An Ignoble Experiment

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The recent report that Apple's (NASDAQ: AAPL) late cofounder Steve Jobs hoped to encourage wireless router makers to include a "guest network" option so Wi-Fi's footprint could be spread exponentially is helping focus more attention on Hotspot 2.0, which enables seamless roaming between Wi-Fi networks and also enables seamless data roaming between Wi-Fi and cellular networks. But recent comments from industry executives indicate Hotspot 2.0 has yet to gain widespread adoption, though its impact could be expansive in the future.

In a column, Re/code's Walt Mossberg recollected that Jobs hoped the industry "would encourage people to share their bandwidth with strangers via these guest networks," and he envisioned creation of a consortium of sorts to make this happen. Though the consortium never happened, individual companies--think independent Wi-Fi firm Fon and cable operators Comcast (NASDAQ: CMCSA) and Cablevision (NYSE: CVC), for example--have glommed onto the guest Wi-Fi network concept to expand their individual Wi-Fi footprints.

Meanwhile, service providers are also starting to jump onto the Hotspot 2.0/Next Generation Hotspot (NGH)/Passpoint bandwagon. In April, Time Warner Cable (NYSE: TWC) confirmed its rollout out of "TWCWiFi-Passpoint," a national Wi-Fi network that includes Hotspot 2.0 technology on most of its public access points as well as upgraded encryption. The Wi-Fi Alliance offers a certification program for Hotspot 2.0 devices under its Passpoint brand, hence the use of the term "Passpoint" in Time Warner's Wi-Fi network branding. Hotspot 2.0 has an access point technology counterpart called Next Generation Hotspot (NGH)

Late last month, Cisco announced it is providing Hotspot 2.0 to Orange Romania, which is using the technology to enable its customers to move between cellular and Wi-Fi networks with seamless authentication. (Cisco also recently published a blog post and white paper detailing the Hotspot 2.0 network it enabled for the 2014 Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona this past February.)

Boingo Wireless is also deploying Hotspot 2.0 technology, starting with a high-profile launch at Chicago's O'Hare Airport during September 2013. However, in a recent case study published by the Wireless Broadband Alliance, Boingo spokesman Christian Gunning acknowledged Hotspot 2.0 suffers from a "chicken and egg issue." Many carriers are waiting for more Passpoint-certified devices to arrive on the market before they will invest in Hotspot 2.0 technology, while device vendors want to see more NGH-compliant networks before they commit to certifying their devices...Continued

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Read more about: Selina Lo, Apple
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Today's Top News

1. Sprint, Dish will start fixed TD-LTE tests within a month

By Tammy Parker

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eBook | LTE Advanced Status Report

A Dish Network (NASDAQ: DISH) executive said the company will begin a trial of fixed wireless broadband service with Sprint (NYSE: S) within a month. Dish launched a similar pilot with Sprint wholesale partner nTelos Wireless in Virginia during June and expanded the service availability in July.

Cullen

Tom Cullen, Dish's executive vice president of corporate development, said during the company's second-quarter 2014 earnings call with analysts that the start of the fixed broadband trials has hinged on availability of TD-LTE Band 41 radios that can access Sprint's 2.5 GHz spectrum.

Cullen shared no other information regarding the upcoming trial with Sprint. However, when Dish and Sprint first announced their trial plans during December 2013, they said the deployment would initially be restricted to limited areas in Corpus Christi, Texas.

Dish's trial with nTelos is focused on central and western Virginia and currently includes parts of Charlottesville, Waynesboro, Staunton, Harrisonburg and Roanoke. Dish-nTelos Wireless high-speed Internet is available for $29.99 per month when bundled with a qualifying package of Dish's satellite TV service.

Ericsson (NASDAQ: ERIC) and Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU) provided infrastructure equipment for that trial. Customers must deploy a BandRich ruggedized outdoor router with built-in high-gain antennas to receive the 2.5 GHz LTE signal from nTelos' network sites. Customers are told to expect download speeds of up to 10 Mbps.

Cullen said the point of the broadband trials is to test the business model and assess how many customers the spectrum can adequately support. "Will the model work at 20 MHz, or does it require 40, or does it require 60?" he said, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript of the call.

Cullen said the assumption is that there would be more available spectrum in rural areas, and that excess capacity can be dedicated to fixed broadband. "We think with outdoor antennas on the rooftop, you're going to get better cell radius, the ability to provide more customer coverage off of a single tower, and those are the things that we hope to learn and better define in terms of consumer consumption patterns over the next three to six months," he noted.

Charlie Ergen, Dish cofounder and chairman, said Sprint's 2.5 GHz spectrum is "tailor-made" for delivering wireless fixed broadband service to the home, particularly in the case of low data users who are not streaming a lot of video. "I think that Sprint's got a real key asset there," he added.

An analyst on the earnings call asked Ergen if it might make more sense for Dish to make an offer to buy T-Mobile US (NYSE:TMUS) rather than just partner with Sprint, given that T-Mobile is ostensibly back on the market after Sprint gave up on plans to buy the rival operator.

"Don't know," said Ergen, who went on to extol Sprint's virtues, including its entrepreneurial attitude and competitive new CEO (Brightstar founder Marcelo Claure). "I'd almost say you ain't seen nothing yet, right?" he added.

Ergen expressed admiration for T-Mobile CEO John Legere, but said Sprint is capable of much more given its strong spectrum position.

Satellite TV operator Dish controls a 56 MHz swath of terrestrial spectrum, including 40 MHz in the AWS-4 band and 10 MHz in the 1900 MHz PCS H Block. Industry analyst Craig Moffett of MoffettNathanson Research said in an investor note that a network-sharing deal with Sprint and T-Mobile or an outright acquisition of T-Mobile by Dish now looks more likely than a sale of Dish's spectrum to a carrier, such as Verizon Wireless (NYSE: VZ).

For more:
- see this Seeking Alpha transcript

Read more about: Sprint, Charlie Ergen
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2. AT&T's exec leading ETSI's NFV spec group as it targets interoperability, open-source technology

By Tammy Parker

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3. Mimosa unveils its first 802.11ac gigabit Wi-Fi backhaul radio

AT&T (NYSE: T) is far from alone in pushing to employ interoperable, open-source infrastructure in its future network architecture, as evidenced by the revised mission statement from the network functions virtualization (NFV) industry specification group (ISG), which is now headed by Steven Wright, lead member of the technical staff at AT&T.

The NFV ISG, part of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), held its seventh meeting earlier this month at the Santa Clara Convention Center in California's Silicon Valley, where attendees discussed the ISG's charter and mission. The group's original charter was slated to expire in January 2015. However, the charter was extended by two more years, shifting the effort into "NFV Phase 2," according to the group's official blog in a post authored by Marc Cohn, a senior director for market development at Ciena.

NFV Phase 2 will focus on interoperability, formal testing and formalizing of dialogues with other industry and standards organizations, including projects developing open-source NFV implementations. Further, the ISG has revised its mission statement to state that the group aims to "facilitate the industry transformation and development of an open, interoperable, ecosystem through specification, implementation and deployment experience."

The NFV ISG's former chair, Prodip Sen of Hewlett-Packard, and vice chair, Uwe Michel of Deutsche Telekom, both stepped down in May, opening the way for Wright's election to the lead role during the NFV #7 event as well as the election of NTT DoCoMo's Tetsuya Nakamura as vice chair. Wright and Nakamura are expected to serve two-year terms.

"I look forward to assisting the ISG as it continues to progress towards its goal of an open NFV ecosystem with interoperable implementations," said Wright, who formerly led ETSI's NFV infrastructure working group.

Wright's new role heading up the NFV ISG dovetails nicely with AT&T's planned shift to an IP- and cloud-based network. The operator has sought to establish a beachhead in the virtualized communications environment of the future via its Domain 2.0 supplier program and User-Defined Network Cloud initiative, and open-source is seen as key to its plans.

Marian Croak, AT&T's senior vice president of Domain 2.0 architecture and advanced services development, previously told FierceWireless that the operator aims to get away from using specialized, proprietary hardware that is tightly coupled with vendor software and turn instead toward the use of "commodity-based hardware" that is deemed more flexible and adaptable.

The NFV ISG was officially initiated in January 2013 by seven leading telecoms network operators: AT&T, BT, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telecom Italia, Telefonica and Verizon Communications (NYSE: VZ). The group now includes 226 members, including 37 operators. Further, 23 proof of concepts (PoCs) have been accepted and the ISG has 15 active work items on its plate.

Cohn wrote that the ISG "continues to make solid progress on the NFV Release 1 baseline," with 11 new deliverables from multiple working groups having been made available for industry comment.

"I continue to be pleased with our progress towards NFV release 1, which is targeted towards December," said Diego Lopez, head of technology exploration, global CTO unit, Telefonica I&D, who also serves as NFV technical manager and chair of the NFV technical steering committee. "Each of our technical working groups is making tremendous progress as we worked towards a solid technical baseline, which is critical as NFV Phase 2 gets underway," he added.

A late September meeting of NFV ISG leadership will discuss the proposals and suggestions for NFV Phase 2. The ISG's next full meeting, NFV #8, will run Nov. 17-21 in Chandler, Ariz.

For more:
- see this ETSI blog entry
- see this Light Reading article

Read more about: Interoperability, open source, Marc Cohn
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By Tammy Parker

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4. Range Networks, 2600hz claim open-source partnership enables common platform for cellular, VoIP

A year ago, Mimosa Networks was still firmly in stealth mode. But the Campbell, Calif., company has now released its first last-mile gigabit wireless radio for Internet service providers seeking fiber speeds delivered over the air.

Mimosa's backhaul radio will ship in two versions this fall.

Mimosa's B5 Backhaul radio runs on 5 GHz spectrum and features coordinated Massive MIMO technology, which enables collocated radios to deliver 16 MIMO streams and 4 Gbps of throughput while sharing the same channel. The B5 radio conducts constant spectrum analysis to find the best, interference-free radio link, according to Mimosa.

Mimosa and Quantenna announced back in January that Quantenna's 5 GHz 802.11ac Wave 2 Wi-Fi chipset would be used in Mimosa's unlicensed wireless hardware suite.

Mimosa's other new offering, Mimosa Cloud Services (MCS), provides network-wide planning and analytics, and includes management and monitoring techniques to support networks as they grow.

Jaime Fink, Mimosa cofounder and chief product officer, told Tech Crunch that a single B5 radio can deliver 1 gigabit of throughput for up to eight or nine miles, though the amount of bandwidth falls as the distance grows. However, Mimosa has been running a 60-mile or so link along the California coast that nonetheless gets several hundred megabits of throughput.

"Wireless networks have been historically limited in the ability to deploy fiber speeds economically and on a global scale," says Brian Hinman, CEO of Mimosa, which was founded in 2012. He added that the company intends to create "a broad suite of products at each layer of the Internet access network that will make wireless a scalable Internet solution for all types of communities worldwide."

The backhaul radio will ship this fall in two versions: an antenna-integrated 5 GHz backhaul radio (B5) that lists for $899, and a connectorized radio-only version (B5c) that lists for $839. Mimosa Cloud Services is available now.

Mimosa has so far raised more than $38 million in venture capital funding. In May 2014, it closed on $20 million in a Series C round led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA).

For more:
- see this Mimosa release
- see this Tech Crunch article

Read more about: backhaul, Brian Hinman
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By Tammy Parker

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Forward |

5. Charlotte, N.C.'s CIO divulges why the city did not gain access to FirstNet spectrum

Range Networks' OpenBTS-based radio access networks (RANs) and 2600hz's Kazoo telecom services platform will be integrated to provide what the companies described as an all-software, all-IP wireless network architecture for mobile network operators and private network service providers.

Specifically, the products' integration will create a single switching architecture for cellular, wireline voice over IP (VoIP) and VoIP over Wi-Fi (VoWiFi). The combined solution is also designed to provide higher network resilience in a multi-node RAN deployment, thanks to built-in redundancy and intelligent management of distributed operations. All elements of the system run on low-cost, commoditized Linux servers.

The companies contend their joint offering will facilitate the entry of new market entrants, which can use the open-source solution at a significant cost advantage to traditional mobile networks.

"The combination of Kazoo and the OpenBTS network architecture represents a major leap forward in expanding the reach of new, non-traditional mobile networks," said Edward Kozel, Range Networks CEO.

Range Networks' cellular systems are based on OpenBTS, its open-source, software-defined radio implementation of the GSM radio access network that presents normal GSM handsets as virtual SIP endpoints to an IP-based core. The vendor earlier this year announced OpenBTS 4.0, which included WCDMA data capability and said it was developing LTE support, with the loose goal being to release that by year's end.

2600hz provides voice, video, fax and SMS technologies in both a cloud and dedicated installation environment. Customers include Internet telephony service providers (ITSPs), fiber-optic network providers, channel resellers and mobile network operators. The company also has opened its infrastructure via a set of open access APIs that encourages developers to create their own telecom applications.

For more:
- see this joint release

Read more about: VoIP, Wi-Fi VoIP
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By Tammy Parker

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