NEWS STORY TWO CONTINUED FROM PAGE ONE » The Best Broadband Cloud Award


recognises an excellent product, service, device or innovation in the area of cloud services, which offered signifi cant new prospects for increased revenue, manag- ing costs, improving quality or increasing customer satisfaction. Ericsson came out on top with its Mobile Cloud Accelerator solution. Wireless is just as important a part of


the broadband industry as fi xed line and this is something that is refl ected in the Best Broadband Access Award—Wireless, which recognises an excellent product or innovation in the area of wireless access networks by a telecom solutions vendor or a broadband operator/service provider. Alcatel-Lucent took the honours for its lightRadio Metro Cell Express product. While on the fi xed line side, Huawei


Technologies stole the show with its largest capacity vectoring system. The Best Broadband Experience Award


recognises an excellent product, service or innovation in the area of Customer Experience, Service Management and Operations, and was picked up by French telco Bouygues Telecom, which developed the user interface for its Bbox Sensation gateway/STBs using the same navigational principles for every service available via the device. The implementa- tion follows four fundamental rules: keep it simple, intuitive and smooth; offer high-defi nition (1280×720) resolution; keep interactions visual rather than text- based where possible; and look after the graphics, using realistic ones that also integrate perspective, carousel and cover- fl ow effects. Rounding out the honours was the Best Broadband Enabler Award, which went to


Facebook opens European engineering centre


SOCIAL networking giant Facebook this week opened its fi rst engineering centre outside of the US. A team of around 20 employees will be based in Facebook’s Covent Garden offi ce in London, which to date has only housed advertising, sales, support and public affairs staff. Facebook began searching for employ-


ees in July, with the fi rst recruits presently being initiated at the company’s Califor- nia headquarters. The UK unit is tasked with building


products in key areas like mobile and platform. With over a billion users now online, the company needs to fi nd new ways to monitise its services. Europe is clearly on Facebook’s radar.


Earlier this year, the company began investing in its own European fi bre network, to cope with huge increases in traffi c on internal systems. At the time, Erik Hallberg, president at TeliaSonera International Carrier, which is building the network for Facebook, explained that the infrastructure will be used to back- haul traffi c between its newly-built data- centre in Sweden the hub of its European operation and datacentres elsewhere. The company has already set up long dis- tance links to provide capacity between its European and US datacentres.


“Facebook is processing enormous amounts of data per user, and it needs to sort it and share it with everyone,” Hallberg said. “This will be the main place for Facebook to aggregate data for European and Middle East users. It needs a network to take traffi c back and forth and make data accessible to Facebook users.” Projections from Informa show that


there will be a huge upsurge in traffi c for most mobile data services over the next fi ve years, largely driven by the spread of smartphones and a 23 per cent increase in the number of mobile users. “The top three data guzzlers on


mobile phones over the next five years will be applications, video streaming and web browsing – in that order of importance,” said Guillermo Escofet, senior analyst at Informa. He added that global mobile data traffic will grow from 3.89 trillion MB in 2011 to 39.75 trillion MB in 2016, amounting to a tenfold increase.


Qualcomm Atheros for its Hy-Fi Tech- nologies. The Best Broadband Transport Award went to Alcatel-Lucent for its 400G Photonic Service Engine (PSE) and 1830 Photonic Service Switch, while the honour for Outstanding Contribution to Broadband Success was picked up by The Broadband Forum for its TR-069 CPE WAN Management Protocol. Finally, the night was capped off


with the Changing Lives Award, which recognises an initiative that signifi cantly impacted telecommunications in the com- munity and contributed to economic and/ or social development. Praised for chang- ing the lives of those who live and work in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly was Super- fast Cornwall, a Public/Private Partnership between Cornwall Development Company and BT, for offering fast broadband con- nections to almost everyone in this rugged and remote region.


The £132m ($214m) project is being


funded jointly by the EU, telco BT and Cornwall Council, and will place 90 per cent of the region’s homes and busi- nesses within reach of super-fast fi bre- based broadband (80Mbps FTTC and 330Mbps FTTP), with the remaining ten per cent to be served by a combina- tion of 4G wireless, ADSL2+ and other technologies. Following a pilot trial involving eight


small exchanges serving some 14,000 customers, deployment began in ear- nest in July 2011. By 2014, the perfor- mance of broadband services available at every one of the 250,000 homes and businesses in the West of England will have been vastly improved, and by 2015, either FTTC or FTTP will be available to around 90 per cent of homes and business in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly.


Comcast thinks outside the box


BY shifting innovation from its set top box product into the cloud, US cable TV provider Comcast has rev- olutionised its offering, according to Mark Hess, senior vice president at the company. Speaking in the key- notes on Wednesday morning, Hess said: “Years ago we were trapped in that set top box. We could never manage to get the innovation into the box.” So the functionality in the set


top box, including tuner manage- ment, parental controls and listing functionality was shifted into the cloud. Now every time a customer presses a button on their remote control, Hess said, a roundtrip to a datacentre is initiated and the service still works faster than it did when the technology was locked in the device. The move to the cloud was also


driven by growth in the devices that Comcast now needs to support. Hess said that, by 2015, there would be 234 million devices capable of IP video in the fi rm’s footprint. The newer the device type the faster the uptake, he


said. While the domestic radio took 38 years to reach 50 million users the tablet took just three, he said, quicker than the smartphone, itself quicker than the PC. Development is also quicker for


newer devices he said. Working on set top box development created high demands on time and resource with very little reach. It took just 12 engi- neers 6 months to develop Comcast’s fi rst iPad app, by comparison. The operator’s vision is now to


enable customers to be able to ac- cess all of their content and services from every device that they use. Given the rapid increase in the number of permutations of device and content, a cloud solution was the only option, he said. Comcast is now fully digital, with its own content delivery network and is building third party apps, such as Facebook, into its solution; “using other people’s products to enhance our own,” he said. “Change is coming and coming


fast,” he added. “You can’t predict it so you have to tune up.”


EDITORIAL


EDITOR Mike Hibberd


DEPUTY EDITOR James Middleton


GROUP PUBLISHER Tim Banham


WORLDWIDE MEDIA SOLUTIONS


ACCOUNT MANAGERS Chris Beales Philippa Daykin


All advertising enquiries to: Tim Banham:


37–41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Tel: +44 20 7017 5218 Fax: +44 20 7017 5647 email: tim.banham@informa.com


PRODUCTION


DESIGN & PRODUCTION MANAGER Joanne Lowe


MARKETING & CIRCULATION


HEAD OF MARKETING Sophie Burdajewicz


While every care has been taken to ensure that the data in this publication are accurate, the publisher cannot accept and hereby disclaims any liability to any party to loss or damage caused by errors or emis- sions resulting from negligence, accident or any other cause. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system or transmit- ted in any form electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.


Printed in Amsterdam by Grafi us print & media solutions


Broadband Daily News brought to you by


www.telecoms.com http://www.broadbandworldforum.com/ I BROADBAND WORLD FORUM DAILY 2012 THURSDAY 18TH OCTOBER 2012 03


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20