travelling through the heart of the French capital. For more information and to register, please click here

du's rollout of Fibre-to-the-Home in the UAE continues to scale upwards

Du, one of the two major operators in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), has selected GPON solutions from Ericsson for its rollout of a Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) network in the country.

Du has been rolling out its FTTH network to many new developments within the city of Dubai, enabling it to offer superfast broadband services and its IPTV service ‘du TV’, as well as telephony.

Ericsson’s Deep Fiber Access solution has been chosen for the project, consisting of Ericsson’s EDA 1500 GPON solution, passive optical components, system integration and related services.

The UAE has become a hive of activity for fibre broadband rollouts in recent years, with Etisalat (the other major operator in the country) making Abu Dhabi the first city in the world to achieve 100 per cent coverage with Fibre-to-the-Home.

Etisalat also intends to pursue the same copper-to-fibre migration strategy in other emirates within its geographical fixed broadband footprint, with another enormous investment of AED7 billion ($1.91 billion).

The UAE currently has one of the highest household penetration rates for fixed broadband services in the world, with 90 per cent – almost eight times the regional average.

The Canadian government is set to investigate the sale of Nortel's patents

The Nortel patents auction saga took another twist Wednesday when Canadian Industry Minister Christian Paradis said that his government will hold an investigation into the sale to establish whether it complies with the terms of the Investment Canada Act.

On Monday, it was announced that a tech-industry consortium including Apple, Ericsson and Microsoft had successfully bid $4.5bn for Nortel’s patent assets, beating a highly-publicised Google campaign to the gavel. Under the terms of the Investment Canada Act, which covers foreign investment, the sale of any asset valued at more than C$312m must automatically be reviewed by the government to assess whether or not it’s of benefit to the country.

On the face of it, it would appear that the consortium has little to worry about: commentators in Canada have said that the patents were recorded as having next to no value on Nortel’s asset sheet, thanks in no small part to the difficulty companies have assessing the value of patents prior to their licensing or sale. It’s also unclear whether or not Nortel’s patent assets can be viewed as a “business” in its own right – a requirement of the law in question – as the company is reported to have made less than $10m a year on licensing and royalty payemtns.

What is giving rise to concern, however, is a growing sense that the sale will have a knock-on effect on competition. Prior to the auction, Google had been vocal about its motivation for bidding for the patents. The search giant claimed it needed to build up its patent portfolio to defend itself against legal attacks from rivals. With Android under increasing pressure from intellectual property claims, many commentators view the consortium’s bid for the patents not as a measure to protect themselves from each other so much as a massive arsenal with which to attack Google.

Under the circumstances, many observers found Mountain View’s approach to the auction a tad bewildering : the mathematically inclined among commentators pointed out that Google’s bids were based on obscure mathematical numbers such as the Brun’s and Meissel-Mertens constants and, once the bidding went past the $3bn mark, the company bid $3.14159bn – or Pi.

The Canadian government has only rejected foreign takeover bids on two previous occasions. Last year, BHP Billiton had a hostile takeover play for Potash Corp thrown out on the grounds of it offering no benefit to the country; in 2008, local aerospace technology firm McDonald Dettwiler was prevented from selling its space division to American defence firm Alliant Techsystems.

A consortium including Apple and Microsoft has successfully bid $4.5bn for Nortel's patent assets

The bunfight for Nortel’s patent chest concluded yesterday, with Chief Strategy Officer George Riedel’s announcement that “following a very robust auction”, the winning bid came from a buyer too big for even Google to take on.

Following months of speculation and a $900m kick-off bid from Mountain View, the booty has gone to a consortium that reads like a Who’s Who of the tech industry: Apple, EMC, Ericsson, Microsoft, RIM and Sony. Even with names like that in the mix, the $4.5bn price paid is still pretty eye-watering or, as Nortel’s Riedel preferred to put it, “unprecedented.”

Swedish kit-making giant Ericsson has confirmed its contribution of $340m to the deal; RIM is reported to have stumped up $770m, with no news yet on how much Microsoft or Apple have contributed, or how the spoils are to be shared out. According to a statement from Ericsson Chief Intellectual Property officer Kasim Alfalahi, the company believes the consortium is “in the best position to utilise the patents in a manner that will be favourable to the industry in the long term.”

Whether the long-term favourability will include Google remains to be seen, however. Since the search giant’s forays into the mobile and desktop operating systems space, it has come under increasing attack from rivals claiming its technologies infringe on their patent holdings. Oracle is currently chasing the company down directly over claims that Android infringes on Java, seeking over $6bn in damages.

Other rivals such as Apple and Microsoft have taken a less direct approach, suing Google partners such as HTC and Motorola over alleged Android infringements. Microsoft, for its part, has successfully turned Android into a cash-cow for Redmond: estimates from Citi and Asymco suggest the company makes five times more money collecting Android-related patent royalties from HTC than it does from sales of its home grown Windows 7 phone.

Along with HP, Motorola and Nokia, Microsoft had been opposed to Google’s attempt to purchase the Nortel patents. The company had said that, under the terms of a 2006 deal, it had a “worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free license to all of Nortel’s patents” and that this agreement was binding, regardless of who owned the IP. Under those circumstances, it’s difficult to understand why Redmond would stump up a lot of money to buy-in to the consortium – other than to use as weaponry in a potential smack-down with Google . The potential revenue stream to be derived from cross-licensing agreements for effectively doing very little in the R&D department is no doubt a further source of appeal to the members of the consortium.

According to Ericsson, the deal is expected to close in the third quarter of this year, providing it can gain the approval of both the Canadian and US courts. A joint hearing on that is expected to take place on July 11^th. The patents involved cover wireless, LTE, social networking and search technologies and optical networking, among others. Despite the massive cash injection from the sale, Nortel has said it’s unlikely that regular shareholders will see any return on it after its other bankruptcy commitments are met.