Wireless network infrastructure innovation
LTE infrastructure innovation
Winners: TeliaSonera and Ericsson
World’s first commercial LTE network
TeliaSonera launched 4G services to customers in Stockholm and Oslo at the end of 2009. TeliaSonera’s current 4G networks cover the central city areas of both.
The first commercial 4G/LTE site was unveiled in May 2009, and services began on December 14.
The 4G network roll-out will continue to Sweden’s 25 largest municipalities and recreation areas and to Norway’s four largest municipalities. TeliaSonera was also the first operator to make a live 4G connection in Finland.
Ericsson has been driving the development and roll-out of LTE by making a strong, compelling case to its customers and highlighting the benefits that LTE technology can bring. Ericsson has filed more than a quarter of all essential LTE patents, been the largest contributor to 3GPP specifications and holds the largest number of existing LTE contracts today.
Ericsson’s LTE offering includes radio, core and backhaul as well as professional services and embedded modules bringing connectivity to portable consumer electronic devices.
LTE infrastructure innovation
Winners: CSL and ZTE
World’s first dual-band commercial network
CSL and ZTE demonstrated LTE technology in September 2009 — the first LTE demostration in Hong Kong — and showed that single cell throughput could reach up to 127 megabits a second. At that conference, CSL announced it would build the first LTE commercial network in Hong Kong in Q3 2009: the first commercial LTE network in Asia and the first dual-band LTE network — 1800 and 2600 megahertz — in the world.
The LTE project in Hong Kong covers various scenarios such as dense urban areas with skyscrapers and highways.
Next G, the software-defined radio HSPA+ service launched by CSL in March 2009,can be smoothly upgraded to LTE, and achieve GSM/WCDMA/LTE common mode and co-sites. This networking solution can provide a true mobile broadband connectivity with seamless coverage, highest standards of customer experience and business productivity.
The system is based on a mature future-oriented software-defined radio unified platform, protecting the operator’s existing investments, enabling coexistence of 2G, 3G, and 4G systems.
Green base station innovation
Winners: Vodafone and Huawei
Green compact base station
The EasyGSM BTS is the industry' s first all IP-based and 100% green compact base station, researched, designed and developed at the Huawei/Vodafone joint radio mobile innovation centre in Madrid.
The system has been specially designed and developed to enable operators to reduce power consumption, use green energy, save backhaul, decrease capex and opex and extend wireless coverage to remote communities.
This solution provides quick and easy site installation, easy maintenance, optimiaed transmission — using economically efficient wifi — and low power consumption, ideally suited to run 100% with green energy without any CO2 emission. Its local management feature, which performs local call switching, allows it to work as an isolated site for local calls, without requiring any connection to the rest of the network while not using any backhaul resources in those scenarios. This is very useful for providing efficiency communications to remote areas.
Green power innovation
Winners: Orange with Tenesol Solar Energie
Solar base station programme
The objective of the programme was to design and deploy innovative engineering solutions in Africa, Middle East and Asia responding to three major objectives: reduce operating costs; improve quality of service; and develop sustainable products with a preference to renewable energy. Orange worked with solar companies to design a low cost solar powered base station specifically for rural areas.
After trials, this programme became the group engineering blueprint for the creation of off-grid radio sites in the area. This solution has now been implemented in 13 countries within the group’s footprint.
For every solar plant used, at least 35 tons of CO2 and 13,000 litres of fuel are expected to be saved per year, which equates to a saving of more than nine million litres of fuel and 25,000 tons of CO2 emissions so far.
The Orange solar base station development programme is the most iconic part of a wider green strategy committed to achieving 20% reduction of our CO2 emissions by 2020 and 15% reduction of the company’s energy consumption.
In 2010, the programme aims to transform radio sites running permanently on generators into pure solar as far as possible or into hybrid solar/fuel stations supplying a majority of solar power.
Energy efficiency innovation
Winners: Portugal Telecom, Swisscom, Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs and others
Green Touch pan-industry eco-initiative
GreenTouch is an ambitious initiative seeking to achieve a 1,000 fold reduction in the energy efficiency of communications networks within the next five years launched in January 2010. The consortium is supported by 15 members from across the industry — such as IMEC, Telefonica, Bell Labs, University of Melbourne, MIT, Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology and most recently Huawei.
This consortium was brought together by groundbreaking research from Bell Labs which found that networks have the potential to be 10,000 times more energy efficient than they are today. The GreenTouch consortium saw in this an opportunity to come together and tackle one of the biggest issues for the communications industry and wider society; namely climate change and the sharp increase in energy consumption and carbon emissions of ICT networks resulting from the exponential and increasing growth in network traffic.
GreenTouch recognises that a radical redesign of communications networks and the invention of entirely new technology will be required; the member organisations driving GreenTouch are working together in an environment of open innovation in pursuit of this goal; their approach to optimising networks for energy consumption as well as usability has been lauded by governments and endorsed by industry leaders around the world.
Mobile interconnect innovation
Winners: XConnect with the GSM Association
SuperQuery for IP traffic routing between service providers
XConnect announced a partnership with the GSM Association in September 2009 to extend the reach of the XConnect Global Alliance to all service providers using the GSMA PathFinder number-translation service and the GSMA’s 750-member mobile-operator community.
SuperQuery allows Global Alliance members to initiate queries to the PathFinder Registry and have numbers published in that registry for discovery by the GSMA Carrier ENUM community.
By enabling Pathfinder SuperQuery, service providers need only to interoperate and interconnect with the XConnect Registry removing the need for separate commercial and technical agreements with PathFinder, thereby simplifying the process of participating in the GSMA Carrier ENUM community.
XConnect is now signing up customers for this service in Europe, the US and Asia.
Mobile applications innovation
Winners: Telus, Bell Canada, Rogers and Aepona
GSM Association OneAPI pilot
Opening up the mobile device to external developers has lead to an explosion in the availability of innovative applications. The next phase is making the operators network assets available to the same innovative developer community.
Traditionally, operator networks have been difficult to access and fragmentation has been a challenge. To address this issue the GSM Association introduced the OneAPI initiative with the goal of abstracting the operator networks into a common set of consistent and easily accessed APIs, which the developer community can access and monetise.
The Canadian operators were the first to take on this global challenge of making this goal a reality. They have taken the important first step and proved it is possible.
In July 2009 the three major Canadian carries, Telus, Rogers and Bell got together and set out with the goal to abstract their individual networks and to make them available to the developer community.
With support from the GSMA and the technology partners Aepona, Neustar and PayPal, the three carriers delivered on a commercial pilot, that gives developers access to the aggregated base of 22 million Canadian subscribers, and all via one URL.
The commercial pilot allows developers access to three carriers network capabilities such as payment, messaging and privacy based location.
Core network innovation
Winners: XL Axiata and Ericsson
Evolved core network
XL Axiata has set up the world’s largest MSC pool containing 15 nodes and serving over five million subscribers. Individual MSC server nodes have been combined in a pool spread over different locations offering efficient node and site level redundancy.
Load is evenly spread between all pool members, smoothing out temporary traffic peaks on the individual nodes. Call success rates are improved due to improved network resilience and virtual elimination of MSC handovers.
Network expansion is also simplified since the radio network is now configured towards the pool rather than an individual MSC, which means that capacity can be increased by simply adding more nodes in the pool, avoiding expensive and time consuming re-parenting.
Ericsson’s blade cluster technology takes the pool concept to the next level, allowing capacity to be expanded through simple insertion of an additional blade. Each blade supports around one million subscribers.
3G site innovation
Winners: Telefónica O2 and Nokia Siemens Networks
High-performance 3G base station
As data capacity grew in O2’s UK network, options were studied beyond the second UMTS carrier. One solution designed and trialled by O2 was to expand the traditional three-sector site to a six-sector configuration using NSN’s latest Flexi2 base station.
The analysis carried out showed that six-sector sites delivered much needed and significant capacity relief in ‘hot’ areas.
These promising results have triggered O2 to consider a wider deployment in London and other key city centre areas. Six-sector is here to stay and is a new weapon in the armoury for network operators.
To support operators to cope with booming mobile broadband usage Nokia Siemens Networks has launched a high-performance site solution which is based on flexi multiradio base station with GSM/WCDMA/LTE capability.
High-performance site solution increases the base station capacity up to 80% as result from doubled resources and higher order sectorisation bringing the total number of sectors to six, all with their own dedicated power amplifier. A complete base station can be built with three lightweight Flexi modules, one system module connected via fibre to two radio modules, in total producing 360W output power and weighing less than 75 kilograms.
Wireless network innovation
Winners: Cox Communications and Syniverse
Combined MVNO and 3G CDMA network
Many North American cable operators are turning to mobile as a catalyst for growth to take their businesses to the next level. To quickly achieve this, the majority are launching as mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs), leveraging existing network infrastructures that belong to established mobile players. However, Cox Communications is taking its own innovative route, launching a service using a combination of an MVNO and building a 3G CDMA network in parallel.
Syniverse Technologies has been working with Cox to ensure long-term success. Cox’s mobile users will expect the ability to roam globally with their full mobile suite of services.
Syniverse is helping Cox ensure high quality of service for both its inbound and outbound roamers by providing detailed subscriber-level reporting and analysis tools that allow Cox to monitor roaming activity in real time to quickly troubleshoot issues and ensure uninterrupted service.
Wireless network planning innovation
Winners: Arqiva with Star Net Geomatics
Laser surveying of telecoms infrastructure
High definition surveying — or simply laser scanning — is the collection of accurate geo-referenced dimensional as-built information of structures and assets. This surveying technology is already widely appreciated and used in the oil and gas market and has been introduced by Star Net into the broadcast and telecommunication infrastructure sector.
Star Net has been working closely with Arqiva, developing procedures for the implementation of laser scanning technology. Arqiva has already recognised us as a key supplier for its implementation of Britain’s digital switchover project.
This innovation sets a milestone in the industry. It will revolutionise the entire wireless telecom and broadcast asset management systems currently used.
The system collects millimetre-accurate three-dimensional data such as equipment location, identification and orientation, structural details and geo-referenced photography which is then delivered to the client for asset integrity and record management.
Other sections
1: fixed infrastructure innovation
3: wholesale service innovation
4: business service innovation
5: consumer service innovation and editor's award