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This Industry Viewpoint was authored by Mike Hawley, Head of Mobility Management Packet Core R&D, Cloud and Network Services at Nokia
Communications service providers (CSPs) take a pragmatic view when it comes to core developments. Beyond the fascinating technology, CSPs want results that meet their end goals.
Generally, there are three goal areas that drive these conversations: … [visit site to read more]
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Brazil’s road to 5G has been a bumpy one, full of delays, regulatory clashes, and spectrum clearing issues.
But now, just over one year since standalone 5G services were first switched on in the nation’s capital of Brasilia, the nation’s mobile network operators are surging ahead with their infrastructure deployments, with coverage reportedly now reaching almost 46% of the country’s population.
According to figures published by Brazilian consultancy firm Teleco, population coverage for 5G in the 3.5GHz band reached 45.7%, with Vivo covering 40.2%, Claro 39.7%, TIM Brasil 36.8%, and Algar 0.7%.
This encompasses 180 municipalities around the country as of July, up from just eight the same time last year.
The coverage has been achieved via the deployment of 14,796 5G base stations, almost a thousand of which had been deployed between June and July this year.
Achieving this level of coverage in such a short span of time is no small feat. The GSMA recently forecast that Brazil would only reach 47% population coverage by 2025, increasing to 84% by 2030, hence the country is already proceeding far faster than anticipated.
In the same report, the GSMA expected 5G subscribers to increase to 36.2 million by 2025 and 179 million by 2030. As of July, the country currently has just over 10 million 5G subscribers.
“The growing coverage of 5G networks in Brazil should drive take-up of the service, which accounted for around 3% of connections at the end of 2022. 5G adoption will also be supported by the increased availability of 5G smartphones. For example, TIM claimed in September 2022 that 75% of devices on sale in its stores were 5G-ready,” read the GSMA report.
Naturally, this is all very positive for the Brazilian mobile sector, reflecting a group of operators highly committed to modernising their networks and unlocking new services for customers.
Whether the operators can maintain the pace of this rollout, however, is a different story. As is always the case with infrastructure deployments, the most commercially viable areas – typically the largest cities – will be covered first, typically leaving more expensive and complicated hard-to-reach areas for last. Extending 5G coverage to these areas economically represents a challenge even in highly urbanised countries, but in Brazil – where various estimates put the rural population at between 24% and 46% of the total population – reaching the upper percentiles of population coverage will be almost impossible.
In addition to this rural challenge, it is also worth noting that Brazil is notorious for its outdated municipal legislation, which can lead to delays in deploying antennae even in some of the country’s largest cities. Operators have long called for clearer and more uniform rules regarding site deployment, but it is unlikely legislation will be introduced in time to simply the majority of the 5G rollout process.
To conclude, great progress so far for Brazilian 5G, but there are still many challenges to overcome down the road.
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Also in the news:
Dish seeks extension for purchase of T-Mobile’s low-band spectrum
Battle for Ethiopia’s mobile money market begins as Safaricom’s M-Pesa takes on TeleBirr
What’s in a name? 6G Internet falls foul of advertising regulator over consumer confusion
A new transatlantic option, an international edge expansion, some network tech as a service news, and a vendor deployment in a less travelled region. … [visit site to read more]
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According to a report from Bloomberg, Huawei may be seeking to sidestep US sanctions by operating a network of semiconductor facilities under different company names.
U.S. Commerce Department added Huawei to its export control list back in 2019, with the company having been deemed a risk national security risk. As a result of this designation, US companies can now only sell products to Huawei if they are granted specific licences from the government.
Matters were made worse in late October, when President Joe Biden levied additional restrictions on chip technology exports,
Combined, the various sanctions in place have left Huawei largely cut off from accessing US semiconductor technology – a major blow to almost all of Huawei’s core business units, particularly smartphone manufacturing.
Huawei, meanwhile, maintains that they pose no security risk, arguing that they are simply caught in the middle of the geopolitical tug-of-war between China and the US.
Nonetheless, it launched its own semiconductor business last year, seeking to solve its chip supply issues through domestic production.
This move was largely in line with the policies set out by the Chinese government, which has made bolstering its domestic semiconductor research and production industries a major priority in recent years, seeking to remove the industry’s heavy reliance on US tech.
Indeed, these measures appear to be working for Huawei, with the company noting in recent months that they could soon return to the 5G smartphone business by procuring 5G chips domestically.
In fact, according to the SIA, Huawei has received around $30 billion in government subsidies to expand this new business. Using these funds, the SIA says Huawei has already acquired two chip-making facilities and is in the process of building three more.
By operating these businesses under new names – such as Fujian Jinhua Integrated Circuit Co. and Pengxinwei IC Manufacturing Co. (PXW), in the cases of the acquired plants – Huawei can potentially bypass at least some of the sanctions against them and retain access to key US technologies.
Naturally, such tactics are sure to draw the ire of the US government, who say they are monitoring the situation carefully.
“Given the severe restrictions placed on Huawei, Fujian Jinhua, PXW and others, it is no surprise that they have sought substantial state support to attempt to develop indigenous technologies,” a speaker from the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) told Bloomberg. “BIS is continually reviewing and updating its export controls based on the evolving threat environment and, as evidenced by the Oct. 7, 2022 rules, will not hesitate to take appropriate action to protect US national security.”
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Also in the news:
Dish seeks extension for purchase of T-Mobile’s low-band spectrum
Battle for Ethiopia’s mobile money market begins as Safaricom’s M-Pesa takes on TeleBirr
What’s in a name? 6G Internet falls foul of advertising regulator over consumer confusion
Fiber broadband technology evolution is not really about technology: it is about business opportunity. Successive generations of PON technology have increased performance levels, providing the opportunity for PON to deliver unbeatable residential services and go beyond residential broadband into higher ARPU 10G services for businesses, factories, mobile backhaul, smart cities, and more.
In the UK, for example, there are more than 50 altnets building fiber networks. Competition is driving down residential broadband prices to as little as £25 per month in central London. Interestingly, Gigabit business services with a reasonable level of service agreement creates 10x more revenues, at around £270 per month. So, by adding only three business customers, a service provider can roughly double their income on a PON. Take that service level up to 10Gb/s, and ARPU goes beyond £700 per month.
10G opportunities are here today and make for an extremely compelling ROI for fiber network operators. So, what is the best way to deliver 10G?
Until recently, that speed could only be delivered by point-to-point (P2P) fiber. P2P is more costly than PON: it requires more equipment, more real estate, more fiber cabling, and consumes more energy. P2P is also an overlay network, so operators end up running both PON and P2P, which increases costs. Hence, there is a growing appetite for converging business services onto PON networks.
How can this be done successfully? XGS-PON (10G symmetrical PON) networks are becoming more widely deployed, already delivering multi-gigabit connectivity to businesses worldwide. But XGS-PON cannot reach true 10Gb/s because its capacity is limited to 8.5Gb/s due to standard specified overhead. The good news is that XGS-PON can easily run faster with 25G PON, delivering true 10G speeds and beyond from the same hardware that is being deployed today for XGS-PON. And this is already happening. There are now 1 million PON lines worldwide capable of 25G PON, enabling operators to address 10G opportunities very efficiently, and that number is growing fast.
More good news is that 25G PON can be complemented with 50G PON in the future, because the two technologies can co-exist. This will enable the delivery of even higher speeds to more customers, but that is not quite the case yet.
A fully mature 50G symmetrical solution ready for volume deployments will take many more years. Unlike 25G PON which is a straightforward evolution from the current solutions, 50G PON is a technology leap involving a new generation of components that need to mature and reach high volumes to become cost-effective. In addition, the migration to 50G PON requires the introduction of new hardware, which takes time and money. The first demonstrations of 50G PON are asymmetrical with 50Gb/s in downstream and 25Gb/s in upstream. Business services are defined as symmetric, so asymmetrical 50G PON brings no advantage over 25G PON. And finally, since both symmetrical and asymmetrical 50G PON variants share the same wavelengths, operators will need to consider swapping all 50G ONTs when they introduce the symmetrical variant. The industry has seen this kind of issue before with 10G PON, which was one of the reasons operators skipped asymmetrical XG-PON and preferred to wait for symmetrical XGS-PON.
So, is it worth considering 50G PON? Absolutely! But it doesn’t mean you have to make hard decisions between 25G PON and 50G PON, because one doesn’t exclude the other. Every operator should evaluate if they can afford to wait for fully mature and deployable symmetric 50G PON, or address the real opportunities today with 25G PON, while having an open path to 50G PON in the future.
25G PON is the most optimized solution for 10G era, and here’s why:
The industry’s experience with GPON also tells us about commercial sweet spots. Operators successfully deploy 1 Gigabit services on 2.5G GPON networks. This 1:2.5 ratio holds true for 10G business services on 25G PON.
As ever, the decision on which technology an operator will adopt comes down to the business case: when does an operator need it, and at what cost. With 25G PON offering an immediate path into highly lucrative 10G business services, the return on an investment in 25G PON looks highly appealing. All the benefits now, while leaving an open path to symmetrical 50G PON in the future.
Learn more about our 25G PON solution.
This article was written by Ana Pesovic
Ana heads the Fixed Networks Fiber marketing activities in Nokia. She built up extensive international telecom experience, with positions in sales, pre-sales and R&D in Germany, Spain, Portugal, Belgium and India. Ana has a Masters Degree in Informatics and Computer Science from the University of Belgrade. As member of the Board of Directors of the FTTH Council Europe, she’s a strong advocate of Fiber.
Nokia are Diamond sponsors of Connected Britain being held at ExCel London on the 20-21 September 2023. Get your ticket here
Three network expansions in three regional US markets to catch up with, one on the backbone and two on the FTTx front: … [visit site to read more]
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