2019.07.05 – Open Broadband News

Connecting the world as one: 5G goes global!

According to the latest research by Hadden Telecoms, 269 network operators are now investing in 5G in 102 countries.

This figure includes 33 operators that have commercially launched 5G networks and service in 20 countries. This compares favorably with data for end March 2019 at which time it was reported there were 211 operators investing in 5G in 87 countries, with 15 operators having commercially launched 5G services.

Alan Hadden, Director at Hadden Telecoms, said: “The number of commercially launched 5G networks has more than doubled over the last three months.”

The term “investments” covers 5G network deployments including commercial service launches and ongoing deployments, commitments to deploy networks, trials, test lab activities, and studies.

Afri-CAN do it!  South Sudan’s first fiber broadband network

Leading pan-African telecoms group Liquid Telecom has announced that it will implement and operate South Sudan’s first fiber broadband network.

The network will connect Sudan to the One Africa broadband network, and to the rest of the world. Liquid Telecom says its One Africa broadband network is approaching 70,000km across 13 African countries.

A symbolic fiber-digging inauguration attended by a number of ministers and VIPs, was held on Monday 1 July to celebrate the announcement.

With phase one due to be completed before the end of 2019, Liquid Telecom says its network will eventually make reliable and affordable internet connectivity available for nearly 13 million citizens of South Sudan, as well as thousands of businesses, government institutions and non-governmental organizations. South Sudan will link to Liquid Telecom’s network across the region, which covers the East African Community, a regional intergovernmental organization of six partner states – Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda. The Community connects up to 300 million people and stimulates cross-border investment and trade.

A world with faster download speeds is in (open)reach

British wholesale incumbent Openreach has increased its minimum download speed for Gfast products to 120 Mbps from 100 Mbps, putting it in line with baseline industry standards. The decision should simplify adoption of this technology by operators looking to extend the life of their copper infrastructure before they deploy fiber.

“The purpose of the change is to improve customer experience and create more certainty for [communication providers] when selling lines at the edge of the service,” Openreach wrote in a briefing to operators.

Openreach faces growing competition from other wholesalers, including CityFibre and MS3 Networks, which are rolling out full-fiber infrastructure across the UK.

Fiber optics will be a real head-terna in the 5G era

You can’t have advanced 5G wireless without fiber optic lines everywhere, according to Phil Ward, Marketing Director at Opterna Europe, the global connectivity solution provider.

Ward describes fiber as the communication base of the future on account of the ever-increasing amounts of data that will need to be transmitted, following the roll-out of 5G, which is expected in 2020. The roll-out of 5G will impact both the wireless side and the wire-line side of the global network infrastructure.

Ward said: “Given the enormous volume of information that will need to be digested quickly to create intelligence, cloud computing and fiber-optic networks will have to work hand-in-hand to facilitate, you can’t have advanced 5G wireless without fiber optic lines everywhere.”

Millions of homeowners making the smart switch

Smart home technology pushed into 34 million new homes worldwide last year, according to a new Smart Home report from ABI Research, a global tech market advisory firm.

In North America, the most valuable smart home market, close to 40% of homes have invested in smart home technology. However, new home growth is poised to decline slightly this year as the market transitions from entering new homes to extending the scope of existing deployments.

“The explosion in smart home investment in the past few years aimed at building a captive smart home user base means manufacturers and service providers face pivoting to deliver offerings that can be integrated into existing smart homes or to deliver pricing and services that can entice smart home users to ditch their existing investments,” said Jonathan Collins, Research Director at ABI Research.

A Series of Fortunate Events – by Broadband Forum

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. It gives the opportunity to all equipment vendors, members of FSAN or of the Broadband Forum, to improve the interoperability of their products by testing them against other solutions presented for the event.

Broadband World Forum will be another key event for Broadband Forum. It will host its Interop Pavilion at the event which takes place at the Amsterdam RAI on 15-17 October. 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.

As part of the Interop Pavilion, the SDN/NFV Work Area is looking for vendor and operator participation in developing and executing the CloudCO Demo. This follows the success of the OB-BAA demo last year which gained very high industry visibility. This year, Broadband Forum will take a major leap forward by leveraging Application Note 446 (APPN-446) which has been enhanced for multi-vendor capabilities that will be provided by the OB-BAA reference implementation. If you would like to be involved in pulling together this highly visible project, see the description on the Wiki here.

Finally, Broadband Forum has confirmed the dates of two more of its highly popular seminars. Two concurrent workshops on Connected Home and 5G will take place at Broadband World Forum on October 15 and its annual BASe North America event will be held on October 26.