Telecommunication News

Sure, it looks like an iPhone in a Sidekick body. But slightly awkward design aside, the T-Mobile G1 Google Phone establishes Android as a slick new entrant in the smartphone space. It promises to be a fun, powerful Web-centric handheld when it launches on Oct. 22.

The G1 starts out looking like a somewhat chunky (4.6 x 2.1 x .62) PDA-phone, topped by a big 320×480 touch screen. The touch screen is wonderfully quick and responsive. Below the screen are five buttons and a small, slightly slippery track ball. Slide the screen to the right and turn the device 90 degrees, though, and it reveals a full QWERTY keyboard of slightly rubbery, nicely separated keys. Theres a miniUSB charging port on the bottom, and a MicroSD memory card slips into a difficult-to-open slot to the right of the keyboard. (The phone comes with a 1GB card.) On the back, theres a 3-megapixel still camera.

The real news here, of course, is Android, Googles all-singing, all-dancing, all-open-source new operating system. It ran quickly and efficiently on the G1s 400 Mhz Qualcomm processor. Unlike with the iPhone, there seem to be several ways to accomplish any task. You can scroll through Web pages with your finger or with the trackball. To search contacts, you can swipe with your finger or start typing on the keyboard. To dial the phone, you can tap the Dialer icon or the physical Phone button.

Theres something ideological about all these options. Apple makes it clear that theres one way to do things, Apples way, and its the best way. But Google says theyre about openness, open source and open choices. That makes for an interface thats a little bit more confusing than the iPhones (but still far, far easier than Windows Mobile) and more customizable for different tastes.

The G1 starts out with a desktop thats a lot like your PC desktop, with four standard application icons and a clock widget you can move around. You can flick left or right to find two more black desktops, or pop out the phones full application menu from a tab on the right. The application menu looks a lot like the iPhones home screen: big, clear icons for various apps. To dial the phone, you can either use the physical keyboard or a Dialer app with a virtual keyboard. We didnt feel any haptic force feedback on the touch screen, though that becomes a lot less important when you have a physical keyboard.

In our hands-on time, we couldnt test the G1s reception or phone calling ability. The G1 works on T-Mobiles 3G network, on foreign 3G networks, and on GSM EDGE networks all over the world, including in the US. The G1 also has Wi-Fi, though you cant use it for phone calls. We got 600-700 kbps on a speed test Web site using T-Mobiles 3G connection, which is a decent speed. You wont be able to use the G1 as a 3G modem for your PC, T-Mobile execs said at the G1s launch.

The G1 works with mono (but not stereo) Bluetooth headsets and has voice dialing on board. We couldnt find a dedicated wired headset jack presumably, itll use the USB port for wired headsets. T-Mobile says the phone has 130 hours standby time and up to 5 hours talk time, which is good for a 3G phone

The G1s contacts, calendar and e-mail apps all sync with Googles online services, T-Mobile reps said. The calendar is sleek and simple. The contact book includes presence information on Google Talk, and lets you dial, e-mail or IM with a tap. In general, the PIM applications use large fonts and a lot of white space - theyre easy to read, but they could stand to pack a little more information onto one screen.

Androids browser, which T-Mobile reps described as Chrome Lite, looks great. It had the best JavaScript performance of any mobile browser weve seen yet, popping down even complex JavaScript calendars that the iPhone struggles with. Its got a lot of nice little flourishes like autosuggesting URLs based on your history.

But instead of loading pages in zoomed-out mode, it loads them zoomed in, which makes it tough to get an initial overview of the page. You have to tap twice to zoom out, then you can scroll around the page using a magnifying glass icon and zoom back in. Fonts and graphics look beautiful, but as with the iPhone, theres still no Flash.

There are separate Gmail and e-mail icons, though the e-mail program can also handle Gmail. It pushes Gmail and pulls IMAP accounts. The IM program handles AIM, Google Talk, Windows Live and Yahoo!. Once again, it prefers Google services - Google Talk online status is integrated into the contact book, but none of the other IM statuses are.

Instead of Apples App Store, Android has the Market, which divides downloadable applications into applications and games. At launch, the device had 23 applications and 8 games were sure that number will improve. Theres about 50MB of free memory on the phone to load apps into I wish there was more, but you can probably also load apps onto your MicroSD card.

The G1 doesnt seem to be equipped for business work. Theres no Exchange syncing yet, and no way to edit Microsoft Office documents. The E-mail program can read Word, Excel and PDF documents, reps said at the phones launch. But this doesnt seem to be threatening the Blackberry much yet.

The Google Maps app on the G1 is, as expected, the best of its kind. Not only does it load maps quickly and beautifully, it has a compass mode that shows Street View facing the direction youre facing at the moment. Cool. It also uses GPS, though not to any great extent yet. Presumably third party programs will come along with better GPS capabilities.

For music and video, theres a pretty standard-issue music player that seems to play all of the usual unprotected formats. The G1 wont come with any desktop syncing software, T-Mobile reps said at the launch. But it will come with a free app to download music directly from Amazons MP3 store, over Wi-Fi networks to the phone.

Since this is a Google phone, of course it has a YouTube application. The YouTube app seems to show a subset of videos, just like Apples YouTube app. When we loaded a video over 3G, it appeared in a window slightly smaller than the screen. It looked pixelated, and although it was smooth the frame rate felt low.

The G1 has a 3-megapixel still camera that we didn’t get to test. It cant record video.

The T-Mobile G1 will sell for $179, with data plans costing $25 and $35/month on top of your voice plan. Thats at least $5 more than T-Mobile charges for data on the rest of their smartphones, which is frustrating, but its about what AT&T charges for iPhone data ($30). This looks like an exciting new device and we look forward to reviewing it in full before its retail launch on Oct. 22.

In what appears to be a first for carriers, Verizon Business, working with Nokia Siemens Networks, has announced successful transport trials carrying 100 Gbps throughput. The test set new records, according to Verizon, for both distance, at more than 1,040 km over field fiber, and performance, transmitting the full 100 Gbps payload over a single wavelength. Moreover, the field trial, conducted in north Dallas, mixed 10 and 40 Gbps signals on the same system with better results than with “conventional transmission.”

The test’s lynchpin platform is the Nokia Siemens hiT 7500 ultra-long-haul DWDM unit, which uses multi-level modulation, polarization multiplexing and coherent detection to carry signals over breakthrough distances at higher speeds, reducing chromatic dispersion and polarization-mode-dispersion tolerance than previously available. The system provides up to 80 channels, each able to carry a variety of 10, 40 or 100 Gbps, for a total capacity of 8 Tbps in a serial configuration. That number seems to be consistent with other leading-edge optical vendors claims for their platform’s capacity.

One of the big selling points for the technology is its ability to enhance existing technology platforms, paving a graceful migration path to the latest cutting-edge optical switches such as the hiT 7500. With its ability to carry multi-rate signals over the same channel, the hiT 7500 can support capacity upgrades to 100 Gbps per channel on existing, lower-speed links over similar distances, without requiring modification to the physical network, reducing implementation times and costs. Verizon has also stated its desire to use GMPLS for inventory management as well.

The announcement comes on the heels of other optical news from the Verizon camp, made earlier this week. The carrier demonstrated its ongoing commitment to GMPLS, which sets up a command plane for the optical layer, with GMPLS interoperability tests, incorporating gear from Ciena, Fujitsu Network Communications, and Tellabs. Verizon claims it’s the first such successful trial run over a commercial network.

Specifically, Verizon is working on creating point-and-click provisioning capabilities for optical channels and an external network-to-network interface that will enable traffic to cross carrier boundaries, or even separate domains of a single carrier, while maintaining key service parameters such as QoS and security.

It’s still very early days, but Verizon’s GMPLS technology is not entirely restricted to field trials. The carrier is currently using a GMPLS control plane to deliver a broadband-on-demand service in New York City. That service was announced just last month, though, so it’s hard to know how well network performance has fared thus far.

A new technology, known as Optojack, that enables the establishment of intelligent optical demarcation points to monitor advanced optical services has been announced by Adva Optical Networking at Broadband World Forum.

Optojack provides optical demarcation and service monitoring at the handoff point between carrier networks, as well as at the demarcation point between the carriers and the customer network. Adva says Optojack is designed to enable remote Operations, Administration and Maintenance (OAM) of key optical network elements in the acess and backhaul portions of the networks.

Analogous to Adva’s successful Etherjack technology, Optojack provides the ability to monitor and test wavelength-based services, a missing service provider requirement today. All too many times providers deliver optical services to customer locations without any visibility into the health or status of the delivered traffic. Additionally, during turn-up or test, there is no way to perform the loopbacks and remote testing from which the most other non-optical services benefit. Without a clear demarcation point that delineates one carrier’s network from the next, or the carriers network from the customer’s, it is challenging for the provider to cost-effectively monitor, manage and troubleshoot an optical service.

Optojack is a Small Formfactor Pluggable (SFP) transceiver-based solution which is compliant with the MSA (SFP MultiSource Agreement) and can be integrated into any SFP-based equipment, including Adva’s flagship FSP 3000 and FSP 150 solutions.

Dr. Christoph Glingener, CTO of Adva Optical Networking commented that Optojack was an invaluable tool to help carriers offer differentiated services to a demanding customer base.

“Due to the competitive nature of our industry, intelligence about the network and the service can be a service provider’s secret weapon”, added Glingener. “No matter the underlying protocol, Optojack allows loopbacks and other key monitoring techniques that provide into network services.”

Singapore has awarded a contract to build the infrastructure for next generation national broadband network (Next Gen NBN) with 1 Gbps capabilities and beyond to OpenNet, a local-Canadian consortium.

The government will provide a grant of up to S$750 million (US$528 million) to the consortium to support the rollout of the new infrastructure. The Fiber to the Home (FTTH) network will achieve 95% coverage to residences and offices by June 2012, two-and-a-half years ahead of the 2015 deadline spelled out in the country’s “10-year intelligent nation” masterplan (iN2015).

In fact, 60 percent of homes and offices can expect to have access by 2010 to this ultra-speed network which will pave the way for innovative services. The next generation broadband network will be a strategic enabler that will sharply enhance productivity of businesses and transform how the country’s residents work, live, learn and play.

Apart from Singapore Telecommunications Limited (SingTel), 30 percent, and Canadian-based Axia NetMedia Corporation, 30 percent, the other members of the consortium are Singapore Press Holdings Limited, 25 percent and SP Telecommunications Pte Ltd, 15 percent.

To achieve a vibrant and competitive next generation broadband market, the government has made “effective open access” a condition in the award of the contract. It is believed that the authorities are careful about ensuring fairness and cost efficiency to customers, as a result of earlier dispute between SingTel and Singapore’s second fixed-line and wireless operator, Starhub Limited, over fees being charged for last mile broadband connection to customers.

With the contract for building of infrastructure awarded, there will be separate submissions due in November 2088 from pre-qualified prospective operating companies for the operation of the ultra-speed broadband network. The company selected to operate the network can get funding of up to $250 million (US$176 million).

OpenNet will make use of existing underlying passive infrastructure such as ducts, manholes and exchanges belonging to SingTel for the deployment of the new fiber network. Subsequently, SingTel will transfer these facilities to a new asset company, a neutral entity, which will independently and separately manage the infrastructure. In addition, SingTel will take steps to reduce its stake in this asset company.

OpenNet will deploy and own all the fiber optic cables and offer whole dark fiber services to downstream operators on a non-discriminatory basis. The consortium will offer attractive wholesale prices of S$15 (US$10.50) per residential fiber connection and S$50 (US$35.20) per month per non-residential connection to operating companies which will be appointed in due course.

To encourage owners to connect their homes and businesses to the network, OpenNet is required to waive installation charges for home and building owners when the network first reaches their premises. After 2013, OpenNet will also fulfil all subsequent requests to install fiber termination points in homes, offices and buildings.

The consortium estimates that construction of the network will cost S$1 billion (US$704 million) while operating costs over the 25-year license period could be up to S$2 billion (US$1.4 billion).

Nordic telecommunications group TeliaSonera is taking controlling stakes in two Asian mobile operators in Nepal and Cambodia. The Stockholm-based telco group is investing US$488 million altogether in Spice Nepal Private Limited in Nepal and Applifone Co in Cambodia.

Through the purchase of 51 percent stake in TeliaSonera Asia Holding from Kazakhstan’s Visor Group, the Nordic telco group gets 80 percent stake in the Nepalese operator with 100 percent ownership of Cambodia’s Applifone. Visor Group retains ownership of 49 percent in TeliaSonera Asia Holding and the transaction is expected to be completed on October 1.

As Nepal’s second largest mobile operator, Spice Nepal serves 1.6 million subscribers or about 41 percent of the market share. Applifone is a start-up mobile operator in Cambodia with more than 97,000 subscribers or about 3 percent market share.

The multi-million dollar investment is in line with earlier announcement by TeliaSonera that it was looking to emerging markets in Asia for growth. The group has set its sights on markets of between 10 and 20 million population with less than 20 percent cellular penetration. Nepal and Cambodia have a combined population of 43 million, low mobile penetration and are growing economies.

Following disclosure of second quarter financial results in July this year, the group declared it was seeking job cuts of 2,900 in Sweden and Finland over an 18-month period aimed at achieving savings of US$830 million. The release of that quarter’s results showed that growth was due to foreign businesses including mobile operations in Russia, Turkey and the Eurasia division. More than half of its operating income is derived from Asia and Eastern Europe. The telco group was formed from the merger of Sweden’s Telia and Finland’s Sonera in 2002.

In an earlier development in September, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the group, TeliaSonera International Carrier announced it built a second point of presence in Singapore in an expansion of its global backbone into Asia. It chose Singapore because of its status as the Internet hub of Southeast Asia. The carrier owns and manages over 43,000 kilometers of fiber optic cable and has more than 100 points of presence across Europe, the U.S. and Asia.

The overwhelming majority of home wiring is perfectly suitable as a conduit for IPTV in a HomePlug network. When it isn’t, however, carriers are at a loss to say why and the homeowners are annoyed that the carriers can’t correctly install a home network.

“They (carriers) don’t have tools that provide them with the diagnostic capabilities for a reliable network,” said Elsa Chan, director of business development for HomePlug technology vendor Asoka USA. “We came out with a tool that provides them an understanding of the wiring in the home and the delivery of the service … information on not only bandwidth (but) packet loss, jitter, latency and a lot of information that that lets them understand why there’s pixelization happening.”

The toolset, priced at US$600 and available late in the first quarter of 2008, includes three adapters and a CD. It helps an installer diagnose whether a problem is with an individual outlet and can be resolved by moving to another spot; whether nearby noisy appliances are creating a problem and can be filtered; or if the home wiring is bad and the homeowner needs an electrician.

“Ninety-nine percent of the time in the deployments we’re seeing today—and we have hundreds of thousands of IPTV deployments running today with our technology (with AT&T and Bell Canada, among others)—it just works; you plug it in and it works,” said Dano Ybarra, Asoka’s CEO. “This is for that one percent of the time when you plug it in and something’s wrong. Rather than just walking away, they can figure out what is wrong.”