LTE “world premiere” by TeliaSonera

Well, it seems 12.December.2009 was the day, the TeliaSonera guys did it first than anybody else: the first LTE (Long Term Evolution) commercial service is up and running (press release here) in the cities of Stockholm (Sweden) and Oslo (Norway).

They name it like a 4G service, but that’s not quite true…  the “real” 4G is the one defined by IMT-Advanced requirements (info here and here).

Anyway, this is a great achievement!  especially when some of us (rest of the world?) are still struggling to get a decent, reliable  and stable 3G network…

Switch where you can, route where you must!

Long time no see…  today while attending a LightReading webinar (Evolution to Packet Optical Transport) about the all new P-OTS (Packet Optical Transport Systems) boxes there was a sentence from one presenter (E\\\ guy) that really said it all:  “Switch where you can, route where you must!“

It isn’t a new dilemma (in fact it’s an old debate on routing versus switching), but taking into account the cost of 10G and 100G routing ports, maybe this same sentence still applies today,… I risk to say, more then ever!

And yes, I’m convinced the P-OTS boxes might help to decrease the need for (unnecessary) routing.

What do you think?

hello 2009!, bye bye Nortel…

Hi everybody, happy new year!

It’s true, we reached 2009 but started with some sad news from Nortel Networks, according the official announcement they are starting a “Financial Restructuring”, but basically this nice and fancy title means they are probably  going to be “cut into peaces” and sold in parts.  Is Nortel Networks definitively out of the Telecom business?

Some more info at LightReading, here and here.

it’s called “resilience”!

On past friday (19.December.2008), France Telecom announced that three major undersea cables in the Mediterranean Sea have been cut, according the press release the Sea-Me-We3,  Sea-Me-We4 and FLAG have been cut during friday morning somewhere between the island of Sicily and Tunisia. France Telecom is a stakeholder in the two Sea-Me-We cables (southeast Asia, Middle East, Western Europe) while FLAG cable is owned by Reliance Globalcom.

The cuts  had impact not only on voice traffic but also on data traffic, some countries from Asia and Middle East almost went out of communications towards Europe (including Internet). Main figures according French Telecom (estimate on the voice traffic – in percentage of out of service capacity):  Maldives (100 percent outage), India (82 percent), Qatar (73 percent), Djibouti (71 percent), United Arab Emirates (68 percent) and Pakistan (51 percent). The cuts forced operators to reroute their traffic between Europe and the Middle East + Asia/Pacific, most traffic is currently being rerouted through the U.S.   Well, above statistical info is enough, if you want more please read the news at LightReading or Reuters!

I was just a bit curios about this cable cut thing…. how is such a massive submarine cable cutted?  the most similar experience I have is when I hit the CAT-5 cable at home (yes, I’m still using cables, no wireless) and the Ethernet router comes to me at high speed until hitting the wall… then, I’m also in “100 percent outage” state 

After a little research I found out that events like this (undersea cable cuts) are happening all the time, on average once every three days and the major causes are cables rubbing against rocks on the sea floor… or from accidents involving ships anchors! (and of course, there are also some conspiracy theories related to cable cuts).

While some of the cuts are almost harmless, other might have big impacts on communications (like the ones mentioned in this post) since the alternative paths are few (and normally have higher routing costs) which might create some bottlenecks on the alternative routes. It’s in cases like this that we might be able to observe the differences between the distinct operator networks, some of them having guaranteed resilient paths, while others might not be prepared for such drastic scenarios (main communication links going down…).

resilience my friends, that ’s the key,  don’t forget it while making contracts with network operators…

have a nice Christmas!

inspirethenewlife.com by Tellabs

I was browsing YouTube searching for some interesting video content related to Telecom (just plain curiosity) and found one of the Tellabs videos, which pointed me to the inspirethenewlife initiative by Tellabs. Of course it’s a marketing oriented site (they have to shell their products!), but it’s also true the website does have some nice content… check the podcasts here, and enjoy them.

have got to admit that the Get Schooled Podcasts are nice! (the entry banner remenbers me some old comics )

update : of course, for Video content on Telecom Industry we cannot forget the Light Reading TV!

Let’s get to the basics: Tier 1 network definition…

note: this post is simply to clarify the Tier-1 carrier / operator definition, I know this isn’t the number one problem in the world but it happens that I was curious about it… so, forget about criticize on this point! I’m just generating some entropy

While reading some papers I’m frequently confronted with the so-called “Tier-1 carriers”… the first impression is always something like: “tier-1 operator is a very, very big operator which uses it’s communication infrastructure to reach anywhere without collaboration from other operators…” but is it really like that?

There are several definitions out there, some people say it is the number one ISP from a country, another say it is a ISP which possess it’s own international backbone… which is not (according my opinion) a feasible one… just imagine at the associated costs!

A quick look at the Wikipedia for Tier-1 Network… “A Tier 1 Network is an IP network (typically but not necessarily an Internet Service Provider) which connects to the entire Internet solely via Settlement Free Interconnection, commonly known as peering. Another name for a Tier 1 network is “transit-free”, because it does not receive a full transit table from any other network“. (just for completeness, peering shall be understood as the exchange of data traffic between different ISP without charge, for mutual benefit of course)

…which for itself doesn’t completely clarify the definition of Tier-1… after googling around I give it a try on ITU-T Terms and Definitions Database:

• Tier 1 – “ENUM (TElephone NUmber Mapping) level in the tiered architecture corresponding to the E.164 Country Code (CC), i.e., .e164.tld. Records at this level contain pointers to Tier 2 for an E.164 number“
• ENUM tier 1 manager – “The entity (ITU Member State(s) or Administration(s)) responsible for the management of the domain for the ENUM CC Level“
• Tier 2 – “ENUM level in the tiered architecture corresponding to the E.164 number, i.e., ..e164.tld. bRecords at this level contain NAPTR (Naming Authority Pointer) pointers for an E.164 number“

So, according ITU-T definition, could we say a Tier 1 network is directly associated with the ENUM Country Code? Is a Tier 1 Network Operator the number one carrier on a certain country independently of the fact it could buy network capacity from other providers?…

At least for me the definition of Tier 1 network is not really concise… I will still think of a Tier 1 network operator as the one that is most closely near the “Internet center”, the one that have full access to the global Internet Routing Table and don’t buy network capacity from other providers (although they do peer with other Tier-1 networks).

On the other hand, Tier-2 operators rely on network connections/transit bought from Tier 1 networks (and also on peering with other Tier-2) to reach other users (especially in cases where users are very far away, in geographical terms).

For last we have the Tier 3 operators, which depend almost completely on Tier 2 networks for network access. We may think of Tier 3 networks as a kind of regional network with very limited scope.

Comments on this topic are very welcome!

2007 Top Ten everything!

So… it seems true, 2007 is indeed over. It’s time to go for a “quick” 2007 review!

This year, the Light Reading folks did a very nice compilation of most interesting Telecom issues from 2007, it’s really a must read, here it goes:

• 2007 Top Ten: Optical Stories “100-Gig is awfully big, Smellabs is smarting, and Infinera makes all the right moves in our list of top optical networking stories of 2007“

• 2007 Top Ten: Cable Fables & Lessons Learned “From a bandwidth crunch to a regulatory jihad and a hammer-toting granny with ‘tude, cable had its hands full in ‘07“

• 2007 Top Ten: Big OSS Stories “IT giants and India have been at the heart of the sector’s M&A action“

• 2007 Top Ten: Services Stories “From FMC to IPTV to (voice) SMS and all the way to UMA, we give you this year’s top services stories from the Light Reading stable“

• 2007 Top Ten: Stock Rockets “Some next-gen communications stocks sizzled in 2007. Here’s our list of the year’s biggest gainers“

• 2007 Top Ten: Techs That Flopped “What’s more fun than failure?“

they even had time for a kind of 2007 Google satire!… 2007 Top Ten: Googly Moments “For a company in the business of shoving ads down our throats, Google sure covered a lot of odd terrain in 2007“

last but not the least, let’s have a look on what 2008 might have for us – 2007 Top Ten: Technologies to Watch “What technologies are going to make a big splash in the next 12 months?“

Happy new year!*

(*) – if possible, with lot’s of money on the Telecom Business…

ITU-T Recommendations

I must say ITU-T Recomendations are plain boring! (I mean… interesting )

Currently decoding G.8080/Y.1304 (06/2006) – “Architecture for the automatically switched optical network (ASON)”.

Anyway, they are needed in this ultra-tech world we are living in, it’s kind of the civil-code for Telecommunications. Whiteout them, interoperability on telecom systems would be a complete chaos. Off course, we can’t also forget about IETF!

IETF vs ITU-T on T-MPLS EtherType

Did someone forgot to change the default Ethertype value on T-MPLS? it seems so…

According an article on NetworkWorld and ComputerWorld, there is a kind of “war” undergoing between IETF (The Internet Engineering Task Force) and ITU-T (International Telecommunication Union) started by allegations from IETF that current T-MPLS specification by ITU-T could lead to massive interoperability issues for service providers.

T-MPLS stands for Transport-MPLS and defines a suite of specifications and architectures in order to allow MPLS traffic to run over an Ethernet provider backbone. The problem seems to be on some shared codepoints (including EtherType, which is a field on Ethernet frame that indicates the protocol being transported) between T-MPLS and MPLS standards.  Since they aren’t fully compatible (due to different technology implementation), according IETF, T-MPLS should use different EtherType in order to avoid any confusion in operational networks.

It is our opinion that the use of common Ethertypes for IETF MPLS and T-MPLS in the manner in which ITU-T SG 15 is currently progressing represents a mutual danger to both the Internet and the Transport network that will carry T-MPLS and this should not be advance

You can read the IETF open-letter here: Letter from IETF to ITU regarding T-MPLS.

On the other way, ITU-T argues that T-MPLS will only be used in the provider network (encapsulating MPLS traffic from client network), as such they would be deployed in disjoint networks leaving no space for protocol conflicts.

T-MPLS working group is undergoing some meetings in Stuttgard (Germany), on which this issue should also be discussed.

I really don’t get it, why didn’t ITU-T defined a new EtherType for T-MPLS in the fist place? anyway, this also sounds a little like politics… “you stolen my EtherType idea! I will not allow it! give it back to me!” (sorry, couldn’t resist!)

Cheers!