LTE Pilot shows good results in TeliaSonera Finland

LTE or Long Term Evolution is 3GPP standard for Mobile Networks and is evolution for family of WCDMA based wireless networks.

But what does the standard really mean for us?

Recently Finnish TIETOKONE Magazine reported pretty interesting results from TeliaSonera's LTE test zone of 7 LTE Release 8 base stations in city of Turku, Southwest Finland.

According to their tests peak download speed of 40 Mbps was reached and for example downloads from the magazine's web library was 22 Megs by average. But what was even more impressive to me was the fact that RTD (round trip delay) to FICIX (Finnish Internet Exchange) took only 32 millisec by average. This is far better than what we get from 3G today. I'd say that getting more bandwidth with LTE is great but less delay translates to better end user experience thus is even more important.

All in all these results are good news for Web Video content providers waiting to get their content to Mobile Phones and Tablets.

So what these results tell to me and our company?

Let's note that the results are from Pilot network that is hardly congested at all.

When the Mobile Web Video hit's the prime time I guess we have some traffic & performance monitoring to do. Also our Windows Agent with TCP Download Speed Test could be pretty useful tool to assest the network prior any public launch.

Nokia N9 QWERTY-slidin' with Intel/Nokia Meego OS (Linux) leaked!

While ago Iphone changed the smartphone market place with large nice to use touch screen and good web apps. Since then mobile data usage has rocketed to new heights around the world.

Now Nokia, teamed with Intel is gearing up to take the high end smartphone leader position back from Iphone and Android phones.

The Nokia N9 smartphone or Mobile Computer like Nokia like to call it's powerhouse is not only running Linux based Meego OS, jointly developed by Nokia and Intel, but ships with sleek aluminium casing and what is more important, full QWERTY slidin' keyboard.

We can only guess what impact this phone has for mobile web usage specially in areas where Nokia has been traditionally very strong. And let's face it - touch screen is nice, but phone with both keyboard and touch screen is far better in Web usage.

While waiting for official launch by Nokia, here's link to the leak post

Read www.engadget.com/2010/08/19/nokias-qwerty-slidin-n9-shows-up-in-the-wilds-of-china/

EchoVault Event Dashboard and Throughput Meter now Online

This is just a quick post letting you all know that our June Issue of EchoNews is now online at Creanord EchoNews.

Let me know how you like the article. It would be also nice to hear what you think about Throughput Meter & Event Dashboard.

All you can eat Mobile data will prevail - NSN to the rescue

I still remember a time when dial-up Internet was billed using credits that needed to be bought upfront. I must admit that I was bit schocked first when I heared about AT&T plans to kill the all you can eat data plans. Back to the stone age I thought. While the plan received lot of support from the media and tech community there were also other opinions. As an good example from December 2009 this Business Week article: AT&T Possible Price Moves May Backfire

The above mentioned article was brought to my attention on December 12th and I replied to the email that was linking to the article like this:

"""I agree with Business Week article about problems of tiered pricing models and trying to educate the users. Both just backfire according to my opinion. Let me ask how many of us are willing to have “usage based” pricing for our home broadband or like to receive letters from ISP stating that you use too much network, cut back or else…?

Luckily there’s (easy to implement) technical solution to the problem that allows provider to control “the bandwidth hungry few” without them knowing it. True win-win.

Actually we had exactly same problem in fixed Internet in a past (starting from university campuses where P2P traffic started to eat all the available bandwidth) and solved it by dynamically allocating bandwidth to all users in fair round robin manner. Staselog is the company I have worked in a past to solve those above mentioned problems."""

Well, to be honest I thought that AT&T is on the other side of the Atlantic and that the European Providers would not go that far. Never say never: O2 in UK followed footsteps of US-based AT&T: Death of all you can eat data, says O2

Now you might wonder why the title of this Blog is saying that All you can eat Mobile data will prevail.

This week Finnish Provider Elisa issued the press release where they explain new Quality of Service (QoS) implementation, developed by NSN, being live first in the world (In Finnish, Sorry).

While the article still talks about challenges that need further attention I still believe we are in a verse of starting to see similar news all around the world soon. Let's see how long AT&T and it's followers are able to compete with the Providers that offer All You Can Eat Buffet.

Mobile World Congress wants Active Service Monitoring

I just stumbled upon this article about MWC at European Telecom Blog. http://mccanntelecom.com/wishes-from-the-mwc

Very interesting to see that industry is now really after Ethernet and Mobile Backhaul with advanced Performance Monitoring and Service Level Management capabilities.

John McCann says: "The MWC was a fantastic opportunity to talk with a number of carriers and vendors who all know that there is an issue but I have yet to see anyone who has a complete end-to-end solution. Some vendors have great radios, some vendors monitor excellently, and some vendors offer a cost efficient way of backhauling. As has happened many times before a very clever network engineer somewhere around the world will come up with a way to solve these problems elegantly without going way over budget and ensuring a consistently good revenue stream.

Are you that engineer?"

At least I think we can say that we have already most of the pieces of the puzzle in place, maybe we should attend MWC next year :)

TWAMP 'ing RFC 5357 - A Two-Way Active Measurement Protocol

RFC 5357 - A Two-Way Active Measurement Protocol (TWAMP)

I have been following up TWAMP ever since Brix Networks (now Exfo Service Assurance) CTO Kaynam Hedayat came up with the idea a long time ago. I'm glad to see that Juniper with Junos and Ciena are starting to support the spec and joining the "lonely" TWAMP pioneer vendor Allied Telesyn. But how about Cisco who still fight the standards with it's IP SLA solution?

Maybe 2010 will be the year when providers are starting to use the TWAMP standard but it's also possible that TWAMP is little too late to be very popular. The L2 CFM like Y.1731 and 802.1ag are gaining a lot of ground with vendors such as Alcatel-Lucent clearing the path. We'll see - Do you have any comments?

Scripting it all - or not?

What's the nature of the scripting.

Scripting is great in automating some task such as creating a new accounts in Unix. Tons of other examples are out there - no doubt about it. But enough is enough. Trying to solve service or performance management challenges with scripts does not fly. Quick proof of concept with limited amount of network elements will be a success. I'm talking about safe lab environment where all devices share same firmware, default configuration and unexpected events are just a scary dream.

But when we're talking about scalable service provider solutions there's totally different beast to tackle. Then we must walk instead of talk. All scripts, now called software are developed and tested by full time professionals. And continuous improvements in quality and function not to mention scalability is must.

So what's difference between software and scripts? The software, even with some bugs is meant to fly - and continue to fly safely where scripts will do the trick until limits are reached and wings burned.