Some operators of Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) broadband ISP networks in the UK have expressed concern to ISPreview after Ofcom appeared to toughen their stance on the compliance of related hardware with their rules. Some providers fear this could effectively ban their kit, reduce choice in the market and push up costs. The issue stems […]

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The demand for more connected experiences, both at home and at work, continues to grow in all geographies. This means that the Communications Service Providers (CSPs) need to rethink their strategies to provide a world-class experience in the indoor environment. As a result, CSPs are exploring different technology solutions to offer a truly differentiated customer experience.

Brazil’s Oi, the first operator in Latin America to launch FTTR, announced the Oi Fibra X strategy last year to provide high-quality connectivity solutions in the country. It is working with Huawei to provide its subscribers with a truly differentiated indoor experience.

“Our strategic goal is to make fiber our core pillar of positioning and achieve leadership in the Brazilian broadband landscape. We are already leader in most of the cities where we launched the fiber service. But, of course, we need to keep differentiating ourselves, and the FTTR [Fiber-to-the-Room] will be a key element, mainly for the higher end segment of consumers that are much more demanding in terms of quality of service,” says Rogerio Takayanagi, SVP Retail and Enterprise, CSO of Brazil Oi. He was speaking during a joint interview with Feng Zhishan, President of Huawei’s Optical Access Product Line.

He explained that houses are made of brick in Brazil, which impacts indoor penetration of Wi-Fi, thus affecting the overall quality of experience. This means that even if consumers purchase higher speeds, they don’t get the desired experience, which leads to frustration.

“When we extend the indoor coverage through the FTTR, we believe that consumers will really realize the power of the fiber. So, the value proposition of the fiber to the room or gigabit to the room is something that definitely differentiates our service and positions our brand much higher,” said Rogerio Takayanagi.

 

Partnering for growth

Oi launched FTTR in Blumenau, and after witnessing a massive increase in its adoption, it is now planning to roll out FTTR across the country. “Partnering with Huawei, the idea is to increase the volumes and extend the use case not only to the end consumers, the residential business, but also the small and medium enterprises. We’re seeing several use cases of people and companies that demand higher coverage and better consistency in their service,” said Rogerio Takayanagi.

With both residential premises and offices likely to become more digital and intelligent, the CSPs need to reimagine their strategy to ensure a best-in-class consumer experience.

Growing importance of FTTR

Explaining the growing relevance of FTTR, Feng Zhishan said, “First, FTTR is driven by the requirements for the digital home, which has transformed from entertainment center to multi-center of digital applications, such as online education, online office, immersive XR experiences, and whole-house intelligence. The demands for high-quality Wi-Fi networks has increased dramatically, posing higher requirements on data rate, coverage, latency, and concurrent connections.”

He further elaborated that 451 CSPs have released gigabit broadband packages, and the number of gigabit users has reached 120 million. However, substandard Wi-Fi experience is limiting the growth of broadband. This can be addressed by using the FTTR approach.

“Limited by Wi-Fi capabilities, it is easy to provide gigabit in the doorway but difficult to provide megabit in rooms. However, FTTR extends a fiber to each room, making gigabit Wi-Fi experience ubiquitous indoors,” said Feng Zhishan. It is then not surprising that CSPs are actively promoting FTTR. It has already been put into commercial use by 87 provincial operators in China and 15 operators outside China.

FTTR extends fiber to all terminals at home or office and helps operators go from FTTH to FTTR, thus increasing user loyalty and ARPU while building a high-end brand. In line with Huawei’s approach of working with telcos for cooperation and innovation, it has worked with CSPs to launch the world’s first-generation FTTR for Home solution in 2020 and developed three generations of FTTR products.

Commenting on the advantages offered by FTTR, Feng Zhishan said, “First, it provides over 1000 Mbps Wi-Fi to each room in a house. Second, supports up to 17 information points to eliminate coverage blind spots. Third, ensures smooth Wi-Fi experience without frame freezing using imperceptible roaming when users move around the house. Fourth, supports intelligent management, and enables operators to remotely identify problems and optimize Wi-Fi performance, reducing home visits and quickly rectifying problems.”

Industry collaboration must to provide high-quality experience

As the demand for superior connectivity continues to grow, Huawei will work closely with global customers and industry partners to achieve high-quality development of the gigabit all-optical home industry. On the other hand, Huawei and Oi will collaborate to carry out technological innovation and cooperative research in the FTTR field, overcome indoor Wi-Fi coverage difficulties, and provide premium FTTR networks to users by building FTTR joint showcases, benchmark customer service centres, and joint marketing activities.

“We can also cooperate in win-win business models to make fibers a standard communication media for residential and commercial buildings,” said Zhishan.

Zhishan emphasized the importance of the industry to collaborate to improve the Wi-Fi experience. “In the pre-decoration field, we need to cooperate with the home decoration and real estate industries to promote the implementation of cabling standards, and work with operators to streamline NCE+app and interconnect with the OSS/BSS domain to build up service capabilities in planning, construction, acceptance, maintenance, and optimization that can be committed, sold, and monetized. In addition, operators need to offer proper packages, standardize fiber routing specifications as well as acceptance and O&M experience, provide installation incentives, and train marketing personnel on how to promote FTTR. Further, FTTR can help the CSPs in making a mark in the smart home field. The operators can build an integrated smart home solution and ecosystem.”

Huawei is looking forward to working with operators to explore more smart home services based on FTTR, such as smart home guarding, home TV, and service acceleration, to help operators achieve greater growth in home DICT services and shift from bandwidth monetization to experience monetization.

 

Mobile operator Vodafone has launched a Mobile Private Network (MPN) solution for businesses and other organisations, which supports the latest 5G Standalone (SA) technology. This means that those who deploy it should benefit from faster mobile broadband speeds, latency and more service customisation. Unlike most existing Non-Standalone (NSA) based 5G networks that rely on some […]

Broadband ISP RunFibre, which is rolling out a gigabit speed Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network across rural areas of South Gloucestershire (England), has announced that they’ve just gone live in the village of Charfield West. But on the flip side, they’ve had to remove several villages from their plan due to competition. Firstly, the deployment to the […]

UK ISP Glide Group, which is currently extending their full fibre broadband network (leased lines and FTTP etc.) to serve more homes and businesses, has announced that they’ve completed a network upgrade of their London datacentre ring – pushing its capability to 9.6Tbps (Terabits) using Juniper PTX series routers. The provider currently has three datacentres […]

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The test was carried out with support from AT&T, Vodafone, and Rakuten Mobile in what the satellite operator claims to be an industry first

Today, US based AST SpaceMobile has announced the results of a successful test that saw it conduct the world’s first ever voice call over satellite using unmodified smartphones.

The call took place in Midland, Texas, over AT&T’s network, using AST SpaceMobile’s BlueWalker 3 satellite to connect to the recipient on Rakuten Mobile’s network in Japan.

“Achieving what many once considered impossible, we have reached the most significant milestone to date in our quest to deliver global cellular broadband from space. While we take a moment to celebrate this tremendous accomplishment, we remain focused on the path ahead and pivotal next steps that get us closer to our goal of transforming the way the world connects,” said Abel Avellan, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of AST SpaceMobile. “I am immensely proud of our team and our incredible partners, whose unwavering dedication and tireless efforts have brought us to this pivotal moment.”

Additional tests were also performed to verify the transfer of SIM information to BlueWalker 3, as well as to test the uplink and downlink rates of 4G and 5G signals.

The BlueWalker 3 low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite itself was launched in September last year and serves as a protype for AST SpaceMobile’s planned commercial satellites, called BlueBirds. Ultimately, AST hopes to deliver direct-to-mobile satellite services to customers around the world using these BlueBirds and has already secured contracts with numerous operators to this effect.

AT&T itself partnered with AST in December last year, saying the planned satellite constellation would help boost the operator’s coverage across rural America.

For now, it is unclear whether access to the satellite for connectivity would be included in existing mobile packages or would come at an extra cost, with AT&T previously said it was “too early” to make such a decision.

The US telecoms space race appears to be well underway, with all three of the American wireless giants having already struck partnerships with LEO players.

For AT&T, their primary partner is UK-based LEO OneWeb, while rival T-Mobile is partnered with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to use the Starlink satellite constellation. Both of these companies already have satellites in orbit; Starlink has around 4,000 satellites circling the Earth so far, while OneWeb is just one launch away from achieving the total number of devices it needs to provide global coverage.

Verizon, on the other hand, has a deal to use Amazon’s fledgling satellite programme, Project Kuiper, which is aiming to launch its first satellites into orbit in 2024.

How will satellite connectivity impact the US connectivity landscape? Join the experts in discussion at upcoming Connected American 2024 conference

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AST SpaceMobile, which is backed by Vodafone and several other global mobile network operators, has successfully completed the “first-ever two-way voice calls” between their prototype BlueWalker 3 satellite in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and a regular 4G and 5G capable Samsung Galaxy S22 smartphone on Earth. The announcement claims that this is “the first time […]

Network operator Freedom Fibre, which aims to cover over 2 million premises in England and Wales with their Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network – supported by UK ISP TalkTalk, has today added three new neighbouring towns along the Wirral Peninsula in Cheshire and Merseyside to their rollout plan. The operator, which is being backed by a […]

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The French operator’s virtual reality (VR) tour of Notre-Dame serves as a window into the future of VR, with profits going towards the cathedral’s restoration

Since the Middle Ages, Notre-Dame de Paris has been one of the most celebrated and recognisable buildings in the world. A focal point of French history, the cathedral has played host to countless pivotal events, from the crowning of Henry VI of England as King of France in 1431 to the coronation of Napoleon Bonaparte as Emperor in 1804. For many, Notre-Dame represents not just the city of Paris, but the indomitable spirit of France itself.

Perhaps this is why, when a fire broke out on the evening of April 15 2019, images of the building engulfed in flame evoked such visceral sadness, not only within France but around the globe.

Now, four years on, in the midst of an extensive reconstruction process, French operator Orange is using VR to allow visitors to explore Notre-Dame throughout its history.

Orange’s ‘Eternal Notre-Dame’ was first launched in January 2022 in Orange’s facility in La Défense after two years of planning. It received around 5,000 visitors in the first six months and, after a year, was transferred to its current location adjacent to Notre-Dame itself. Since then, the experience has subsequently received over 60,000 visitors.

The experience itself takes place in an underground car park adjacent to the cathedral that has been repurposed to allow up to 100 headset-wearing visitors to wander freely, exploring the monument in the virtual world for around 45 minutes.

Alongside a headset, the experience requires visitors to don an LED-studded backpack that provides power and processing for the experience, while Wi-Fi infrastructure is used to track the users’ positioning within the facility and avoid collisions. While comfortable for the duration of the experience, this somewhat cumbersome setup illustrates one of the main obstacles facing the broader adoption of VR outside of a dedicated home-set up.

Nonetheless, for Morgan Bouchet, Orange’s global head of XR and metaverse, VR technology is on the right path. Devices are getting smaller, sleeker, and more powerful, and the advent of edge computing will allow the processing power to be offloaded to the cloud, eliminating the need for backpacks.

“In the Orange Lab at the Orange Innovation Park, we are exploring this scenario without the backpack thanks to edge computing. To stream the billions of polygons for the experience we need a very specific infrastructure, but thanks to 5G and fibre we can deliver it,” he said.

For Orange, part of the motivation for developing this experience was, of course, civic duty – of the €30 ticket price for the experience, Orange’s share (€10) is donated directly to Notre-Dame’s reconstruction.

But beyond helping to play a role in restoration, the value for Orange is also in demonstrating the potential of extended reality (XR) to enterprise customers. According to Bouchet a number of the operator’s B2B customers have already taken part in the experience and are reportedly ‘blown away’ by the technology’s potential.

“For Orange it’s a way to express something new,” said Bouchet. “We’re meeting with clients on the B2B side – they want to explore and understand the value of this technology and how they can use it in future. This is a good use case to demonstrate those capabilities.”

Bouchet said that major opportunities were available in segments like the automotive sector and healthcare, with virtual training being a key use case for both the private and public sectors.

As for the future of the ‘Eternal Notre-Dame’ experience itself, Orange says visitors will be able to enjoy the virtual tour until the end of 2024, to overlap with the Olympic games in Paris. Orange is also making the virtual experience available for customers around the world via Meta Quest’s App Lab and the Pico VR store; as before, all proceeds will go towards the cathedral’s restoration.

Furthermore, Bouchet explained that the project’s success has led them to begin engaging with other telcos and customers around the world with whom they could develop similar VR experiences.

“We’re currently in discussion with other countries in the world – in Asia and North America – to deliver similar experiences outside of France. We will look to licence the physical version of the VR experience to others if they want to offer the same kind of experience to their customers,” he explained.

Asked what Orange’s individual plans were for XR moving forward, Bouchet said that the company’s next project would also focus on Notre-Dame in the form of a 5G augmented reality experience for the social media app Snapchat.

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