Open letter identifies four barriers to deployment

The UK broadband industry has responded to boasts by Prime Minister Boris Johnson that the country will get full fibre coverage by 2025.

Key figures in the industry have said that this target is only achievable if the government eliminates several barriers to network rollout ? and quickly.

The government official target for such deployment is currently 2033,but Boris Johnson said during the Conservative leadership election that he wanted to bring this forward to the mid-2020s. He has not given any indication of how this would be achieved.

˙ Boris Johnson laughs off fibre targets

˙ Openreach recruits more fibre engineers

˙ EE to launch 5G in 2019

Full fibre pledge

An open letter, signed by the heads of the Internet Service Providers Association (ISPA) the Federation of Communications Services (FCS) and the Independent Networks Co-operative Association (INCA), has identified four key barriers to be resolved.

These include calls for planning reform to make it easier, cheaper and quicker to build and upgrade infrastructure, the abolition of business rates on fibre, and laws that require new-build homes to include provisions for full fibre connectivity.

There also concerns that Brexit will make it difficult to assemble the vast workforce required to build out full coverage by 2025. Telcos want guarantees of access to skilled labour and more skills training.

?The industry stands ready to rise to this challenge, but we need a Prime Minister who can provide the direction, idealism and commitment to fulfil this ambition,” said the letter. ?We call on you to give a full commitment that your Government will give us the tools we need to deliver future-proof connections across the UK.

?While the ?3-5bn of public funding indicated by Government will be crucial to deliver connectivity to the hardest to reach areas, a concerted effort is needed from Government to remove significant regulatory barriers in the immediate term. Removing these barriers will 2 enable better use of private and public investment to roll out fibre further and faster.”

Openreach CEO Clive Selley has previously said that the target was a?stretch” but not out of the question if the right support was given to the industry. Meanwhile BT CEO Philip Jansen has lent his support to the idea.

?We welcome the Government’s ambition for full fibre broadband across the country and we are confident we will see further steps to stimulate investment,”he said. ?We are ready to play our part to accelerate the pace of rollout, in a manner that will benefit both the country and our shareholders, and we are engaging with the Government and Ofcom on this.”

BT is not the only company investing in full fibre infrastructure, with Virgin Media, TalkTalk, CityFibre, Hyperoptic and Gigaclear among those building out networks.

By Steve McCaskill

What is CPR?

The ‘Construction Projects Regulation’ aims to break down technical barriers and provide a common technical language to assess the performance of construction products and to harmonise the rules for marketing these products.

Four Key Concepts of CPR:
? A system of harmonised technical specifications
? A framework of notified bodies
? A system of conformity assessment for each product family
? CE marking of products

For more information please click – Understanding CPR

Cable ISP Virgin MediaUK has today announced that they?ve completed the rollout of their 500Mbps+capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP)based DOCSIS/ RFoG broadband and phone network to cover 4,000 extra homes in the Gortonarea of Manchester.

As it stands today Virgin has built a network thatcovers 714,000 premises across the metropolitan region and 94,000 of those havebeen added since 2015 as part of their national Project Lightning networkexpansion, which aims to add an additional 3-4 million premises to their UKcoverage (so far they?ve completed over 1.7 million).

Other than Gorton, Virgin has also been busyworking around the Hurst, Hyde, Littleborough, Bury, Cowlishaw and Didsburyareas of Manchester.

Angeliki Stogia, City Councillor for DigitalInfrastructure, said:

?It cannot be underestimated howimportant connectivity is today as we rely more and more on digital technologyin our everyday life, education and work. So it?s fantastic to see the role outof ultra-fast broadband across the Gorton community, which will have anundeniable benefit for residents and businesses alike.?

Vodafone has announced that their new 5Gnetwork, which promises average mobile broadband speeds of 150-200 Mbps and peaks upto 1Gbps, has now started rolling out into Birkenhead, Bolton, Gatwick,Lancaster, Newbury, Plymouth,Stoke-on-Trent and Wolverhampton after initiallyonly going live in a few major cities.

The live deployment started earlier this month on 3rd July 2019 (here)in the busiest parts of Cardiff, Birmingham, Bristol,Liverpool, London,Manchester and Glasgow (the Isles of Scilly were also on the list). After today’supdate their network is now live in parts of 15 UK towns and cities.

On top of that the operatorsaid they were also widening their 5G roaming footprint today by adding 20towns and cities across Germany to the 35 places already on their 5G Europeanroaming network, which will go live sometime this summer. Once ready both UKconsumers and business customers will be able to roam over 5G in parts ofGermany, Italy and Spain at no additional cost.

NickJeffery, Vodafone UK CEO, said:

?Vodafone’s global presencemeans we can provide our consumer and business customers with 5G in moredestinations than any other UK provider. Combined with our new unlimited dataplans, we are offering customers the best roaming experience ever. They won’thave to hunt for Wi-Fi or rely on often expensive and slow hotel connections;they can use their 5G smartphones to enjoy faster roaming.”

Vodafone added that ?customers can also use[our] newunlimited data plans with 5G roaming,” which they said meansyou won’t be left ?worrying about running out of dataor running up a large bill” (this is also available on their4G network across 77 destinations).However they neglect to mention that roamingdata itself is not in fact ?unlimited“and thesmall print on their website states: ?Roamingdata on all unlimited data plans is capped at 25GB per month in inclusiveroaming & ?6/dayroaming destinations.”

Top 5 Supercomputers from TOP 500 list all sporting petaflops in abundance

By Abigail Opiah

The TOP 500 project has released a list of500 supercomputers, but this time, all 500 systems deliver a petaflop or moreon the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark, with the entry level to thelist now at 1.022 petaflops.

The benchmark the project decided on was Linpack, which means that systemsare ranked only by their ability to solve a set of linear equations, A x = b,using a dense random matrix A.

The top of the list remains largely unchanged, according to TOP500, but hasseen the addition of two new entries in the top 10, one of which was anexisting system that was upgraded with additional capacity.

Here is the top 5!

Summit and Sierra

Two IBM-built supercomputers, Summit and Sierra, installed at the Departmentof Energy?s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and Lawrence LivermoreNational Laboratory in California, respectively, retain the first two positionson the list.

Both derive their computational power from Power 9 CPUs and NVIDIA V100GPUs. The Summit system slightly improved its HPL result from six months ago,delivering 148.6 petaflops, while the number two Sierra system remainsunchanged at 94.6 petaflops.

The Sunway TaihuLight

The Sunway TaihuLight, a system developed by China?s National ResearchCentre of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology (NRCPC) and installedat the National SupercomputingCentre in Wuxi, China, holds the number three position with 93.0petaflops. It?s powered by more than 10 million SW26010 processor cores.

Tianhe-2A

At number four is the Tianhe-2A (Milky Way-2A) supercomputer, developed byChina?s National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) and deployed at theNational Supercomputer Centre in Guangzhou, China.

It used a combination of Intel Xeon and Matrix-2000 processors to achieve anHPL result of 61.4 petaflops.

Frontera

Frontera, the only new supercomputer in the top 10, attained its number fiveranking by delivering 23.5 petaflops on HPL.

The Dell C6420 system, powered by Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 processors, isinstalled at the Texas Advanced Computing Centre of the University of Texas.

Others on the list included, Piz Daint, Trinity, a Cray XC40 system operatedby Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories improves itsperformance to 20.2 petaflops, and the AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure (ABCI)which is installed in Japan at the National Institute of Advanced IndustrialScience and Technology (AIST).

China claims the most TOP500 systems, with 219, followed by the UnitedStates, with 116. Japan is in third place with 29 systems, followed by France,with 19, the United Kingdom, with 18, and Germany with 14.

Researchers develop wireless transceiver ?quadruple the speed of 5G”

The last few months have seen several telecommunications companies ramping up their 5G efforts, with Vodafone switching on its 5G network in some parts of the UK earlier this month.

However,electrical engineers at the University of California have developed wireless transceiver that could operate at ?quadruple the speed of 5G”.

5G offers speeds of operate within the range of 28 to 38 gigahertz, twenty times faster than 4G. However, a team at the Nano scale Communication Integrated Circuits Labs has gone one step further with the development of a end-to-end transmitter-receiver.

The wireless transceiver is a 4.4-millimeter-square silicon chip that boasts radio frequencies of 100 gigahertz thanks to its unique digital-analogue architecture. This brings it into the realm of 6G, which is expected to eventually work at 100 gigahertz and above.

?We call our chip ‘beyond 5G’ because the combined speed and data rate that we can achieve is two orders of magnitude higher than the capability of the new wireless standard,” explained senior author Payam Heydari, NCIC Labs director and UCI professor of electrical engineering & computer science.

?In addition, operating in a higher frequency means that you and I and everyone else can be given a bigger chunk of the bandwidth offered by carriers.”

Wirelesstransceiver targets performance of fibre optics

Researchers in this field have long wanted to develop wireless systems that can offer the same performance and speeds of fibre optic networks, which would have significant implications for the telecommunications industry.

However, they have faced hurdles due to physical limitations in digital processing. NCIC Labs developed a chip architecture that relaxes digital processing requirements by modulating the digital parts in the analogue and radio-frequency domains.

Heydari said that as well as enabling the transmission of signals in the range of 100 gigahertz, the transceiver’s layout means that it uses considerably less energy than current systems at a reduced overall cost.

Transmitters and receivers able to handle high-frequency data communications could also enable emerging wireless technologies such as the internet of things and autonomous vehicles.

Co-author Huan Wang, a UCI doctoral student in electrical engineering & computer science and an NCIC Labs member said:
?Our innovation eliminates the need for miles of fiber-optic cables in data centers, so data farm operators can do ultra-fast wireless transfer and save considerable money on hardware, cooling and power.”

Infinera (NASDAQ: INFN) and Italian service provider Fastweb say they have successfully demonstrated single-wavelength transmission of 500 Gbps on 180-km of Fastweb’s backbone fiber network. The high-speed network transmission trial leveraged Infinera’s Groove platform.

The trial used a live fiber route between Milan and Turin and did not require changes to the route’s amplifiers, tuning, or other elements, the partners say. Fastweb already employs the Groove disaggregated network platform, as well as the Infinera 7300 Multi-Haul Transport Platform and mTera Universal Switching Platform, in its fiber backbone. All three platforms came to Infinera through its acquisition of Coriant; Coriant added 600G capabilities to the Groove system shortly before the acquisition closed (see ?Coriant adds 600G transmission to Groove via CloudWave T”).

The trial aimed to demonstrate Fastweb’s ability to quickly scale capacity on its fiber-optic backbone, which comprises more than 650 nodes. ?Providing our customers with resilient, high-quality, and innovative solutions is in Fastweb’s DNA,” said Andrea Lasagna, CTO at Fastweb. ?As the market for high-performance long-haul transport continues to grow at an accelerated pace, a scalable and simple network approach is required to satisfy the growing demand for bandwidth. This trial confirms the outstanding performance provided by Infinera’s innovative solution, which enables us to deliver a best-in-class customer experience at the highest transmission speeds.”

wHEN

Security & Policing 2019 will take place from Tuesday 5 ? Thursday 7 March 2019.
Join us at Stand D22A
Address: Show Centre, ETPS Rd, Farnborough GU14 6AZ
Telephone: 0207 091 7835

OPENING TIMES

• Tuesday 5 March ? 09:00-16:30
• Wednesday 6 March ? 09:00-16:30
• Thursday 7 March ? 09:00-15:00
  Please note there is no general admittance to Security & Policing, all visitors are subject to Home Office approval

Virgin Media trials10G-EPON with ARRIS

February 11, 2019

Author Stephen Hardy
Editorial Director and Associate Publisher

UK cable operator Virgin Media and communications technology provider ARRIS say they have launched a field trial of 10G-EPON in Cambridgeshire. The collaborators say they can supply 8 Gbps downstream to 50 residences using the 10G-EPON technology.

The trial leverages DOCSIS Provisioning of EPON (DPoE) enabled 10G-EPON modules installed in an ARRIS E6000 Cable Modem Termination System (CMTS). The CMTS,which can reside in a cable system head end or hub, helps supply services to customers over hybrid fiber/coax (HFC) or, in this case, all-fiber networks. ARRIS says it enabled service delivery 12 weeks after initial installation and using Virgin Media’s existing infrastructure. This infrastructure included RF over glass (RFoG) technology, a point-to-point fiber to the premises (FTTP) approach that leverages in-place DOCSIS-enabled network hardware (see “SCTE to develop RF over Glass standards”).

Virgin Media brought in Sam Knows, the official speed test provider of UK telecom regulatory authority Ofcom, to confirm the download and upload speeds trial participants experience. A results screen visible in a video that describes the trial indicates that the upstream and downstream rates aren’t symmetrical; the typical upstream rate has not been revealed.

In the same video, Ben Thomas, head of broadband and value added services at Virgin Media, says that the service provider does not have plans to roll out such high-speed broadband services in the near future.

Evolutionof IXP Architectures in an Era of Open Networking Innovation

December 2018

ByHarald Bock, Infinera

Internet exchange points (IXPs) play a key role in theinternet ecosystem. Worldwide, there are more than 400 IXPs in over 100countries, the largest of which carry peak data rates of almost 10 Tbps andconnect hundreds of networks. IXPs offer a neutral shared switching fabricwhere clients can exchange traffic with one another once they have establishedpeering connections. This means that the client value of an IXP increases withthe number of clients connected to it.

Simply speaking, an internet exchange pointcan be regarded as a big Layer 2 (L2) switch. Each client network connecting tothe IXP connects one or more of its routers to this switch via Ethernetinterfaces. Routers from different networks can establish peering sessions byexchanging routing information via Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and then sendtraffic across the Ethernet switch, which is transparent to this process.Please refer to Figure 1 for different peering methods.

IXPs allow operators to interconnect nclient networks locally across their switch fabrics. Connectivity then scaleswith n (e.g., one 100-Gbps connection from each network to the switchfabric) rather than scaling with n? connections, as is the case whenindependent direct peering is used (e.g., one 10-Gbps connection to each of npeering partners). This leads to a flatter internet, improves bandwidthutilization, and reduces the cost and latency of interconnections, including indata center interconnect (DCI) applications. To avoid the cumbersome setup ofbilateral peering sessions, most IXPs today operate route servers, whichsimplify peering by allowing IXP clients to peer with other networks via asingle (multilateral) BGP session to a route server.

[Native Advertisement] IXPs can be grouped into not-for-profit (e.g.,industry associations, academic institutions, government agencies) andfor-profit organizations. Their business models depend on regulation and otherfactors. Many European IXPs are not-for-profit organizations that rely, forexample, on membership fees. In the U.S. most IXPs are for-profitorganizations. It is important to understand that all IXP operators, whilestill providing public neutral peering services, may also provide commercialvalue-added services (VAS), such as security, access to cloud services,transport services, synchronization, caching, etc.

Over the past few years, content deliverynetworks (CDNs) have been major contributors to the traffic growth of IXPs.IXPs are critical infrastructure for CDNs to keep their transport costs undercontrol. This is facilitated by putting content caches into the same locationsas IXPs put their access switches. Often these locations are neutral colocation(colo) data centers (DCs).

Current IXP infrastructure

While early IXPs in the 1990s were based onFiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI) or Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM),today the standard interconnectivity service is based on Ethernet, as mentionedabove. The L2 IXP switch fabric itself has also evolved from simple Ethernetswitches in just one location, connected via a standard local area network, to InternetProtocol/Multiprotocol Label Switching (IP/MPLS) switches distributed overmultiple sites, which require wide area network (WAN) connectivity over opticalfiber. Utilizing an IP/MPLS switch fabric for the distributed L2 switchingfunction provides better scalability and is more suitable for WAN connectivity.The distribution of the IXP switch fabric over several locations facilitatesaccess for clients and improves resiliency. In most cases, these locations arein metro or regional areas, but extending the IXP fabric to a national orglobal scale is also possible.

Consequently, with more locations andincreasing bandwidth, a flexible and scalable high-performance connectivitynetwork becomes an important strategic asset for IXP operators. For larger IXPs,today?s locations are connected via high-capacity DWDM WAN links ? typically nx 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) today, with higher data rates like n x400GbE in preparation. Client routers connect to the IXP switch fabric withEthernet interfaces of 1/10/100GbE today and potentially 25GbE and 50GbE in thefuture.

Figure 2 shows a high-level standard IP/MPLSarchitecture of a distributed IXP. Client routers connect to IXP provider edge(PE) routers at different sites (e.g., in colo DCs) via standard1/10/100GbE interfaces. (Note: Depending on the business model, the colocationservices may be provided by the IXP as VAS or may be provided by an independentcolo DC provider.) The PE routers are connected to core provider (P) routerswith high-capacity links, often n x 100GbE DWDM. Detailed architecturesare highly customer specific and depend on many factors such as availabilityand ownership of optical fiber, topology, bandwidth, resiliency and latencyrequirements, etc.

It should be noted that althoughIP/MPLS-based L2 switch fabrics are mainly used today, there are alternativeapproaches such as Virtual Extensible Local Area Network (VXLAN) available thatare based on more recent DC connectivity methods. It may well be that thesemethods, which do not change the basic architecture topology, will be deployedmore often in the future.

It may also be worth mentioning that toprovide better resiliency of the IXP infrastructure, especially forhigh-capacity interfaces such as 100GbE, photonic cross-connects (PXCs) areincreasingly being used between client and PE routers. In case of failure orscheduled maintenance, the PXC can switch over from the client router to abackup PE router.

Innovation at IXPs: Disaggregation, SDN, NFV, network automation

Disaggregation, software-defined networking(SDN), network function virtualization (NFV), and network automation, asalready applied in the big ICPs? DC-centric networks, are now increasingly alsobeing used in telco networks and IXPs. As IXP networks are typically morelocalized than telco networks and must cope with less legacy infrastructure andservices, they may be an ideal place to introduce new networking concepts.

Disaggregation and openness speed innovation.Disaggregation, when applied to the IXP router and transport infrastructure,provides horizontal scalability, ensuring that even unexpected growth can beeasily handled without the need for pre-planning of large chassis-based systemcapacity or forklift upgrades.

On top of that, in a disaggregated network,innovation can be driven very efficiently, as network functions are decoupledfrom each other and can evolve at their own speeds. This enables IXPs to introduceadditional steps in interface capacity (e.g., 400GbE or 1 Terabit Ethernet) aswell as single-chip switching capacities (12.8T, 25T, 50T per chip) andfunctionalities (e.g., programming protocol-independent packet processors [P4])seamlessly. At the same time, the underlying electronic and photonicintegration will drastically reduce power consumption and space requirements aswell as the number of cables to be installed.

Openness breaks the dependency on a singlevendor and enables network operators to leverage innovation from the wholeindustry, not just from a single supplier.

Disaggregating the DWDM layer: Open line system

The underlying optical layer combines thelatest optical innovation and end-to-end physical layer automation with an opennetworking approach that seamlessly ties into a Transport SDN control layer.There are a number of industry forums and associations driving the vision ofopen application programming interfaces (APIs) and interworking further,including the Telecom Infra Project?s(TIP?s) Open Optical & Packet Transport project group, which is leading thealignment on information models, and the Open ROADM (reconfigurableoptical add/drop multiplexer) Multi-Source Agreement project, as well as other standardsdevelopment organizations such as the International Telecommunication Union?sTelecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T), which is working to ensurephysical layer interworking.

In addition, advances in open opticaltransport system architectures are creating ultra-dense, ultra-efficient IXPapplications, including innovative 1 rack unit (1RU) modular open transportplatforms for cloud and data center networks that can be equipped as muxponderterminal systems and as open line system (OLS) optical layer platforms.Purpose-built for interconnectivity applications, these disaggregated platformsoffer high density, flexibility, and low power consumption. Designed to meetthe scalability requirements of network operators now and into the future, innovationsin OLSs include a pay-as-you-grow disaggregated approach that enables thelowest startup costs, reduced equipment sparing costs, and cost-effectivescalability.

Many IXPs are deploying open opticaltransport technology to scale capacity while reducing cost, floor space, andpower consumption. Recent examples include the Moscow Internet Exchange(MS-IX), France-IX, Swiss-IX, ESpanix, Berlin Commercial Internet Exchange(BCIX), and the Stockholm Internet eXchange(STHIX).

Disaggregating the Router/Switch: WhiteBoxes, Hardware-independent NOS, SDN, and VNFs

Router disaggregation is well establishedinside DCs. Instead of using large chassis-based routers, highly scalableleaf-spine switch fabrics are being built with white box L2/L3 switches andcontrolled by SDN. Using white boxes together with a hardware-independent andconfigurable network operating system (NOS) provides greater flexibility and enablesIXP operators to select only those features that they really need.

Carrier-class disaggregated router/switchwhite boxes are distinguished by capabilities that include environmentalhardening, enhanced synchronization, and high-availability features, withcarrier-class NOSs that are hardware independent. To ensure the resiliencyrequired, these platforms rely on proven and scalable IP/MPLS softwarecapabilities and support for IP/MPLS and segment routing as well as datacenter-oriented protocols such as VXLAN and Ethernet Virtual Private Network(EVPN). Additional services such as security services that in the past may haverequired dedicated modules in the router chassis or standalone devices can besupported with third-party virtual network functions (VNFs) hosted on the whiteboxes or on standard x86 servers.

Packet switching functionality can beincreased with P4. P4 can be used to program switches to determine how theyprocess packets (i.e., define the headers and fields of the protocols that willneed to be processed). This brings flexibility to hardware, enabling additionalsupport for new protocols without waiting for new chips to be released or newversions of protocols to be specified, as with OpenFlow.

The comprehensive SDN/NFV management functionalityenables IXP operators to introduce advanced features such as pay-per-use,sophisticated traffic engineering, or advanced blackholing for distributeddenial of service (DDOS) mitigation.

Conclusion

IXPs are an integral and important part ofthe internet ecosystem. They provide a way for various networks to exchangetraffic locally, resulting in a flatter and faster internet. To staycompetitive, IXPs are also undergoing a transition from standard Ethernet/IPnetworks to cloud technologies, such as leaf-spine switching fabrics andDCI-style optical connectivity to reduce total cost of ownership, increaseautomation, and facilitate the offering of VAS in addition to basic peeringservices.

Harald Bock is vice president, network and technology strategy,at Infinera.