At first glance the agreement, dubbed OSSii (Operations Support Systems interoperability initiative), throws into question the whole concept of standardized interfaces in the telecoms software sector. Indeed, comparisons between OSSii’s stated aims of ‘simplifying interoperability between OSS systems in a multi-vendor environment’ and TMF’s Frameworkx or the efforts of the 3GPP, are inescapable.

OSS in particular has never been a sector that was heavy on standards but with CSP’s increasingly insisting on a multi-vendor approach to next-generation IT systems, reduced integration costs and fast roll-out times, true interoperability is being forced on an albeit reluctant sector of the industry. Previously, standards for interoperability were at best slow to develop (for example the time taken to develop the 3GPP Sy interface) and at worst only given lip-service while vendors developed proprietary interfaces and work-arounds of their own.

If the new spirit of friendly and open-mindedness OSSii is trying to engender does gain traction and become the industry norm, doubts over the need for standards bodies of one complexion or another will inevitably grow. For this to happen however, the OSSii is going to need a lot more signatories than the current three. Crucial too will be the range of signatories to the MoU, both in terms of size and portfolio. It will be important that OSSii is not seen simply as a means whereby infrastructure vendors can impose their collective will on the OSS market and while the founders appear to have made the process of joining the MoU as easy as possible, it is likely many vendors will take a ‘wait and see’ approach, for the time being at least.

To finish on an observational note, it could of course be argued that if OSS vendors had trusted each other a bit more five or ten years ago, it would have saved everyone a lot of time, trouble and money, but sadly this industry just doesn’t work that way.

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

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.

Du has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Chinese infrastructure Huawei

UAE operator Du has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Chinese infrastructure Huawei. Under the terms of the agreement, the two firms will and exchange project management experiences, knowledge and research, according to the operator.

They will exchange best practice industry methodology, concepts, tools and techniques and work together to better define best practice portfolio and project management concepts, processes and techniques, said Du.

“By signing this agreement with Huawei, we are fulfilling our commitment to the pursuit of best practices in all that we do,” commented Ananda Bose, chief corporate affairs officer at Du.

Wang Haitun, director at Huawei, added: “[The MoU] will facilitate a stronger relationship between our two companies as we work together to develop best practices that will be implemented in our respective project management offices for the benefit of the telecommunications industry.”

Huawei is already working with Du’s rival, Etisalat, after it signed a global consultancy services deal last month with the UAE-based operator group.

Huawei’s business consulting team is partnering with Etisalat to assist in developing the operator’s mobile broadband services and its digital services portfolio.

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard Meets Huawei chairman Sun Yafang in Beijing

Chinese infrastructure vendor Huawei and the Australian government appear to have settled their differences as Huawei reaffirmed its commitment to the Australian market this week.

The firm’s chairwoman Sun Yafang met with Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard in Beijing on Wednesday and told her that Huawei is looking forward to playing a role in promoting business and educational opportunities between China and Australia.

In March last year, it was reported that Huawei was told not to bid for any contracts relating to Australia’s National Broadband Network (NBN) project, reportedly due to security concerns harboured by the government over Huawei.

At the time, Gillard said that the decision to exclude Huawei was “prudent”. Although she did not refer to the Chinese vendor by name, she said that the Government was obliged to do its “utmost to protect [the NBN’s] integrity and that of the information carried on it.”

Now though, Huawei says it is working with Australia’s ICT industry and has established a local board of directors in Australia, which it claims has been a great success for the local business. Huawei Australia has grown from a company 20 staff in 2004 to over 700 staff today, the firm said, over 85 per cent of which are locals.

“Huawei is committed to forging long-term business, community and education partnerships that will benefit the Australian people and the economy,” said Sun.

Huawei has seen its net profit increase by almost a quarter year on year to reach CNY15.38bn ($2.47bn)

Chinese infrastructure vendor Huawei has posted its financial results for 2012, in which it saw its net profit increase by almost a quarter year on year to reach CNY15.38bn ($2.47bn). Revenue for the year stood at CNY220bn, up from the CNY203.9bn recorded in 2011.

The firm said it saw growth across all three of its business groups: carrier network, enterprise and consumer (devices).

The carrier network business group generated CNY160.1bn in revenue, an increase of 6.7 per cent year-on-year. The enterprise business continued to grow at home and abroad, generating CNY11.5bn in sales revenue, a 25.8 per cent increase from the previous year. The consumer division’s global sales revenue reached CNY48.4bn, an increase of 8.4 per cent year on year.

Over the year Huawei invested CNY30.09bn – representing 13.7 per cent, of its total sales revenue — into research and development. In the next five years, the firm expects to see a compound annual growth rate of ten per cent.

According to CEO Ren Zhengfei, Huawei is fundamentally changing its approach to reward its key personnel better, in order to better compete with its rivals.

“In the past, our appraisal system focused on commonalities rather than individualities, and therefore failed to appropriately widen the gap between employees with respect to compensation and benefits,” he said.

Sanqi Li, Huawei

The CTO of Chinese equipment vendor Huawei clearly envisions a world where network applications and services will run on commodity hardware and software. For a company that sells specialist boxes into networks, this could be a bold statement, but Sanqi Li, CTO of the firm’s carrier network business, simply sees it as the evolution of business models for both carriers and vendors.

Speaking about what he calls the “new digital economy” Sanqi believes the next generation of technology, particularly virtualisation, will bring about more change than the industry has seen in the last 100 years, especially in terms of business models. While he acknowledges that the operator is already the foundation stone of all connections, he argues that operators need to move beyond what is traditionally perceived as their position in the digital ecosystem.

“This next change is less about technology and more about business. The operator business model at present is rigid, slow, and hard to change. Network architecture today is closed, complicated, and still focused on elements that the carriers can control,” Sanqi says, alluding to the idea that telcos should be partnering with OTT services using technologies developed by the vendors. Indeed, with an assertiveness that some of his competitors might be wary of displaying, he adds: “Vendors are increasingly responsible for the operator business model.“

Sanqi believes that the existing TCO structure for network operators is not sustainable, because opex is still growing and is now at 82 per cent, up from 77 per cent ten years ago.

“We’re looking at the fundamental limit of existing network infrastructure,” he says. “Today’s network architecture is closed, protocol-centric and vertical, fragmented and with software embedded in the network devices.” The devices might be in the network for ten, 15 or even 20 years and all services are best effort with very little differentiation between them, he adds. Networks are over complicated by the continuing presence of two decades’ worth of technology, from TDM to ATM,  and frame relay to IP and MPLS.

“These networks are multi-generation and multi-technology, and control is always at the centre of the model. Voice and messaging are all controlled directly by the operator, but this traditional service model cannot be sustained because it’s slow to adapt,” he warns.

A business model that is rigid, slow, and hard to change, can be saved by the core virtualisation expectations of SDN (software defined networking), he says. He characterises the move to this new architecture as a move from closed to open; rather than having a network that scales up, it’s about having one that scales out, across different sectors and verticals, while enabling new network capabilities.

“It’s about stopping the operators from having a controlling mentality and giving them an enabling mentality. Then the telcos’ true capabilities in network, QoS and billing can really come into their own,” Sanqi says.

Huawei, which caters to cloud service providers as much as it does traditional telcos, is talking about bringing cloud business technology into the telco network, using SDN to dynamically allocate resources and spectrum across 2G, 3G, and 4G as well as to provide a virtual gateway direct to the customer’s home.

In terms of the core technologies, Sanqi talks about Network OS, which decouples the control layer from network devices, as well as Cloud OS, which deals with massively distributed datacentres, virtualisation and automation. The combination of these two OSes, touches every part of the network and structurally optimises it.

Sanqi reckons that decoupling, or ‘abstracting’ the control layer can reduce the time and effort needed to manage network devices by a factor of between five and 20. “Abstraction in the cloud layer can lead to simplicity, where providers can automate and orchestrate new services and apply different cost strategies,” he says.

It’s a big shift for an industry that has historically built networks around specialised appliances and one that will need critical mass from the vendor community before the carriers buy into the idea wholeheartedly. But Sanqi says that this approach does not mean moving everything to x86 hardware and argues that it would not have a detrimental effect on Huawei’s business as a maker of both network hardware and software. SDN and virtualisation means network functions are no longer embedded in devices, with control becoming more of a software-based model, breaking away from a costly status quo in which controllers for many remote devices are run vertically, he says.

“More and more hardware shipments will be focused on data centre boxes, the likes of which Huawei sells. These are not just x86 processor boxes, but those that might also require GPU power for video rendering,” he says.

In terms of architecture and software, OpenFlow is expected to be the chosen switching specification, while the Cloud OS will be based on OpenStack. Huawei is building a centralised routing control algorithm and the network OS is still to be decided on, but a key feature is that it decouples control from the devices themselves. The company already has SDN-enabled routers deployed alongside OpenFlow-tested equipment, Sanqi says.

Moreover, an increasing proportion of Huawei’s future product development will be in software, as network functions, no longer embedded in specialist network devices, will all be controlled by software that needs to be open, abstract, programmable and virtualised. How long this process will take is anybody’s guess, though, as represents a move to an entirely new business model.

“Carriers won’t swap everything out at once. This is more of a migration and needs to be managed carefully as it can touch all parts of the system. But the endgame is that carriers are looking for programmability in software to open up the capability to work with OTT,” he says.

Huawei and ZTE are locked in a patent dispute in Germany

Chinese vendors Huawei and ZTE are trading blows in a patent dispute in Germany, with the former accusing the latter of infringing upon its LTE and terminal patents.

Although Germany’s Mannheim Court dismissed Huawei’s accusation that ZTE had infringed on its LTE terminal patents, it did rule that ZTE had infringed on Huawei’s ‘Key Derivation Function’ patent. A judgement ZTE will appeal to the higher court over.

“ZTE is confident that the ZTE product involved in the lawsuit launched by Huawei does not infringe Huawei’s patent rights,” the firm said in a statement. The court decision will not affect any ZTE business operations around the globe including in Germany, it added.

ZTE also stated that Huawei has launched several other patent lawsuits against it in Germany, France and Hungary. It has prepared technical solutions to all relevant patent lawsuits to ensure that customers are not affected in any way, ZTE said. It added that no lawsuit will affect ZTE’s business operations anywhere around the globe.

“In response to these and other court actions, ZTE has filed 18 patent lawsuits against Huawei in Europe and China, concerning a portfolio of LTE infrastructure, core network and terminals,” ZTE said. It added that the firm won a series of lawsuits in the China Shenzhen Intermediate Court and German Patent Courts in 2012.

“ZTE continues to pursue these lawsuits and will proactively coordinate with all parties to achieve a suitable settlement. In terms of the sale of products using unlicensed ZTE technologies, ZTE will take any legal means including sales bans and compensation to prevent infringements on ZTE’s patent rights and to protect the benefits of both the clients and the company.”

Dubai-based Etisalat has signed a global consultancy services deal with Huawei

UAE-based operator group Etisalat has signed a global consultancy services agreement with Chinese vendor Huawei.

According to the operator, Huawei’s business consulting team will partner with Etisalat to assist in developing the operator’s mobile broadband services and its digital services portfolio.

The primary objective of the agreement is for Huawei to support the operator group in enhancing its profitability through traffic monetisation schemes, premium customer-support solutions and cooperation on go-to-market strategies for new Etisalat services, the operator added.

The agreement will include cooperation on Etisalat projects such as building LTE mobile networks and over-the-top (OTT) media offerings such as Etisalat’s e-Plus packages.

“This agreement continues a long and successful history of collaboration between both companies and presents us with a win-win situation,” said Mr. Ahmad Abdulkarim Julfar, Etisalat Group’s CEO. “With a large and growing global presence of over 139 million customers in fifteen countries, Etisalat Group has built up a large and talented international workforce. This agreement will enable us to further collaborate to bolster the international expertise that already exists in the group.”

The firm launched a SingleEPC solution, which it said enables a smooth evolution to cloud-based telecom networks.

Meanwhile, FusionNet, Huawei’s new generation of network architecture for LTE-B  improves Cell Edge User (CEU) throughput by at least 500 per cent, according to the vendor.

Finally, its Managed Services Unified Platform (MSUP) V2.0s received the Frameworx Conformance Certification from the TM Forum. TM Forum’s standards and services give service providers the necessary market tools to adopt innovative services and business growth models to reduce cost and risk during planning, design, and implementation.