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- IPv4 Shouldn’t Exhaust Growth of Telecom Service Providers: Adrian Taylor
- 5G Will Help Both Consumers and Enterprises of India: Vivek Kalra
- Embracing and Deploying Open Networks: The Key to Taming Digital Disruption in 2021
- Vodafone Idea, Airtel and Jio Prepaid Plans That Offer Minimal Daily Data
- Dish TV Offering Free Service Up to 1 Month, How to Get It?
| IPv4 Shouldn’t Exhaust Growth of Telecom Service Providers: Adrian Taylor Posted: 09 May 2021 09:08 AM PDT
As rural broadband initiatives help bridge the digital divide, communications service providers have a wealth of opportunities to add subscribers, expand territory, and grow their business. However, they will first need to address the challenges posed by IPv4 exhaustion—and its impact on the cost of new subscriber IP addresses. Since November 2019, when the final allocation of publicly available IPv4 addresses was made, new IPv4 addresses have been obtainable only at high open market prices. There is a virtually unlimited stock of IPv6 addresses available, but migration to the new standard is a highly complex prospect and impractical in the short term for many communications service providers. They need a more feasible and affordable way to support new subscribers. Fortunately, there's another way forward. Carrier-grade NAT (CGNAT), a standard for network address translation (NAT), makes it possible to extend the life of existing IPv4 addresses to support additional subscribers. In this way, communications service providers can capture new opportunities for growth—while simultaneously positioning their business for IPv6 migration when the time is right. Rural Broadband Initiatives Expand Opportunities for Communications Service ProvidersWhile broadband plays a central role in peoples lives, millions of households in both rural and urban communities still lack access to high-speed internet from broadband services from either Fibre to the Premises (FTTP), fixed wireless internet, or mobile ISP—representing a vast potential market for providers. Now accelerating support for rural broadband initiatives and digital divide programs are turbocharging that opportunity. Meanwhile, demand for broadband services is surging. As the COVID-19 pandemic shifted broad swathes of modern life online, average broadband network usage in the UK doubled in 2020 compared to 2019. Rural broadband networks have performed well, thanks in part to infrastructure investments by rural broadband providers and an increase in FTTP penetration. This robust connectivity paves the way for new opportunities for both communications service providers and underserved communities and customers, facilitating the introduction of new services such as rich content experiences, new forms of collaboration, distance learning, telehealth, IoT, precision agriculture, and more. One of the problems that communications service providers will need to address upfront is IPv4 exhaustion—a significant issue but a solvable one. Overcoming IPv4 ExhaustionThe cost of acquiring more IPv4 addresses to support new growth has escalated rapidly over the last few years, as the last remaining IPv4 addresses from Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) have been fully allocated. IPv6 migration is a complex and long-term prospect—and even if communications service providers chose to switch over their own infrastructure, they'd still need to be able to support IPv4 at the same time in order to carry IPv4 content and accommodate IPv4 devices. In order to accommodate large waves of new customers connecting to broadband services, many communications service providers will need to find a way to extend the utility of their current IPv4 addresses. Carrier-grade NAT (CGNAT), also known as large-scale NAT (LSN), offers a solution. In a standard NAT design, network address translation enables a single public IPv4 address to be shared across the devices on a private network. CGNAT adds an additional translation layer to NAT that allows service providers to share their own public IPv4 addresses across the private IPv4 networks of multiple subscribers, multiple devices of a single subscriber, or multiple businesses. By using architecture models like NAT44 or NAT444, CGNAT can expand IP address pools by 40 – 60x or more. This helps communications service providers support new subscribers and drive growth without the need to purchase new IPv4 numbers on the open market or to upgrade or enhance home modems, routers, or cellular phones. Building DDoS Protection into Growing NetworksAs communications service providers leverage address translation technologies to grow their footprint and reach new rural broadband initiative and digital divide customers, they need to keep security top-of-mind; service provider networks are big targets for distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Traditionally, a DDoS attack on a communications service provider's infrastructure was somewhat isolated. If an individual subscriber was targeted, the attack was contained to their service. With a NAT gateway in place, however, hackers can target the gateway itself to take down the access of large swaths of subscribers. They can also target an individual subscriber and jump to the corresponding NAT gateway to propagate their attack to other subscribers. A CGNAT solution can help communications service providers protect subscribers from DDoS attacks and ensure that the NAT gateway itself is not compromised. Mitigation techniques include IP anomaly protection to recognise and drop traffic from common attack signatures; Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) rate-limiting; CPU overload protection caused from spoofing attacks; connection rate limiting; and automatic IP address blacklisting to mitigate attacks targeting NAT pool addresses. Bridging the Transition to IPv6While communications service providers address the immediate challenge of IPv4 exhaustion, they should also be making plans for an eventual transition to IPv6—an evolution that is already well underway among online content providers and large mobile network operators as they have migrated their networks to 4G and 5G. The interconnected nature of IPv6 adoption makes it a complex and long-term process. To achieve full IPv6 adoption globally, each link in the chain must be running IPv6, from the end-user to the carrier to the content provider. Realistically, not all three of these links in the chain will switch over at the same time. Subscribers will always want to connect to as many endpoints as possible, including at least a few IPv4-only websites. As a result, even companies with IPv6 implementation in their networks still need to communicate with legacy IPv4 servers and applications. On the other side of the equation, IPv4 customers need to be able to use services developed with IPv6. A complete carrier-grade networking (CGN) solution should provide both CGNAT and IPv4-IPv6 migration techniques. By enabling connectivity between IPv4 and IPv6 devices, networks, and internet destinations, these solutions can help communications service providers extend the life of their current IPv4 investments while they evolve and manage the hybrid environment resulting from coexisting IPv4 and IPv6 infrastructure. As communications service providers seek to offer high-speed broadband while also dealing with IPv4 exhaustion and planning for IPv6 adoption, carrier-grade networking, including CGNAT and IPv4-IPv6 transition, is becoming an essential platform for long-term growth. By – Adrian Taylor, Regional VP & Sanjai Gangadharan Regional Director, SAARC, A10 Networks |
| 5G Will Help Both Consumers and Enterprises of India: Vivek Kalra Posted: 09 May 2021 08:25 AM PDT
There is a multitude of use-cases of 5G that will be discovered and developed further once the technology arrives commercially in India. Vivek Kalra, Director & Head of Telecom, India & SAARC, Juniper Networks, talks about the readiness of India to adopt 5G standards of communication and sheds light on how AI-driven networks will help the Indian telecom operators. How upgrading to SD-WAN will support Indian enterprises, and what will it offer to telecom service providers?Enterprises across verticals in India have started adopting SD-WAN to overcome the rigidness and shortcomings of their existing WAN deployment. SD-WAN allows enterprises to leverage a combination of transport technologies – including MPLS, LTE, Broadband & VSAT. This adds operational complexity to SD-WAN. This makes SD-WAN a very big opportunity for telecom Providers. They are offering SD-WAN as a service by combining connectivity, CPEs and life cycle management of the overall solution. How is 5G going to make a difference in India both from a consumer point of view and from a business perspective?The 5G era will introduce a wide range of time-critical services for consumers, enterprises, and government organisations across various sectors in India. Applications built in this era demand data delivery within a specific guaranteed time duration. For example, we will see increased demand for immersive media experiences driven by AR and VR technology, which spans both consumer and enterprise use cases. We will also see a rise in remote control operations in various industries as well as unmanned vehicle systems powered by the connectivity that 5G brings. Are we ready for 5G? Once 5G gets launched, who is going to benefit more out of it?All operators in India are running 5G Trials for various use cases and are gearing up to launch 5G in the next few quarters across big cities. Operators are running Transformation across all aspects of their networks. All decisions of operators across Radio, Transport, Data-centres & IT, are all keeping 5G in mind. 5G has various use cases, relevant & beneficial for both consumers and enterprises. How are AI-driven networks going to help Telecom Operators?Data traffic has seen explosive growth driven by various applications and use cases. Telecom networks are more critical than ever and have become pervasive in all aspects of our lives. Operators are focused on delivering quality of service', enhanced customer experience and are keen to add agility and self-healing capabilities in their networks. AI and automation play a key role there. Automation controls service experience for customers and operations experience for operators. Operators are starting to focus their automation investments in areas of network planning, optimisation, assurance, and operational efficiencies. India is transforming into a huge market for data centers. How are these data centers evolving, and how will it impact the operations of India Inc.?India has one of the world's largest telco markets, and we have seen some of the biggest industry players here looking to get a slice of the data center market. While we continue to see telcos partnering with global hyper-scalers to offer value-add services and even seen some looking at building their own data center campuses, the data center market in India is still in its nascent stages. To keep up with the explosive growth of data and cloud computing in India, data center operators need to rethink their data center operations with a focus on delivering assured experiences. This starts by simplifying operations from design to deployment through everyday operations and assurance with the power of automation. By building modern, automated data centers, companies will be in a stronger position to support India's data center market as well as its digital transformation agenda. The Covid-19 pandemic has led to a surge in cyber-attacks. How can companies strengthen their IT infrastructures to make them attack-proof?The threat landscape in India is only growing more complex and sophisticated. Service providers and enterprises alike need to adopt a modern security approach that will not sacrifice network performance and impact the end-user experience. To achieve this, these companies need to look at unifying all network elements into a threat-aware network and adopt a Connected Security Strategy. This approach to network security gives organisations the ability to safeguard users, applications, and infrastructure. By extending deep network visibility and security policy enforcement to all points of connection across the network, companies in India can better bolster their cybersecurity posture. |
| Embracing and Deploying Open Networks: The Key to Taming Digital Disruption in 2021 Posted: 09 May 2021 05:46 AM PDT
The 2011 volcanic eruptions in Iceland led to a complete shutdown of travel across Europe for an entire week. But it was hardly a barrier. The entire world witnessed the fiery yet majestic scenes as drones relayed real-time images which sent viewers into a tizzy. On the other hand, KLM Airlines resorted to Twitter to communicate with customers as call centres were unable to take the heightened load. Post-crisis, the company returned to usual ways of business operations. But six months later, the CEO realized how efficiently they had adapted to the crisis and learned new ways of communicating that offered much value. The company then decided to invest in Twitter as a part of customer service and leveraged the platform for much more. In both of these examples, more data, more ubiquitous data, and faster data is created, which is delivered by more modern, more capable networks. In today's environment, the response to the pandemic is telling the same story of data ubiquity and digital preparedness, at our businesses, in our own homes and within our communities. Digital Preparedness Plays an Important Role During Extreme DisruptionResponse to the pandemic has sped up the adoption of digital technology and adoption of advanced networks by several years, and many of these changes are here to stay for long. 2020 witnessed the boom of mobile apps for COVID-19 and the adoption of technologies like AI/ML and Big Data for contact tracing and remote patient care. In their efforts to contain the spread of the pandemic, countries have deployed digital technologies to facilitate planning, surveillance, testing, contact tracing, quarantine, and clinical management. This has flattened their COVID-19 incidence curves and maintained low mortality rates. In 2021, service providers will implement leading innovations, such as IoT, augmented reality, and stringent data security measures, in telehealth solutions. From empowering contact tracing and telemedicine to supporting virtual learning and e-business, digital technology advancements have been a lifesaver to mankind during the crisis. These new digital technologies need a robust network ecosystem to ride on. Are Our Current Networks Ready for This Digital Disruption?Technology companies, big and small, have been phenomenal in creating the innovations to develop applications and services for supporting use cases like telemedicine, virtual care platforms, video conferencing and virtual learning. Going forward, these applications will grow substantially
These are some of the big shifts that can be expected in near future. This would not only mean high bandwidth and low latency but also demand flexibility and agility to respond to variable customer demand. In short – networks would need to be more open, programmable. The need for openness and programmability means that our legacy networks need to be refreshed and built-in new ways. In 2021 and Beyond – Openness Is Key to Delivering the Needed Bandwidth for Taming Digital DisruptionLegacy telecom infrastructure has largely operated on tightly integrated, proprietary software and hardware. These are primarily hardware-centric with software driving specific applications. Traditionally, telcos had many challenges to address – constrained vendor choice, high CapEx and OpEx and very limited flexibility. At present, they are solving the conundrum of scale and bandwidth, which comes with high cost. Additionally, they also have to deal with exponentially increasing data traffic, mounting network complexity, the sheer number of newer devices. These are major problems and with the existing architectures, telcos will be unable to solve this. They need an entirely new network architecture with an open and disaggregate network. The new networks must be interoperable, have the potential to reduce complexity and deliver high coverage. So what are the next steps for telcos? The answer is – Transition off of legacy networks to more open, more interoperable, and more software-centric virtual platforms. The end goal – A robust interoperable network ecosystem that can handle complexity and maintain a high quality of services while keeping costs low To achieve these goals, telcos will have to evolve their present radio access networks to the next level of openness and intelligence. Until now, despite the advantages, the deployment of open networking has been measured. Operators had their own reasons like low confidence in multi-vendor interoperability and lack of stability and reliability considering the hyper-dynamic nature of mobile networks. But 2020 changed things. It brought acceptance for open networks in a big way Now telcos accept the notion that the digital networks will have to evolve to handle newer use cases cited above. And move to open technologies will be a major part of this evolution. The next thing on the telcos' list would be replacing monolithic telecom equipment with networking components they can mix and match. This could make their networks more cost-effective. Though some big telcos are taking firm steps towards this:
The rising demand for open networks from telcos has instigated enterprises to devise open, disaggregated networking solutions:
A Great Start, but a Long Way to GoIsn't it a great start? Going forward the market for O-RAN hardware and software will account for ~10% of the total RAN market and exceed $5bn in cumulative revenue during the next five years. The next big step will be implementation. Seamless O-RAN deployment will be driven by proper solution planning and design, supply chain management, shipping logistics, component testing, RF optimization and drive testing. Radio access products must be tested extensively before deployment. TIP and O-RAN alliances are extending implementation and deployment support by expediting system integration, testing, and verification processes to create approved blueprints and reference designs. Everybody involved in the value chain understands the significance of having open platforms. Open networks will be the key to leveraging digital technologies like 5G and FTTH which are going mainstream. It is now the turn of operators to embrace more open networks and drive vendor ecosystems accordingly. By – Christopher W. Rice, CEO – Access Solutions, STL |
| Vodafone Idea, Airtel and Jio Prepaid Plans That Offer Minimal Daily Data Posted: 08 May 2021 11:51 PM PDT
There is a multitude of unlimited data prepaid plans available in the market today. Private operators, including Vodafone Idea (Vi), Bharti Airtel, and Reliance Jio, offer users a plethora of prepaid plans to choose from. These plans range from offering minimal 1GB fair usage policy (FUP) data to 4GB data per day. Some users don't need a lot of mobile data, and hence the 1GB daily data plan is more than suitable for them. Today, we will look at all the prepaid plans from the operators that offer 1GB of daily data to the users. Reliance Jio Prepaid PlansReliance Jio offers only a single prepaid plan with 1GB daily FUP data. It is the Rs 149 plan that comes with a validity of only 24 days and offers users unlimited voice calling and 100 SMS/day. There is complimentary access to all the Jio apps included. Once the user exhausts FUP data, the speed will drop to 64 Kbps. Bharti Airtel Prepaid PlansBharti Airtel offers two prepaid plans that come with 1GB daily FUP data. These plans cost Rs 199 and Rs 219. The benefits offered with both the plans are the same except that the Rs 219 plan comes with a validity of 28 days, and the Rs 199 plan comes with a validity of 24 days. Both the plans offer users 1GB of daily data, unlimited voice calling, and 100 SMS/day. Post the consumption of FUP data; the internet speed is capped at 64 Kbps. Vodafone Idea Prepaid PlansVodafone Idea also offers two prepaid plans with which the users get 1GB of daily data. These two plans come for Rs 148 and 219. The Rs 148 plan comes with a validity of 18 days, while the Rs 219 plan comes with a validity of 28 days. The Rs 219 plan of Vi is very similar to that of the plan offered by Bharti Airtel. In addition to the data benefits, users get unlimited voice calling and 100 SMS/day with both the plans. Further, with the Rs 219 plan, the company also offers users 2GB bonus data as an "app/web exclusive offer". There is also an added benefit of free access to the Vi Movies & TV app with the Rs 219 plan. When compared, the Rs 149 plan from Reliance Jio looks the most economical if the user wants a 1GB daily data plan. However, the plan from Jio comes for 24 days only. If you want a plan with 1GB daily data for at least 28 days, you will have to consider the options provided by Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea. Further, users can also look at the Rs 199 plan offered by Reliance Jio that offers users 1.5GB daily data for 28 days. |
| Dish TV Offering Free Service Up to 1 Month, How to Get It? Posted: 08 May 2021 06:25 PM PDT
One of the largest Direct-to-Home (DTH) operators in India, Dish TV, is offering up to 30 days of free service to its users. Users can avail the offer if they are going for long-term plans. There are multiple offers for users going for different long-term validities, including 3 months and above, 6 months and above, and 12 months and above. Note that users don't have to pay anything extra for the free service on purchasing long-term packs from the DTH service provider. Know more about the offer ahead. Dish TV Recharge Offers For Long-TermDish TV offers users multiple packs to choose from when they are going for a recharge plan. The DTH service provider offers mixed packs of HD and SD channels to the users for varied rates. Now users can recharge with any of the plans offered by the company for the long term. Users going with a plan for 3 months and above are eligible to get 7 days of free service from the company. Further, users going with plans for 6 months and above or 12 months and above will be eligible to get up to 15 days and 30 days of free service from the company. On top of this, users going for the 12 months plan will also get a free box swap facility from the company. These are the Dish TV recharge offers for users going for the long-term packs. Any user of the company is eligible to receive the benefits of the recharge offer if he/she goes for long-term packs. The offer is already live for the customers of the company. How Can You Recharge Your Dish TV Account?You can recharge your Dish TV with a channel pack in multiple ways. One of the simplest is to go to the company's website and enter the required information on the given field – 'Quick Recharge'. You will have to enter your VC number or RMN for recharging your account. The company further allows users to add channels and customise their subscription by paying extra for the new channels. Further, you can recharge your Dish TV account from other payment apps such as Google Pay and PhonePe. You can open the apps on your device and enter the required information and go ahead with the recharge plan that you wish to buy. Dish TV also offers cashbacks when users directly recharge with the company's mobile app. If you plan to purchase a new Dish TV Set-Top Box (STB), you can do that as well from the company's website. The HD STB from the company can be purchased for an amount as low as Rs 1,347. Users will get a channel pack worth Rs 408 for 1 month with more than 299 channels and 12 HD channels. Dish TV also offers an Android STB through which users can stream both over-the-top (OTT) content and watch satellite TV with the click of a single button. |
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