In a technology-focused environment it is possible to conclude that building the business case for IP transformation is all about the network, the technology and the associated spend. That would be a mistake. To build an effective business case network operators must take into account the complexity of the program and its far reaching impact on their business.
The business case validates and supports the transformation activity. As the network operator invests (both capex and opex), the business case demonstrates the feasibility of the exercise and also that the tangible benefits (the return on investment) warrant the expenditures and opportunity cost. IP Transformation isn’t easy, but a well-executed strategy based on a strong business case will result in years of tangible benefits for your business.
IP Transformation: Steps to Success
The first challenge is to justify the costs. It is crucial to determine how the company is going to realize a return on the money invested.
There are 3 essential activities you should complete first in order to build a strong business case:
Build a Better Business Case
In my experience, only those business cases that took into account the ‘big picture’ really stood the test of time, and were not revisited or even scrapped during the delivery program.
The current services portfolio and future roadmap for sales offerings must be understood and modeled. Without it, the company is embarking upon change without understanding its very purpose: what it sells, to whom it sells, where, when and how. This applies equally in strategic industries, such as energy distribution and transportation, where infrastructure services are provided to support business and engineering applications.
Why is this so hard to achieve, and so often ignored? There are several reasons that need to be addressed.
#1. Get the Right Sponsors
Sponsors are often technology focused, and they primarily see the feature roadmap and decommissioning benefits. They tend to ignore the wider organizational stakeholder needs and benefits. The technological benefits of change rarely justify the investment on their own. It takes a holistic set of benefits to make the numbers work.
Also, the portfolio is often fragmented across the business, and pulling together the roadmap is seen as almost impossible. This is not an insignificant undertaking, but it is a necessary cost if the real benefits are to be understood and realized.
#2. Do a Technology Audit
The next step is to understand the current technology baseline, and the level of change that is required. This includes not only the physical network assets, but also the data models, the logical service layer, and the associated OSS and BSS changes.
In many cases, a multi-pronged approach to audit is required. This will cumulatively drive a deeper understanding of the known starting position and give a baseline for planning the investment in network and IT change.
Coordinating these technology efforts, driven by different organizations, but with dependent outcomes, takes significant effort and forethought. Only when they are delivered as a combined view can you truly understand the technology roadmap costs.
#3. Establish Good Governance
In parallel to the network change you must determine the scope and effort required to smoothly and quickly migrate the network and IT operations environments. This audit is driven by a different stakeholder base, with their business-as-usual demands and their own drivers for influencing the network and IT change.
I have witnessed several instances of C-levels operating in ‘splendid isolation’ at this stage, and later wondering why the dependencies between Operations, IT and network change were not planned in when considering the business case.
You must impose strict governance and coordination to plan the roadmap, appease all the stakeholders, and identify the true requirements and costs of operations uplift.
#4. Get Full Corporate Visibility
Any financing should take into account the wider business. What parallel investments are occurring elsewhere? Can they be leveraged, or are they going to impede the change program, and cost the company time and money, or cause blocking dependencies later?
In one particular case, I witnessed HR releasing resources through a funded early retirement plan, only for the change program to hire back those very same resources as contactors. This went on for 18 months, with both programs claiming success against their own measures.
Such company investment programs running in isolation are not uncommon. Early analysis can identify dependencies, and save enormous financial impacts later.
IP Transformation: It’s a Journey
Make your business case first, before you embark on your IP Transformation journey. It gives you the map, which then provides the route and directions for the program’s journey. Like any seasoned traveler, I have learned that a sound map and a route marked with clear waypoints is a pre-requisite before setting out. The white paper, “Better Business Case Management for IP Transformation” outlines these ideas in more detail.
Watch for our next blog, The business case for IP Transformation: Managing the service roadmap.
By Steve Blackshaw, IP Transformation Product Line Management, Alcatel-Lucent
In his role as Senior Director of IP Transformation at Alcatel-Lucent, Steve Blackshaw leads large-scale network evolution and transformation programs for some of the world’s largest telecommunications service providers.
]]>The cost savings and reduced complexity from enterprises moving to an all-wireless communications network is a seductive one. However, worries still exist among many enterprise IT managers that Wi-Fi is not up to snuff. Indeed, there are still concerns about scalability, quality, and security issues.
A recent TechZine article by Subramania Vasudevan, Director, Advanced Performance in WCTO, Alcatel-Lucent, All-wireless enterprise with LTE and Wi-Fi, notes that enterprise IT managers have a particular lack of confidence in the quality of the wireless link provided by an all Wi-Fi infrastructure.
“There’s the limited ability of the Wi-Fi network to scale with increasing data rate needs,” Vasudevan noted. “In fact, we’ve seen aggregate capacities barely increase — even as Wi-Fi networks densify.”
LTE small cells can help. Small cells help provide in-building LTE on a cost-effective, as-needed basis.
Many mobile operators are considering unlicensed spectrum to bring greater bandwidth into the enterprise, he added. This can help meet the scalability demands. In fact, operators are looking to aggregate LTE in licensed bands along with LTE in the 5GHz unlicensed bands, which are known together as Licensed Assisted Access (LAA) or LTE unlicensed (LTE-U).
The limitations of Wi-Fi often come from the sharing mechanism between the uplink and the downlink. By using an LTE-based system, enterprises can resolve the problem of contentious uplink by means of scheduled access. This frees up the enterprise’s existing Wi-Fi for downlink, according to Vasudevan.
“By offloading the Wi-Fi uplink to cellular, LTE small cells improve enterprise services,” he wrote. “In addition, in-building enterprise traffic, such as Lync application data, can be shunted across the enterprise LAN (i.e., local breakout is enabled).”
At the same time, the combination relies on pre-existing Wi-Fi APs and user equipment, so the sum total is that the LTE downlink capacity can be aggregated with the Wi-Fi APs downlink capacity. This can lead to users everywhere seeing higher throughput in more locations because they benefit from LTE Wi-Fi aggregation and LTE-only for uplink.
The all-wireless enterprise network might be closer than many enterprise IT managers realize. This is a good thing since so many of us use our smartphones as our primary communications device and a significant number of interactions on those devices originate or terminate in-building where coverage and quality of service are a challenge.
If you spend any time in a developing country, you quickly discover that the majority of Internet connectivity comes via cellular connections. For many in developing countries, a smartphone effectively is their first regular connection to the Internet.
Roughly 87 percent of all broadband connections in emerging markets will be by way of cellular by 2017, according to Alcatel-Lucent forecasts. This is especially true in Latin America and the Caribbean, where the GSMA estimates that Latin America will have the second highest installed base of smartphones in the world behind only Asia Pacific by 2020.
The latest 4G Americas report shows that Latin America added 17 million LTE connections over the past twelve months, a 324 percent connection growth rate and the highest in the world.
Small cells technology is helping operators in Latin America and the Caribbean keep up with mobile broadband demand. Small cells are inexpensive to deploy, and they enable operators to add coverage and density as subscriber demand warrants.
“As mobile data usage escalates, adding small cells has become the popular solution,” noted a recent Alcatel-Lucent blog post on the topic, Latin America’s path to broadband increasingly made possible by small cells. The post noted that small cells are increasingly being used as the primary means for servicing cellular connections in Latin America and the Caribbean, with macro cells adding density in areas of particularly high use.
Alcatel-Lucent should know. The company leads the market in Latin America for small cell use according to Frost & Sullivan. In fact, Alcatel-Lucent has more than 50 percent of the market, and has secured 18 contracts in 13 countries since 2013.
“Small cells are the key to bringing mobile broadband to their citizens,” noted the Alcatel-Lucent blog post. “And as operators move from 3G to 4G/LTE networks, small cells play an even more important role in providing increased bandwidth and capacity needed to support advanced communications applications.”
Leading the way in Latin America and the Caribbean are Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and Colombia, with the highest small cells usage. But small cells make so much sense that countries in all parts of Latin America are jumping on the bandwagon.
]]>I’ve always thought of trains as one of the safer modes of transportation. But recent high-profile train accidents remind us that even vehicles on tracks can run into problems that can result in crashes, with potential results including death, injury, and property loss.
You may remember the tragic Amtrak accident on May 12 in Philadelphia. It killed eight people and injured more than 200 others. The train derailed while taking a curve for which the maximum recommended speed was 50 miles per hour, but preliminary analysis from the National Transportation Safety Board indicates the train was moving at 102 miles per hour. This wreck put new focus on the need for positive train control, better known as PTC, systems.
The NTSB has been talking about the need to improve railway safety with PTC since 1969. However, when two Penn Central commuter trains collided head on, killing four and injuring 43 things heated up due to the increased national attention. In fact, it should be noted that the NTSB in 2014 put out a “most wanted list” on which implementing PTC systems ranked first. The list also noted at least six other railroad accidents from 2008 to 2012.
“PTC systems work by monitoring the location and movement of trains, then slowing or stopping a train that is not being operated in accordance with signal systems and/or operating rules,” the NTSB explains. “This safety redundancy prevents train-to-train collisions and overspeed derailments, as well as the associated injuries and fatalities to passengers, railway workers, and others.”
Yet for all the talk about the need for PTC systems, and the fact the government has set requirements regarding the installation of PTC systems, most U.S. railroads will fail to install positive train control by the Dec. 31 federally mandated deadline, notes Thierry Sens, marketing director of the transportation segment at Alcatel-Lucent in a recent TrackTalk article, Give PTC* the best chance of success with IP/MPLS.
That said, PTC systems do exist. Toward the middle of this year an estimated 14,300 of the 22,000 locomotives in the U.S. were partially equipped with PTC, Sens says. Plus, 19,000 of the 32,600 wayside interface units and 1,800 of the 4,000 base station radios required for PTC had been installed since the government in 2008 ordered PTC be installed on lines carrying hazardous materials or passengers.
As the NTSB paper notes, PTC systems are in use on the Northeast Corridor and on the Michigan Line between Chicago and Detroit. And as Sens discusses, Norfolk Southern is also among the organizations moving PTC forward by upgrading its communications network to IP/MPLS.
The IP/MPLS network allows the railroad, which is one of the nation’s largest (with a 34,600km network), to separate and prioritize traffic, and provides the resiliency required for the important PTC function via its fast reroute, link aggregation group, non-stop routing, and non-stop services capabilities. Alcatel-Lucent’s ADSL+ solutions, integrated access devices, microwave technology, and Service Access Routers power the Norfolk Southern IP/MPLS network, which was first deployed in 2010 and now operates in 22 states.
“PTC is the right thing for the U.S. railroad industry, particularly following recent high-profile accidents,” says Sens. “It will prevent train-to-train collisions, derailments caused by excessive speed, unauthorized incursions on track where maintenance is taking place and the movement of a train through a switch left in the wrong position. Its interoperability features are also a critical element of an efficient and successful rail network.”
Attorney Barlow Keener agrees. As he mentions in a recent INTERNET TELEPHONY magazine column, railroad safety and railroad viability are both for railroad companies and their riders, as well as for the American economy itself. According to the Federal Railroad Administration, he notes, 140,000 miles of U.S. railroads deliver 40 percent of all national freight.
]]>Ninety percent of those 4.2 billion people without access live in the developing world, and in the least developed countries less than one person in 10 is online. Meanwhile, in the developed world, 82 percent of the population is online.
These statistics are laid out in a new blog by Marcus Weldon, president of Bell Labs and the CTO of Alcatel-Lucent, who in his piece calls on people and companies to do their part to help the Broadband Commission achieve its goals to flatten the digital playing field across the globe and among different groups of people. In his blog, Weldon talks about the problem that the “digital deserts” that exist today play in setting up a long-term environment in which one set of people can collaborate, communicate, and conduct commerce, and another group of people – to whom he refers as “an analog underclass,” operate primarily in physical space, and if they do want to connect digitally have to wander from connected oasis to connected oasis.
“If we want to avoid this dystopia, we all need to do more to help the [Broadband] Commission and its incredibly laudable goals. And this must start at home – in the organizations for which we work and in which we are involved,” writes Weldon, who has already has offered Bell Labs resources to help the Broadband Commission create and build on projects to bring connectivity to those who lack it.
The Broadband Commission has been around since 2010, but was just re-chartered with the aim of helping achieve the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals.
“The UN Sustainable Development Goals will stimulate action over the next 15 years in areas of critical importance for humanity and the planet,” explains ITU Secretary-General Houlin Zhao. “All three pillars of sustainable development – economic development, social inclusion, and environmental protection – need ICTs as key catalysts. That is why the Commission believes that ICTs, and particularly broadband, will be absolutely crucial for achieving the SDGs.”
The ITI Secretary-General made those comments last month during The Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development, an ITU and UNESCO gathering at which high-profile people representing academia, government, and industry came together to discuss and debate how to accelerate the adoption and availability of broadband around the world. The event had a special focus on developing and less developed nations and groups such as the disabled, non-English speakers, rural dwellers, and women.
Communications business magnate Carlos Slim Sr. and the president of Rwanda chair the commission. Other members include former FCC chairman Kevin Martin, who is now with Facebook; Bharti Enterprises CEO and founder Sunil Bharti Mittal; MIT Media Labs founder Nicolas Negroponte; Jeffrey Sachs, who is the special advisor to the U.N. Secretary General and an expert on poverty; and several operator and vendor CEOs, and telecom ministers from around the world.
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Sometimes fiber to the subscriber is the best fit to support broadband services for residential and small and medium businesses. However, existing copper continues to have an amazing ability to be enhanced to meet broadband requirements. Indeed, copper-based technologies such as VDSL2 vectoring, Vplus, and G.fast can support bandwidth rates of 100, 300mbps or even 1gbps.
To decide which areas are ideal candidates for fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) or business, and which can be more than adequately served with copper-based technologies, Bell Labs Consulting suggests that service providers consider:
“To do this, service providers need to conduct a thorough access study, including a detailed market analysis of the service area,” Mohamed El-Sayed, consulting manager of the network strategy and technology evolution practice of Bell Labs, writes in an aptly titled recent TechZine article, Study shows ultra-broadband potential of copper. “With this information, the service provider can determine present and near-future bandwidth demand.”
The average bandwidth required for a fixed network in a residential area can vary significantly based on all of the above. Here are a few of the many related data points mentioned in the blog. A study by Alcatel-Lucent suggests that the current upper bound broadband access rate is about 50mbps and will be 100mbps by 2020. A Bell Labs study for a major operator in Western Europe indicates 40mbps is sufficient for triple play resident services there. And a study by U.K. government regulator Ofcom reports that average fixed residential broadband subscribers get 22.9mbps, and that broadband with a minimum download speed of 30mbps is available to three-fourths of subscribers by only has seen 21 percent penetration.
“For residential and SMB subscribers, high-speed copper technologies can deliver bandwidth in excess of current and anticipated demand,” says El-Sayed.
The bottom line is that extending the life of copper provides two major benefits. First, it is less costly than putting in fiber particularly in residential or rural areas. Second, it enables service providers to offer ultra-broadband services quickly. In a hotly competitive world with a seemingly insatiable appetite for high-speed services now, this point is as if not as important as the first.
]]>It’s monsoon season here in Arizona, so we desert dwellers know as much as anybody about the power of a storm. We also understand the problems that storms can create, such as taking out the power.
However, natural occurrences like storms and other unexpected events like power line cuts by backhoes aren’t the only external challenges with which power utilities have to contend. In a recent blog Dave Christophe, Director of Utilities Marketing at Alcatel-Lucent, explained that there’s now an additional consideration that could negatively impact power company abilities to bring people and businesses power consistently, cost effectively, and safely. That is the systematic decommissioning of legacy telephone and data networks.
Sun setting analog, frame relay, and TDM networks, Christophe explains, eliminates the communications infrastructure on which power utilities have long relied to transmit data from substations and do teleprotection, as just a couple examples.
Christophe in his piece references a recent article by his colleague Mark Madden, Vice President of North American Utilities at Alcatel-Lucent, in which the latter notes the risks of such sun setting and offers tips on steps utilities should take to avoid any interruption in the networks on which they rely – and thus in their power infrastructure and services overall. Madden also provides an example of what the transition away from legacy communications networks could lead to if not managed properly.
The example involves a regional utility that depends upon circuit-switched and frame relay technologies to support dynamic line rating sensors that track the characteristics of high-voltage transmission lines, including heat load and sagging.
“Imagine that the carrier that provided their circuit-switched and frame relay network –which, although outdated, were reliable – suddenly served notice that they planned to shut down the service within 120 days,” writes Madden. “This might sound extreme, but it is a realistic scenario. Required notice periods in many parts of the country are very short.”
To avoid getting into such a pinch, Christophe and Madden urge utilities to develop plans to transition from legacy to newer communications services and technologies.
]]>Go to Australia and you’ll quickly realize that not only is the country run reasonably well, but the continent also has a good digital infrastructure.
This is no surprise, because Australia has made a significant investment in national broadband infrastructure as part of an agenda to capture economic and social benefits in the emerging digital economy. Government broadband, particularly for the Australian National Broadband Network (NBN), ensures ubiquitous national availability of an open access, high-speed services delivery platform.
Recently the Centre for Energy-Efficient Telecommunications (CEET) undertook a study, Benefit of the National Broadband Network, to see exactly how beneficial government broadband is to the country of Australia.
The study established that the NBN will likely deliver a substantial economic benefit, but it highlighted the importance of new service utilization to meet that potential.
The study found that NBN should boost real GDP by about 1.8 percent and real household consumption by about 2 percent. After NBN debt-servicing requirements are taken into account, growth in real household consumption is about 1.4 percent thanks to the government broadband infrastructure of NBN.
The study found that the government broadband initiative also benefited six categories of online services above and beyond the economic growth mentioned above. These categories were:
“A clear finding of the study is that there would be negligible economic benefit in building an NBN if the only utilized service category is entertainment,” noted a recent Alcatel-Lucent blog post that looked at the study. “However, economic benefits will flow if other services, such as telehealth and teleworking, are more widely spread and utilized as a result of NBN.”
The findings clearly show that investment in government broadband initiatives do, in fact, benefit the economy as a whole and lead to the foundation that benefits business in the digital age. While the benefits of government broadband initiatives have been widely talked about, it is reassuring to see examples of these benefits in practice. Australia is one such place to look for an example of the benefits of government broadband.
]]>The mining industry is booming thanks not only to natural resource demands in China, but also because every electronic device, including smartphones a lot of the precious materials that miners pull from the earth. For example, an iPhone contains gold, silver, platinum, copper and many rare earth elements like Yttrium, Lanthanum, Neodymium, Gadolinium and Europium.
Keeping these bustling mines efficient requires a highly reliable, accessible, secure and high-performance communications network. The reason is the mines tend to be operational 24/7/365. It is a major factor in why many mines are in the process of or evaluating upgrading their communications networks, since the existing Wi-Fi, 2G, 3G, proprietary VHF and PMR options are not keeping pace with mining information interchange demands of all types.
One solution is private, ultra-broadband, as described in a recent TrackTalk posting, LTE for mining: delivering ultra broadband in the middle of nowhere, by Thierry Sens, Marketing Director Transportation Segment, Alcatel-Lucent (ALU). Indeed, the reason for the title is somewhat obvious in that mines tend to be in not just remote but very remote locations.
For example, the Rio Tinto West Angelas mine in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, the solution for better connectivity has been a private single and converged ultra-broadband 4G LTE network for its pit fields, railways and ports.
The network, installed in 2013 by Alcatel-Lucent, helps with mission-critical communications for things like in-pit autonomous haulage systems (AHS), autonomous drilling systems (ADS), driverless freight train control, anti-collision systems, in-pit proximity detection, in-pit CCTV, high-precision GPS and an array of telemetry systems and sensors are now integral components of successful mine sites around the world, according to Sens.
Alcatel-Lucent has provided an illustration of a private broadband for mining. While a bit of an eye chart, what stands out is the extent of the IP/MPLS infrastructure along with the wireless links from the mines to the backbone network.Source: Alcatel-Lucent
For Rio Tinto, the performance of its LTE network has led some observers to comment that they have a better mobile signal in the middle of the mine, hundreds of miles from the nearest city, than in their office.
“An LTE network is also contributing to reduced operating costs by using an IP protocol to support all applications on a single converged radio network, and improvements in operational efficiency,” notes Sens.
Private LTE networks and mining are a good fit, as Rio Tinto has demonstrated.
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If you traveled by air this summer, consider yourself lucky if you made it to your destination on time. It was a tough summer for both the airlines and for passengers, as IT issues in both July and August led to widespread delays and flight cancellations in the U.S. and beyond.
Most recently, a software update to a plane routing system at an FAA control center in Leesburg, Va., led to what some are now calling Flypocalypse.
The En Route Automation Modernization system routes planes through 160,000 square miles of airspace over Washington, according to The Washington Post, but on Aug. 15 it was unable to handle that important task. “For several hours, the system that processes flight plans at the center stopped functioning for reasons that are still unclear,” according to the Post.
The result: The delay or cancellation of hundreds of flights nationwide and a sea of frustrated passengers.
The August event followed by just more than a month another airline system glitch that had even more widespread repercussions.
In early July, the busiest month of the year for air travel, a router malfunction in United Airlines’ reservation system led to big delays at the company’s Chicago, Denver, and Houston hubs – negatively impacting a reported 400,000 passengers.
As happened during the August event, many stranded passengers in July lit up social media with their complaints.
The problem with the system – which in addition to selling tickets is used to create gate assignments, manage aircraft movement, schedule pilots and flight attendants, and track maintenance schedules – led United Airlines to ground all its planes from 8 to 9:49 a.m. on July 8, according to The Washington Post, which noted the airline also grounded several flights the previous month.
Given the complexity of predicting weather, of airplanes themselves, and of all the people and systems involved in scheduling planes for takeoff and orchestrating them en route and at landing, it’s kind of amazing that things work as well as they do most of the time. But it’s tough to have that perspective when you’re a passenger who’s been waiting for hours at the airport, or a stakeholder in an airline, for which time is money.
The good news is that there are proven technologies in which airlines, some of which are reporting record profits, can invest to make their systems – and in turn, their businesses – more reliable.
One of those solutions for helping make aviation travel less chaotic is IP/MPLS services.
IP/MPLS is a communications network architecture that can prevent problems like minor router failures from grounding flights, noted Thierry Sens, marketing director of transportation and oil & gas segments for Alcatel-Lucent. In a July blog, Don’t let unreliable IP routers ruin your airline’s reputation, Sens notes that IP/MPLS offers high network availability and resiliency via its fast reroute, link aggregation group, non-stop routing, and non-stop services capabilities.
The technology also features embedded security via network access control, network group, encryption, and traffic anomaly detection. That’s important in this day and age of frequent and high-profile network and system breaches, as we need to closely guard the key infrastructure that is our transportation system, and protect the passengers and airline employees.
]]>Fiber-to-the-home networks service more than 130 households today, and PON is the dominant FTTH architecture. This trend is expected to continue, with 90 percent of the forecast 300 million FTTH subscribers by 2019 to be served by PON, according to Ovum.
As PON subscriber numbers grow, so will the types of users it can address. And that will include enterprise customers. That said, TWDM is the best and obvious way forward for service providers in the GPON realm, according to Ana Pesovic, senior marketing for wireline networks at Alcatel-Lucent who in a recent TechZine posting, TWDM technology moves ahead: XG-PON1, explains why TWDM is superior to XG-PON1 on a number of fronts. These include from a bandwidth perspective, in terms of revenue potential, and in its ability to lower carrier risk.
Ovum backs up those statements in its recent article TWDM-PON is on the horizon: Facilitating fast FTTx network monetization, in which the firm suggests that communications services providers would do well to leapfrog XG-PON1 and move on to TWDM-PON.
Ovum explains the case for TWDM citing its ability to:
“Now is the time CSPs should begin evaluating TWDM PON, analyzing deployment scenarios in terms of operational and monetary benefits,” Ovum suggests.
Pesvoic of Alcatel-Lucent, which launched its Universal TWDM-PON technology solution last year, agrees, commenting: “TWDM-PON lets operators offer high revenue generating commercial services, consolidate all services (residential, business and mobile backhaul) over one network, or perhaps co-invest to share deployment cost and risk. As a result, TWDM-PON monetizes the network faster.”
]]>For more than a century, the massive Paris Metro has been enabling commuters and tourists to easily travel across the French capital. Régie Autonome des Transports Parisiens (RATP), which operates the metro network, employs roughly 54,000 employees and has yearly revenue of more than €5 billion ($5.43 billion). As part of the Grand Paris initiative, which has support from several levels of government, RATP is planning:
However, getting there means having a next generation communications network. With that in mind, the Paris Metro is converging its five communications networks into a single IP/MPLS network. Instead of separate networks for TETRA, CCTV, telephony, passenger info and IT, RATP is boldly moving ahead with a converged network aided by the expertise of Alcatel-Lucent.
“By converging our five separate legacy networks into one single IP/MPLS network,” noted Patrick Goasdoué, director of telecommunications for RATP in a recent Alcatel-Lucent interactive case study, Signaling Change for the Paris Metro, “We will not only reduce our maintenance costs, but also improve our operations.”
Companies often struggle with moving forward thanks to a network of fragmented systems that don’t effectively integrate with each other. With its expansion plans, RATP saw the opportunity to fix its own fragmentation issue as it expanded its metro network. This was a perfect time to migrate to IP/MPLS, which moves all communications over a common IP backbone.
The advantage of converging networks into one system extends far beyond improved efficiency, security and control, as Alcatel-Lucent noted in the case study. IP/MPLS not only handles communications traffic today, but it also makes future expansion easier; it can handle new applications and services, manage even more lines, trains and CCTV coverage, and be ready for whatever new innovations emerge in the next few years.
At the same time as it simplifies the communications network and makes it future-proof, the move to IP/MPLS will enable the Paris Metro to significantly reduce congestion and pollution, combat urban sprawl and agricultural encroachment, promote the economic development of the surrounding region and contribute to France's reputation as worldwide leaders in economic progress.
Not a bad trick for an old dog.
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In North America, the Positive Train Control (PTC) system was mandated by the United States federal government in 2008 for railway lines carrying passengers and hazardous materials. Yet, the government deadline to have 96,500 km of track with the feature by 2015 will not be met.
Similarly, the European Train Control System (ETCS) in Europe, part of the Europe Rail Traffic Management System (ERTMS), is currently only deployed on 5000 km of track. The EU is aiming for a rollout on Europe’s 68,000km core network by 2030, and there is a long way still to go.
“With the US government set to introduce a five-year extension of the PTC bill by the end of 2015, and the EU turning the screw on ETCS deployment, this is not going away,” noted a recent blog post, Unlocking the benefits of train control with IP/MPLS, by Thierry Sens, Marketing Director Transportation Segment, Alcatel-Lucent. Sens, explained that, “Railways should therefore embrace the respective mandates as an opportunity to improve their network architecture and technology, specifically by introducing IP/MPLS.”
Signaling and train control systems require strict reliability, resiliency, performance and security, as they are mission-critical communications. IP/MPLS architecture is perfectly suited for the task.
By combining IP/MPLS routers, IP/MPLS switches, optical switches, packet microwave and LTE radio networks, railway operators also can build a converged IP/MPLS network to host both mission-critical signaling systems and additional features desired by operators such as CCTV networks and passenger Wi-Fi. While the cost of rolling out the required infrastructure to support these train control mandates is large, railway operators can at least use the opportunity to overhaul their communication systems with modern technology.
Refer in Portugal and Trafikverket (previously Banverket) in Sweden, for instance, are deploying IP/MPLS to support their signaling applications while introducing features such as synchronous Ethernet, cyber-attack protection, non-stop routing, non-stop services and fast reroute.
“These railways are well placed to reap the rewards of improved interoperability, capacity, reliability and safety by hosting enhanced train control on IP/MPLS,” observed Sens. And, Alcatel-Lucent is working with these railway operators on the design and rollout of the systems based on IP/MPLS.
Meeting the regulatory demand for automatic safety features on railways is not quick or easy. But the benefits can be great for railways that do, and next generation communications is the foundation for enabling them to meet future requirements as well as improve operational excellence and the customer experience.
]]>There tends to be a prejudice in the press for covering the latest and greatest technology and how it is being used in the developed world. The reality is that especially when it comes to wireless, the impact of having ubiquitous and affordable access to communications, not just for voice but for data (aka the Internet), is busy transforming the developed world in ways that may be even more profound.
In fact, in the developing world, connectivity is the lifeblood of economic progress improving not just commerce itself but also the delivery of healthcare and as a tool for rapidly improving the education of young and old alike. Data is where it is at, and 4G has become as important in the developing world as in the developed.
A great example of this is in the work Alcatel-Lucent has done with aggressive mobile services provider Smile in Tanzania and the Ivory Coast. One interesting factoid is that in Tanzania, for every 1 landline subscriber there are 166 mobile phone subscribers. In short, the age old problem of increasing tele-density in the developing world as the engine for progress is being conquered and with impressive speed that has opened the eyes of many to the vast potential of all of Africa and other parts of the developing world.
The short video embedded below tells the story.
“What we are doing is much more than just installing a mast or selling a cable. It has an impact on the people in this country. It gets a different kind of meaning, “notes Daniel Jaeger, Vice-President for Africa, Alcatel-Lucent.
Indeed, wireless access has demonstrable impact. A study of the World Bank claims that a 10 percent growth in the number of Internet users in sub-Saharan Africa will generate a GDP increase of more than 1.3 percent. This leads to an observation of what happens when the percentage of users grows a lot more than 10 percent which is what the aforementioned landline to mobile comparison highlights.
And, it is not just Africa where this phenomenon is occurring. In the not too distant future there are forecasts that upwards of 70 percent of the world’s population of 7 billion people will have wireless personal communications capabilities. In some countries the number of devices already exceeds the number of citizens.
What the Smile deployment also illustrates is that the point that giving the most modern infrastructure nationwide is good business. Enabling people to use their phones for broadband data interactions as Smile’s competitive inroads indicate opens up significant revenue opportunities including the fact that as people become more device-centric they increase their usage as economic development enables them to have more money to spend. Where they are spending it is on wireless services. The reasons are obvious, e.g., in a connected world the value of ubiquitous access is as important, and in many ways more important, than other utility services like electricity.
As outgoing Alcatel-Lucent CEO Michel Combes explains in discussing what’s next for Africa now that 4G LTE and Ultra-Broadband networks have enabled a positive political, economic and social change: “For me Africa is at the heart of tomorrow…Becoming digital is an important catalyst for change. The focus of development will continue to bring connectivity to users by working with local, regional and international partners to literally help ‘connect’ the African people."
]]>Facilities-based service providers that own the access network are ideally positioned to distribute video both today and in the future, according to Chris Croupe, who works in strategic marketing at Alcatel-Lucent. Video comes in a variety of forms, its applications continue to expand, and this kind of content continues to multiply, Croupe notes in his recent TechZine posting, Future of video content: Evolution toward 2020.
Calls leveraging video have become widespread, he adds, noting that 59 percent of smartphone users under 35 years of age make at least one video call a month, and 37 percent of this group does so at least once a week.
Online video is also multiplying in terms of both available content and its applications. While online video caught on primarily a source of entertainment. (Do you remember watching one of the popular cat playing piano YouTube videos?) Today, it’s also commonly used in business. Indeed, most major companies, and many other organizations of various sizes, are leveraging online video to promote their brands and educate customers on their offerings. Alcatel-Lucent is one example of this, Croupe says, note the company’s New Guy at the Office series.
Meanwhile, the quality of video continues to improve, with 4k Ultra-HD technology adoption expanding by camera and TV manufacturers, and creators of content, says Croupe.
All of the above have contributed to a large upswing in global bandwidth consumption, which Bell Labs expects to be in the neighborhood of 1 Zb a year this year and to reach 4.3 Zb a year by 2020.
New connected TVs and other devices that make it possible for viewers to access video streams delivered over their television also make it possible for service providers like the telcos to make their mark in the over-the-top video space with content and video delivery networks. However, OTT video is just part of the opportunity going forward, and perhaps not as singularly important as it may seem, Croupe argues.
As the posting points out, while the way in which we consume video continues to evolve and expand beyond the TV, the television set remains the primary device of choice for watching video across different genres (comedy, drama, documentaries, movies, news, sports) of content. Indeed short form content is the only type of content for which the TV is not the preferred device for watching video, according to Alcatel-Lucent.
While we hear a lot about the wild growth and growing business for OTT streaming services, revenues in this space are markedly lower than those from linear video service providers on a global basis, according to Alcatel-Lucent. OTT services revenues do have high growth rates, but that’s not difficult considering that they started from zero.
Alcatel-Lucent also points out that video streaming providers depend upon high-bandwidth connections. Without them, users will abandon such services.
“Going forward, some content will be delivered as part of a linear package and other content will be streamed in an on demand fashion,” says Croupe.
“Operators can use local and consumer contextual data to provide discovery and delivery options for their customers and provide individually curated ads based upon the manner in which the content is being consumed and other consumer data where permitted,” he adds. “Overall, we believe the service provider’s position in video content delivery will remain extremely strong.”
Given all of the concerns about OTT encroachment on value-added services, particularly video ones, the Alcatel-Lucent message should be welcome news to communications service providers assuming they embrace the opportunities ahead and understand not just the competition but cooperation that will enable them to remain as critical parts of the evolving video-centric world.
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