Telecom News

• Verizon, CWA, IBEW reach tentative deal to end strike of wireline workers

  May 31, 2016 by Telecom News / 475 Views

  By Sean Buckley  FierceTelecom.com

  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.

   

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• T-Mobile becomes number one US smartphone channel

  May 31, 2016 by Telecom News / 514 Views

  Written by Scott Bicheno  Telecoms.com

  

  Disruptive US operator T-Mobile has become the leading sales channel for smartphones in the US, according to new research from Counterpoint.

  T-Mobile overtook Verizon to take the number one smartphone sales spot, having been a distant fourth just two years ago. This change is viewed as indicative of a broader change in the way smartphones are being purchased in the US, with the cost of devices increasingly uncoupled from the service contracts and, if needed, paid for via conventional financing arrangements.

  “The US market has undergone significant shifts in the power of the different sales channels with the move to unsubsidized plans,” said Neil Shah of Counterpoint. “The growth of T-Mobile through its different ‘Uncarrier’ moves, the removal of subsidies and enticing subscribers with ‘Simple Choice’ & ‘Jump’ plans, has helped the operator to become the top smartphone sales channel in the USA.

  Samsung and Apple together captured almost two-thirds of the total smartphone shipments share at T-Mobile, with Samsung leading. However, it will be an uphill task for T-Mobile to maintain this lead ahead of Verizon and continue to attract millions of subscribers to its network. The move to unsubsidized and unlocked has also boosted demand in the open channel, which continued to contribute close to 10% of the total shipments in Q1 2016.”

  

  US smartphone sales on the whole declined by 4% year-on-year due to the maturity of the market (most people already have a smartphone) and a lengthening on the upgrade cycle. The latter factor will be a direct result of the shift in buying habits as fewer consumers are being prompted to upgrade their subsidized phones by the renewal of their postpaid contracts.

  “The US market decelerated due to softness in Apple iPhone demand and iPhone SE demand not materializing until Q2 2016,” said Jeff Fieldhack of Counterpoint. “Carriers continued to push subscribers to non-subsidy plans as for the first time more than half of the combined subscriber base of the top four carriers are now on non-subsidized plans. This is a significant shift from the subsidy-driven model just ten to twelve quarters ago. This has changed the basis of competition in US mobile landscape.

  “The focus has shifted to creating more value for the consumer, instead of being device-driven. Unsubsidized device sales have educated consumers that flagship smartphones are costly. This has led to a temporary softness in the device upgrade cycle; the in-carrier upgrade run rate continues to be in 5-6% range per quarter. Handset manufacturers will continue to push hardware and marketing limits to entice subscribers to not defer upgrading.”

   

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• ARM’s new CPU and GPU will power mobile VR in 2017

  May 30, 2016 by Telecom News / 520 Views

  

   

  
  

  ARM, the company that designs the processor architectures used in virtually all mobile devices on the market, has used Computex Taipei 2016 to announce new products that it expects to see deployed in high-end phones next year. The Cortex-A73 CPU and Mali-G71 GPU are designed to increase performance and power efficiency, with a particular view to supporting mobile VR.

  ARM says that its Mali line of GPUs are the most widely used in the world, with over 750 million shipped in 2015. The new Mali-G71 is the first to use the company's third-generation architecture, known as Bifrost. The core allows for 50 percent higher graphics performance, 20 percent better power efficiency, and 40 percent more performance per square mm over ARM's previous Mali GPU. With scaling up to 32 shader cores, ARM says the Mali-G71 can match discrete laptop GPUs like Nvidia's GTX 940M. It's also been designed around the specific problems thrown up by VR, supporting features like 4K resolution, a 120Hz refresh rate, and 4ms graphics pipeline latency.

   

  As for CPUs, ARM is announcing the new Cortex-A73 core, which prioritizes power efficiency. It's up to 30 percent more efficient than the previous Cortex-A72 while offering about 1.3 times the level of peak performance, but ARM has also focused on sustained usage — the A73 offers over twice the performance within its power budget, meaning it doesn't need to be as hasty to slow down to save battery life.

   

  

   

  Although ARM architecture dominates the mobile landscape, there's a good chance you won't see these specific products in your 2017 flagship phone. ARM licenses its architecture and cores separately, meaning companies are free to pick and choose what they like. Apple, for example, licenses ARM architecture but now designs its own custom CPU cores (known as Twister in the most recent A9 processor) and uses PowerVR GPU solutions from Imagination Technologies. Samsung, meanwhile, designs some Exynos processor cores but uses them alongside ARM's Cortex cores and Mali GPU in the international Galaxy S7. And Qualcomm reverted to its own custom Kryo CPU cores in the Snapdragon 820 — which powers the US Galaxy S7 — after using Cortex in the 810.

  All of this is to say that you shouldn't take the performance laid out here by ARM as a benchmark for your next phone, because it'll all depend on how the manufacturers choose to implement the technology. But the new Cortex and Mali products do demonstrate that mobile technology continues to advance in terms of power and efficiency, and that it's adapting to new challenges such as VR.

  ARM expects chips to move into production at the end of the year and appear in shipping devices in early 2017.

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• Huawei Completes 5G Key Technology Tests in the Field Trial Sponsored by IMT-2020 5G Promotion Group

  May 30, 2016 by Telecom News / 513 Views

  [Shenzhen, China, May 27, 2016] Huawei completed the first phase of key 5G technology tests as a part of a series field trials defined by the IMT-2020 5G Promotion Group. In April 2016, the outdoor macro-cell tests, conducted in Chendu, China, consist of a number of the foundational key enabling technologies and an integrated 5G air-interface. The test results successfully demonstrated that the new 5G air interface technology can effectively improve spectrum efficiency and to meet diverse service requirements for 5G defined by ITU-R.

  
  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.

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• Microsoft and Facebook to build subsea cable across Atlantic

  May 28, 2016 by Telecom News / 418 Views

  This post was authored by Frank Rey, Director, Global Network Acquisition, Microsoft Cloud Infrastructure and Operations.

  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.

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