2019.06.07 – Open Broadband News

Don’t get caught off BASe! Register now for Broadband Forum’s Ultra-Fast Broadband Acceleration Seminar    

The bustling agenda of confirmed presentations continues to grow for Broadband Forum’s Ultra-fast Broadband Acceleration Seminar (UFBB BASe), taking place  June 25-27, 2019 in Den Haag, Netherlands.

Nico Weling, Vice President – Research & Innovation at devolo, is confirmed to speak on “Peaceful Coexistence: an approach to PLC/xDSL interference mitigation”  which will explain different approaches to minimize or avoid frequency overlaps between PLC and xDSL/G.fast and point out the advantages of the dynamic solution versus static ones.

Additionally, Koen Berteloot, Domain Manager Access Technology at Proximus, will join recent additions to the agenda, including: Mr.Jongpil Lee, Vice President at KT Labs, who will speak on “One Giant Leap for G.hn – Unearthing Buried Copper Values,” Dr. Bart Kamphorst, Researcher at TNO, who will present on “PON Traffic Analysis – Insights from the Real World,” and Ovum’s Consumer Services Senior Practice Leader Michael Philpott who will present research on “Key Trends in the Smart Home.” GiGA Wire has also joined as a Platinum Global sponsor and will demonstrate its G.hn technology at the event. These luminaries join a world-class line-up of carriers, vendors, and analysts already committed. To see the latest agenda, click here.

UFBB BASe is a conference uniquely constructed by technology innovators for technology leaders and has emerged as THE must-attend event for broadband professionals seeking a conference with the technical depth and real-world insights to bring actionable innovations back to their respective companies.

The early-bird registration deadline for the seminar is fast approaching on June 10 – register today!

UK Gfast comes home to boost

Openreach (BT) is progressing with a future upgrade of its hybrid-fiber Gfast broadband technology, which could enable the service to harness some of the existing radio spectrum frequency being used by VDSL2 based Fiber-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC) lines. Early tests show a possible boost to speed and coverage.

BT has also updated its Access Network Frequency Plan (ANFP) to support it, plus the future 212MHz Gfast profile. Further related guideline changes for Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) transmissions are expected around September 2019.

At present both VDSL2 (uses 17.664MHz of spectrum and delivers speeds of up to 80Mbps) and Gfast (uses 19-106MHz for speeds of up to 330Mbps) keep their spectrum separate so as to avoid interference and because they use two different forms of half/full duplexing (i.e. the transmission of data in two directions, either asymmetrically or symmetrically): VDSL2 uses Frequency Division Duplex (FDD) and Gfast harnesses Time Division Duplex (TDD).

FANS-y that! Ogero among world’s first to trial Nokia solution

Ogero, Lebanon’s fixed network services provider, is one of the first operators globally to commercially trial Nokia’s Fixed Access Network Slicing (FANS).

The solution helps to solve the long-lasting challenge of fixed infrastructure sharing and enables Ogero to create several discrete network slices over its existing Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) network in a fully programmable way. Once deployed, Ogero will be able to provide customers with a virtual slice that looks, feels and operates just like a physical network.

The solution leverages Nokia’s market leading software-defined access portfolio with its cloud-native software platform Altiplano and SDN programmable Lightspan FX OLTs. Ogero provides all the telecom network infrastructure in Lebanon covering more than 12,000 KM of laid fiber optics cables reaching over one million subscribers.  The trial demonstrates how Ogero can use slicing to maximize the usage of its fiber access infrastructure and provide a virtual portion to Mobile Operators, Data Service Providers (DSPs) and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) challenged with building their own networks.

A spoonful of AI helps the data volume go down

“In the past, large volumes of data made us sweat.” So said Pari Bajpay, vice president of Next Generation Enablement at CenturyLink, during a presentation titled “Can AI deliver its promise of a cost-effective, improved experience in telecom?” at the TM Forum’s recent Digital Transformation World event in Nice.

“We didn’t have the networking, compute and storage capacity to cope. A lot of the data would be turned off and you would only work on the critical aspects of the data because what you had on the other end of it was humans that could not process such large volumes,” noted Bajpay.

However, as big data technology has matured, Bajpay and his team at CenturyLink have grappled with the issue and are now leveraging AI to extract more value from their data.

“With AI we are able to get value out of humungous volumes of data and make data-driven decisions with a broad scope of data points. We can correlate across unstructured and structured data to predict future events. The level of efficiency that we get now was not possible before.”

This Is FibreTap! Trio’s FTTX plug and play solution goes up to eleven

At ANGA COM in Cologne, Germany, Emtelle, HellermannTyton & Senko Advanced Components revealed the fruits of a collaborative project and launched a brand-new solution into the Fiber-to-the-X (FTTX) market. Unveiled at the Emtelle booth on the first day of the exhibition, the three leading companies explained the collaboration and the benefits of FibreTap, the ultimate plug and play ruggedized drop solution.

FibreTap is a pre-connectorized plug and play solution designed for overhead and underground use. It is a non-splice solution which improves speed of installation and saves time at the customer drop through its plug and play connection method. At the launch, it was revealed that the project has been under wraps while the companies worked on designing and testing the solution to ensure it offers maximum benefit to operators worldwide.

Matthew Hunter, Managing Director at HellermannTyton, reiterated the importance of the strong partnership, saying: “It made logical sense to partner with Emtelle and Senko to create such a solution, due to our long-standing relationships and 180+ years’ experience between us. To pre-connectorize our well-renowned closures to Emtelle’s quality cable with Senko’s ruggedized connector, makes a complete solution that helps installers worldwide on making fiber installations quicker, easier and more effective.”

Data transmission gets the Italian job

Telecom Italia (TIM), in partnership with Nokia, has achieved a wavelength speed of 550Gb/s for data transmission over a long-distance backbone network.

The trial covered more than 350km on TIM’s operational network between Rome and Florence using the new Nokia Photonic Service Engine 3 (Nokia PSE-3) and the companies say that it demonstrated a new European record for data transmission over a long-distance backbone network. The collaboration also resulted in a transmission rate of 400Gb/s over 900km between Rome and Milan, and 300Gb/s over 1,750km.

Elisabetta Romano, Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at TIM, said: “Today’s result, which triples transmission speed compared to the current one, confirms that TIM’s network is the most advanced infrastructure capable of offering new digital services and platforms, also with a view to developing 5G.”

A Series of Fortunate Events – by Broadband Forum

Registration closes on June 10 for Broadband Forum’s Q2 2019 Meeting in Seoul, South Korea. Taking place from June 17-20, and following the successful Q1 meeting in Warsaw, Poland earlier this year, the event promises to provide a platform to discuss the latest developments in Connected Home, 5G and Open Broadband, and more. To register, please visit here.

Broadband Forum will host the 4th XGS-PON Interoperability Test Event with FSAN (Full Service Access Network), from 8-12 July at the LAN labs in Tauxigny, France. Registration for the event will be open soon.

In addition, at the Amsterdam RAI, 15-17 October, Broadband World Forum, the global communications’ industry’s biggest event is fast approaching and will return after two successful years in Berlin. The event annually welcomes over 4,000 attendees from around the world and is the perfect opportunity to connect with the entire fixed network ecosystem with a large floorspace and three days of curated content.