Interview: Executive Director, ICT Institute, Indonesia: “4G, will have a great positive impact on the Indonesian community’s economy and job creation prospects.”

Heru Sutadi, founder and executive director, ICT Institute, Indonesia

Heru Sutadi, founder and executive director, ICT Institute, Indonesia is appearing on Day One of the LTE World Summit taking place on the 24th-26th June 2013, at the Amsterdam RAI, Netherlands. Ahead of the show we find out more about this thoughts on the issues of roaming spectrum harmonisation.

What overall impact has the development of advanced telecom services, and specifically 4G, had in Indonesia?

Telecommunications developments, and in particular 4G, will have a great positive impact on the Indonesian community’s economy and job creation prospects. As a predominantly mobile broadband country, Indonesia requires the latest wireless technology because the public need high-speed access, putting pressure on the operators to provide a higher quality of service for its users.

What areas need to be focussed on to improve the environment for LTE roaming?

To develop LTE roaming, a suitable environment should be built, the focus of this being the harmonisation of frequencies in the region and around the world. This will then enable interoperability between mobile devices and customer premises equipment (CPE). Without proper regard for interoperability, and the use of LTE/4G frequencies that do not match the frequency allocation used in other countries, roaming will of course be a problem.

How important will spectrum harmonisation be for the mobile technology that follows LTE?

Harmonisation of the frequency spectrum will be very important as it will help lower the price of mobile device and CPE and also improve interoperability for users when roaming abroad.

What do you think will be the most exciting development in telecoms in the next two years?

In the next two years, the speed and capacity of telecommunications equipment will increase. This needs to be done to meet the challenges of rapid increase in the demand for data. Large files such as video will dominate but other applications will also be so important, because what is the use of a high-speed network if it is only used for conversations or SMS.

Why is the LTE World Summit such a critical event in your calendar?

The LTE summit is very important because through this event we can see and hear the latest developments in technology and establish communications and networking with all parties in the world involved with the development of LTE.

—

The LTE World Summit, the premier 4G event for the telecoms industry, is taking place on the 24^th-26^th June 2013, at the Amsterdam RAI, Netherlands. Click here to download a brochure for the event.

Interview: CTIO, Etisalat, UAE: “Applications that enhance the customer experience will help us monetise our investments.”

Marwan Zawaydeh is the CTIO of Etisalat, UAE.

Marwan Zawaydeh is the CTIO of Etisalat, UAE. He will be speaking on Day Two of the LTE World summit taking place on the on the 24th-26th June 2013, at the Amsterdam RAI, Netherlands. Ahead of the show we speak to him about the latest developments in LTE in the region and learn more about his views on RCS, roaming and LTE monetisation. 

We spoke to you this time last year. How has your LTE network developed since then?  

These were very exciting 12 months for Etisalat and for our customers, and we are looking forward to build on this success to continue to lead innovation in the region and provide our customers the latest in technology. We were able to significantly enhance LTE coverage, which has now reached 80 per cent of the populated area. Coverage will be further enhanced further this year as the number of deployed sites will double. We were also able to bring a very rich portfolio of LTE terminals which includes dongles, a Mi-Fi, and popular smartphones from Apple, Samsung, and Blackberry. We were able to secure exclusive deals with these top manufacturers and were able to provide our customers with very attractive packages. This resulted in significant growth of our mobile data traffic as our customers adopted LTE enthusiastically. This has resulted in a significant increase in the ARPU from our mobile customers.

Can you give me examples of a couple of your biggest challenges that you faced?

The first challenge we had was to provide proper coverage to our LTE customers. We started with the 2.6GHz band because it was the only band available at the time. This gave us regional leadership in LTE until enough spectrum in the 1.8GHz band became available.  Another big challenge was the fragmentation of the LTE global deployment and the difficulty in bringing a comprehensive LTE eco-system to our customers. We had to expedite the introduction of the 1.8GHz band to be able to provide our customers the best-in-class LTE smart phones and LTE devices.

The LTE World Summit, the premier 4G event for the telecoms industry, is taking place on the 24th-26th June 2013, at the Amsterdam RAI, Netherlands. Click here to download a brochure for the event.

How do you meet the challenge of offering good value to the consumer and at the same time monetising your investments?

This challenge can only be met when investments result in superior customer experience and access to new and innovative products and services. Fortunately, LTE is all about providing our mobile customers much higher throughput, lower latency, and an overall superior customer experience. But this wouldn’t be possible unless we looked at our network end-to-end. Many operators struggle in backhauling LTE traffic and that results in a deteriorated customer experience. Etisalat had a vision several years ago to invest heavily in the fibre network as a converged and future-proof platform. The UAE is currently number one globally in deep fibre deployment because of Etisalat. Our fibre-rich network enabled us to provide GigE connectivity to all our mobile sites to provide an unmatched customer experience. At the same time, continuing to flatten the network architecture helped us enhance the cost effectiveness of our deployment and significantly enhance the overall delivered value to our customers. Applications that enhance the customer experience will help us monetise our investments.

An example of that is eLifeTV, which provides our customers with access to live HD channels and HD video content. We are finding it to be very popular in our market and now we have the platform to enable it we will continue to introduce similar services.

How important is LTE roaming for your customers and what are the challenges in enabling it?

UAE has a unique characteristic of a huge expat population that roam a lot so it is important to facilitate LTE roaming as early as possible, but there are several challenges that still remain.

Current roaming agreements do not provide the required QoS, SLA, and security requirements for enriched LTE services. Etisalat is in the process of deploying an IPX Hub to enhance the roaming capabilities,not only for data traffic, but also for high value voice and rich communication services in the future. Etisalat’s goal is not only to provide roaming to customers in our local market but to become a roaming hub for other operators as well.

What are your plans for RCS-based services and are you excited about them?

We believe enriched services such as RCS are the future and we are actively exploring various options of introducing RCS services as part of our portfolio of innovative products and services. Actually, we already have the required back-end system, which will ensure a fast time to market. We are working with our marketing team to determine the right market-entry strategy for these services in UAE.

Why is the best thing for you about attending the LTE World Summit?

We are always keen on attending the LTE World Summit to share our experience and learn from other leading operators. The telecom industry is very dynamic and mobile technology is evolving fast. Etisalat takes pride in consistently taking a leadership in the MENA region and providing our customers with the most innovative technologies and best in class products and services. Attending the LTE World Summit helps us travel fast through the experience curve via engagement with the top operators and vendors in the industry.

Interview: VP, networks and systems, Communications Research Centre, Canada: “We are going to learn a lot about small cells and SON (self-organizing heterogeneous networks) from LTE.”

Dr. Alex Vukovic, vice-president, networks and systems, for Communications Research Centre (CRC), Canada

The Communications Research Centre (CRC) is Canada’s federal centre of excellence for wireless telecommunications R&D and a leading contributor to solutions for wireless demand in a modern economy. Dr. Alex Vukovic, vice-president, networks & systems, for CRC, is appearing on Day One of the LTE World Summit, the premier 4G event for the telecoms industry, taking place on the 24th-26th June 2013 at the Amsterdam RAI, Netherlands.

With so many bands already being used for LTE, can it truly be considered a worldwide standard?

Although there are many bands in which LTE can operate, LTE is considered a worldwide standard. According to the Global mobile Suppliers Association (GSA), 163 commercial networks are already launched in 67 countries, with 415 operators in 124 countries now investing in LTE. The same source forecasts that there will be 248 commercial LTE networks in 87 countries by the end of 2013.

What are the best frequencies for operators to focus on if they wish to have a roaming capable band?

This is a real challenge facing service operators. The bands are so fragmented and diverse and often tied to legacy systems. Having globally available bands, which will enable worldwide roaming and interoperability using compatible end-user devices, is currently difficult due to the lack of global harmonisation of spectrum. Moreover, it would be very difficult to render any existing bands due to regulatory and policy challenges presented in each specific administration. To ensure true global roaming, administrations need to adopt directives and spectrum-use policies that support globally harmonised bands for LTE.

It is obvious that there would be many benefits from having global spectrum harmonisation, such as enabling of roaming capabilities, economy of scale, cross-border operation and coordination, interoperability and efficient use of available spectrum. To me, from both technological and practical standpoints, there are several bands of interests for potential solutions to global roaming. For example, the 2.6 GHz band is widely available for LTE systems in both FDD and TDD formats. In the future, we may see the 3.5GHz band and bands in the 600MHz range become home to a collection of LTE systems.

The LTE World Summit, the premier 4G event for the telecoms industry, is taking place on the 24^th-26^th June 2013, at the Amsterdam RAI, Netherlands. Click here to download a brochure for the event.

Are there any good economic reasons for operators to make LTE roaming more affordable or will lower charges only come through regulatory moves?

Operators have to respect economic conditions. If they see their source of revenue derived from roaming diminishing due to competition, they will be enticed to reduce roaming rates. The bottom line is that mobile network operators always have to look to maintain revenue streams and profitability. However, competition is probably the most viable economic reason for operators to make roaming more affordable.

Nowadays, we have moved into a world of feature-rich content provided over mobile networks, and much of this content is generated by sources other than mobile network operators (from Google, Apple, YouTube, etc.). This poses additional challenges to operators.

Regulatory decisions could indeed impact the affordability of roaming, although the fiscal health of operators would need to be considered before such decisions are made.

Should operators talk to each other on a one-to-one basis or is there a more open way of discussing roaming needs?

Given the type of roaming/equipment commonality problems being faced, I believe that finding a global solution requires more than just service providers discussing amongst themselves. Service providers can easily come up with roaming agreements if their customers’ smart phones and tablets operate on the same bands. This is a complex issue which requires dialog between network equipment manufacturers, end-user device producers, regulatory bodies and service providers.

Traditionally, operators from region to region or country to country establish roaming agreements between themselves. Normally, a clearinghouse is used to transfer billing records and/or perform financial clearing functions among mobile network operators consistent with their roaming agreements.

What lessons do you think can be learned for the technology beyond LTE?

LTE is just in its infancy and all of the features that it can deliver have yet to be fully exploited. We are going to learn a lot about small cells and SON (self-organizing heterogeneous networks) from LTE and its advances. LTE will also teach us about implementing more sophisticated antenna platform technology for smart pads.

We may also make interesting discoveries related to cross-layer communications and to handoff between macro/micro cell systems, such as LTE-to-WiFi handover. This last technology piece will be exciting as it has the potential of devising new kinds of service provisioning concepts that may do much to change the service-provider landscape. The evolutionary development to watch over the next 5-10 years involves the adaptations and evolutions that occur as Wi-Fi and LTE search to find applications niches beyond what they are today.

However, one of the biggest findings so far is that technology interoperability alone, as delivered by LTE, cannot solve the global roaming challenge – a level of global spectrum harmonisation in emerging spectrum allocations is also necessary.

What do you think will be the most exciting development in telecoms in the next two years?

The near future will be very interesting for the global build-out of LTE. Due to the explosive growth of traffic and non-homogeneous nature of traffic in a service area, development of wireless heterogeneous networks will be considered a viable possibility.  This will evolve to wireless heterogeneous networks that add to the macro cell capacity by using small cells (microcell, femtocell, handover to Wi-Fi, etc.) as an underlay to the macro coverage. However, the successful implementation of heterogeneous networks faces many challenges in using small cells (e.g. complex interoperation, media-independent handover, billing, interference mitigation, etc.).

Another exciting development will be the emergence of higher-capacity short-range offloading technologies following in the line of Wi-Fi offloading. Unlike heterogeneous networks mentioned above, short-range offloading will focus on the home, office and public hotspot environments by providing hundreds of Mbps over ranges of up to 100 metres.

Interview: LTE roaming business development, Orange Group: “All communications has turned to 4G – it’s a hit!”

Laurent Pouillieute, LTE roaming business development, Orange Group

Laurent Pouillieute, LTE roaming business development, Orange Group is speaking on Day One of the LTE World Summit, the premier 4G event for the telecoms industry, taking place on the 24th-26th June 2013, at the Amsterdam RAI, Netherlands. Ahead of the show we speak to him about what the challenges that lie ahead for 4G, particularly around roaming.

What major developments have there been with regards to the LTE industry in your region this past year?

2012 was a busy year with several 4G domestic launches in each EU country [we operate in] and 2013 is proving much bigger. On the devices side, the trend of 4G compatible devices is clearly increasing. All communications has turned to 4G – it’s a hit! On the 4G roaming side 2012 was a year of preparation and in 2013 things are starting to happen for regional roaming.

What are the technical challenges involved in enabling roaming?

While 3G roaming is mature in EU, with all services open, 4G roaming has raised new challenges for the industry. These are:

-          device band support is still an issue for worldwide roaming. Hopefully, at regional level compatibility is fine but it is clearly a limitation for fast worldwide 4G roaming.

-          LTE network interoperability, first days of LTE roaming would be busy with debugging all new 4G routes (time & resources).

-          LTE roaming timing; to try to reduce the time between LTE domestic and roaming launch.

-          VoLTE is a real challenge and the industry (including devices) need to deploy it fast in the next few years. The right interconnect model has to be found in order to ensure end-to-end QoS and we strongly believe that we need an IPX overlay to deliver that.

What do you think will have to be done to get LTE roaming to become the norm?

Having one single common/universal band everywhere would clearly help the roaming business to deploy faster on all regions.

The LTE World Summit, the premier 4G event for the telecoms industry, is taking place on the 24^th-26^th June 2013, at the Amsterdam RAI, Netherlands. Click here to download a brochure for the event.

Will Wi-Fi offset the need for roaming?

I do not believe Wi-Fi will offset the need for 4G roaming. Indeed, 4G offers much better response time, bandwidth, QoS, and transparent customer experience and better coverage and mobility.

Pricing for LTE, particularly for roaming is a controversial subject. Are operators getting it right?

Pricing for LTE reflects both MNO’s investments in deploying 4G quickly and with maximum coverage and improving services and the customer experience. Roaming pricing has been regulated in some regions (such as the EU price caps), and this could help to develop usage.

What do you think will be the most exciting new development in LTE in 2013?

LTE will bring faster speeds and much lower latencies, opening up the possibilities for applications that we have not even imagined yet. What is exciting is the capacity to deliver end-to-end QoS thanks to that investment, and for that we need to find the right operating models, giving everyone its fair share of revenue (network operator, carrier, content provider and end user).

iPhone 5 expands LTE support but European/US roaming headaches remain

As the dust finally settles post iPhone, the tech blogs and comments sections the internet over are overflowing as Apple vs Android owners get embroiled in largely pointless arguments over the various merits of their preferred platform. As far as my own predictions based on rumours go, the only significant things I got wrong were the name (iPhone 5, not the new iPhone-phew) – and the lack of 800MHz LTE support, which I’ll get onto shortly. (It all mounted to a rather anti-climatic reveal, which made me long for the days when Apple announcement leaks were rare).

As far as we’re concerned though the major news of course was that, as was entirely expected, the iPhone 5 now offers LTE support. Crucially, for European and Asian operators and their customers, the iPhone 5 now supports their networks too, thus avoiding the disappointment that many faced when they realised that the iPad 3, which was touted as 4G capable, in fact only operated on US, Canadian and Japanese LTE networks.

This time, Apple has laid out the exact specs of what countries that will get LTE support, but there are still a couple of major LTE limitations that some may not realise.

The Verizon iPhone 5 can roam between the the US and Europe on LTE- but the other two iPhone variants can’t

There are three SKU’s of iPhone 5 with different LTE chips– (the A1428) a GSM model supporting AT&T in the US and Canadian networks, and the A1429 CDMA model for Verizon, Sprint and KDDI in Japan and the A1429 GSM model for the rest of the world.

This means that if you buy an iPhone 5 in Europe, you won’t be able to roam in the US on LTE, at all. However, the CDMA A1429 supports 1800MHz, so if you buy that one in the US, you should then be able to use in on 1800MHz LTE networks in the UK such as EE.

Secondly, there is no support for 800MHZ and 2.6GHz frequencies at all, which many operators, such as O2 and Vodafone in the UK, will be using for LTE once the auctions are complete and they get their networks up and running. Therefore their customers are going to have to wait for the iPhone 6 to get LTE support.

This is a double whammy blow for O2 and Vodafone in the UK, as on top of losing customers defecting to EE to get LTE now, they also have to contend with the fact that some customer’s may not be willing to commit to a two-year contract on the iPhone 5.

The LTE chip inside the iPhone 5 is Qualcomm’s MDM9615M. It’s a very impressive chip, built on a 28nm manufacturing process which makes for low power consumption yet still supports LTE in both FDD and TDD flavours and 3G in DC-HSPA+, EV-DO Rev-B and TD-SCDMA guise – the latter making it well suited for China.

However, the multiple frequencies required for LTE clearly make it impractical to offer a single chip version and maintain performance and power. It looks as though we’ll have to wait at least a year for Europe/Asia and US support in a single device, Apple or otherwise, while the ‘world-phone’ status that the iPhone 4S offered to become a reality in a highly fragmented LTE world.

LTE roaming is one of the many topics on the agenda at the LTE Asia conference, coming up NEXT WEEK at the Marina Bay Sands, Singapore. If you’re interesting in attending, there’s still time to register here.

LTE everywhere, but not a drop to drink

The LTE World Summit 2012 finished earlier this week, and by and large it was a great success – with the great and the good of the mobile industry interested in LTE (which is pretty much everyone), attending in some form or another.

While it was a success an issue did crop up was that while wifi was available in the exhibition hall, it was not freely available in he Plenary. For anyone who enjoys tweeting this is something of an issue. Tweeting is a spontaneous art form, and once you’ve memorised what you want to say, left the room, gone down two floors, gone into the exhibition hall and waiting for your phone, your tweet may well have gone stale.

Fundamentally, the root cause of the issue is one that strikes at the heart of the issues that the conference was addressing – that I could not tweet as I refused to turn on my data connection for fear of the outrageous roaming charges. There has been movement in this area – the EU has recommended caps on reducing charges and O2 has responded by announcing rates much lower than there – but they won’t kick on until July this year. (I’m on Giffgaff, an o2 (Telefonica) MNVO, so we’ll see if this gets passed on).

Wifi offload was also one of the big topics of conversation at the conference and while interference from multiple hotspots was not an issue, congestion from too many requests was – highlighting one of that technology’s drawbacks.

What we’re all dreaming of is to be able to use our phones abroad as we would at home – on fast, effective LTE networks. That’s the vision we’re all driving towards. Of course if we were already there – living the dream, or at least, tweeting the dream, they’d probably be no need for an LTE conference in the first place, which would just not do at all. As such, I’m looking forward to great LTE coverage at affordable prices – at the 5G conference coming your way soon.

Captain Kirk to get LTE, but will he be able to roam?

Courtesy of U.S. Cellular, LTE is coming to Riverside, Iowa, future birth place of James T Kirk. Phew.

This week saw more progress in the US LTE market, with the news that U.S. Cellular would be launching an LTE network in March. It’s good news, especially for the future of intergalactic space travel. By this I mean, of course, that U.S. Cellular says that it will be covering the state of Iowa with LTE, which, as we all know, is where Captain Kirk will be born in the year 2225. (Well, at least in the original series, as opposed to the alternative timeline introduced in the 2009 movie where Kirk in born is space, but raised in Iowa. OK. Um.. too geeky?Um.. what were we talking about? OK, LTE in the US. Right).

U.S. Cellular said that it would offer two devices that would operate on its network; a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet and a Samsung Galaxy Aviator 4G LTE. One issue this throws up is roaming. And not across the reaches of the galaxy either but simply across the US.

Although all US carriers operate LTE at 700MHz, they do so at different band plans and so aren’t necessarily compatible. It took a while for people to realise that you wouldn’t be able to roam between AT&T and Verizon. However, it seems that U.S. Cellular and Verizon both will use 700MHz A and B blocks, so they should theoretically be compatible as far as LTE roaming is concerned. Whether it will actually happen though, we’ll have to wait and see, but if it doesn’t happen, the attraction of LTE on U.S. Cellular could be severely curtailed for anyone that has to move outside of its footprint. It’s an issue that will become increasingly important as users get used to LTE. Once they have it at home, they’ll want it on the move – at least if they’re company is paying for the no doubt eye watering roaming charges. It’ll be worth keeping an eye on how the US solves it internally, as it could well have implications for the rest of the world too.