Japanese equipment vendor NEC this week signed a memorandum of understanding with Chongqing City, one of China’s four national central cities, with a view to forming a strategic partnership in the smart city and cloud service areas.
Chongqing is a major city in Southwest China with a population of 28.8 million and aims to shift its status from an industrial-oriented economy to a communications industry hub.
Despite the operator support behind Rich Communications Services (RCS), it will only be the very biggest international players that deploy the technology in their own networks. The rest will look to cloud-based offerings to fulfil their needs, according to business systems firm SAP Mobile Services.
John Sims, president of SAP Mobile Services, recently told telecoms.com that “only the biggest operators in world will deploy RCS in their networks. But beyond the top five or ten operators globally, the rest of the industry will look for a hosted solution.”
Open source cloud computing software CloudStack, which is developed by all-volunteer association the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), has this week graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a top level project. The move signifies the maturity of CloudStack as an open source tool for creating, managing, and deploying infrastructure cloud services.
CloudStack uses existing hypervisors such as KVM, vSphere, and XenServer/XCP for virtualisation and supports the Amazon Web Services (AWS) API as well as offering its own. Target environments include service providers and enterprises where it can be used to set up on-demand cloud computing services or a private cloud for use by internal employees.
Although large enterprise customers remain the focus for mobile operators worldwide when it comes to deploying cloud services, operators feel unlikely to generate a significant return on investment from cloud services in the short term.
The Telecoms.com Intelligence Industry Survey asked what percentage of revenues operators are likely to invest in cloud services over the next two years. The mode response was between 11 and 20 per cent – with 28.9 per cent opting for this bracket. When asked what percentage of revenue respondents believe operators will see for their investment, the mode response, with 38.1 per cent, was zero to 10 per cent.
Norwegian software firm Opera has acquired Silicon Valley based Skyfire Labs, a specialist in mobile video optimisation and cloud. The firm is known for its Rocket Optimizer software which allows mobile operators to use cloud computing to optimise video and multimedia on crowded cell towers, in 3G and 4G LTE networks.
The acquisition price includes $50m cash upfront and performance based earn-out payments over three years, including $26m in cash held that can bring the total deal size to $155m.
As traditional, and even more modern, network architectures struggle to cope with more dynamic applications and services, another acronym has emerged as a possible answer to operators’ challenges. But ask ten different industry pundits what SDN (software defined networking) means and you will likely get ten different answers. At the time of writing, telecoms.com had just published a poll offering a variety of definitions, the clear leader of which was “other”—effectively meaning something else not on the list.
Four out of five European enterprises describe themselves as very or somewhat interested in adopting Network-as-a-Service (NaaS), reflecting rapidly increasing or spiking bandwidth requirements faced today as well as the need for a more cost-effective connectivity model. The findings were published this week in a survey carried out by Vanson Bourne on behalf of network specialist Ciena.
Cloud services will be one of the key revenue generators for operators over the next 24 months, according to data from the Telecoms.com Intelligence Industry Survey 2013, with over 80 per cent of respondents expecting operators to own their own cloud infrastructure within the next two years. Over 90 per cent expect operators to be selling cloud services within the same time frame.
Although only about 12 per cent of respondents think more than 50 per cent of operators worldwide will own their own cloud infrastructure by 2015, the majority think between 11 and 30 per cent will have some kind of cloud platform in place.
Just over ten years ago I went backpacking in Brazil for a month with some friends. We arrived in Rio de Janeiro, one of the world’s great party towns, at nightfall and found, to our dismay, that we couldn’t get a caipirinha for love nor money. It turned out that we’d landed on the day of the presidential elections and there was a blanket ban on sales of alcohol because the authorities were concerned that violence might erupt if politics mixed with booze.
Eventually we managed to persuade a man running one of the street food outlets on the Copacabana beach to sell us a beer. He told us that the winner of the election would be a man known as Lula. Lula, leader of PT, the worker’s party, went on to become perhaps the most popular president in the history of Brazil, introducing sweeping social reforms designed to lift millions of Brazilians out of poverty.
It’s becoming a cliché in TV land that content-rights restrictions, and not technology, are slowing the pace of industry development. At CES, Boxee and Dish demonstrated workarounds that have allowed them to offer two products frequently blocked by rights issues; namely cloud-based DVRs and out-of-home live TV viewing.