ITU Telecom World 2003 Notebook...
Nortel Pres.-CEO Frank Dunn called on regulators to move away “very quickly” from legacy rules that focused on individual networks that delivered a single service and focus instead on “multiservice” converged networks. He said one challenge for regulators was that restrictions they might place on domestic operators could be overridden by providers outside their borders using IP networks. He cited the example of a U.K. company that offered voice telephony to a cable modem subscriber in another country. As networks converge to all IP, voice and data services are driven to the same network, he said: “We need a smarter, more adaptive, more intuitive network. One network that could handle any access device, from anywhere, at anytime,” Dunn said in a keynote speech here. That means boundaries between wireline and wireless networks and public and private networks have to be eliminated, he said. The “multiservice, unified network will have a multiservice edge on it” with a broadband base, he said. “Here’s why the regulators around the world need to change very quickly,” he said. “As we deploy broadband access -- be it a cable modem, be it a DSL -- the good news for the service providers is they have given significant value to their customers and they can charge for that. These networks have unbundled for the first time where the money flows and who provides the service and who puts in the infrastructure,” Dunn said. In the past, “the service was embedded in the network” when a company built a circuit- switched network for voice traffic, he said. In that vein, service providers who wanted to provide data previously constructed dedicated networks, he said. Today, whoever has an infrastructure will compete against similar providers for business, Dunn said, which he said turns many existing regulatory models on their head. That means competitors have to move away from focusing on networks to “connectivity/services” models for data, he said. For regulators, that upends regimes where rules apply to a voice business and separate regulations apply to data, he said. “Some service providers would like to offer these [converged] services today,” Dunn said. “I know the capability exists. I have seen it. People have deployed it in networks. But they can’t offer it because if they offer voice and data together they are going to get regulated as a voice solution,” Dunn said. Unless regulators make changes, 3rd party players outside of a country’s geographic boundaries could offer those services beyond the reach of domestic rules “and basically take these businesses over,” he said. Regulations need to shift in an “environment where we have unbundled infrastructure to build services,” he said. “It’s a very scary environment.” -- MG
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Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin added his voice to a growing chorus of industry top brass bullish on 3G wireless rollouts for next year, telling a session of the ITU Telecom World 2003 in Geneva, Switzerland, Tues. there was “ample room” to move fixed wireline traffic onto wireless networks. He spoke on a panel with Cisco CEO John Chambers at a show in which wireless has emerged as the technology star, although 3G plans appear to have won as much attention as Wi-Fi and other unlicensed technologies. Of the $850 billion in voice revenue generated worldwide in 2002, 40% came from wireless, Sarin said. “We have ample room to move fixed voice minutes onto our networks,” he said. “We believe the gap will continue to narrow with a bit of encouragement from us.” The carrier, the largest in the world, continues to be on track to bring out 3G handsets in significant volume in the Sept.- Oct. period, he said, citing how the speeds of that service would drive demand for new data applications on cellphones. Another factor that helps is that “the Internet hype has subsided,” he said. Sarin said Vodafone would play in the wireless broadband access space, as well. “Wireless broadband access, will it be here in the next month? The answer is no,” he said. “Will it be here in a few years, the answer is yes.” Both he and Cisco’s Chambers expressed cautious optimism about a telecom turnaround, although Sarin said his industry was in a rapid growth curve and was somewhat protected from the global economic situation. “The question is what kind of strength will the recovery have and how long will it last,” Chambers said.
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At the ITU Telecom World 2003 show here Wed., the head of Samsung’s telecom network business, Ki-Tae Lee, attributed the slower-than-expected rollout of 3G services to the lack of both differentiation in next-generation handsets and of “killer” 3G services. But he and other wireless officials repeatedly have touted video-on-demand (VoD) over 3G wireless handsets as an expected driver of significant revenue for next-generation networks. In Korea, of the 8.6 million handsets, 37% run on the next-generation CDMA 1x EV-DO system, he said. By year-end, 5 million handsets are expected to use that technology in Korea, he said. Among the challenges for 3G rollouts is that rates for new services such as VoD “are still relatively too high for consumers relative to voice.” Lee also said there was a need for more applications and services that took advantage of the faster speeds of 3G networks, including m-commerce and “m- education.”
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While the exhibit floor at this year’s Telecom World show lacks the towering displays of past years, some vendors still are showing off fancy new prototypes. Takeshi Natsuno, managing dir. of i-mode strategy for NTT DoCoMo, said the carrier was displaying a concept handset called the “wallet i-mode phone.” The phone contains technology that stores information such as an ID card for building entry, smart card tickets for boarding trains and an “e-wallet function for use at video stores and other venues, he said. Separately, Katsumasa Shinozuka, pres.-CEO of OKI Electric Industry, described a cellphone technology that converts a caller’s face to an animated image to protect a user from “possible misuse” of the image. “It was developed by OKI from security and privacy protection” for new handsets that use video technology, he said. Asked by a Dallas telecom analyst whether video applications on the phones were likely to have consumer uptake, Bridget Cosgrave, pres. of Belgacom carrier & wholesale unit, retorted: “Sir, you drive to work.” She said that in Belgium, typical train commutes range from half an hour to 2 hours each way. “You don’t take the train. People would love to watch videos while on the train,” she said.
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Asked about pricing pressure on chip manufacturers in the global economic downturn, Qualcomm Chmn.-CEO Irwin Jacobs told a news conference that “on the CDMA side, we have had fairly good growth. We probably would have had better growth if the economy had been strong.” The WCDMA-Universal Mobile Telephone Service (UMTS) chip is working its way to market, he said, and “we will begin to see a lot of upward growth.” Jacobs said another positive factor was the worldwide acceleration of wired to wireless network traffic. Qualcomm outlined an “enhanced commitment” in the European wireless market to its Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless (BREW) system for developers of wireless applications. It said it recently assigned a dedicated BREW team to its London office to support operator trials and introductions of BREW-based services.
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While panelists and other conference participants repeatedly have touted the impending introduction of numerous 3G wireless handsets in significant quantities, some skepticism has bubbled up at the show as to whether content- rich applications also will be ready to drive consumer use. Ewan Sutherland, exec. dir. of the Brussels-based International Telecommunications Users Group, repeated a joke that 3G stands for “games, gambling and girls.” He said; “My preferred explanation is that it’s greed, gullibility and grief.” He cited technology trends that wireless executives had plugged at the show. “Then we wonder why we've been charged 2 pounds tenpence to make a phone call,” he said.
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Sprint said at the ITU show that it was streamlining service level agreements for global data offerings, with new service performance measures that provided common parameters and contract language. The company said the agreements offered a first in the telecom industry by providing a 100% guarantee on IP services. Sprint also said it would offer a service level agreement on “jitter” -- a performance measurement that supports real-time voice-over-IP and video- over-IP applications. Jitter measures variation in latency. Sprint said it was important for businesses using excess data services bandwidth for videoconferencing or for consolidating call traffic within a company.