OFC 2018 Theme: 400 Gbps

Mobile World Congress Americas (MWCa) And AT&T Spark - All About 5G

9/14/2018

We attended Mobile World Congress Americas (MWCa) in Los Angeles, CA this week, as well as the AT&T Spark event in San Francisco. Since 5G is launching first the US, these two events became the public events where significant 5G-related announcements happened.

Verizon. Will launch 5G Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) on October 1 in four markets: Houston, Indianapolis, Los Angeles and Sacramento.
AT&T. The company reiterated its own 5G plans (mobile 5G by year-end 2018 in cities such as Atlanta, Charlotte, Dallas, Indianapolis, Oklahoma City, Raleigh, Waco, Houston, Jacksonville, Lousville, New Orleans and San Antonia), plus it made some announcements like that it is beginning 5G-ready CBRS equipment testing (using Samsung CBRS equipment and CommScope as SAS provider). Also, at the Spark event on Monday, the company announced three strategic telecom equipment suppliers, Ericsson, Nokia and Samsung.
T-Mobile. Announced that it had completed a Cisco vEPC system (upgradeable to 5G Core) carrying traffic for 70M users that was from Cisco. It also announced that it signed a $3.5B 5G agreement with Ericsson. This is in addition to the July 30 announcement made earlier with Nokia for $3.5B, as well. Generally, the company has set expectations as recently as September 10 that it will provide nationwide 5G by the year 2020.
Sprint. Announced that it had demonstrated a 5G NR connection of Massive MIMO with Nokia equipment.

Additionally, discussions about spectrum in the US market were very active discussions. Some points we picked up on:

No new mid-band auctions will occur in the US market for another 2-3 years, so this means that new capacity is going to come from LAA (just announced on the iPhone Xs this week, as well) and from CBRS (discussed above).
The "who has the fastest 5G throughput" battle will be won at the millimeter wave. In other words, using millimeter was, speeds as high as 10 Gbps are possible, but with mid-band (1-6 Ghz), where LTE is currently deployed, cannot go much over 2 Gbps. So, to beat the Ookla Speed Test, the mobile operators who deploy mmWave early will get a leg up. However, in order to deploy mmWave, these have to be small-cells that are within 100 meters of users. Since it is so difficult to get real-estate rights and backhaul for small cells, this is going to be a big challenge. Nevertheless, this is how the battle will be won.
T-Mobile's 600 Mhz rollout is now in 1,250 cities. The company will eventually enable 600 Mhz 5G. 600 Mhz should dramatically improve T-Mobile coverage because it is low-band spectrum.

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OCP Summit 2018 - Disaggregation Theme Dominates

3/21/2018

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The OCP Summit 2018 hit record attendance and we can can summarize the theme as that of continued disaggregation of network/server functions. Examples of demonstrations, presentations and proposals associated with disaggregation are as follows:

Flash/SSD. Project Denali was presented by Microsoft. The idea is it separates SSD controller functions from the flash memory itself, allowing the controller to be modified for different work-loads. This means, essentially, controller semiconductor companies such as Broadcom and Marvell may need to be selling directly to hyperscalers such as Microsoft, as well as to their historical customers - the SSD vendors - such as Western Digital and Samsung, for instance. We believe other hyperscalers have implemented flash unbundling already.
Unbundling of Networking. Facebook showed off its FBOSS, a network operating system. Big Switch demostrated its FRR Open Source BGP, a routing protocol and Google showed off its Controller-based P4 system. There was some levity in this presentation as the hardware upon which the Google system ran was "(not disclosed)" - see accompanying slide.
P4 network layer abstraction and programming environment. Google showed what we believe to be a live, in-production system using P4 to perform route injection and many other functions.
Taking the OCP concept a bit further from the traditional server, storage and switch market, Mojo Networks demonstrated an Edgecore-supplied "OCP Accepted" Wireless LAN Access Point that was running the Mojo AP software and working with the Mojo Networks cloud-managed services offering. This wasn't just a desk unit, the company had 21 live-working Access Points using the OCP concept that powered WiFi to the trade-show floor.

One clear message away from disaggregation was presented and proposed separately both by Facebook and Arista was that for co-packaged optics. Both companies explained that this integration will consume lower power; Arista went so far as to say it would consume 30% lower power on a system-wide basis. There was no clear consensus at the show whether co-packaged optics was going to be a hit; however the power-hungry hyperscalers must certainly be entertaining it.