Spectrum Auction & Equipment Market Competition

With only days until the 3G spectrum auction begins (April 9), further details have emerged about which operators plan to bid for pan-India spectrum.
In the meantime, 2G is where all the current growth is, and Ericsson AB (Nasdaq: ERIC) has landed itself a $1.3 billion deal to help India's mobile market leader bolster its existing network and prepare for 3G. (See Ericsson takes away major Airtel 3G deployment.)
Spectrum bid battle shapes up
India's Department of Telecommunications has pre-approved all of the companies that submitted applications to take part in April's 3G and BWA (broadband wireless access) spectrum auctions. (See Bids Flood In for India's Spectrum Auctions.)
And it's possible to tell from the pre-qualification data (specifically, the size of the upfront deposit) which of the hopefuls are planning to bid for pan-India spectrum -- that is, bid for spectrum across all of India's 22 "circles" (service areas).
In the 3G auction -- for spectrum in the 2.1GHz band -- six of the nine bidders have pan-India aspirations: Aircel Ltd. , Bharti Airtel Ltd. (Mumbai: BHARTIARTL), IDEA Cellular Ltd. , Reliance Communications Ltd. , Tata Teleservices Ltd. , and Vodafone Essar .
Etisalat DB Telecom, which is yet to launch its 2G services, is to bid in a majority, but not all, of the circles, while S Tel Pvt. Ltd. and Videocon Telecommunications are set to bid in a small number of select circles.
In the BWA auction -- for spectrum in the 2.3GHz band -- eight of the 11 pre-qualified firms are looking to pick up countrywide airwaves: Aircel, Bharti Airtel, Idea Cellular, Infotel Broadband Services, Qualcomm Inc. (Nasdaq: QCOM), Reliance Wimax, Tata Communications Ltd. (NYSE: TCL), and Vodafone Essar. (See Qualcomm Unveils LTE Plans for India.)
Internet service providers Augere (Mauritius), Spice Internet, and Tikona Digital Networks are set to bid in select circles.
Bharti puts big bucks into 2G
With its subscriber base at 124.6 million (end of February) and growing at nearly 3 million per month, Bharti Airtel is expanding its network, and preparing its infrastructure for the arrival of 3G (so it's confident of emerging from the auction with some spectrum in the bag!).
As part of those efforts, the carrier has awarded Ericsson a $1.3 billion contract to expand and upgrade its network in 15 circles. The Swedish giant will supply: radio access network (RAN) equipment to support GSM, GPRS, and EDGE connections; circuit and packet core equipment; microwave backhaul gear; and "intelligent network" systems to support pre-paid account provisioning, activation, and service management.
The vendor states that part of its job is to "ensure that Bharti Airtel's core and transport network is 3G-ready in order to reduce time to market and enable the fast rollout of 3G services at a later date." They all hope...
Ericsson may be an incumbent provider at Bharti, but it shows how competitive the traditional suppliers can be, even in the face of increasingly stiff competition from the Chinese duo of Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. and ZTE Corp. (Shenzhen: 000063; Hong Kong: 0763).

MTS INDIA is focusing on DATA Service

A crowded voice services market and plummeting average revenues per user (ARPUs) has led Sistema Shyam TeleServices Ltd. , which sells its services using the MTS India brand, to focus its attentions on data services growth in 2010.
The CDMA operator launched its data services offerings in November 2009, and by the end of January this year about 10,000 of its 3.2 million customers were using mobile data applications.
"Voice ARPUs are dipping very significantly, so it makes sense to focus on data," MTS India's CIO, Rajeev Batra, tells Light Reading Asia. "Our ARPU for data services is between 500 and 600 Rupees [US$11.10 and $13.31]," adds Batra, an Indian telecom industry veteran.
MTS India, which operates in 11 of India's circles (service areas), but which has a license for all 22, offers its data services in about 24 cities, but has plans to extend this to 100 cities by the end of this year. "We are adding significant numbers month-on-month. We have covered the metros [the major Indian cities of New Delhi, Mumbai, and Kolkata]. We see a latent demand in Tier 2 or B-towns also." (See A Guide to India's Telecom Market for more on India's circles.)
However, the carrier, which is considering an IPO later this year, has decided not to apply to take part in India's 3G auction, focusing instead on 2G investments and making best use of its existing spectrum. (See Bids Flood In for India's Spectrum Auctions and India Watch: 3G Wait Over?)
The operator's data services strategy involves targeting enterprise customers and the youth market: Young people are among the prime users of data services in India. (See Report: Mobile Internet Yet to Take Off in India.)
"We are targeting the young professionals, and we [plan to] offer better types of devices in the market" to meet the needs of that demographic, says the CIO. (See India Sees CDMA Handset Growth.)
He says the operator is brokering deals with "big names" to source high-end devices, but declined to identify any potential partners at this time.
"Besides the youth, we see potential in the enterprise segment, not just for large enterprises but in the small and medium enterprises as well," with plans to offer cloud computing and other corporate applications.
In addition, MTS India has run mobile TV service trials and plans to launch a commercial service soon in all the circles where it currently operates. The operator is also planning to announce partnerships to launch its services into the netbook user sector.
Batra believes these moves will help counter the current perception that CDMA can't provide high-end services. "We will break the perception that CDMA is a poor cousin of GSM."
CDMA still suffers from the perception that it is an inferior technology, because of the low tariffs and low-end handsets associated with the initial services launched by India's CDMA operators about nine years ago. More recently, those CDMA players, Reliance Communications Ltd. and Tata Teleservices Ltd. , have launched GSM services to run in parallel with their CDMA offerings and have, in the past, hinted at discrimination by the government in favor of GSM. Considering all those factors, it was a surprise when Sistema opted to build a CDMA network.
But the CIO explains that Sistema chose CDMA as its underlying mobile technology, even while India's CDMA players were moving towards GSM, because of the technology's data service strengths. He says the company had to do all it could to grow in an already large market -- the operator launched its initial voice services in October 2008 when there were already more than 300 million mobile lines active in the country -- and "the best way to do that was through a CDMA network. Data speed on CDMA is far more stable, superior, and uniform. It is a better technology." (See India: Still Booming, Attracting Investment and Shyam Launches CDMA Service.)
Another way MTS India distinguishes itself from many of its rivals is that it is not planning a major push just now into rural areas. Batra says that, while the company will cover the rural areas with its voice service, expanding its data services into rural areas, where ARPUs are even lower than in the cities, will only come when there is a greater penetration of PCs outside the cities.
— Gagandeep Kaur, India Editor, Light Reading

Femtocell Market will the grow in coming years

The Femto Forum, the independent industry and operator association that supports femtocell deployment worldwide, today announced it has completed the world’s first femtocell plugfest. The plugfest process, which extended over many months and culminated in the test event itself, was organized in cooperation with ETSI (the European Telecommunications Standards Institute) and had widespread vendor support with over twenty companies participating, including vendors of network equipment and femtocells as well as software and hardware components.

The companies involved were Ablaze Wireless, Acme Packet, Airvana, Alcatel-Lucent Telecom, Alpha Networks, Askey Computer Corporation, C&S Microwave, Cisco Systems Inc, Contela, Continuous Computing, Genband, Huawei, IntelliNet Technologies, ip.access, Kineto Wireless, NEC, Node-H, Nokia Siemens Networks, picoChip, Technicolor, TRaC Global and Ubiquisys.

 

The primary objective of the plugfest, organized as an ETSI Plugtests™ interoperability testing event, was to demonstrate the effectiveness of the 3GPP femtocell standards in supporting interoperability between femtocell access points and network equipment from different vendors.  This helps ensure that there is consistent interpretation of the standard. 

 

Standardized femtocells provide operators and consumers with a richer ecosystem of femtocell products, as well as facilitating economies of scale.

 

“The history of cellular is littered with companies that had extremely promising proprietary technologies but failed to achieve widespread adoption.  Put simply, the mobile operator community does not embrace non-standardized technologies.  The development of the 3GPP femtocell standard was momentous, but verification of the standard is required to enable mass market deployment.  Through the plugfest we are now a vital step closer to that target,” said Simon Saunders, Chairman of the Femto Forum.

 

“The fact that the plugfest was carried out so quickly after the completion of the 3GPP standard is testament to the industry’s support for standardized femtocell access points and network equipment.  This process will ultimately allow operators to multisource the technology as they do with mobile handsets today,” said Natasha Tamaskar, Chair of the Femto Forum’s IOT Initiative. ”This plugfest represents a crucial step towards the Femto Forum’s vision of a fully open interoperable femtocell ecosystem.”

 

Adrian Scrase, Head of ETSI’s Mobile Competence Centre, remarked, “I’m delighted that the Femto Forum partnered with ETSI for this significant event. The availability of the 3GPP Home NodeB (femtocell) specifications has encouraged the development of products that this interoperability event has been able to test. The results will not only provide confidence to the participating companies, they bring vital feedback to the standardization process. The event is therefore a critical part of the route to mass-market success for standardized femtocell solutions for 3GPP-based mobile networks.”

 

Interoperability tests were conducted between femtocell network gateways, security gateways, femtocell access points and chipsets to verify 3GPP’s Iuh interface as defined in the Release 8 series of specifications.  The plugfest also tested the IPsec/IKEv2 security protocols which allow femtocells to communicate over the public Internet to operators’ core networks in a highly secure manner. 3GPP’s Release 8 femtocell standard was published in April 2009, and defines the secure interface between femtocell access points and femtocell gateways in the core network.

 

TRaC Global, which specializes in testing, regulatory and compliance services, coordinated the plugfest for the Femto Forum.

Location Based Services

A Location-Based Service (LBS) is an information service provided by operators that is accessible by mobile devices. LBS services utilize the geographic position of the mobile device to provide location information to the consumer. Uses of LBS include mapping and navigation applications and social networking services based on location and presence technologies either embedded in the handset or placed in the network.

 

LBS services can be used in a variety of contexts, such as health care, professional and personal life, etc. LBS services include services to identify a location of a person or object, such as finding the nearest ATM machine, business or the location of a friend or employee. The applications that LBS services enable continue to grow. For example, LBS services include parcel tracking and vehicle tracking services. LBS services can include mobile commerce when taking the form of coupons or advertising directed at customers based on their current location. They include personalized weather services, traffic alerts and even location-based games.

 

Juniper Research reported in April 2008 that it expects nearly 1.3 billion users – 30 percent of the mobile subscriber base – will use local mobile search services by 2013. Juniper notes that advertising supported local search will be the key to driving this sector, with the caveat that the effectiveness of advertising in this sector will vary widely according to local conditions. The best equipped regions are considered to be Western Europe and North America, as countries within these regions typically have good local digital information suppliers such as Yellow and White Pages, as well as good mapping data. Total mobile search revenues are expected to reach $4.8 billion by 2013, according to the April 2008 Juniper report.

 

ABI Research similarly expects that mobile search ads will create their own sector of business in the advertising space. ABI noted in an April 2008 report that the market for mobile search ads is expected to jump from $813 million in 2008 to $5 billion in 2013.

 

Mobile location-based social networking is predicted to become a key driver for the uptake of location-based services as it provides a unifying framework for a large set of applications such as friend finders, local search and geo-tagging.  According to ABI Research, the emergence of location-based social mobile networking services offered by providers such as GyPSii, Pelago and Loopt is revolutionizing social networking by allowing users to share real-life experiences through geo-tagged user-generated multimedia content, exchange recommendations about places, identify nearby friends and set up last-minute face to face meetings. Location-based mobile social networking revenues are predicted to generate $3.3 billion by 2013 according to an August 2008 report from ABI Research.

 

While many LBS applications will include features that allow users to share experiences in real-time via fixed social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, fully-equipped mobile location-based social networking sites will also gain momentum with ABI Research predicting in a November 2008 report that more than 82 million subscriptions are expected by 2013. ABI Research director Dominique Bonte commented that, “while growth will be mainly driven by the availability of multimedia-centric GPS handsets, other mobile form factors will also become important.”  One key factor that will be critical for location-enabled social sites to achieve significant market share is licensing agreements with carriers and handsets manufacturers. While initially a wide range of business models will coexist, ultimately advertising-based models are expected prevail due to the perfect fit with the local search- and content-driven social context.

 

In addition to these consumer benefits, LBS services provide benefits to the enterprise user such as resource tracking and fleet management, search functions, and targeted promotions.

 

In the past, LBS services have been closely associated with E911 emergency services and public safety, and this will continue to be refined in the near future. However, the promise of commercial LBS services has been prevalent for several years, and we are starting to see navigational services available in the Americas market. Location information may be to the cell site level, or eventually, within a few meters. This type of location awareness and high accuracy technology can add tremendous value to any application that provides relevant, contextually accurate location-based content.

 

The first LBS services globally were first launched commercially in Japan by NTT DoCoMo based on triangulation for pre-GPS handsets in July 2001, and by KDDI for the first mobile phones equipped with GPS in December 2001. Mobile handset makers have taken an upstream initiative to embed LBS in their mobile equipment. Originally, LBS services were developed by mobile carriers in partnership with mobile content providers.

 

The main advantage is that mobile users don't have to manually specify ZIP codes or other location identifiers to use LBS, when they roam into a different location. GPS tracking is a major ingredient for success, utilizing access to mobile web.

Nokia Siemens Network focused of All-IP Microwave Backhaul

Nokia Siemens Networks is introducing a microwave radio for the largely untapped “E-Band” frequencies* that are ideal for providing high-capacity mobile backhaul in dense urban areas. This new radio expands the spectrum that can be used by the company’s FlexiPacket Microwave platform, meaning that Nokia Siemens Networks becomes the only vendor to have a single mobile backhaul solution providing all-IP microwave connectivity from 6 to 80 GHz for a worldwide market.

 

“There are high expectations for 4G mobile networks – a peak capacity for high-mobility applications of at least 100 Mbps,” said Vesa Tykkyläinen, head of Microwave Radio Transport at Nokia Siemens Networks. “These requirements, far beyond the current capabilities of 3G, will be first addressed by LTE and the evolving WiMAX standards. This increase in over-the-air bandwidth will drive a corresponding increase in the capacity requirements for mobile backhaul networks and will require an end-to-end all-IP microwave solution. Our the new E-Band radio helps to address this challenge.”

 

With the aggregation of multiple LTE base stations in dense urban areas, the backhaul traffic capacity requirements per cell site will likely exceed 500 Mb/s and even reach 1 Gb/s. Nokia Siemens Networks’ new 70/80 GHz E-Band radio, which is integrated into the FlexiPacket Microwave solution, provides up to 2.5 Gbit/s of transport capacity for each GHz of radio frequency channel over a distance of 3 kilometers.

Furthermore, the licensing costs for the E-Band spectrum are typically much lower than the corresponding licenses for 6-38 GHz spectrum, with many regulators, for example in the U.S. or the U.K., looking for the “light licensing” approach.

 

The Nokia Siemens Networks’ FlexiPacket offering addresses the whole chain in mobile networking, including radio, hub-site and network management, with carrier-grade quality of service.

 

 

About Nokia Siemens Networks
Nokia Siemens Networks is a leading global enabler of telecommunications services. With its focus on innovation and sustainability, the company provides a complete portfolio of mobile, fixed and converged network technology, as well as professional services including consultancy and systems integration, deployment, maintenance and managed services. It is one of the largest telecommunications hardware, software and professional services companies in the world. Operating in 150 countries, its headquarters are in Espoo, Finland. www.nokiasiemensnetworks.com