News

Changes include CFO Matt Ellis will stepping down for his role, as well as new CEO appointments for Verizon Consumer Group (VCG) and Verizon Business Group (VBG)

Verizon’s latest financial results, reported in January, were something of a disappointment, with the company suggesting that strong competition coupled with a tough global economy had forced it to lower its forecasted profit for the financial year.

Perhaps this is why today we are seeing a wave of executive changes across the company, with the company aiming to “further strengthen [its] competitive capabilities”, according to Verizon chairman and CEO Hans Vestberg.

Perhaps the largest of these changes is that EVP and CFO Matt Ellis stepping down from his role after seven years to pursue other interests. He will be replaced by SVP and controller Tony Skiadas, who, in turn, will be replaced by Mary-Lee Stillwell, currently VP of accounting and external reporting.

“I appreciate the contributions Matt has made to Verizon in his 10 years with the company, shaping our organization with his strong leadership and financial aptitude. He’s been an influential member of my executive leadership team and a trusted partner. I wish him all the best for the future as he now moves on to new opportunities,” said Vestberg.

Other changes include the appointment of Sowmyanarayan Sampath, currently head of VBG, as EVP and CEO of VCG.

The vacant CEO role at VBG will be taken by Kyle Malady, Verizon’s current head of global networks and technology.

As the final step in the reshuffle, Joe Russo, SVP and chief network officer, will succeed Malady as head of global networks and technology.

“One of our strengths at Verizon is the depth of our leadership and the breadth of skills they bring to the table. Sampath, Kyle and Joe are long-time Verizon veterans,” explained Vestberg. “I am confident these leaders will best position Verizon for the new era of customer growth. These transitions will begin immediately and all will report directly to me.”

How is the US telecoms market evolving in 2023? Join the telecoms industry in discussion at this year’s live Connected America conference in Dallas, Texas later this month!

Also in the news:
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UScellular urges customers to put down their phones in latest initiative
VMO2 and Vodafone give rural Scotland a 4G boost

News

The penalty comes as a result of having breached their Deferred Prosecution Agreement (DPA) with the Department of Justice (DoJ) from back in 2019

This week, Swedish mobile network equipment vendor Ericsson has announced that it will pay the US DoJ the sum of $206.7 million, settling a legal battle related to a highly publicised bribery scandal.

Back in 2019, following an investigation, the DoJ and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) accused Ericsson of having bribed officials in China, Djibouti, Indonesia, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Vietnam during the period between 2010 and 2016.

To resolve this conflict, Ericsson signed a DPA with the DoJ, agreeing to pay the US government $1.06 billion to settle the matter.

However, last year, Ericsson announced that an internal investigation had revealed the company may have made bribery payments to the Islamic State terrorist group in Iraq, dating back to 2011.

This revelation, as well as further questions about Ericsson’s activities in Djibouti and China, led the DoJ to accuse the vendor of violating the terms of its DPA.

“When the Department afforded Ericsson the opportunity to enter into a DPA to resolve an investigation into serious FCPA violations, the company agreed to comply with all provisions of that agreement,” said Assistant Attorney General Kenneth Polite. “Instead of honoring that commitment, Ericsson repeatedly failed to fully cooperate and failed to disclose evidence and allegations of misconduct in breach of the agreement.”

As a result, this week Ericsson is once again being forced to pay its way out of trouble, settling this latest clash by agreeing to a settlement with the government worth $206.7 million.

The company had been expecting a fine of some sort from the DoJ for some time, having set aside around $220 million in its budget to cover this expense back in January.

“Taking this step today means that the matter of the breaches is now resolved. This allows us to focus on executing our strategy while driving continued cultural change across the company with integrity at the centre of everything we do,” explained Ericsson CEO Borje Ekholm.

In related news, Ericsson recently revealed that it would cut around 8,500 jobs globally as part of efforts to cut costs and streamline its operations. Around 1,400 of these roles will be in the vendor’s home market of Sweden.

The company is currently seeking to reduce its costs by around $880 million by the end of 2023.

Keep up to date with all the latest telecoms news with Total Telecom’s daily newsletter

Also in the news:
AT&T signs up to use Frontier’s fibre to connect mobile towers
UScellular urges customers to put down their phones in latest initiative
VMO2 and Vodafone give rural Scotland a 4G boost

VIEWPOINT

Over the last few years, the 5G ecosystem has moved from strength to strength, with the technology emerging as the fastest-growing communications technology ever.

“5G is developing three times faster than 4G and reached the milestone of crossing one billion subscribers by the end of 2022. There are now around 243 5G networks and more than 3.85 million 5G sites globally,” said Yang Chaobin, Senior Vice President and President of ICT Products and solutions at Huawei. He was speaking at the 5.5G is Coming Summit at Mobile World Congress 2023.

The growing 5G ecosystem means the new service requirements are becoming more diverse and complex. The 5G networks will not be able to meeting the growing requirements. For instance, 1 Gbps uplink is required to support high-precision industrial vision for AI-based inspection, remote control in mining industries and self-driving vehicles, among others.

At the same time, the next evolution in communications standards, 6G, is still being developed and is likely to become a reality only by 2030, seven years away. In this scenario, the telcos must adopt 5.5G to improve the 5G customer experience and to ensure that they continue to bring new and innovative use cases to their subscribers.

“5.5G is necessary to improve 5G, which has become an industry trend and an established consensus. Now, the industry has defined clear roadmaps for 5G-Advanced (5.5G), F5G-Advanced (F5.5G), and Net5.5G standards and introduced clear spectrum strategies. Key technologies and applications have been verified, and the industry consensus has steadily progressed to best practices. With all these developments, 5.5G is arriving at an accelerating rate to improve network capabilities by 10 times for various industries looking to unleash stronger digital productivity,” elaborated Yang Chaobin.

Developing 5.5G Ecosystem 

The industry is realizing the growing importance of 5.5G as a natural evolution of 5G. Now the industry must come together to promote and jointly develop 5.5G technology. He elaborated on four areas of standardization, spectrum strategy, steady implementation and smooth evolution for maximized ROI, in which the industry must work to develop the technology.

A clear roadmap for industry standardization is a must for the growth of the technology. The technical specifications of 5.5G need to be defined in 3GPP Release 18, 19 and 20. While 3GPP Release 18 will be frozen in the first half of 2024, F5.5G has progressed from proposals to specification design. So, the industry stakeholders are coming together to accelerate the development of the 5.5G ecosystem.

Industry standardization needs to be followed with a clear and well-defined spectrum strategy. Yang mentioned in his speech that the 5.5G industry is now promoting the use of sub-100 GHz frequency band to support New Radio via a two-fold strategy. First, the legacy spectrum will be refarmed to ensure smooth evolution to 5.5G, and secondly, joint efforts will be made to ensure that large-bandwidth spectrum mmWave and the upper part of 6 GHz (U6GHz) will be allocated to 5.5G.

Further, all the industry stakeholders need to work in tandem to ensure that 5.5G technology develops so they are able to address the growing demands from 5G networks. Several developments point to the fact that there is an increasing consensus in the industry to support the development of 5.5G. For instance, industry partners led by GSMA have established a 5.5G community at Mobile World Congress 2023. Further, World Broadband Association (WBBA) recently released its “Next Generation Broadband Roadmap” white paper for F5.5G. Besides, leading analyst and consultancy firm Omdia released Net5.5G white paper recently to align industry roadmaps to accelerate progress in technical evolution, application scenarios, and industry ecosystem.

Yang mentioned that 5.5G supports critical technologies such as spectrum refarming and equipment multimode multiplexing, thus enabling service providers to maximize the use of the existing 5G network resources and ensuring smooth evolution to 5.5G. This is crucial to help service providers protect their investments.

5.5G: Setting New Milestones 

Thanks to the industry’s efforts, 5.5G has already achieved several milestones. Yang shared that several operators in different geographies have successfully verified innovative technologies such as Extremely Large Antenna Array (ELAA) and Multi-band Serving Cell (MBSC), making 10 Gbps a reality for 5.5G. Further, the standardization of 50G PON for F5.5G as next-generation PON by the ITU-T and the maturing key technologies such as uplink and downlink symmetry and multi-band in one is paving the way for a seamless evolution to F5.5G.

The growing popularity of 5G use cases like immersive services such as XR and holographic communications and customers are demanding further improvement in experiences. Further, the growth of Internet of Things connections and growing digitalization is pushing the industry to upgrade the networks for 5.5G era.

He mentioned that Huawei will continue to develop products and solutions that will help the industry to seamlessly transition to 5.5G so they are able to leverage the emerging market opportunities.

 

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VIEWPOINT

The service providers have already started harvesting the fruits of 5G investments across the world and this has created a `certainty effect’, said Peter Song, President of Huawei’s ICT Strategy and Marketing, Huawei, at the ongoing Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2023 recently.

“There are more than 240 5G networks commercially launched, almost twice the number of 4G networks in the first three years. There were one billion 5G subscribers by the end of 2022. To compare, it took 4G more than five years to achieve that number, and more than 800 5G smartphones are available, and the great news is a solid financial impact that the leading 5G operators are getting as we speak,” said Peng Song. Huawei recently convened 5G Business Success Summit at Mobile World Congress 2023 at Barcelona, Spain.

The Road to 5G Monetization

However, the service providers need to adopt innovative strategies to monetize 5G. Huawei’s analysis revealed that the fast migration of 5G users and traffic is the key to successful 5G monetization. Peng Song mentioned that if an operator migrated 30% of traffic to 5G eMBB in three years, it would take less than four years to see Return on Investment (RoI). This time period can be further shortened if the operator deployed Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) and ToB services.

He further elaborated on the energy efficiency aspect of 5G networks. “5G has the higher energy efficiency than 4G. In the initial phase of 5G user migration, the overall power consumption still increases. However, as the 5G traffic ratio exceeds 30%, we have found that the power consumption of high-traffic sites even started to decrease,” said Peng Song.

Several Paths to Ensure Compelling 5G Experience and Faster Monetization

5G networks come with several new-age capabilities to help service providers deliver a superior experience. For instance, operators can provide a guaranteed downlink and uplink speed for VIP users.

Another emerging capability that is helping service providers accelerate monetization is 5G Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) services. Nearly 95 operators had commercially introduced 5G FWA services for more than 10 million home users by the end of 2022.

Elaborating on the FWA opportunities for the service providers, Peng Song said, “We can identify two potential markets for 5G FWA. Copper Sunset in developed markets and the high-speed broadband access in emerging markets. While in Europe, rural areas, a large number of copper users cannot upgrade to 100 mega-BPS. Replacing copper with 5G FWA benefits those consumers getting better experiences and operators, of course, lowering their expense.”

“On the other hand, in emerging markets, the fibre penetration is still quite low. 5G FWA has become the first choice for 100 mega-BPA’s home browned access in those markets. Because of fast time to market, plug and play, and the less cost in medium and the load density household areas,” he added.

Leveraging 5G Private Networks Opportunity

Another key 5G monetization opportunity for telcos is 5G private networks. “The key is to open the door to a comprehensive enterprise DICT business, and therefore, besides 5G toB connection, operators can leverage cloud, edge computing and value-added service as a business to provide real holistic business partnerships to the enterprise,” said Peng Song. He mentioned that China Mobile believes 5G private network business can facilitate three to ten times revenue in enterprise DICT business.

“We are pleased to see that in just one year, outside of China the number of 5G private networks deployed by carriers has doubled, and the top industry companies have started to embrace 5G private networks, and this market will continue to grow very rapidly,” said Peng Song.

5G is unlike any previous technology and is not just about economic value to the operators but also brings massive social benefits. It not only helps the telcos in reducing their carbon footprint but can also bring down the digital divide.

He urged the industry to use Huawei’s G.U.I.D.E. business blueprint to maximize the potential of 5G and to move from `5Good to 5Great’. “5G networks bring experiences to mobile users and fiber-like experiences to households. That’s `G’. Second, this powerful network ability of 5G can support uranium experiences-based monetization in not only downlink but also uplink. That’s `D.’ Third, of course faster user and traffic migration is the foundation of 5G business success, which shortened the ROI and achieve greener network. That’s `E.’ In addition, 5G private network together of other technologies can facilitate three to ten times revenue enterprise DICT business segment which opened a new blue ocean market, and that’s `I.’ Lastly, simplified 5G networks management together with value baed intelligent operation is another successful dimension, and that’s `U’,” said Peng Song while explaining the G.U.I.D.E. principle. From 2024 to 2030, 5G will continues to accelerate the service providers’ 5G monetization with G.U.I.D.E strategy.

 

 

Press Release

Adtran, the leading provider of next-generation open and disaggregated networking solutions, today announced that it successfully completed a field trial of 800Gbit/s single-carrier transport, achieving error-free transmission over a record distance of 2,220km in NYSERNet’s production network. The test route passed through 14 route-and-select flexgrid ROADMs comprising a total of 28 wavelength-selective switches. Leveraging 140GBd digital signal processing (DSP) technology from Acacia, an industry leader for silicon-based high-speed optical interconnect products, this result was made possible by Adtran’s use of continuous symbol rate tuning and probabilistic constellation shaping offered by Acacia’s Coherent Interconnect Module 8 (CIM 8). The trial showcases an opportunity for network operators to increase capacity and efficiency while minimizing complexity and cost.

“We’ve taken single-carrier 800Gbit/s data transmission further than ever before. And we’ve achieved it not in a lab but in a real-world network also carrying live traffic. What’s more, we succeeded without any optimization to the line system, maintaining the same amplifier settings used before the field trial. We’ve demonstrated that the highest capacity and reach can now be accomplished even over deployed fiber comprising a mix of standard G.652 and G.655 and including multiple network nodes and flexgrid ROADMs,” said Sorin Tibuleac, director of system architecture at Optical Networks, Adtran. “Building on the success of our TeraFlex™ CoreChannel™ technology, these results represent the next milestone in the development of high-speed optical networks. The potential to enhance throughput while minimizing opex and operational complexity is immense.”

Adtran’s trial marks the longest distance ever achieved for 800Gbit/s data transport using a single optical carrier with real-time DSP. To realize this, it utilized Acacia’s CIM 8 transceiver technology, which increases baud rates up to 140Gbd to generate 800Gbit/s signals. By achieving long-distance transmission with single-carrier optics, the demo helps operators reduce footprint and energy consumption. The trial used Adtran’s FSP 3000 open line system (OLS), which provided the necessary flexibility to configure the wider required bandwidth and perform testing. Featuring a modular architecture, multiple amplification and multiplexing options, and different chassis sizes, this truly open OLS enables operators to deploy customized and future-proof solutions.

“We’re pleased to play a key role in this trial and proud of our record-breaking network. Alongside our partners, we’re showing that the highest speeds are now possible over extremely long distances, even in intricate and heterogeneous network environments. This demo reveals a way to address complexity and cost while eliminating the need for expensive and unnecessary infrastructure expansion,” commented Bill Owens, chief network architect at NYSERNet. “The success of this trial offers a major boost to the research and education institutions we support. By working with global leaders like Adtran and Acacia, we’re ensuring that our network can benefit from the latest innovation and keep our academic community at the forefront of scientific research.”

“Our field trial sets a new standard for long-haul, single-carrier data transmission over an existing network with live customer traffic. It shows the full potential of our technology to increase capacity and efficiency while reducing power consumption and expense,” noted Christian Rasmussen, VP of DSP and optics engineering at Acacia. “Our CIM 8 coherent optical module was instrumental in enabling this achievement. Featuring our 8th generation DSP and advanced silicon photonics, the CIM 8 module offers baud rate adjustment up to 140GBd and continuous modulation, which optimizes the use of available spectrum. This gives service providers complete transmission flexibility to match their network’s architecture, improve fiber utilization and simplify deployments.”

Adtran are Title Sponsor for the Total Telecom Connected America event, taking place in Dallas on March 28-29, 2023. Join Adtran’s Prayson Pate as he discusses progress and potential in 5G and fixed networks with Christopher Sambar, President – AT&T Network, AT&T, and Elad Nafshi, Chief Network Officer and EVP, Comcast on a panel moderated by The Wall Street Journal’s Sara Mascall FREE TICKETS AVAILABLE

 

News

Announcements today from ISP Grain, Bath based Truespeed, and B Corp Zen reinforces the sense that there is still plenty going on with the UK’s ambitious smaller telco’s.

Rochdale based broadband provider, Zen, continued to show commitment to its B Corporation certification and Carbon Neutral status, announcing installation of 675 solar panels to the roof of its headquarters office building. This is only stage one, with another 500 panels to follow which should see solar power generate 330 MWh of electricity for the company.

Paul Stobart, CEO at Zen, commented “One way to reduce reliance on fossil fuels is to invest in solar, which is exactly what we are doing at Zen.”

Heading further north, Cumbria-based ISP Grain has secured more funding to assist with plans to roll out fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) across the North of England. Existing shareholders Equitix, Albion Capital and Pinnacle Group have been joined by funding from Landesbank Nord/LB to take the total capital invested in the business to £200 million.

German Landesbank Nord/LB has committed £110 million, whilst the existing shareholders have are investing an additional £21 million of equity. CFO Roland Barzegar, said ‘This further investment in Grain will see us accelerate the rollout already underway across the country. We have proven that our model of providing fast, reliable and great value broadband is working, and customers are happy that they have more choice outside of the national broadband providers.’

Finally, at the other end of the country, Bath based Truespeed expects progress to come from transformation of internal systems, and to achieve this have looked to BT’s talent pool, hiring Robert Purdy as Chief Information Officer. Prior to joining Truespeed Robert was Director of Consumer IT, responsible for delivering the BT, EE and Plusnet brands across broadband, mobile and television services. He says he was drawn to Truespeed by “how successfully it has grown and how well it’s situated in its current scale-up phase.”

Another well funded business, Truespeed were founded in 2014 and are supported by Aviva Investors who have so far invested £175 million firm, most recently in January 2022.

Richard Tang, Founder and Chairman of Zen Internet will be one of the speakers at the Total Telecom Connected North event, taking place on 17 – 18 April 2023 at Manchester Central.

Bath-based broadband ISP Truespeed, which is building a new 10Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network across rural parts of South West England, has appointed a former BT Director – Robert Purdy – to be their new Chief Information Officer (CIO) and support the rapid scale-up of their build. The operator, which already covers 60,000 premises […]

Business broadband ISP Commsworld has signed yet another agreement with Northumberland County Council in England, which is worth £22m and will see them replace the council’s ageing Wide Area Network (WAN) with modern full-fibre infrastructure. Local businesses and homes could also see improved connectivity. The agreement, which follows closely behind last year’s contract to roll […]