More than 100 companies suggest ways U.S. government can help advance the IoT

Many industry watchers feel the U.S. is slipping behind other countries, particularly Germany and China, in creating a unified national strategy for development of the Internet of Things or IoT. But federal leaders, in the early stages of involvement, reached out to the telecom industry for guidance.

Back in April the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, a part of the U.S. Department of Commerce, issued a “request for comments on the benefits, challenges and potential roles for the government in fostering the advancement of the Internet of Things.”

Two months later and the call for comment has been met in spades with more than 130 filings coming from a broad swath of telecom interests including carriers like AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon and Vodafone; vendors including Nokia, Ericsson, Huawei and Samsung; and industry trade groups like the Wi-Fi Alliance, Wireless Infrastructure Association, the Open Connectivity Foundation and the GSMA.

Here’s a full list of the respondents and their filings with NTIA. A review of some of the filings indicates a strong industry expectation that the rapid uptake of IoT will require global coordination and will likely create new markets while disrupting existing ones.

Verizon representatives told NTIA: “To support this explosion of IoT devices, a robust and secure underlying communications network must serve as a foundation. That network requires both increased commercial spectrum and development of the underlying core infrastructure. We encourage all stakeholders to work together to ensure that these necessary building blocks for IoT development are available and accessible. To enable sufficient spectrum to power this new wave of connected innovation, private and public sectors must continue to cooperate, not only to develop more ways to effectively share spectrum, but also to provide federal users incentives to free up spectrum for commercial licensed and unlicensed use. As potentially billions of new IoT devices are deployed, they will drive data growth that – combined with the parallel growth in overall data usage by consumer devices – will require new commercial spectrum allocations to accommodate the unprecedented demands for more bandwidth. This includes spectrum necessary to support 5G, since 5G’s super-fast speeds and low latency will help facilitate new IoT use cases.”

Ericsson commented: “In Ericsson’s view, 5G is the technology that will unleash the true potential of the Internet of Things. To support the IoT’s development, the government should unleash the resources that will ensure U.S. leadership in 5G by releasing more spectrum for commercial use. Through network slicing, 5G technology will allow a single infrastructure to meet the very different needs of Massive and Critical IoT devices – it will enable networks to handle the incredible increase in data from the billions of low energy, low data devices, while also providing very high reliability, availability and security for critical uses. We also encourage the government to support global standards and best practices and to allow industry to continue to innovate and coalesce around the most favorable IoT solutions.”

And from the GSMA’s point of view: “The United States should forbear from regulating IoT and avoid reflexively extending legacy regulations designed for outdated technologies to the IoT…The U.S. government should support and promote industry alignment around interoperable, industry-led specifications and standards across the global IoT ecosystem…The U.S. government should promote the allocation of globally harmonized spectrum that can support IoT…The U.S. government should encourage industry to build trust into IoT devices. Existing laws and regulations, operating in tandem with self-regulatory regimes and best practices, will provide sufficient protection to consumers as the IoT develops…Finally, the U.S. government should engage on a bilateral and multilateral basis, as appropriate, to ensure that international IoT activities similarly encourage competition, investment, and innovation. Regulatory interference at this stage—from any source—could lead to fragmentation and impede innovation, inhibiting the IoT’s ability to reach its full potential to deliver benefits to consumers.”

AT&T expects to see opex savings from SDN and NFV in the range of 40% to 50% but it will take a few years to reach that goal, said Krish Prabhu, president of AT&T Labs, yesterday.  Prabhu discussed the prospects for software defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) in a question and answer session at the Cowen and Company Annual Technology, Media & Telecom Conference, which was also webcast.

Opex savings from SDN and NFV will occur when network functions are controlled through software, replacing today’s approach that relies more heavily on manual operations, Prabhu said.

“Opex savings will materialize when [functions] are fully automated,” said Prabhu.

AT&T has established a goal of virtualizing 75% of its network by 2020 and by that point, the company expects to see margins increase – apparently because of opex savings – Prabhu noted.

Opex Savings from SDN and NFV Will Exceed Capex Savings
The results that AT&T expects from SDN and NFV on the capex side are not as ambitious as what the company forecasts for opex.

Krish Prabhu

Prabhu doesn’t expect to see any capex savings from SDN and NFV, but that statement only tells part of the story. AT&T is expecting to handle four to eight times more traffic on its network within a few years than it handles today – and the company expects to accommodate that growth without increasing capex as a result of implementing SDN and NFV, Prabhu said.

Prabhu’s comments are quite similar to those made by Verizon CFO Fran Shammo recently. Shammo told investors that Verizon’s  capex also would remain flat despite the implementation of SDN because of additional investment required to add small cells to the company’s wireless network.

AT&T also expects to invest substantially in small cells moving forward. Prabhu noted, for example, that while the company has built 90% of the macrocells it expects to need, it has only built 5% to 10% of the small cells it anticipates deploying.

DIRECTV Now
A key contributor to AT&T’s increasing bandwidth needs could be the company’s planned linear OTT video offering dubbed DIRECTV Now, which customers will be able to stream to a variety of wired and wireless devices.

According to Prabhu the company will be ready to meet bandwidth demand when the service launches later this year. On the wireless side, he noted that the company has 40 MHz of spectrum in the AWS-3 and WCS bands that will be available to support the new service.

 

The latest Ericsson Mobility Report forecasts such rapid growth in the number of global IoT devices that they will overtake mobile phones as the largest category of connected device by 2018. Ericsson reckons Western Europe will be the biggest growth driver for IoT devices, forecasting a 5x increase by 2021. This won’t necessarily be the result of a greater appetite for IoT by European consumers, however, with Ericsson saying directives such as eCall for cars and smart meters compelling the continent to increase its number of connected devices. “IoT is now accelerating as device costs fall and innovative applications emerge,” said Rima Qureshi, Chief Strategy Officer at Ericsson. “From 2020, commercial deployment of 5G networks will provide additional capabilities that are critical for IoT, such as network slicing and the capacity to connect exponentially more devices than is possible today.” While the majority of IoT devices will be connected via non-cellular means (presumably wired or wifi), cellular IoT devices are forecasts to be the fastest growing category. Ericsson reckons a major reason for that growth will be 3GPP standardization of cellular IoT technologies, by which it’s presumably referring to NB-IoT. Other notable findings from the latest report include the fact that global smartphone subscriptions are expected to overtake those of basic phones in Q3 of this year and that the use of cellular data for smartphone video has doubled among teens in the past year, in contrast to a significant fall in the amount of time they spend watching traditional TV. Additionally the first devices supporting 1 Gbps LTE download speeds are expected later this year. Lastly Ericsson used the report to bring attention to the need to harmonise 5G spectrum in the frequencies above those currently licensed for mobile but below the 24 GHz+ range that was addressed at WRC-15, including better accommodation for microwave backhaul. It said the 3.1-4.2 GHz range is considered essential for early deployments of 5G and offered the chart below to illustrate how un-harmonised the global microwave backhaul picture currently is.

Retro gaming giant Atari will soon be entering the IoT arena following a partnership with Sigfox, the low power WAN provider. Famed for its trailblazing old-school computers and gaming consoles in the 1980s and 1990s, an announcement from Atari said it will soon be developing and launching consumer IoT services. While tangible details weren’t particularly forthcoming, and won’t be for the time being, Atari did hint at a move back to hardware having been primarily, if not solely, focused on software and gaming for the best part of the last 20 years. Atari said the initial product line will include offerings in areas such as home, pets, lifestyle and safety. By combining with Sigfox, Atari plans on developing a wide range of new products, from the very simple to the highly sophisticated, which users can track at any time. Sigfox says that by connecting to its network, products will benefit from an extended battery life and no need for paring or connectivity configuration. “By partnering together and using SIGFOX’s dedicated IoT connectivity, we are going to create amazing products with our brand,” said Fred Chesnais, Chief Executive Officer, Atari. “We look forward to our collaboration with SIGFOX and releasing new products to the mass market on a global scale.” It’s fair to assume Atari is targeting a move back into hardware and away from gaming, although more information will be released in due course. Atari says development of the new product line will begin in 2016.

Qualcomm has announced new chips and technologies designed to boost domestic wifi coverage, at-home IoT connectivity, wearable tech capability and next generation broadband delivery.

Starting off with domestic wifi coverage boosting, and Qualcomm launched a new family of 802.11ac platforms designed to optimise device wifi usage by intelligently allocating radio spectrum in the home. It says its new three radio solutions combine two 5 GHz radios and a 2.4 GHz radio to help improve connectivity; and its platform, used on new routers and repeaters, can appropriately dedicate radio in the legacy 2.4 GHz band to devices only compatible with the 802.11n standard. This, in theory, can alleviate congestion on domestic networks and ensure more bandwidth availability for devices compatible with the newer 802.11.ac band.

Qualcomm says the self-organising features integrated into the new platform means it will become much easier to register and configure new devices on the network; while automatically allocating capacity for devices based on real-time conditions.

“As people rely on their home network to support more devices accessing the internet and streaming media, Wi-Fi is being stretched to the limit,” said Gopi Sirineni, vice president of product management, Qualcomm Atheros, Inc. “We are changing the game with features designed to deliver the best possible Wi-Fi experiences and now, uniquely, we are driving those technologies into more cost-effective products to extend the benefits to a wider swath of consumers.”

IoT is also in Qualcomm’s sights, as it unveiled a new chip set targeting low-power smart home devices. It says the QCA4012 chip brings dual band wifi, enhanced security, low power and small form factor for connected devices. Companion SDKs and services from partners Ayla, Exosite and Iota Labs include API interfaces and other tools to support IoT device and cloud integration.

“IOTA Labs has developed cutting edge IoT solutions integrating Qualcomm Technologies’ latest products with the IOTA Labs platform,” said Amit Singh, director and co-founder, IOTA Labs. “IOTA Labs’s leading edge IoT platform and experience acts as an accelerator for clients to transform their offerings into leading smarter products and services with a lower cost of ownership.”

The Snapdragon Wear 1100, included in the raft of announcements, joins the product line and targets consumer-led IoT products, including smart-accessories and wearable tech. Qualcomm says it has been designed to target  the wearable segment where a smaller size, longer battery life, smarter sensing, enhanced security. It also comes with a modem capable of LTE, wifi and Bluetooth support.

“We are delighted to add Snapdragon Wear 1100 to our Snapdragon Wear family, thus making it easier for customers to develop connected wearables with targeted use cases such as kid and elderly tracking,” said Anthony Murray, SVP of IoT for Qualcomm Technologies. “We are actively working with the broader ecosystem to accelerate wearables innovation and are excited to announce a series of customer collaborations today.”

Finally, Qualcomm also announced a fixed networking launch which it claims will help operators deliver up to 1 Gbps data rates on existing infrastructure up to 100 meters. The GigaDSL chipsets are intended to support gigabit data rates on existing telephone lines providing a high-speed extension for VDSL without losing spectrum capacity. It says existing infrastructure can be upgraded to the new processors without having to rip up the network and start again. The product line will become available from June for both fibre to the building and customer premises equipment.

“With these new GigaDSL product offerings, we are able to meet carriers’ broadband goals, complementing fiber deployment in time for major events, such as the 2018 Winter Games in Korea and the 2020 Summer Games in Japan,” said Irvind Ghai, VP of product management at Qualcomm Atheros.

Verizon and the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) have come to a tentative agreement on a four-year labor contract, putting an end to a month long strike of the telco's nearly 40,000 wireline workers.

U.S. Secretary of Labor Thomas Perez announced the agreement in a statement issued on the agency's website Friday morning.

"Today, I am pleased to announce that the parties have reached an agreement in principle on a four-year contract, resolving the open issues in the ongoing labor dispute between Verizon's workers, unions, and management," Perez said in a statement. "The parties are now working to reduce the agreement to writing, after which the proposal will be submitted to CWA and IBEW union members for ratification."

Perez said that "I expect that workers will be back on the job next week."

Verizon offered the wireline unions a nearly 11 percent raise, a small increase in pension benefits, and a promise to add 1,400 new union jobs. In addition, Verizon agreed to scale back subcontracting and withdrew a proposal to relocate employees for extended periods -- two issues that were sticking points for the unions and the company. 

Marc Reed, Verizon's chief administrative officer, said in a statement that "Verizon is very pleased with this "agreement in principle." 

The tentative contract was praised by both leaders of the IBEW and CWA. Both unions said that they will share the contract details with their members for approval in the coming days.

"This tentative contract is an important step forward in helping to end this six-week strike and keeping good Verizon jobs in America," said Lonnie Stephenson, IBEW President, in a statement.

Chris Shelton, President of the CWA, echoed a similar sentiment.

"The agreement in principle at Verizon is a victory for working families across the country and an affirmation of the power of working people," Shelton said.

On May 16, Perez met with Lowell McAdam, chairman and CEO of Verizon; Chris Shelton, president of the Communications Workers of America; and Lonnie Stephenson, president of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

During that joint meeting, the three parties said they agreed to find a way to resolve their disputes and return to the bargaining table on Tuesday to continue talks.

After not being able to negotiate what the CWA and IBEW deemed a fair contract with Verizon, the company's wireline workers began their strike on April 13. 

At that time, neither the unions nor the company were able to come to an agreement over various issues related to health care, pension, and outsourcing job functions.

Huawei completes 5G key technology tests in 5G field trial

Strong Promotion for Global Partnership on 5G Technology Innovation and a Global 5G Standard

Launched by China Academy of Information and Communication Technology (CAICT), the IMT-2020 5G Promotion Group aims to foster a joint effort to promote 5G technology evaluation and field test among the global mobile industry and ecosystem to ensure the successful commercial deployment by 2020. One of the key objectives for IMT-2020 5G Promotion Group is to realize the 5G vision for the enhanced mobile broadband service as well as to create the new capabilities for 5G to enable the IoT and vertical services, this represents the unprecedented technical challenges such as to realize 10Gbps or peak rate 20Gbps user data rate, 100 billion connections, and 1 ms of end-to-end network latency for the 5G air interface.

Early this year, IMT-2020 5G Promotion Group announced a three phase 5G networks trial plan, spanning from 2016 to 2018, with a first phase test from September 2015 to September 2016. The first phase test is focused on key radio technologies and performance test.

As one of the core members in the IMT-2020 5G Promotion Group, Huawei actively contributed IMT-2020 5G Promotion Group and 5G technology test. In addition, Huawei established an extensive collaboration with CAICT, China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Telecom in the Chinese operator community to explore the innovative air-interface technologies to achieve best spectral efficiency and massive links capabilities. Huawei’s effort is focused on New Radio (NR) technology, which includes the optimized new air-interface, full-duplex and massive MIMO technologies, these are the enabling technologies to achieve the superior end-user experience for the emerging mobile broadband service such as 4K, 8K and virtual reality and augmented reality.

Best-in-Class Test Results Using 5G New Air Interface

The 5G air interface technology has been implemented through three novel foundational technologies, i.e., filtered Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (F-OFDM), Sparse Code Multiple Access (SCMA) and Polar code to meet 5G requirements and performance targets.

F-OFDM technology is the basis for creating ultra-flexible air-interface to adaptively fit all the 5G use-case scenarios defined by ITU-R with a single radio technology platform. It allows multiple concurrent radio numerologies and frame structure to deliver very diverse services; F-OFDM can ensure the future-proof for the 5G system to meet emerging innovative services requirements. The test results showed that F-OFDM can increase system throughput by 10% using those free guard bands in LTE system. In addition, F-OFDM supports asynchronous transmission from different users. Test results showed that it will provide 100% higher system throughput compared with that in LTE system in the presence of mixed service on the same carrier frequency with mixed radio numerologies. .

SCMA is to support massive connections and obtain higher system throughput simultaneously via the joint optimization on sparse SCMA codebook design and multi-dimensional modulation. It can further consider optimization on power allocation among different SCMA layers especially in downlink to improve total system throughput. The test results showed that SCMA is to increase the uplink connection number by 300% and at the same time increased the downlink system throughput up to 80%.

For Polar code, it allocates information to the highly reliable data locations in the code structure to transmit useful information of user and at the same time it supports channel coding of any code rate with an appropriate code construction to fit any future service requirements. The test results showed that Polar code provided coding gain from 0.5dB to 2.0dB compared with Turbo code used in LTE system.

System Integration of Innovative 5G Air Interface Technologies

The flexible system integration of several innovative 5G air-interface technologies, namely, F-OFDM, SCMA and massive MIMO has been verified in the first phase of key 5G technology tests. In the test, multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) supported up to 24 users and up to 24 parallel layers transmission on the same time-frequency resources. The test results showed that MU-MIMO can achieve 3.6Gbps cell average throughput using 100MHz system bandwidth, it is almost 10 times of that in LTE baseline system.

The trial has validated the optimal integration of the above new radio technologies and the capability of flexible 5G air-interface technologies, the trial is also served as a technical re-risk to support the on-going 3GPP standardization work.

Full Duplex Implemented in the First Phase of 5G Test

Full Duplex mode has also been tested in the first phase of 5G test. In the initial test stage on Full Duplex, it allows simultaneous transmitting and receiving of data at the base station with three level cascaded technologies, namely, passive analog cancellation, active analog cancellation, and digital cancellation. The test results showed that the Full Duplex can provide self-interference cancellation capability more than 113dB in real world environment and result in a total 90% system throughput gain over the conventional half duplex mode used today.

Huawei has successfully completed the first phase test of 5G technologies in China. "The trial of 5G technologies in China will be a great contribution to 5G applications in the future.” Dr. Wen Tong, Huawei 5G Chief Scientist emphasized that, "As a member of the IMT-2020 5G Promotion Group, Huawei is pleased to work with CAICT, China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Telecom, and took the initiative to be the first to complete 5G key technologies tests and corresponding system integration test based on our proposed 5G new air interface."

He also announced the plan of the second phase of 5G test which will focus mainly on the wide coverage, high hotspot capacity, and massive connections with high reliability, low latency with reduced power consumption.

Today we’re excited to announce the latest step in our global cloud infrastructure as Microsoft and Facebook announce plans to build “MAREA” – a new, state-of-the art subsea cable across the Atlantic. The new MAREA cable will help meet the growing customer demand for high speed, reliable connections for cloud and online services for Microsoft, Facebook and their customers. The parties have cleared conditions to go “Contract-In-Force” with their plans, and construction of the cable will commence in August 2016 with completion expected in October 2017.

We’re seeing an ever-increasing customer demand for high speed, reliable connections for Microsoft cloud services, including Bing, Office 365, Skype, Xbox Live, and Microsoft Azure. As the world continues to move towards a future based on cloud computing, Microsoft is committed to building out the unprecedented level of global infrastructure required to support ever faster and even more resilient connections to our cloud services. This robust, global infrastructure will enable customers to more quickly and reliably store, manage, transmit and access their data in the Microsoft Cloud.

“In order to better serve our customers and provide the type of reliable and low-latency connectivity they deserve, we are continuing to invest in new and innovative ways to continuously upgrade both the Microsoft Cloud and the global Internet infrastructure,” said Frank Rey, director, global network acquisition, Microsoft Corp. “This marks an important new step in building the next generation infrastructure of the Internet.”

MAREA will be the highest-capacity subsea cable to ever cross the Atlantic – featuring eight fiber pairs and an initial estimated design capacity of 160Tbps. The new 6,600 km submarine cable system, to be operated and managed by Telxius, will also be the first to connect the United States to southern Europe: from Virginia Beach, Virginia to Bilbao, Spain and then beyond to network hubs in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. This route is south of existing transatlantic cable systems that primarily land in the New York/New Jersey region. Being physically separate from these other cables helps ensure more resilient and reliable connections for our customers in the United States, Europe, and beyond.

Microsoft and Facebook designed MAREA to be interoperable with a variety of networking equipment. This new “open” design brings significant benefits for customers: lower costs and easier equipment upgrades which leads to faster growth in bandwidth rates since the system can evolve at the pace of optical technology innovation. This is critical to ensure the Microsoft Cloud continuously improves to provide the highest availability and performance our customers need for their mission-critical workloads and data.

Microsoft and Facebook are working with Telxius, Telefónica’s telecommunications infrastructure company, building upon their longstanding experience in subsea cables on this innovative new system. Telxius will serve as the operator of the system and sell capacity as part of their wholesale infrastructure business.

As one of the largest cloud operators in the world, Microsoft has invested more than $15 billion (USD) in building a resilient cloud infrastructure and cloud services that are highly available and highly secure while lowering overall costs. Microsoft has now announced 32 Azure regions around the world with 24 generally available today – more than any other major cloud provider. This latest investment, together with Microsoft’s previously announced investments in global fiber assets including the NCP trans-Pacific subsea cable, is further proof of Microsoft’s commitment to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.