Obama pushes expanding high-speed wireless service

http://www.cnbc.com/id/41264739


WASHINGTON - U.S. President Barack Obama on Tuesday called for expanding high-speed wireless services to meet the voracious appetite of consumers and businesses, a task that could be tough because airwaves are a finite resource and demand is almost limitless.

"Within the next five years, we will make it possible for business to deploy the next generation of high-speed wireless coverage to 98% of all Americans," Obama said during his annual State of the Union speech to the U.S. Congress.

"This isn't just about a faster Internet and fewer dropped calls. It's about connecting every part of America to the digital age," he said, noting farmers in rural areas can sell their crops abroad and doctors can chat with patients via video.

The Obama administration has endorsed making 500 megahertz of wireless airwaves, or spectrum, available over the next decade to meet the growing demand for broadband services, including the widely popular Apple iPad and proliferation of smartphones.

The Federal Communications Commission hopes to repurpose 120 megahertz of spectrum through incentive auctions where television broadcasters like CBS Corp would voluntarily give up spectrum in exchange for a portion of the proceeds.

"President Obama is helping the nation to understand the incredible benefits that broadband wireless can bring: to our business, to healthcare, to productivity and to education," said Verizon Wireless general counsel Steve Zipperstein.

"Wireless innovation requires public policies that foster innovation, growth and encourage continued investment by Verizon and our partners in the technology," he said.

However, the broadcast television industry has raised concerns about giving up its airwaves. An industry representative noted airwaves it relinquished two years have yet to be fully used.

"We would encourage Congress to immediately pass spectrum inventory legislation that fully identifies airwaves that are not being used," said Dennis Wharton, a spokesman for the National Association of Broadcasters.

Copyright 2011 Reuters.

Clearwave winner for stimulus funding

Stimulus winner Clearwave has ambitious middle mile network plans

Although small incumbent telcos won a large portion of broadband stimulus funding, some competitive local exchange carriers also were winners. One of the larger CLEC stimulus awards went to Delta Communications, a competitive carrier that operates under the name Clearwave.

The company won a grant for $31.5 million through the stimulus program, which it will use in combination with as much as $45 million in matching funds, to build a 740-mile fiber network in rural Illinois that will interconnect anchor institutions and businesses in numerous communities. When the project is completed, anchor institutions and business customers will have dramatically improved bandwidth availability at economical rates, Clearwave President Scott Riggs told Connected Planet.

Clearwave, which already serves 1500 business customers in the area, expects to gain more. When we can come in and offer them 10 or 20 meg for less than they pay for a T-1, why wouldn't they switch over to that service? asked Riggs.

Anchor institutions such as schools, libraries, government agencies and health care facilities will see even better rates, as Clearwave promised to offer them deeply discounted services as part of its stimulus application for a three-year period. Their pricing, Riggs said, was discounted almost to the point where it's at about what it costs us to serve them.

The pricing will be so attractive in comparison with current offerings that any anchor institution not taking the new service could be viewed as shirking its fiduciary responsibility, Riggs said.

A high-speed network

Clearwave got its start in the mid-1990s, initially operating as a paging company, then transitioning into a CLEC strategy around 2001. We're now transitioning into fiber transport with some last-mile components, said Riggs.

Clearwave has already co-located in 20 incumbent central offices operated by AT&T and Frontier and will add 10 more as part of the stimulus project, connecting all COs to the fiber network.

The government requires any company using stimulus funds to build a broadband network to allow other service providers access to that network at reasonable rates and, as a result, Clearwave also expects to see other service providers coming in to offer residential broadband services, using Clearwave's network for backhaul. The Clearwave network will connect to carrier interconnection points in St. Louis and Chicago, enabling nationwide and even worldwide connectivity. Clearwave also expects to provide connectivity to numerous cell towers.

A final element of the project is a new data center, which will house key equipment, including routers. Although not part of the stimulus project, Clearwave expects to eventually use the data center to support hosted services for its customers.

If at first you don't succeed . . .

Clearwave won its stimulus funding in the second round of the stimulus program, after an unsuccessful attempt in the first round. After being rejected on its first try, Clearwave looked closely at first round applications that were successful and reworked its application to include more anchor institutions, including a 911 project.

Clearwave has not yet broken ground on the new project because it is still waiting for environmental approvals. But the company has selected key vendors including Cyan and Juniper. And Clearwave, which has about 32 employees, has hired about five new people and expects to double its work force within 12 to 18 months as a result of the stimulus project.

Apple Competition and Steve Jobs Health

Steve Jobs' latest medical leave comes at a time when competition to Apple Inc.'s popular iPhone and iPad products is mounting fast.

The Cupertino, Calif.-based consumer electronics giant has set the tone for the mobile computing market. Its iPhone usurped Research In Motion Ltd.'s BlackBerry for leadership in the U.S. smartphone space and triggered a host of copycat devices that employed its touchscreen interface. Similarly, Apple set off the boom in tablet computing, selling more than 7 million iPads in less a year on the market.

But the competition is catching up. Already, handsets running Google Inc.'s Android operating system have become trendy among technophiles and neophytes alike. And though the iPad remains the dominant tablet computer, new devices are on the way from Research In Motion, Samsung Electronics Co., Acer Inc. and Dell Inc.

On Monday, Mr. Jobs, 55, told Apple employees he had been granted a leave "so I can focus on my health." Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook will run the company in Jobs's absence though Jobs would "be involved in major strategic decisions for the company."

Mr. Jobs' absence leaves Apple without its most important visionary as the competition circles the products that have come to symbolize the world's most valuable technology company. Mr. Jobs is credited with stewarding projects like the iPhone and iPad from conception to production. He is viewed as the company's top dealmaker, cutting agreements with content publishers and network operators.

Importantly, Mr. Jobs is the company's pitch man, whipping up excitement among customers for the company's latest gadget. "He has a set of skills motivating people and shepherding certain designs through in new products and in deal-making that's awfully rare," said Kevin Landis, president of SiVest Group. He added that while he sees Jobs as an essential part of Apple's strategy, the chief executive's temporary medical leave isn't going to push him to change his Apple holdings, which constitute nearly 10% of his "Technology Leaders Fund."

Apple did not respond immediately to a request for comment on how Mr. Jobs' absence might affect its competitive position.

Whether the competition can displace Apple is an open question. The company has legions of loyal fans and commands respect from technologists. Its designs regularly win plaudits for their stylish simplicity.

And Apple has weathered Mr. Jobs' health concerns before with Apple Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook filling in for the CEO.

Still, Mr. Cook can't replace Jobs' star power as a pitchman. Last week, the crowd at the launch of the iPhone on Verizon's network was noticeably deflated when Mr. Cook rather than Mr. Jobs showed up.

And competitors are stealing pages from Apple's playbook with success. In recent months, more smartphones running Android have been sold in the U.S. than those running Apple's operating system, according to Nielsen Co. Several tablet computers, including Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. unveiled its "Xoom" tablet at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to a warm reception. And Samsung has shipped more than one million Galaxy Tab slates, an iPad competitor, in its first quarter. "I do think the Jobs' absence is a window for the competitors," said Kim Caughey Forrest, an analyst for the Fort Pitt Capital fund, which sold all its Apple shares a few years ago. "It should be really interesting to see what happens."

Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703396604576088344195546876.html#ixzz1BPuqTCEq

4G Impact to Wireline and Backbone Carriers

Interesting article as 4G rolls out will it stimulate more backbone upgrades?

Connected Planet spoke to Sanjay Mewada, NetCracker's vice president of strategy, about what critical OSS components operators like DoCoMo should be thinking about as they move to deploy LTE infrastructure and services.

Connected Planet: What's different now with LTE than all other instances of upgrades in the past?
Sanjay Mewada: Nowadays, once a competitor goes to 4g or LTE, you have to respond, so the cycle times that service providers enjoyed before are gone. With DSL or fiber-based rollouts you went market by market in a methodical way, scaling up as you went. But now, the cycle between planning, deploying and going live is very short; no more three-year cycles because of competitive pressures and the push to make public announcements to keep investors and the market happy.

Also, when upgrading bandwidth on the access side, it has a dramatic cascading effect now on the backhaul and core networks. So it's not enough to go 4G on mobile and not to do the same on fixed. If you are offering 60 Mbps on a smart phone, then your RAN has to be able to handle that, and your backhaul and core simultaneously have to. It would be of course smarter to do it even earlier than when you roll it out on the access side, as you don't want to bear the consequences of a huge surge.

It's a mistake to roll out 4G in certain areas just so you can say you have it for marketing purposes, without considering the whole footprint and the impact on service.

Connected Planet: How do tighter cycle times impact OSS strategy?
Sanjay Mewada: Your rollouts have to be as efficient as possible and bring to bear the right capabilities and tools right from the start, as there is little room for error when customers have so many choices to churn. That means something like workforce management for next-gen networks in fixed and mobile will be very important. You can't have multiple truck rolls because of scheduling problems, or because a technician forgets certain pieces of hardware, electronics or tools, or even hammers and nails for that matter! You have to do it right the first time, especially since resources are increasingly limited (physical, logical and human). Everything from the municipal approvals necessary to build base stations, to the antennae, to the hammers and nails needs to be managed in a comprehensive and complete manner.

Quality of service and service management will also be very important now that you are going beyond SMS and onto offering HD TV on mobile phones or high-quality videos. Customer expectations and tolerance for failure will rise, and drop, respectively. The stakes are much higher now that you are offering a 70-Mbps service like video streaming or video conferencing over iPads, smart phones and other devices. Now more than ever, end end-to-end management of quality will mean a lot; there cannot be unrecognized and unplacated drops of IP packets if you are going to compete successfully in terms of customer satisfaction. I think I saw a Spiderman cartoon that read: With more power comes more responsibility. Well, with more bandwidth comes more focus on quality.

Third, I think device management will be crucial with the proliferation of devices. If you have 50 billion devices (and that's before M2M comes to the fore) then you have to manage reading, messaging, viewing, interactions connectivity among Kindles, iPads, Blackberrys and so on. Ensuring connectivity is optimal for a device, for an application, for a location, for a preference will mean you will need very robust networks and very intuitive and aware OSS capabilities.

If you've been kicking the same can down the same road with your legacy systems, this is the moment of truth to invest in future proofing your systems to accommodate changes in a really rapid way.

Verizon to Carry iPhone

Other than tweaking the iPhone 4G's controversial antenna, Apple has made few changes to the Verizon version that will end AT&T's exclusivity, according to media reports from Tuesday's announcement. Verizon's iPhone will not support its Long-Term Evolution 4G service, but the carrier did confirm that it would soon offer an iPad over its network. Apple priced Verizon's iPhone at $199, the same as AT&T's. Some questions remain, such as how Verizon will price its monthly packages and whether its network can handle the increased traffic demands that swamped AT&T.

Verizon to Carry iPhone

Qwest E-Line offering delivers dedicated bandwidth

From USTelecomdailylead -

A new point-to-point Ethernet offering from Qwest dubbed iQ E-Line service, announced today, provides customers with end-to-end dedicated bandwidth, said Eric Bozich, vice president of Qwest National Network Services in an interview with Connected Planet.


It enables the kinds of applications we see customers looking for such as disaster recovery, data replication between data centers and mission-critical business applications, said Bozich.

Service rides on DWDM

The new service rides on top of Qwest's nationwide dense wavelength division multiplex (DWDM) network, relying on multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) for bonding and concatenation of circuits.

We're leveraging customer premises equipment (CPE) that provides granularity and gives flexibility in the loop technology, Bozich said. That equipment can support a wide range of incremental data rates, enabling customers to upgrade bandwidth speeds with a programming change, provided that their access link has sufficient bandwidth. The new E-Line service can be ordered at rates ranging from 5 Mb/s to 1 Gb/s.

The CPE underlying Qwest's offering can support a wide range of access options including Sonet, DS-1 and metro Ethernet, said Bozich. The benefit to them is that the presentation is Ethernet, he said.

From the customer premises, traffic is carried back to one of 16 Qwest points of presence nationwide that are nodes on the carrier's DWDM network. At that point, the customer's connection is aggregated with other connections, with bandwidth dedicated to each customer based on what the customer has ordered.

This approach enables Qwest to provide service level agreements and, because no queuing is required, latency is minimized, Bozich said.

E-Line vs. Ethernet private line

Until now, Qwest has offered point-to-point Ethernet only through a Sonet-based offering, which the company calls Ethernet private line. In that offering, the CPE converts the Sonet signal into Ethernet for the customer, Bozich explained.

Because it does not rely on Sonet, the new E-Line service uses bandwidth more efficiently, making it more cost-effective, Bozich said. He added, though, that some customers likely will prefer the Ethernet private line offering because it supports Sonet's inherent self-restoration capabilities.

Customers relying on DWDM connectivity, Bozich said, are designing in their own redundancy, with alternate and primary paths and diverse routing.

Qwest did not need to make any major network upgrades to support the new E-Line offering, Bozich said. But the CPE supporting the offering is new to Qwest, he said. The carrier has not revealed which manufacturer is supplying that equipment.