NEWS: Human wave headed for telcos

KUALA LUMPUR: To accommodate the coming influx of mobile broadband users and stay competitive, telcos must take proactive steps now to upgrade the current infrastructure, said Mike Adams, head of sales for Nokia-Siemens Networks.

“We expect that by 2015, five billion people will be online (globally),” he said. “Most will get connected through mobile cellular broadband and the capacity we have now was not built to handle mobile connectivity on such a large scale.”

According to Nokia-Siemens, the mobile network infrastructure was built mainly for voice communication. Although Malaysia uses a combination of time-division multiplexing (TDM - built for voice) and Ethernet transport (built for packet data transfer), Adams believes there must be a swift paradigm shift to a full Ethernet system.

“There is no way TDM will be able to cope with the huge load in the future and increasing its capacity is a cumbersome exercise of adding more outdated equipment,” he said.

“The full Ethernet network is the future. This will run on ‘full packet’ backhaul — meaning that everything, including voice, gets transferred as data packets — and this increases the speed and effectiveness of the system exponentially.”

Potholes on the path

Nokia-Siemens admits that there are at this time several drawbacks to operating an Ethernet system.

“Right now, getting qualified individuals to manage an Ethernet system is difficult,” Adams said. “Training existing staff for the transformation is tedious and time consuming.”

It believes that cost of new equipment is not a major factor. “Of course, cost is (always) a factor but it is not the most pressing concern by any means,” said Adams.

The company offers a newer and more long-term solution for telcos, known as the FlexiPacket Microwave Radio, which combines carrier Ethernet transport with microwaves.

It said that, unlike the existing infrastructure, FlexiPacket requires no base-station shelter. It is also relatively small and can be installed atop buildings.

“This system has a highly sophisticated management system that eliminates the need for complicated configurations,” said Adams. “It is scalable up to 900Mbps (megabits per second) and what we call ‘zero footprint’ because you do not need to build anything to house it.”