Vodafone’s month hints at future strategy

As the operator responsible for the first mobile phone call in the UK,Vodafone has a long and storied history in the world of telecommunications.

But July 2019 will go down as one of the more eventful months in Vodafone’s 30 year history. It started with the launch of 5G services in the UK and concluded with the takeover of Liberty Global’s central European cable networks.

But in truth, the Newbury-based operator has rarely been out of the headlines. Aside from product launches and acquisitions, there have been sales,spin-offs, and tales of boardroom politics.

The events have not only underlined the challenges facing the company but have also given an even clearer indication of the company’s future strategy.

˙ Vodafone agrees deal for Liberty assets

˙ Vodafone-Liberty deal is big for EU telecoms

˙ 5G in the UK: the what,where and how much

Takeovers

Convergence has been the buzzword at Vodafone UK for several years.Achieving growth has become more difficult in the mobile market, meaning the company has moved to aggressively expand its fibre footprint through network builds, acquisitions and partnerships.

The ?18.4 billion takeover of Liberty Global assets in the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary and Romania was one the final acts of former CEO Vittorio Colao’s tenure and is designed to accelerate this strategy even further.

Earlier in July, Vodafone received EU approval for the transaction ? one of the final barriers to completion? and on the final day of the month, the deal was sealed.

But the takeover has increased Vodafone’s debt and its balance sheet,leading some to question the wisdom of the deal at a time when significant capital is required to invest in the spectrum and infrastructure upgrades required for 5G networks.

The 5G spectrum auctions in Germany and Italy in particular have resulted in a couple of nasty surprises ? and billions of euros in licensing fees.

Dividend cut

These factors, along with others, resulted in the company announcing it would reduce its dividend for the first time as an independent company. Such a move would be unpopular at the best of times, but investors are usually more tolerant if the cut is used to fund a major investment programme that promises long-term gains.

However, Vodafone shareholders ? already concerned at the declining value of their stakes ? were reportedly unhappy at the move because the company had promised only six months prior that the dividend would not be slashed.

In a bid to appease shareholders, both Group CEO Nick Read CFO Margherita Della Valle requested a 20 per cent cut in their share bonuses.

Vodafone has undertaken several measures to reduce its debt pile,including the sale of Vodafone New Zealand for ?2.1 billion ? a deal also completed on the final day of the month.

Tower spin-off

But it is through infrastructure sharing and monetisation that Vodafone sees the most promise ? not just in improving its balance sheet, but also in making network rollout more efficient.

Vodafone has more than 110,00 towers across the continent, estimated to be worth more than ?12 billion. These assets have the capability to generate new revenue streams and accelerate the pace and scope of its 5G rollout.

It’s why earlier this month, Vodafone confirmed plans to create Europe’s largest tower company, commanding control of nearly 62,000 towers in ten countries. The company is tasked with identifying monetisation options -such as offering space to third parties – and could eventually float on the stock exchange.

Any revenue generated from the business or from an IPO would be used to reduce its debt.

Networking sharing

Vodafone itself is pursuing an active and passive network sharing strategy, believing this will enable it to roll out 5G quicker, cheaper and faster, as demonstrated by two other deals this July.

In the UK, Vodafone has expanded its passive infrastructure sharing agreement with O2 to cover 5G. The ‘Cornerstone’ joint-venture will have greater powers will be given to Cornerstone in order to improve efficiencies and identify monetisation options.

And in Italy, Vodafone is merging its masts into TIM’s tower business in exchange for cash and a stake in the company. The enlarged INWIT will now control 22,000 masts, increasing the potential for monetisation, and will have two anchor tenants in the form of TIM and Vodafone Italy.

As one of the world’s largest mobile operators, its never dull at Vodafone. The past decade has seen it contend with challenging market conditions, make major acquisitions and sales, and embark on major investment programmes.

There’s no doubt that there are challenges ahead, but a bounce in the firm’s share price suggests the moves it has made are inspiring some confidence among investors about its future prospects.

For now, however, it will be hoping that August is quieter than July.

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

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.”

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.

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.”

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.?

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.

Those in the biometrics industry know intuitively that facial recognition has advanced by leaps and bounds in recent years, but a new report from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) puts numbers to just how far the state of the art has come.

NIST, which is the world’s premier agency in the evaluation of biometric technologies against defined standards, has just published its latest report, ?NIST Interagency Report(NISTIR) 8238, Ongoing Facial Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT)”; and the organization has compared the data therein to previous reports, finding significant jumps in accuracy and other metrics.

Assessing 127 software algorithms from 39 providers ? ?the bulk of the industry”, the organization said in a statement ? NIST found that on average,between 2014 and 2018, facial recognition technology ?got 20 times better at searching a database to find a matching photograph”. Other metrics further elaborate the progress. In 2010, five percent of algorithms failed to match a face in a given database. This year, only 0.2 percent failed in their searches.

That having been said, ?[t]here remains a very wide spread of capability across the industry,” commented NIST computer scientist Patrick Grother. But Grother attributed much of the recent advancement to machine learning technology, and in particular to systems based on convolutional neural networks, a machine learning structure inspired by biological processes. ?About 25 developers have algorithms that outperform the most accurate one we reported in 2014,” thanks to the emergence of these technology, Grother suggested.

NIST’s full report, and those from previous years, are available from the organization’s website.

December 2018 ? by Alex Perala