An Ignoble Experiment

2. SK Telecom strikes new LTE roaming deal, plans quad-band LTE devices

Concerns over alleged security issues prompted Sprint Nextel (NYSE:S) and Softbank to promise a U.S. lawmaker that Sprint's network will not use network equipment from China's Huawei, which is also being targeted by Canadian lawmakers considering new regulations on foreign wireless suppliers perceived as security risks.

Mike Rogers, (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, confirmed in a statement that Softbank and Sprint have reassured him that once their merger is complete, they will not integrate Huawei equipment into Sprint's wireless network. Further, they promised to make "mitigation efforts to replace Huawei equipment in the Clearwire (NASDAQ:CLWR) network," said Rogers.

Sprint is the majority owner of Clearwire and has proposed to buy the 50 percent of Clearwire that it does not already own.

The Clearwire part of the agreement with Rogers is particularly noteworthy given that as recently as October 2012, Clearwire received U.S. government approval to deploy Huawei gear in its planned TD-LTE network. At that time, Clearwire CTO John Saw told FierceWireless that Samsung and Huawei base stations are deployed at the edge of the network, while the core network equipment is being provided by domestic vendors Cisco and Ciena.

Rogers added he expects Sprint and Softbank to make the same assurances before any approval of the merger deal by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a government body reviewing the national security implications of Softbank's bid to buy 70 percent of Sprint for $20 billion.

"If government approval of the transaction is somehow contingent on an agreement to restrict purchase of equipment from any vendor based on the flag of heritage, then it is a sad day for free and open global trade and it does nothing to secure the network," Bill Plummer, Huawei spokesman, told Bloomberg. "Everyone is global, and every company faces the same cyber challenges."

In October, Congressman Rogers' House Intelligence Committee released a report recommending the United States block acquisitions and mergers involving Huawei and fellow Chinese vendor ZTE. The report also recommended the U.S. government and U.S. companies avoid using equipment from the two Chinese companies due to fears their involvement in critical infrastructure "could undermine core U.S. national-security interests."

Softbank's LTE network in Japan employs equipment from multiple suppliers, including Huawei and ZTE. Softbank has said it does not use Huawei equipment in any of its core network infrastructure, however.

Huawei is also facing great scrutiny in Canada, where the federal government is pondering rules to govern telecom network gear from foreign suppliers, according to Bloomberg. Though no one company is reportedly being targeted by the review plan, Huawei is already barred from bidding on telecommunications contracts for Canada's government networks.

However, Huawei is a network vendor for Canadian operators Wind Mobile, Telus and BCE, the nation's largest phone company.

"We will continue to work transparently with customers and the federal government to address any issues necessary," Huawei spokesman Scott Bradley said in an e-mail to Bloomberg.

In related news, United States recently created a new cyber-espionage review process for U.S. government technology purchases, barring NASA and the Justice and Commerce Departments from buying IT systems unless they are approved by federal law enforcement officials. The process specifically targets gear produced, manufactured or assembled by one or more entities that are owned, directed or subsidized by China.

Though Huawei has been impacted by restrictions on it in certain countries, the Chinese vendor has been running neck and neck with infrastructure market leader Ericsson (NASDAQ:ERIC). Huawei is expected to gain business from select LTE deployments in Europe during 2013, thanks to its aggressive pricing, and is poised to attract substantial business from China's TD-LTE rollouts as well.

For more:
- see this Mike Rogers statement
- see this Bloomberg article and this article
- see this New York Times article (sub. req.)
- see this CNN article
- see this CNET article

Read more about: Telus, M&A, Sprint
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By Tammy Parker

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3. Centri's optimization, policy control technology in early operator trials

SK Telecom has expanded its LTE roaming program to include Globe Telecom of the Philippines. The South Korean operator previously initiated LTE roaming service with CSL in Hong Kong and SingTel in Singapore.

SK Telecom also intends to plans to launch quad-band LTE devices that work at 850 MHz, 1.8 GHz, 2.1 GHz and 2.6 GHz during the second quarter. "These devices carry a great meaning as they mark the first Korean LTE device that can operate in 2.6 GHz band, which is chosen by most mobile carriers across the world for LTE service. With these devices, customers will be able to enjoy LTE service in other countries just like they do in Korea," said the operator.

"Going forward, SK Telecom will expand its strategic partnerships with mobile carriers across the globe, while also focusing on enriching the line-up of devices that function in multiple frequency bands," said Kim Young-Sup, senior vice president and head of the operator's collaboration marketing office.

At this year's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Verizon Wireless CTO Nicola Palmer said the company will announce at least one international LTE roaming partner this year with more to follow. She said Verizon will implement LTE roaming in Canada and other countries. Verizon currently has 3G roaming relationships with more than 200 carriers worldwide, and Palmer said the company hopes to extend those relationships to LTE.

The Global mobile Suppliers Association (GSA) has identified 1800 MHz as the prime band for LTE in the foreseeable future and a key enabler for international roaming. The second most popular band used in commercially launched LTE networks is Band 7 (2.6 GHz) followed by Band 20 (800 MHz) and then Band 4 (AWS).

The GSA also noted adoption of the APT700 MHz band plan by numerous nations across Asia Pacific and Latin America paves the way for global LTE spectrum harmonization.

For more:
- see this SK Telecom release

Read more about: roaming, Verizon
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By Tammy Parker

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4. Broadway concerned about losing 600 MHz TV white space spectrum

Centri Technology, which rolled out its mobile network management and optimization platform in February, is working with two mobile operators--one each in North America and in Europe--on early trials of its technology, according to a top company executive.

Vaughan Emery

Vaughan Emery, Centri's founder and CEO, told FierceBroadbandWireless that the Seattle-based company has no commercial network contracts to announce yet for its Connected Experience Platform (CXP). He said, however, that the company is already working with phone and access point manufacturers to embed pieces of its technology in those platforms.

The startup is gaining traction, having completed a Series B round of funding in November 2012, which brought it $4.5 million in venture capital from investors led by the Matthew Pritzker Company, a private investment firm in Chicago. Centri was founded in 2009 with a technology transfer from the University of Mississippi, which is still an equity holder in the company. Its Series A financing of $1.5 million was raised in 2011 through an angel group located in Seattle.

Centri's CXP is aimed at enabling operators to optimize and secure their data network, apply parental and corporate policies as well as monetize new premium services. "There's finite capacity and exponential growth. Efficiently managing network resources is really our objective, and we do that at a granular level," said Emery.

Centri's primary selling point is that its client-server architecture integrates network management and optimization functions from an end-to-end perspective.

According to a forthcoming white paper commissioned by Centri and written by regular FierceWireless contributor Mark Lowenstein, products such as bandwidth management, encryption and policy control have historically been provided to operators by separate vendors and maintained in operational silos. "The disadvantage of this approach to network management is that these are disparate products, each addressing a particular part of the problem," wrote Lowenstein.

Centri's end-to-end solution includes software that goes into the endpoint, whether that is a connected home, an M2M device, a tablet or smartphone. "That allows us to know the individual device, not just based on IP address or a MAC address," said Emery, adding that he believes traffic shaping needs to be done at the endpoint rather that at the network edge or inside the radio access network.

By linking to the back-office billing functions, Centri can tell what plan a particular device is on and from there apply certain optimizations, policies and traffic shaping to the data traffic. Centri can run its servers in the operator's data center or hosted in a cloud offering as well.

Centri's technology can capture data across heterogeneous networks, or HetNets, which can include both cellular and Wi-Fi components. The vendor uses a technique called reverse proxy to retain visibility of data sent and received from a device, whether it's on an end user's home carrier's cellular network, a visited network or a Wi-Fi network. This type of capability could become key to intelligent Wi-Fi offloading from home or visited cellular networks.

Centri's platform includes patented mobile optimization capabilities based on bi-level caching. The technology analyzes data streams and looks for repeated data patterns, which are actually cached on the send and receive side. "View this as a dynamic cache that's being built using data that [is] sent and received from both endpoints," said Emery.

That caching allows Centri to reduce the amount of data that is pushed across the network because the data is already in a cached state on both the send and receive devices. According to Emery, this improves network capacity and also results in faster response times because the data is already at the send and receive sites.

Emery also touted Centri's Smart VPN product, which uses public stream cipher encryption to simultaneously encrypt data and compress it, helping save device battery life, which can be slashed in half by traditional VPN approaches.

The policy control and network optimization space is heating up, as evidenced by Oracle's recent agreement to acquire Tekelec and Cisco's acquisition of Broadhop last December. Other competitors in this arena include Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE:ALU), Amdocs, Ericsson (NASDAQ:ERIC), Huawei, Juniper Networks, Nokia Siemens Networks, Openet and ZTE. Another startup, Vasona Networks, is using traffic-shaping techniques to help operators optimize networks by the cell.

Read more about: HetNets, policy control
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By Tammy Parker

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5. FirstNet reports progress on restarting BTOP LTE projects

Broadway theaters are growing increasingly concerned about the impact the FCC's planned 600 MHz spectrum auctions will have on wireless microphones used in live performances.

The FCC's planned incentive auction, in which it hopes to persuade broadcast stations to free up some of their 600 MHz spectrum, is aimed at opening up frequencies for licensed mobile broadband services as well as unlicensed operations in TV white space (TVWS), the unoccupied spectrum that sits between TV channels. However, wireless mics and other devices already operate in TVWS.

Wireless microphones and other low power auxiliary devices are currently allowed to operate on unused channels in the UHF and VHF frequency bands used by broadcast television (TV channels 2-51, except channel 37) on both a licensed and an unlicensed basis. The FCC has proposed opening wireless broadband uplink band at channel 51 and expanding downward toward channel 37, with a downlink beginning at channel 36 and expanding downward.

According to the New York Times, the Broadway League, a national trade association, has told the FCC that interference with wireless mics could devastate the sound and stagecraft at major productions. Aside from disrupting performances, such interference might result in physical harm to actors and production workers and ultimately cause significant financial damage to the performance industry.

The Broadway League takes particular issue with a proposed requirement that users of wireless mics register in a database for channel protection, starting a thirty-day notice and comment procedure. The group contends such a scenario is unworkable in numerous instances. For example, touring companies bringing a Broadway musical production to different cities must set up in a matter of days, making adjustments to coordinate with local TV broadcasters and other known users in the vicinity of the theatre.

"There may well be frequencies that are unusable because of regular or sporadic use by unidentified parties. Only after this on-site coordination will a touring-company know whether it will need to register in the database for protection on additional channels. There simply is no opportunity for a thirty-day notice and comment procedure," said the association in comments filed in January.

The Broadway League has proposed that the FCC provide spectrum licensed under Part 74 rules to professional theatrical productions, ensuring they can register directly with one of the TV bands database administrators for protection from interference from unlicensed operations by TV white space devices. Part 74 licenses are currently limited to AM, FM, TV stations, broadcast networks and cable television systems operators, motion picture and television program producers and certain Broadband Radio Service and Educational Broadcast service stations.

This is not the first time theaters and companies have been faced with shifting their wireless mic operations, as they had to acquire new equipment when the FCC opened up the 700 MHz band (frequencies between 698 and 806 MHz, also known as TV channels 52-69). At that time, the FCC reserved two channels for wireless mics near TV channel 37 for wireless mic use. However, those channels are wide enough to accommodate only 15 to 20 wireless mics, or fewer than one-third needed for the Broadway stage production of Mamma Mia!

"The more the FCC auctions off, the smaller our part gets," Tom Ferrugia, director of government relations for the Broadway League, told the New York Times.

The 120 MHz the FCC hopes to get from the 600 MHz incentive auctions is a major piece of the 300 MHz the agency aims to free for mobile broadband by 2015. Broadcaster participation, however, is voluntary, meaning the FCC may garner considerably less than 120 MHz of 600 MHz spectrum for wireless broadband use.

For more:
- see this New York Times article
- see the Broadway League filing

By Tammy Parker

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