Communications

Performance per watt – Intel talks the talk

One thing that struck me at last week's AdvancedTCA Summit in Paris was Intel's Keate Despain's focus on performance per watt during his keynote address.  What a change from just a few years ago!  And it's not just Keate Despain, or the AdvancedTCA audience.  CPU performance per watt has finally become a significant competitive issue.  A quick Google search on "performance per watt" returns more than 2 million results including two paid ads, one by Intel and one by AMD.

Also at the Euro-ATCA Summit I had lunch with Stefan Ludwig who was promoting P.A. Semi's PWRficient processors, i.e. power optimized processors based on the PowerPC architecture.

I love it.  For years, I've pushed our engineers to focus on performance per watt and to this day I have a running argument with Texas Instruments over their C6x series DSPs (which are optimized for performance rather than performance per watt). 

This has nothing to do with being "green."   Every system and subsystem has to fit within some power budget.  At one time, a plug-in board for an IBM PC was risky if it dissipated more than 15 watts.  Until recently, carrier hotels (for example) had cooling for 50-150 watts per square foot.  3000 watts per rack was a big deal.  Try putting an IBM blade server in that!  You'd be hard pressed to support ten CPUs in an entire rack.  [Interesting discussion here (free but registration required).]

In my experience, if system architects focus on performance per watt, you end up with designs that are also competitive on density and cost, but it seldom works the other way around.

Paris and the Euro-AdvancedTCA Summit next week

I'll be in France next week.  On Tuesday and Wednesday I'll be at the AdvancedTCA Summit Europe 2007 at Disney's Newport Bay Club near Paris.  I have other meetings in and around Paris on Monday afternoon and Thursday, then I'm flying back to Boston on Friday morning.

On Tuesday afternoon I'm organizing, and speaking in, Tutorial T2B - AdvancedTCA/MicroTCA in Next-Generation IMS Networks, and on Wednesday morning I'm representing PICMG in Session 203: COTS Ecosystem (organized by Mountain View Alliance).

If you are attending the AdvancedTCA Summit, please say hello.  Or if you are otherwise in Paris next week and want to meet, please send me an email or text chat on Skype.

London, Munich & Paris next week

Just as I made a tour through Asia four weeks ago to discuss AdvancedTCA, I'll be in the UK, Germany and France this coming week meeting with specific customers, partners and prospects.  We've had prototypes and customer-specific ATCA media blades at ATCA interoperability workshops since 2003, but special order only — no products that were generally available.  We finally productized and released the industry's first ATCA media blade, the MG 7000A, late last year.  Now we're out seeking feedback on our ATCA product strategy.

So in quick succession, I'll be in London on Monday evening and all day Tuesday, in Munich Tuesday night and all day Wednesday, and then in Paris late Wednesday through Friday morning.

Traveling in Asia next week – AdvancedTCA

I'm leaving for a week in Asia to discuss AdvancedTCA with specific customers, partners and prospects in Korea, China and Japan.  If you are not familiar, AdvancedTCA refers to a set of open standards for telecom platforms, i.e. hardware (blades, racks, power, cooling, backplanes) and platform software (hardware management, carrier-grade OSs, high availability middleware).  It began within PICMG in 2001, but has now grown to include a series of cooperating organizations, each focused on a different part of an eco-system, as this chart from Intel illustrates.

Based on my experiences with CompactPCI in the 90s, the ATCA eco-system has taken longer to develop.  Indeed, I was showing early samples of NMS designed ATCA media blades to prospects in 2003-04, but it's only in late 2006 and this year that we've seen significant business opportunities.  With hindsight, there is a lot more capability in the ATCA eco-system (compared to CompactPCI) and there's been much more interaction with broad swaths of the telecom industry.  The good news is it appears the market has finally arrived and it will be bigger than CompactPCI ever was.

Is this better than the racks and racks of commodity 1U servers than Google uses?  No, it's different.  If your application requires only Intel MIPS, then Google's approach is the most cost effective.  However, custom silicon does a better job of packet forwarding, so high end routers are custom systems (or built on ATCA as this NEC mobile packet router is).  Similarly, DSPs can provide up to an order of magnitude better efficiency (computations per watt) for many media applications.  Other motivations for a telecom platform include telecom-specific line interfaces, high density interfaces and the ability for "crafts persons" in the central office to swap blades without interrupting service.  So, until recently communications gear was built on proprietary platforms.  Finally that's changing.  Every major equipment provider is using or evaluating AdvancedTCA and communications systems based on ATCA are coming to market.

At NMS we productized and released the industry's first ATCA media blade, the MG 7000A, late last year.  Now we're out seeking feedback on our ATCA product strategy, thus this trip to Asia.  So in quick succession, I'll be in Seoul Korea, Nanjing and Guangzhou in China and then on to Tokyo on Thursday evening and back to the US on Saturday the 16th.

At VON Next Week

Next week I'll be attending and speaking at Spring VON 2007 in San Jose.  If you'd like to connect, send me an email (rbt@nmss.com) or IM me on Skype (brough).  I'm arriving Monday afternoon and leaving Thursday mid-day.

I'm speaking on Tuesday afternoon (3:15pm) on the panel, Lessons Learned in Implementing IMS.  While our implementation is not complete, I'll be talking about what we've learned so far as we adapt our MyCaller Ringback Tone service to fit an IMS environment.

NMS is also exhibiting at VON (Booth 1019) focusing on our developer products including:

• Vision Media Gateway with Signaling, a complete, scalable, highly available solution for connecting IP-based value-added services to legacy PSTN networks, just being introduced at VON,
• Vision VoiceXML Server, unique as an integrated video and voice server for rapid deployment of IVR and IVVR systems,
• AdvancedTCA media solutions, i.e. our MG 7000A media blade.

In addition, we have a pod devoted to video development platforms as video is a big part of this show and NMS has a significant presence in mobile video.  Among other things, I'm hoping we'll be able to approximate the Mobile TV demo we routinely run in Europe and Asia based on the live service on the Hong Kong CSL network.  In Barcelona last month we were directly calling a backdoor number in Hong Kong (I still haven't seen the roaming bills for that week!).  Unfortunately in the US, the only 3GSM, i.e. UMTS, network is Cingular's and, so far, Cingular is the first and only 3GSM network in the world to roll out 3G without support for 3G-324M mobile video telephony.  So if we get the demo running in time, it will be running on mobile handsets using WiFi.

It's sad that the US is so far behind the rest of the world in mobile features, especially as we lead in minutes of use (i.e. talking)!

See you in San Jose next week.

Interactive voice & video on ATCA

CompactPCI and AdvancedTCA Magazine has published an article (pdf) I wrote about implementing interactive voice and video response (IVVR) systems in the AdvancedTCA architecture.  Until recently, these two areas have been rather disconnected. 

The AdvancedTCA market has started to take off — later than any of us expected back in 2001-2002, but it is finally happening.  However, ATCA adoption has been led by large (frequently ponderous) equipment providers and by high capacity packet-centric applications, for example, the SGSN packet router in 2.5G & 3G mobile networks — not a lot of media applications like IVVR.

Meanwhile the IVVR market has exploded in Asia and Europe, where 3G video telephony has been deployed, and NMS Communications is emerging as the leading technology supplier to IVVR developers.

Recently, we've started to see interest in deploying IVVR on ATCA.  We certainly want to foster this, as we've launched the first high capacity ATCA media product, our MG 7000A.  :-)

Telecom Wrapup — Key Events of 2006

As pundits are thinking about their predictions for 2007, I thought it might be useful to look back on 2006, focusing on items that may not have gotten the coverage — or the perspective — they deserve.

My picks:

1. Death of traditional fixed-line telephony - a turning point
   
2. Dual mode (mobile & WiFi) phones off to a very slow start
3. Some positive results from the U.S. AWS spectrum auctions
4. Questioning the value of Calling Party Pays (CPP) regulation
5. China’s 3G licensing delay obscures interesting VAS developments
6. AdvancedTCA finally gets production momentum

The complete explanations are in my article just published in the NMS Telecom Innovators News.

The Last Supercomm

Last week I attended Supercomm, spoke on a panel in the AdvancedTCA forum and attended the first day of the PICMG MicroTCA working group meetings.

I've been focused on mobile communications so, for me, the 3GSM and CTIA conferences are more important than Supercomm with its focus on traditional telecom operators.  None-the-less there were some interesting trends.

Fixed-mobile convergence was a major issue at the earlier mobile shows as mobile operators are running out of new individuals sign up, at least in the developed countries, and so are looking for services they can sell to enterprises.  The idea is one service (one or two numbers) works at your desk, on your mobile phone using VoIP over WiFi in your enterprise (or a hotspot) and on your mobile phone over regular cellular otherwise.  Well at Supercomm, it was apparent that all operators, fixed & mobile are interested, as are IP-PBX vendors.  The issue is who will be the primary service provider.  I saw more vendors and more IMS (IP Multimedia Systems) hype, but nothing particularly new versus the article I wrote 6-7 weeks ago for International Wireless Telecoms (UK).

Whether I believe the IMS hype or not, we (NMS) sell a lot of systems that are used for media services in the Intelligent Network and the evolving IMS, so fixed-mobile convergence is good for NMS.

AdvancedTCA was everywhere.  Last year at this time, there were chassis, boards and other AdvancedTCA components available, but few systems.  This year there were system-level products based on AdvancedTCA on display in a wide variety of booths.  NEC, Huawei, Alcatel, Nortel and Siemens have each stated they are migrating the majority of their platforms to AdvancedTCA over time.  Other vendors, like Lucent, also spoke about migrating platforms to AdvancedTCA, but without a firm commitment as to when or how much.  In any event, it was clear we've turned the corner -- AdvancedTCA is happening in a big way.

The PICMG display area had many AdvancedTCA component vendors, including NMS, displaying a wealth of technology: chassis, components, boards, software, many different Advanced Mezzanine Cards (AMCs) and quite a few MicroTCA chassis.  The latter were a bit surprising as the MicroTCA specification is still in development and unlikely to be final before the end of the year (at the earliest).

Among other things, NMS demo'ed what I think is the first implementation of iTDM, the Internet TDM protocol, approved by PICMG a few months ago and discussed in this article.

Triple (or quadruple) Play for the ILECs based on IP-TV over DSL or various flavors of PON.  It's hard for me to picture the major ILECs catching up with cable company offerings anytime soon, but there was an enormous amount of equipment on display.

QoS, SLAs and Flow Control were widely discussed and promoted.  The industry is trying hard to duplicate the fine-grained control of ATM.  This is a poor use of capital, understood in Internet circles (for example see this by Dan Blicklin), but the debate goes on...  I shouldn't complain, as NMS has a significant play providing media servers, media server technology and other audio and video media infrastructure for IMS and NGN networks.

This is the last Supercomm.  The TIA and USTA are parting ways and the name will end.  Next year the TIA will have Globalcomm in Chicago June 5-8, 2006 and the USTA will run TelecomNEXT in Las Vegas March 19-23, 2006.  Too many shows...

Speaking on AdvancedTCA at Supercomm

I'll be in Chicago next week for Supercomm.  I have a variety of meetings scheduled and, on Wednesday morning, I'm speaking at the AdvancedTCA Forum 2005 in the session entitled AdvancedTCA in Asia.  Hopefully I'll be fully awake, despite Jeff's party the night before.

The AdvancedTCA in Asia panel also includes speakers from NEC and Huawei, so Japan and China will be well represented.  Hopefully, I can add another point of view and some insights into ATCA in Korea, India and other parts of Asia.

Then on Thursday, I'll be at PICMG's MicroTCA working group meetings.  While still a work-in-progress, MicroTCA promises to round out the AdvancedTCA eco-system with a lower cost way to package Advanced Mezzanine Cards (AMCs).

Legacy telecom hits the 21st century: TDM circuits on AdvancedTCA switch fabrics

Recently I wrote an article on Internal TDM, or iTDM, which has just appeared in the May issue of CompactPCI and AdvancedTCA Systems magazine.

My interest in iTDM came from our need to support a mixture of legacy TDM and VoIP in the same chassis, including in AdvancedTCA chassis and on Advanced Mezzanine Cards (AMCs).

The AdvancedTCA (ATCA) specifications for next generation telecom equipment have gained a lot of traction, at least in the telecom industry.  ATCA supports telecom approaches to power, cooling, packaging, reliability, management and serviceability.  It's extremely scalable and, from the beginning, ATCA developments have focused on packet transport and on leveraging high-speed serial interconnects (Gigabit Ethernet, StarFabric, Serial RapidIO, etc.). 

The only thing ATCA hasn’t done well, at least so far, is support traditional TDM circuit switching.  VoIP protocols aren't well suited to our requirements for TDM transport and switching within a chassis.  For NMS, iTDM over Ethernet with VLAN hits the nail on head.  The article attempts to explains why.