BT accelerates African growth

BT has announced a new phase of investments into the rapidly growing economies of Asia Pacific, Turkey, the Middle East and Africa (AMEA) with the objective of accelerating its expansion in high growth markets.

By hiring more people in the region, launching more competitive capabilities across a larger number of countries and delivering a differentiated service experience, BT will be in a strong position to capture opportunities in a total AMEA market evaluated at around 32 billion GBP.

This new phase of investments builds on the success of earlier programmes announced in 2010 for the Asia Pacific region and in 2012 for Turkey, the Middle East and Africa. Earlier this year, BT brought those regions together into a single integrated market unit to better address the needs of a new generation of regional multinationals and big domestic players that are increasingly expanding from China and India into the Middle East and Africa. The combined geography is expected to generate 44% of the global GDP growth by 2025, with 3 billion people expected to enter the middle class over the next decade.

Developments announced today will include the following:

• 400+ new people focused on regional business growth across all key markets, including Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, South Africa, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Turkey.
• New hires will include industry specialists focused on sectors such as logistics, healthcare, consumer packaged goods and financial services, and professional services experts based in 11 countries.
• These hires will be additional to the 600 positions announced earlier this year for BT’s Global Development Centre in Bangalore and to the 600 hires expected for BT’s new Global Shared Service facility in Kuala Lumpur announced in April.
• Securing new value added services licenses in various countries, enabling an extended portfolio offering.
• Better infrastructure through five new IP and Ethernet Points of Presence starting with India and Turkey, four Network-to-Network Interfaces (NNIs) with the first in Indonesia, and an enhanced satellite capability to support remote coverage and disaster recovery.
• Stronger portfolio capabilities in the fields of security, cloud, unified communications, mobility and contact centres.

source: www.biztechafrica.com

2013 - a connection telecom retrospective

2013 was the year of sharp fibre price cuts, causing a spike in fibre-to-the-building installations that will cause a steep rise in the number of businesses – big and small – with access to true symmetrical high-performance broadband.

A 1 Mbps service can cost as little as R1500 for installation and R 1500 in monthly subscription fees, and is available from providers including Internet Solutions and Neotel.

Having fibre makes a company’s transition to voice over IP infinitely easier, as the speed and other performance improvements remove much of the hassle of engineering VoIP.

Fibre’s superior response times further contribute to VoIP’s attraction. Analogue access lines have an inherent delay in the modulation-demodulation process. For their part, digital circuits have latency delays in the low hundreds of milliseconds, while fibre is orders of magnitude faster, with latency as low as 1.5 to 2ms.

Reflecting this trend, we are noticing a rise in a new kind of niche network provider that specialises in pulling fibre from the kerb into business premises. Communications service providers will have to work out pricing models that allow this development to flourish.

Another important trend relating to fibre costs is the launch of a number of new north-south fibre services. FibreCo Telecommunications, for example, completed its fibre-optic network in November, interconnecting Johannesburg, Bloemfontein, East London and Cape Town and providing more cost effective open-access fibre.

Together, these two events will dismantle one of the biggest inhibitors to adopting fibre connectivity – cost – heralding great benefit for communications in this country.

source: www.itnewsafrica.com

Huawei to roll out 4G service in Ethopia's capital Addis ababa

Ethiopia's Ethio Telecom said has selected  Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies Co Ltd, launch a high-speed 4G network across the Ethiopia's capital city Addis Ababa. Early this year Ethio Telecom had signed a $1.6 billion deal with Chinese frims Huawei and ZTE to expand mobile phone infrastructure across Ethiopia. Reuters has quoted Abdurahim Ahmed, Ethio Telecom's head of communications as saying “"In terms of allocation, Huawei will be responsible for the expansion of 4G in Addis Ababa, including other mobile services - the 2G, 3G, IP and the like.” More than 400,000 subscribers are likely to benefit from the 4G roll-out which will be completed in eight months. The rapid growth of Africa's telecoms industry is being linked with its economic growth. The continent’s telecom subscriber base was 650 million last year.

source: www.telecomtiger.com

security aspects in UMTS network

Cellular Internet access Yet, security and privacy issues in femtocell-enabled cellular networks, such as UMTS and LTE, still need to be fully addressed by the bodies.we review significant threats to the security and privacy of femtocell-enabled cellular networks. We also propose novel solution directions in order to tackle some of these threats by drawing inspiration from solutions to similar challenges in wireless data networks such as WLANs and mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs).

                               

The use of mobile devices has changed since the advent of digital technologies such as GSM. What started as a voice only service, has been upgraded mobile networks are used by more than 4 billion users worldwide. One effective way to meet the increasing demand for data rates is to deploy femtocells, which are low-power base stations that connect to the mobile operator through the subscriber’s residential to support data traffic as well. With modern smartphones, users are able to browse the Inter-net and obtain services such as ebanking, navigation, social networking and recommendations based on the subscriber’s location. Femtocells, which are low-power and low-range base stations for cellular networks installed by users at their own premises, are believed to meet the surge in data rates that these multimedia and interactive services require. They offload the macrocell network and provide backhaul connections to the cellular operators’ networks through the users’ residential broadband accesses.

Long Term Evolution (LTE) is the mobile network tech-nology for the next generation mobile communications, as defined by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). In addition to features such as increased data-rates, lower latencies and better spectral efficiency, one of the most in-teresting aspects is the radically novel all-IP core network architecture, known as Evolved Packet Core (EPC). LTE is expected to make extensive use of user-installed femtocells, in order to achieve its goals of spectral efficiency and high-speed for a greater number of users. It is clear that the sensitivity and confidentiality of users and data transiting in such digital cellular networks is paramount both to businesses and private users.

The issue of user identity protection was already raised in the early GSM networks, and the solution that has been adopted ever since has never been substantially revisited. With the ongoing migration towards all-IP and femtocell-enabled cellular networks, the legacy solution might not be appropri-ately suited anymore. In fact, GSM, UMTS and LTE standards mandate the use of unlinkable temporary identifiers  to protect the identity of mobile devices at the air interface, but the capillary deployment of femtocells might render this insufficient to guarantee a satisfactory level of protection for the users. TMSIs  are usually unchanged in a given location (or tracking) area, which is composed by up to a hundred adjacent cells, and femtocells could make it possible for malicious users not only to track the movements of mobile subscribers, but due to the low range, to have an unprecedented accuracy as well. For instance, such tracking attacks could be perpetrated by curious employers, in order to monitor whether an employee is visiting a competitor, or by governmental agencies, in order to illegitimately track people’s locations.