2021.10.15 – Open Broadband News

Squid Games Breaks the internet!

South Korean Internet service provider SK Broadband has sued Netflix to pay for costs from increased network traffic and maintenance work because of a surge of viewers to the U.S. firm’s content, an SK spokesperson said on Friday.

The move comes after a Seoul court said Netflix should “reasonably” give something in return to the internet service provider for network usage, and multiple South Korean lawmakers have spoken out against content providers who do not pay for network usage despite generating explosive traffic.

Netflix’s data traffic handled by SK jumped 24 times from May 2018 to 1.2 trillion bits of data processed per second as of September, SK said, riding on the success of several Netflix productions from Korea including “Squid Game” and “D.P.”

Netflix said it will review SK Broadband’s claim, and seek dialogue and explore ways in the meantime to work with SK Broadband to ensure customers are not affected.

Rural areas in France are better connected

Rural areas in France have better access to fiber optic internet than many cities, and more than 60% of homes nationwide have access to coverage, a figure far above the European average, new figures suggest.

Fiber optic internet has been deployed across France much faster than ADSL broadband, with more than 60% of French people now having access to fiber, Le Figaro reported on October 7. This is much higher than the European average, at 38%, and far higher than say, in Germany, where fiber optic coverage is at just 8%.

Small towns and “low-density” rural areas are also increasingly being equipped with fiber optics, at a faster rate than urban centres. Despite the fast rollout in some areas, many more densely populated zones are being “forgotten”, experts have said. Ariel Turpin, head of Avicca, said: “The deployment of fiber in the highly-populated zones has been stalling for years and is in free fall in ‘medium-dense’ areas.”

Fixed broadband revenue a ‘Thrilla in Manila

Driven by the strong growth in the fixed broadband segment, the total fixed communications service revenue in the Philippines is expected to increase at a compounded annual growth rate of 5.0% from US$3.6bn in 2021 to US$4.7bn in 2026.

Fixed broadband services revenue, on the other hand, will increase at a CAGR of 6.3% during 2021-2026, driven by the healthy growth in broadband subscriptions and rising broadband average revenue per user (ARPU) levels.

Hrushikesh Mahananda, the Telecom Analyst at GlobalData, said: “DSL lines will remain the dominant fixed broadband technology with 36.7% share of the total fixed broadband subscriptions in 2021, but will gradually lose its market share over the forecast period. Fiber broadband lines, on the other hand, will increase at a robust CAGR of 17.2% over the forecast period, supported by the government and operator investments on fiber network infrastructure and FTTH service expansions.”

Open broadband bringing 5G benefits to fixed line

Broadband Forum has revealed its latest project, Open Broadband – WWC Reference Implementation for 5G-RG (OB-5WWC).

This project is designed to help vendors and operators bring products to market more quickly, with reduced development times and cycles. The organisation says that the project will bring the benefits of the 5G ecosystem to fixed-line services and offer a full end-to-end solution to operators.

OB-5WWC aims to create a reference implementation of the Broadband Forum specified Wireless Wireline Convergence solution for 5G capable residential gateways (5G-RGs), and builds on the Broadband Forum and 3GPP specifications already available. The founding members from BT, Deutsche Telekom, Telecom Italia, Telstra, Verizon and Vodafone UK held a formal kick off meeting in September.

David Woolley, project leader for OB-5WWC at Broadband Forum said: ‘The formation of the OB-5WWC project will help to fulfil the need for 5G and fixed-line convergence that is now viewed as a fundamental need, and will ensure the full benefits of the 5G ecosystem can be realised. We have already received strong support from the service provider community and are calling for all interested parties across the industry, including customer premises equipment (CPE) manufacturers, end-to-end integrators, and hardware and software vendors, to join the project and share ideas.’

A common core for fiber and 5G just around the corner

Convergence between wireline and wireless networks is one of those ideas that feels like it’s perpetually on the horizon. But experts told Fierce a perfect storm of industry trends – virtualization, disaggregation, 5G, fiber, cloudification – has finally come together to bring the long-sought after approach within reach.

Dave Allan, distinguished engineer at Ericsson and leader of the Broadband Forum’s Wireless-Wireline Convergence (WWC) Work Area, told Fierce he’s been working on convergence for a long time. The ultimate goal, of course, is a common core for both the fixed and mobile access networks. But when the industry took a previous crack at convergence about 10 years ago, he said the necessary puzzle pieces just weren’t in place.

The Broadband Forum has been working shoulder to shoulder with wireless standards body 3GPP on convergence specifications since early 2017, when the groups held a joint meeting to look at use cases, set goals and establish how work should proceed. They’ve been actively writing specifications to make convergence a reality since 2019, with 3GPP addressing this in its Release 16 standard.

Ken Ko, managing director of Broadband Forum, noted there are several different routes to convergence but at least one of the defined paths would eliminate the traditional BNG entirely and terminate residential service “in the [5G] mobile core itself after going through an adaptation function in the access network.”

He added “in the most forward-looking version of that convergence, there’s not even much of an adaptation function. The mobile protocols are actually coming all the way out to and through the 5GRG.”