It’s Triple-play Time!

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The six men of Indostan’, in the poetic folk tale by Godfrey Saxe, went to see an elephant and came to different conclusions about the nature of the creature. In much the same way, that currently popular buzzword, ‘convergence’, can mean different things, depending on which sector of the information technology industry you come from. Indeed, customers have their own ‘take’ — which may not always match the industry’s cosy expectat ions.

The 16th annual ‘Convergence India’ show in Delhi earlier this month mirrored this divergence of views and approaches, at the cutting edge of what is often seen as the most exciting technology happening today: the great ‘manthan’ or churning of voice, data and video that customers worldwide are experiencing.

For India’s telecom providers, convergence is both challenge and opportunity. The challenge lies in deciding which broadband service the customer is ready, and willing, to pay for, so that the costly transition to 3G or third generation technology makes business sense. A second challenge is the very nature of broadband mobile technology, which requires industry to run, merely to stay in place, and, like Alice in Wonderland, run twice as fast to get any place at all.

Even as India gropes towards spectrum allocation in 3G, the world is talking about 4G, which might see the convergence of the two competitive cellular technologies — CDMA and GSM — to achieve what is known as LTE (Long Term Evolution).

Ready for digital TV: Ashok Chandak of NXP with the first realisation of a low-cost set top box, designed with India and China in mind

Convergence in this sense could be seen at the Delhi show, in the stands of players such as Vanu Inc (founded by Dr Vanu Bose, son of Dr Amar Bose of Bose Audio fame.) Vanu has created technology that it calls a ‘software radio’, which allows a single reusable hardware platform to support heterogeneous, multiple wireless services.

At Convergence India, Vanu Inc’s Managing Director, Pradeep Malhotra, showed this writer a live demo of the company’s multi-operator radio access network (MultiRAN) system running three GSM and one CDMA operations, simultaneously. The company is currently field-testing this system with India’s largest network services company, GTL Ltd.

Transporting voice, video and data (often called Triple Play) transparently over networks — wired or wireless — becomes easier, more efficient, if it harnesses a combination of a very old technology and a very new one; Ethernet and Internet Protocol. Carrier Ethernet is the name of the new game, and interestingly, two of the leading players at the event, offering Ethernet transport infrastructure, were both Israel-based.

MultiRAN solution from Vanu

RAD Data Communications is a pioneer of a technology called Pseudo Wire — a mechanism for emulating various telecom services across networks that use Ethernet or the Internet Protocol. First offered in 1999, Pseudo Wire is reinventing itself to help networks seamlessly migrate from 2G to 3G. Another Israeli player, ECI Telecom, used the Delhi event to launch its new 9000 family of carrier Ethernet products.

Convergence of a different kind stimulates telecom players such as Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson and Motorola to ‘hedge their bets’ in the unspoken competition between cellular broadband services such as 3G, 4G and LTE on the one hand, and mobile WiMAX on the other. For existing cellular players, the upgrade map via 3G and 3.5G to LTE will make sense; but for entrants with no legacy baggage, WiMAX will seem an attractive option. Which is why a company like Alcatel-Lucent remains technology-agnostic saying, “Leave the back-end to us, surge forward to 4G along any route you like.”

At Convergence India, the company demonstrated WiMAX on a laptop using a tiny plug-in for the PCMCIA slot (it will soon be available as a USB device). Subscribers in India who currently depend on data cards from the main mobile providers to access Internet anywhere have to live with fairly slow speeds of around 125 to 150 KBPS. Replaced by a WiMAX card, this can boost speeds almost ten-fold.

Alcatel has joined with the Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DOT) to set up the C-DOT-Alcatel Research Centre near Chennai. One of the first products for the world market to roll out from the centre is a WiMAX modem or CPE (Customer Premises Equipment), which will allow home users to set up WiMAX networks at access speeds of 10 MBPS or more in much the same way that they can today set up a Wi-Fi network.

Anupam Wahi, Alcatel’s senior manager for South Asia business development, gave a live demo of a WiMAX network, which allowed me to stream video at 5MBPS on my laptop even as I simultaneously browsed the Internet, and took a VoIP conference call, complete with video from my built-in webcam.

‘Say Mi-MAX’

Converged home: The CHOIS system from Innomedia

“Don’t say WiMAX, say Mi-MAX”, suggests G. Santhanam, Country Manager for Airspan, a company with UK and Canadian links that has made a name for itself in extending wireless LAN networks into logistically challenging environments. The company’s engineers demonstrated a USB plug-in device that they called a ‘WiMAX finder’, working in all four bands of the 802.16E standard, and harnessing MIMO (Multiple In, Multiple Out), an antenna technology that makes such quad band operations possible.

Since WiMAX is largely to be found in licensed bands, such solutions will allow users to latch on to the nearest hotspot anywhere in the world.

However, there are small portions of the spectrum that may provide licence-free access to WiMAX (mostly around 5 gigahertz). The US-based Aperto showcased its base station radio technology to exploit this licence-exempt WiMAX possibility.

Set top box in spotlight

For Indian customers, convergence is becoming increasingly meaningful and is centred around what is known as the TV Set Top Box (STB).

With the analogue systems graduating to fibre-based digital cable networks in the metros and with three (soon six) direct-to-home (DTH) satellite TV providers coming into play, the set top box is poised to become a compelling interactive tool that takes viewer control beyond switching TV channels… to accessing video on demand, Internet surfing, IP-based voice and video calls, as well as personal video recording.

The Bangalore-based Innomedia showcased its Converged Home and Office Integrated Services (CHOIS) solution providing all these options through a neat remote.

It is already fuelling a network of over 3,000 homes in a Reliance colony in Jamnagar and at another at the Dhirubhai Ambani Knowledge Centre in Mumbai.

Viewers of Asianet in Kerala are likely to be the first to be offered such an interactive service via cable and set top box. The solution, which was shown at the Delhi event, has been created by Cisco.

NXP, the semiconductor product development company founded by Philips, used the Convergence India show to unveil an Internet Protocol set top box compatible with AVS (Audio Video Coding Standard), which will allow the transport of high-quality video over the Internet. In effect, the NXP solution, STB 222, untethers the set top box from wired cables, and makes it yet another client of the Internet.

NXP’s Global Sales Director, Ashok Chandak, gave me a personal preview of this technology using a reference design box, even as a Chinese player became the first to license it for mass production.

President PK iPhone

In mobile alliance: YiYi Wang and Kanwaljit Talwar

There was a surprise aspect of convergence on show in Delhi — the convergence of interests that saw an Indian entrepreneur set up a unit in Shenzhen, China, to manufacture smart phones that might give the iPhone a run for its money in cost-conscious markets.

Kanwaljeet Talwar, the man behind this initiative, has partnered with Shenzhen B&K Electronics, and has set up the Asia Mobile Alliance in Delhi to shortly begin marketing the President PK iPhone, and a number of other compellingly priced models. When the Minister of State for Commerce, Jairam Ramesh, coined the term Chindia, he may never have foreseen the extent to which the term has assumed new relevance in an era of converging technologies and business priorities.

The actual fabric that makes convergence at home and office possible was also on display.

Tejus Networks had a slate of products to enable residential and corporate triple play services. Sterlite Technologies featured live demos of a fibre-powered home allowing visitors to experience true broadband via optical fibre.

Some of the largest optical fibre networks in India, owned by Indian Railways and Railtel Corporation of India, invited businesses to ride on the back of this 30,000-km long network with 3,000 points of presence to fuel their own enterprises.

It was yet another instance of converging agendas and technologies, which just proved that sometimes all the wise men of ‘Indostan’ could be right, even as each had a different take on the exciting creature they were touching and feeling.

source :: http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/ew/200...33150030100.htm