Mobile data growth is a key reason Facebook is investing in a private fibre network in Europe

Mobile operators worldwide should be preparing for an impending surge in traffic over the next several years,  with mobile users in 2016 consuming an average of 6.5 times as much video, over eight times as much music and social media, and nearly ten times as much games than in 2011.

The statistics are drawn from recent forecasts from Informa Telecoms & Media, but with foresight of this curve, social giant Facebook is investing in its own European fibre network, to cope with similar increases in traffic on internal systems.

Erik Hallberg, president at TeliaSonera International Carrier, which is building the network for Facebook, explained that the infrastructure will be used to backhaul traffic between its newly-built datacentre in Sweden – the hub of its European operation – and datacentres elsewhere. The company has already set up long distance links to provide capacity between its European and US datacentres.

“Facebook is processing enormous amounts of data per user, and it needs to sort it and share it with everyone,” Hallberg told Telecoms.com. “This will be the main place for Facebook to aggregate data for European and Middle East users. It needs a network to take traffic back and forth and make data accessible to Facebook users.”

Ron Kline, principal analyst, network infrastructure, at Ovum added that resilience of the network is a key reason for Facebook to invest in its own private network.

“One of the tenants of Facebook and any other internet service providers is that the network can’t fail – the reliability and resiliency of the network are key,” he said. He added that latency is another consideration, because if it takes too long for a signal to transfer to the network, then Facebook will have issues with sessions timing-out, which would affect internal processes such as backup and mirroring.

“The other thing is they have huge amounts of data – it’s hard to imagine how much data is in these datacentres – just racks and racks of servers,” Kline added. “It’s a lot of bandwidth. To buy here and there from different carriers is virtually impossible – you need to have a private network that can be sized to the bandwidth requirements and give you the most reliable network you can have.”

Projections from Informa show that there will be a huge upsurge in traffic for most mobile data services over the next five years, largely driven by the spread of smartphones and a 23 per cent increase in the number of mobile users.

“The top three data guzzlers on mobile phones over the next five years will be applications, video streaming and web browsing – in that order of importance,” said Guillermo Escofet, senior analyst. He added that global mobile data traffic will grow from 3.89 trillion MB in 2011 to 39.75 trillion MB in 2016, amounting to a tenfold increase.

Verizon's LTE network has suffered a nationwide outage

US carrier Verizon Wireless this weekend suffered an outage that affected its LTE network across the country. According to reports, the service went down early Sunday evening, and had only been partially restored across the country on Monday morning. Some users reported that 3G services were affected as well, leaving customers replying on 1xRTT for data access.

Disgruntled users have been taking to social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Reddit to complain about the outage. Reddit used Vzw_insider was one of the first to alert users about the ourage and said that, “just want to let you all know VZ 4g mode is out nationwide. We’re working on it, calling Vz customer service will do no good as this is a network issue. Looking at at no ETA for repair just yet. I’ll keep this thread updated as the night goes on.”

Meanwhile, Twitter user @derekduncan asked, “Is there any irony in watching a Verizon LTE commercial during nationwide outage?”

Verizon has yet to comment officially on the outage and had not responded to request for comment from Telecoms.com. The outage is the third to affect the service since its launch in December 2010, which announced last week that it had launched a fleet of test vehicles to test and monitor its 4G network.

Verizon is not the only company to suffer from outage issues, with Canadian mobile company RIM recovering from the effects of a data centre failure that affected its Blackberry messaging services worldwide.

The LTE North America 2011 conference takes place on the 8-9 November 2011 at the Fairmont Dallas Hotel in Dallas, Texas, USA.

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Challenges to IP-based metro transport network

As telecoms networks are in the shift to be packetized and broadband-based, All-IP has been the future development trend of service networks. According to prediction, bandwidth is expected to grow at an annual rate of over 30% in the next five years. The two-layer networking mode “IP over WDM” is gradually replacing the traditional three-layer “IP over SDH over WDM” mode at both backbone layer and metro layer, and the flat architecture enabling carriage of IP packets directly over photonic layer has been an inevitable trend. IP over WDM networking architecture poses new requirements for photonic layer WDM equipments, and WDM layer will take over the networking, service grooming and end-to end circuit monitoring and management functions originally provided by SDH networks.

Published by ZTE Corporation

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Published by ZTE Corporation

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