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Getting The Full Download On DataOffload: Pre-MWC13 Exclusive With Birdstep Technology

www.birdstep.com

In the run-up to MCW 2013, we interviewed Lonnie Schilling, newly appointed CEO of Swedish software company Birdstep Technology, that provides smart mobile connectivity and security solutions.

CTOIC: What do you see as the key theme for MWC in 2013?

Lonnie: Well as in previous years, there are going to be many themes in 2013, but a reoccurring theme, and perhaps the greatest challenge for operators is keeping up with subscriber demand, staying ahead of the bandwidth curve driven by more video rich content and ensuring a compelling user experience for a wider demographic customer base.

CTOIC: How have operators been responding?

Lonnie:  Not always in the best way! It seems that data caps have come back into play, but this is wholly counterproductive and fails to take account how customers want to use their mobile phones. Mobile subscribers are consuming more and more data and watching longer forms of video but these caps are self-defeating in such that customers believe that consuming data implies incurring punitive charges or data throttling which make the service non-compelling. So the real challenge for operators is to come to grips with complementary technologies like Carrier WiFi and Smart Data Offload solutions, and align this with their business needs to meet the requirements of their subscribers.

 CTOIC: But hang on, I thought LTE/4G was supposed to solve this bandwidth crunch?

Lonnie: Yes LTE does bring efficiencies over 3G and certainly more bandwidth, but the business case for the necessary coverage and density is prohibitively expensive. Here too Carrier WiFi is being used as a cost efficient solution for offloading. MNO's are now beginning to take advantage Smart Data Offload solutions to selectively offload non-premium data, perhaps a YouTube video, to WiFi while keeping premium data, such as a video subscription service like Netflix or Webex on the cellular core to leverage existing Subscriber Management services. In addition to smart selective offload, the MNO is interested in using subscriber analytics to better understand the Customer Experience from the perspective of the handset. The analytics give insight into what services are being consumed over WiFi and cellular, where the subscriber is when they consume the services and the quality of the service is, both objective and subjective. This resolves a key concern MNO's have had with WiFi; the operator now has complete visibility of the subscriber and service whether the user is on cellular or WiFi.

CTOIC: Presumably you agree LTE/4G does at least scale to the higher bandwidths required for emerging services, even if the costs are high?

Lonnie: I would argue that LTE has not kept up with the bandwidth curve. Just look at how smartphones are being used to consume more video. Did you know that it is expected that 2/3 of the world’s mobile data traffic will be video by 2016 or that globally, the average mobile connection will generate 1,216 megabytes of mobile data traffic per month in 2016, up 1,221% from 92 megabytes per month in 2011, a CAGR of 68%! This trend shows that the rate at which data consumption is growing, continues to outpace the rate at which mobile technology, including LTE, can deliver bandwidth. So here’s the telling data point, LTE gives us roughly 12x increase in bandwidth over 3G, but bandwidth growth over the period since LTE began development has gone up 30x. And, according the Cisco, the problem further exacerbates over the next few years. LTE is behind the curve when the market is demanding greater bandwidth.

CTOIC: So what is the answer?

Lonnie: I believe MNO’s must be more pragmatic about augmenting their mobile service offering with Carrier WiFi, in conjunction with Smart Data Offload solutions. By deploying an intelligent offload solution, the MNO can become much more innovative in how they package and tariff the service and effectively compel their customers to consume more instead of less. By associating network policy with the intelligent offload solution, the MNO decides which applications will be transported via cellular or WiFi determined by time-of-day, location, quality of connection or user policy profile. The point is that the MNO can be completely agnostic to the access medium for a greater aggregate RAN capacity, or develop innovative business models for maintaining premium traffic on the cellular and non-premium traffic over WiFi. Standards such as Hotspot 2.0 and ANDSF enable the automated network discovery, selection and security, as is done today in cellular networks. Then link this to the ability to have real-time active / passive analytics for the MNO to maintain a very clear perspective of the customer experience, even when using WiFi, and the MNO maintains the control of the experience associated with their brand and offering. It is not a huge leap in faith to foresee in the very near future that a customer can globally roam and handoff between cellular, WiFi and back to cellular based on a defined network policy.

CTOIC: How quickly do you anticipate this happening?

Lonnie: It’s already begun! But fact is that it will happen much faster than it did for the cellular industry, which took 30 years to get to where we are today with transparent international roaming where subscribers are unaware of all the transactions between operators taking place in the background. All that complexity is completely shielded from the user even though their own handsets are participating in the transactions. I believe the “Law of Accelerated Returns” tells us that it may be up to an Order-of-Magnitude less time than it took for cellular. Besides, the hotspot infrastructure is already there or under construction, and of course the industry understands well how to develop and negotiate roaming agreements.

 CTOIC: Presumably cellular operators will not offload all their data. What data will they keep on their own infrastructures and how will that decision be made?

Lonnie: That will vary between service providers. But one thing they will all want is the ability to make intelligent decisions in real time over what data to move according to business rules and perhaps traffic conditions. Those decisions will be made by policy and executed in Smart Offload software that understands the subscriber, the data, the location and time-of-day and can offload according to specified rules.

CTOIC: What might those business rules be?

Lonnie: A service provider network might be getting a lot of You Tube traffic that is filling up the cellular network, and that could be offloaded to Wi-Fi. But say that operator has a contractual relationship with another OTT provider like Netflix that requires guaranteed QoS and the ability to monitor the activity. Then Netflix traffic would be kept on the cellular network and use the subscriber management capabilities there.

CTOIC: How will Wi-Fi be integrated with cellular?

Lonnie: That is still subject to debate. There are various options on the table, with some advocating running Wi-Fi in parallel with the cellular infrastructure and others who believe cellular and WiFi to be converged in the Packet Core. Regardless of the level of integration, I think it likely that operators will want to adopt a hierarchical structure where WiFi is implemented into the small-cell architecture and provides bandwidth and coverage in high-density venues and in-doors.

 CTOIC: Thanks Lonnie, let’s see what MWC 2013 has to answer in this debate.

During Mobile World Congress 2013, Birdstep is located in hall 7, E80, within the Swedish Pavilion

Lonnie Schilling
Chief Executive Officer, Birdstep Technology

Lonnie Schilling

Schilling brings 20 years of experience of equity investment, strategic business development, architecture sales and marketing within the international communications market. He was most recently Director, Mobile Service Provider Sales & Business Development at Cisco and he has also held leading management positions in other global companies such as Motorola, ITT, Worldview Technology Partners, Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN). Schilling holds a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland. He completed graduate and postgraduate studies at the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology, the International Institute for Management Development, INSEAD and the Marshall School of Business at USC.

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Part II of The Big Data Summit organized by TM Forum in Amsterdam: the demos.

In this short blog I’m just reporting on the demos I saw at the show in January. Part III will be on the conference content itself which was very interesting. For a first of it’s kind, having 4 exhibitors was a reasonable achievement. I didn’t get to talk the folks Amdocs whose booth only had brochures nor with the Lavastorm guys as they were too busy for me both times I tried. I did get to the Guavus and Esri booths so here’s w

hat I took away.

Guavus was the sole sponsor of the event – although still only a silver sponsor, so the TM Forum sales people must be tough cookies ;o)

Guavus Logo

Guavus is a private 350 person company head-quartered in San Mateo, CA with offices throughout the US as well as in the UK, Singapore, Montreal and India where they also have R&D teams. As a few others, they claim to have been delivering Big Data analytics from 2006, before the name even existed.

It’s always a delicate balancing act to ride a hype wave like this Big Data Tsunami. You need to be seen to have been doing it for ages, but then again you also have to acknowledge its novelty otherwise you can’t join in on the orgy of industry news.

The CEO founded the company after working at SPRINT labs. Anukool Lakhina, realized there was a scalability hurdle that the traditional model for storing data and doing business intelligence analytics were not going to be able to cross. He raised some money and started working on a solution. The core algorithms developed then are currently patent pending.

Guavus now works with 2 of the big US Telcos as well as Bell Canada through the recent acquisition of Neuralitic. Star Hub is also a major client in Singapore that came about through the Neuralitic acquisition.

The company’s primary focus is in the Telco space, because that's where the core data resides. But as an aggressive young company Guavus is already looking at other segments and has a few confidential Proof of Concepts underway.

I asked Suzanne McCormac, Senior Director of Marketing Communications, if Big Data could save Telcos from falling into the commodity oblivion of the dumb pipe. “They’re sitting on a gold mine  - if they can just figure it out they have the opportunity to compete with the OTT players because they have better data from billing, CRM etc. There is a fantastic window of opportunity for them here”.

I asked Suzanne why Guavus, a US focussed company came all the way out to Amsterdam for the show, “The TMF Big Data Summit in Amsterdam is a key event for Guavus given the company's global expansion plans. We expect to announce several more CSP deployments outside of the US in 2013."

Despite being one of only four exhibitors, Guavus had no demo, but I’m told they’ll have a lot to show at this years Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Esri Logo

The only real demo I saw at the show was from Esri, a Geographical Information System or GIS company with a strong emphasis on being environmentally friendly and sustainable. That they clearly are, as Esri has been around since 1969. The company is atypically still privately held. Headquarters are in Redlands, California. Randy Frantz, Esri’s Telecoms & LBS Industry Manager was at the show and told me Esri is now the world’s largest GIS software supplier with over 3,000 employees and 350,000 clients (his business card uses the LBS acronym without explaining it, so if you’re as forgetful as I, let me remind you it stands for Location Based Services).

The demos were all of the graphical analysis of various data points that had a geographical component. Randy showed me several instances of dynamic charting where all sorts of graphs and colours automatically updated on the screen as you move around navigating through the data. So for example, clicking on one part of the network automatically updated the QoS/QoE data around the screen. One demo also integrated Esri’s display capabilities with IBM’s Business Intelligence software Cognos.

I got a clear impression that having Esri as part of a solution, say in an operator’s NoC, would make for an extremely powerful UI. Although Esri can undoubtedly power great monitoring interfaces, the competitive edge I sensed was more for trouble-shooting type of applications were interactivity is key. Such a top-of-the-range solution pointed to by the Big Data demos I saw clearly targets top tier operators that could justify the cost.

If you missed it, part I of this series is an interview of Nik Willetts, TM Forum's Chief Strategy Officer. It's here.

Part III is a report on the conference content, it's here.

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Part I of III: TM Forum’s chief Strategy officer on Big Data

The Big Data Summit organized by TM Forum in Amsterdam was my first.
My first on Big Data - well that’s not so surprising as there haven’t been many yet - but also my first TM Forum event. That’s strange as I’ve been in and out of the Telco industry for over a decade – it was a great event so better late than never.

Before reporting on the event itself in part III (BTW you can get a preview with 50-odd tweets from my time-line @nebul2), this blog is the feedback from my discussion with Nik Willetts, chief strategy officer of the Forum. He started by reminding me who they are. Part II covers the rare demos I saw.
TM-Forum is a 25-year-old non-profit US incorporated organization with about 120 staff. It is Telco based with around a thousand member companies, a quarter of which are service providers. These operators account for a whopping great 90% of the world’s subscribers!

Nik told me this conference was in line with the general Telco movement away from pure network management towards more services. His job, and this conference in particular, are to look for the next wave of digital growth.

He sees Big Data underpinning most successful customer programs in the future. “The whole industry must become data driven, with shorter cycles so as to establish new services that can compete with the eBays or Googles of the world. Without this transformation operators will be loosing very real money. Today’s digital services are built around user experience whereas traditional Telco services are built around technology. It’s going to be about market pull or what customers perceive, where it used to be about what engineering departments pushed. Successful operators will have a deep understanding of User Experience.” Nik pointed to an example given during the conference by Cricket, where analytics were used to determine exactly where user calls were being dropped geographically and feeding that experience data to network engineering teams, thus reducing churn. “But cost reduction will also be a key driver for Big Data within service providers as a better understanding of User Experience helps operators anticipate customer issues and reduce truck rolls.”

I asked Willets what had already struck him during this event. He told me it was “different stake-holders playing multiple roles, attacking the issue from different angles. TM-Forum always tries to get different people round the table together.”

I asked about the general squeeze operators are feeling here in Europe, and whether Nik saw it as a global phenomenon or one restricted to developed markets. “TM Forum covers the whole world, so operators in developing markets have the benefit of seeing what operators in developed markets have or haven’t done successfully to cope with new threats and opportunities. That’s exactly what you can see at this Big Data event. TM Forum is instrumental in this knowledge and experience sharing”.

This is the first dedicated TM Forum event on Big Data although the subject has been covered for about 2 years within other conferences.
Willetts was happy with attendance for a launch event with over 150 delegates and 12 CxOs. The event will be replicated in a year somewhere else.
When I complemented Nik for the absence of the usual sales pitches in presentations he told me that “as with other TM Forum events, there is no pay-to-play here i.e. vendors cannot pay to get to speak. The business model is for delegate fees, sponsorship and exhibitors, with all presentations being vetted. We do allow vendors to speak alongside their customers where it adds value to the presentation, as you may have seen with the Cricket/TEOCO presentation”.

TM Forum logo 1

Part II (the exhibition) is here.

And if you want to skip straight to the conference content itself, that's here.

Stay tuned for the full write up of the event.

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HbbTV is for real and is growing beyond its French and German birth ground

HDMI stick from Japanese startup TVF

A look at some of the demos from the December 2012 HbbTV Symposium

HbbTV has been a hot topic for a couple of years now and seems to be spreading well beyond it’s original Franco-German birth grounds, albeit still mainly within Europe for now: Spain and Scandinavia were most mentioned at this year HbbTV Symposium. Although I saw a lot of Brits at the symposium there wasn’t much mention of HbbTV activity from what seems, in this context, a remote Island territory. HD Forum’s Frédéric Tapissier invited me to the gathering that was held in Issy-les-Moulineaux near Paris and of course all the speakers were preaching to the quire about how great HbbTV is. So in this blog I’ll just concentrate on the real HbbTV demos that were on show. And yes it does now seem that we’re well beyond slideware: there is at last some horsepower under the HbbTV bonnet, although some of the solutions I saw, however impressive, didn’t always fix a problem I knew existed. I got to see 4 of the 6 demos on display, here’s what I saw.

IMJ is a Japanese service development company with about 800 people. In October they launched a 5 people spinoff called TVF located San Jose. Nariaki Hatta was demonstrating an HDMI Wi-Fi stick that turns any old TV with HDMI into a smart-TV. So far not much of that is new, but what really dazzled me was a simply feature which I could see making this work even for your great aunt. With the stick plugged into an HDMI behind the TV, launching a Smartphone app automatically launched an app on the dongle. Assuming the TV is set to automatically tune into an HDMI that becomes active this is a potential for a zero setup kit. My Sony TV at home wakes up on some HDMI ports from some devices, so it’s possible, but this is a potential Achilles heel if HDMI hand shaking doesn’t work.

HDMI stick from Japanese startup TVF

I was a bit surprised to see this small Japanese offshoot come all the way from the West coast to rainy France. Nariaki Hatta told me they came via Intertrust, a major sponsor of this year’s event. Oh by the way, the Intertrust CEO gave an enlightening talk that wasn’t about the glory of HbbTV, but explained why Google and Apple born out of the tech start-up world were so bad at the standards game as oppose to TV operators, and so were less likely to be HbbTV supporters. But back to TVF, also surprising was that their whole Linux and Android environment isn’t yet HbbTV, they’re working on it, so their presence really was a mystery.

Anyway the Demo, that turns a smartphone into a remote control to control a VoD portal, was impressive with absolutely no latency when flicking on the smartphone with simultaneous response on the large screen. Live TV services are not supported yet, but Mr Hatta told me this could come in the future.

A commercial launch is pending in Japan with the mobile operator Softbank Mobile.

The next demo that caught me Eye was breathtakingly simple. French TdF

demoed its new “Salto” service, which has just been launched with French public broadcaster France Télévisions. Salto is a pretty cool name for the service, it means somersault in French.

Salto is a near-real-time start-over service available when programs are still airing. It is available from 2 minutes into the program and until the program is finished, when it is made available from within the TV station’s own catch’up service.

The intended Unique Selling Point (USP) is simplicity. Salto is currently available for HbbTV, although it can be ported to any other environment.

The only constraint is that a client app must be deployed on the viewing device.

A small blue button appears whenever you are watching a program for which Salto is available (i.e. when you tune to a live program that started at least 2 minutes ago). Pressing the blue button of your remote let’s you start-over the program, i.e. from the beginning. Pressing the blue button again brings you back to the real-time transmission. That’s it – I don’t see how it could get any simpler.

The app knows what channel is being watched so the TDF backend servers can then serve up a unicast stream on request. An internal TDF CDN is used to stream “open files”. This required some specific engineering as the traditional streaming techniques for VoD work with “closed” files.

The demo that Guy Huquet showed me included an HbbTV enabled TV set and a 2nd screen demo running on an iPad.

IRT is the Institut für Rundfunktechnik, the German research centre for broadcasters and a long-time supporter of HbbTV. Georg Huber for IRT was demoing a red-button demo from German public broadcaster ARD. The features available included:

  • Teletext converted to HbbTV in HD quality,
  • Mediatek, which is a catch’up tv service,
  • An EPG representing the time line of TV channel with present, past & future linking to catch’up and PVR,
  • Special event live streaming during the Olympic games (no longer operational),
  • A selection of HD webcams with panoramas from Germany and Austria.

 

A menu bar on the bottom of the screen is easily sinkable to fit broadcasters graphics charter and logo in true HbbTV spirit.

A shopping demo looked promising until it transpired that it lamely requires a number obtained independently from the shopping website.

A fun TV App Gallery demo involved flashing a QR code to connect second screen to TV set, then scan in a new app with another QR Code (e.g. from my doctor’s waiting room). However much fun this seemed, I did get a feeling this part of the demo was one of those neat solutions desperately looking for a problem to solve.

Lastly, “DOTSCREEN” is a French start-up with 30 people in Boulogne near Paris.

Their CEO Pascal-Hippolyte Besson positioned the company for me explaining that compete with the likes of Accedo Broadband in that they develop apps but say their differentiators are that they also run services and target more screens including the car radio.

They have been an early adopter of HbbTV, also developing apps for France TV.

I saw demos on show of French daily paper “20 minutes” and Météonews available in 20 languages.

On the latter, a 30-minute playlist cleverly looks like barker channel. When you select a geographic area a pre-roll ad is played, which is the business model here. Weather forecasts are available from 10 days to 3 hours. The app is distributed on Philips’ TV as a reference app worldwide and by LG in France although it can be downloaded anywhere. With the advertising DOTSCREEN is clearly playing in the B2C arena. It is however early days and not yet clear what kind of rev-share deals will be available for TV set makers or other stakeholder.

Other developments of note include apps for France 24, TéléStar, Deezer, the PS3 platform and Aljazeera’s stream app for Google TV.

DOTSCREEN’s Olympic games demo, developed for France TV, was still running too.

This demo included moderated news & tweets. French broadcaster TF1 that was listening to the same demo as me noted that the performance of the app was stunning in real-time.

DOTSCREEN finished with an interesting demo for a “pseudo-channel” of home decorating videos pulled off a video store. It showed how to simply breath some fresh life into a collection of videos that could be gathering dust in video storage somewhere. In this case, the app drove the user to interact by making some boring old videos look super sophisticated just with some clever navigation e.g. a playlist of all videos relevant to redecorate a bathroom. Of course there’s a business model here too as the interactivity also lets you buy objects like lights or other fixtures.

The Demo for the daily free paper “20 Minutes” illustrated the fully automated extraction of videos and metadata from the newspaper’s website.

PS: I missed out on the demo of HTTV that was at the show. I'll be posting an update soon.

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Gulf big three Telcos could win big time if only they could cooperate on content

I’ve been spending some time out in the Gulf again on various consulting gigs.

There are currently three pretenders to the crown of biggest regional Telco. Saudi’s STC, Qatar’s Qtel and the Emirates Etislat. STC has a pretty impressive footprint in its own vast country, but the other two make up for a lack of a large local market with capital participations in dozens of other operators, mainly throughout Africa and Asia.

The situation resembles Europe before a combination of regulation and market forces toppled the national incumbents off their pedestals. Most agree any losses the incumbent suffered in those years starting in Thatcher’s 80s but more in the 90s and 00s for the rest of Europe were a small price to pay for the improvements and value consumers saw in triple play services.

But that was before Apple, Google or Netflix loomed so threateningly large on the horizon. Now, with their weakened positions, a common defensive strategy against these behemoths from the USA is to go and cry in front of regulators and governments for some form of protectionism. That might ease the pain, but not cure the problem. The more ambitious ones may seize the opportunity and remember grandpa’s old line that if you can’t beat it, join it. I’m finishing a white paper sponsored by Broadpeak, that explores how and why local operators should embrace OTT providers by selling them their own CDN services, which will always be better than anything from a global provider.

Imposing data caps seems unrealistic in current competitive market conditions, as the operator that initiated them would lose out badly in market share. In France, Free has been fighting Google over YouTube traffic to their subscriber’s detriment for over a year now, the situation is escalating out of control with consumer groups complaining the regulator.

But out here in the gulf the situation is different. Incumbents haven’t yet started their downward spiral and there is an opportunity to do something great.

I believe these three companies have left it too late to succeed alone.

It took Belgacom nearly 10 years to become the content heavyweight it now is in its home market, but nobody had ever heard of Netflix when they first started and Apple was still trying to recruit content into iTunes Music Store.

So where the Belgian incumbent took a decade to get things right, the Gulf Telcos only have one or two years before the global OTT players turn their focus here.

With its subsidiary Intigral, STC has taken a clear lead in terms of content aggregation and probably in video infrastructure too. Opening the capital structure of Intigral to let Etisalat and QTel in may seem counter intuitive at best and probably downright crazy to many. But together the 3 operators could muster enough clout to finally beat some sense into the reactionary content owners.

This triumvirate would need to cooperate on technical CDN issues (but that's a story for another blog), but that still leave a wealth of areas to compete head-on, from user experience to hardware, packaging, pricing, bundling, marketing, business services, etc.

The Middle East is rife with video piracy and Hollywood majors should remember the music labels had all but killed themselves in their wars against file-sharing. They hung on by the skin of their teeth, and some are again a bit hopeful that the likes of Deezer or Spotify might pave the way for the industry’s return to at least part of its former glory. Incumbents like Orange are desperately trying to get into deals with these companies (see Orange - Deezer here).

Hollywood and the TV content rights-holders had been steadfastly maintaining their divide and conquer strategy to content licencing, making any attempt to aggregate content beyond a local play aimed at a specific device impossible.

That attitude has started to crumble, not least because the content owners want to initiate their own OTT strategies without limitation of device or geography.

A stakeholder with enough financial backing could flash a check with enough zeros on it to buy the exclusive rights in the whole region. This could be for a major sporting event or maybe the latest Hollywood blockbuster.

If I go along with this pipe dream, maybe the best of the Rio Olympics in 2016 will only be visible on IP networks in the Gulf, with traditional broadcast left with the crumbs…

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Continuing broadband boom heralds arrival of the home gateway at last

The home gateway has been talked about for long enough, but how many have actually been installed so far? Not a lot, and meanwhile its future appears to have been imperilled by the spectre of cloud services offering a safe and cheap place of unlimited capacity to store all that music and all those home videos, as well as providing the source of on demand pay TV content. But this negative equation between the gateway and the cloud is a false one, for actually the two are going to march forward together. The cloud may well be the place where personal and recorded content is stored, but the gateway will be the point of control, mediating between the external network based services and the increasingly diverse functions executed within the digital home.

This point has not been lost on the more astute vendors of both hardware and software for home gateways, as can be seen from a clutch of recent product announcements. One that stands out for me came from Arris with the introduction of its Touchstone family of wireless voice and data gateways. Arris deals in CPE and infrastructure for the cable TV industry, although now prefers to set out its stall as a broadband services company. Touchstone therefore is for cable operators only, but for the first time Arris is making as much play about the features on the home network side as on the HFC (Hybrid Fibre Coax) front. Arris describes it as a game changer, presumably both for itself and its cable TV customers. Such rhetoric can often be dismissed as marketing puff, but on this occasion it is about right. Whether the Touchstone family itself proves to be the game changer remains to be seen, but the shift in emphasis that it represents on the CPE front most certainly is. It is no coincidence that some of Arris’ largest customers such as Comcast of the US, the world’s number one cable TV operator with over 20 million subscribers, have been clamouring for this product and plan to start deploying it before the year is out.

 

On the HFC side, Arris is touting its channel bonding, which increases available bandwidth by aggregating up to 24 channels together. It was notable the strong emphasis Arris is placing on upstream bandwidth to meet increasing demand, generated partly by cloud services, for uploading content rather than just consuming it within the home. On the home networking side, Arris was trumpeting its inclusion of Celeno’s CLR260 3x3:3 chipset, which is pretty much state of the science for home Wi-Fi technology with various enhancements to the standard MIMO technology, including transmit beam forming, which involves coordination of multiple transmission antennae such that radio waves from each interfere constructively at the receiving end to boost the overall signal and hence increase both range and bit rate. Other important add ons aimed more at dealing with interference both from physical objects and radio signals are Tunneled Direct Link Setup, designed to focus available bandwidth on the actual point to point links in operation at the time, and real time channel hopping, aiming to find the best part of the spectrum at a given moment for transmission.

 

The underlying message behind developments such as the Arris gateway is the continuing proliferation of broadband services, as confirmed by the latest data from the Broadband Forum indicating that global broadband subscriptions have soared to over 624 million by the end of Q2 2012 compare with about 565 million a year earlier. The Forum itself argues that this presents a huge opportunity for broadband operators to exploit the connected home, as they control the means of service delivery. This must all be music to the ears of the few software companies that have specialized in the home gateway, notably French based SoftAtHome, which was ahead of its time with its SOP (Software Operating Platform), but it now looks as if the rest of the industry is catching up. SoftAtHome has a modular platform that is hardware independent, and supports not just existing broadband delivered services such as TV, but also what the company believes will be big emerging applications in the digital home, such as home security, environmental control, and eventually remote healthcare. This is a good place to be if, as Arris claims, the game has indeed changed to one favoring the fat home gateway as an equal partner with the cloud.