 | Issue: | Latin America 2012 |
| Article no.: | 9 | |
| Topic: | An Olympic effort: Modernizing and future-proofing Brazil’s communications infrastructure | |
| Author: | Oscar Rodriguez | |
| Title: | President and CEO | |
| Organisation: | Extreme Networks | |
| PDF size: | 224KB |
About author
Oscar Rodriguez serves as President and CEO of Extreme Networks, providing strategic leadership for the company as it delivers high-performance Ethernet network solutions and services to enterprises, data centre hosting companies and carriers.
Rodriguez is an industry veteran with more than 20 years of executive leadership experience spanning sales, marketing and operations.
Article abstract
Latin America will host the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016. This requires an Olympic effort to enhance the Brazilian communication capacity, learning from the British example of the surge of demand. Brazil is already progressing with freeing up unused broadcasting bandwidth and auctioning off 4G telecom licenses. One of the greatest challenges is to grow the infrastructure gradually, phasing out of existing infrastructure and moving towards vendor-independence. This can be achieved by implementing Software Defined Networking (SDN). By selecting a vendor agnostic interface to separate the control/management plane from the data/forwarding plane, SDN enables network operators to choose the best of breed solution components.
Full Article
Brazil and South America in general are making a serious push as players on the world stage in both the business world and that of sports and entertainment. Indicative of their growing success, four Brazilian cities – Sao Paolo, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte and Brasilia – were recently named “power houses of the urban revolution” by ForeignPolicy.com, alongside cities in Chile and Argentina.
An even greater mark of Brazil’s rising status on the world stage is the fact that, in the next four years, the country will host two of the largest sporting events in the World: The 2014 FIFA World Cup, and the 2016 Summer Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. The 2014 World Cup will mark the first time South America has hosted the event since 1978, when Argentina both played host and won the title. The Rio Olympics marks an even greater milestone for South America – the first time the continent has ever been awarded the Games.
While South America and Brazil are celebrating the future arrival of these events, they also face significant challenges. In addition to building out the civic infrastructure for the Games and the World Cup, including venues, training facilities, housing, and public transit, the demands on communications networks will also be widespread.
Since 2000, the number of mobile subscriptions in Brazil has increased more than ten-fold, from just under 24 million, to more than 242 million, according to ANATEL (AgênciaNacional de Telecomunicações), placing a considerable demand on existing communications infrastructure. However, over the next four years, meeting domestic demand will be just the tip of the iceberg. Demand on infrastructure will be magnified considerably leading up to and during the Olympics and World Cup events, with attendance for each expected to be in the millions.
Looking to the past, glimpsing the future
Over the past few weeks, the world has watched transfixed as the greatest athletes in the world have competed in London for the sporting world’s most prestigious title – an Olympic Gold Medal. That the eyes of the world have been trained on the Olympic Games is not new, but the way they have watched – and tweeted and posted and gobbled up bandwidth in the process – is representative of the enormous impact that evolving technology is having on our lives.
According to the results of a survey conducted by Mobile ad network Mojiva and IAB UK in July 2012, 76 percent of Great Britons were expected to use a mobile device to follow the country’s progress during the Olympic Games. They were not alone. More than two million people visited the Olympic Park during the games, bringing with them the mobile devices that connected them to the world. What did these millions of people, both locals and visitors, do on their connected devices? They made phone calls, they texted, tweeted, posted on Facebook, and they watched hours upon hours of events, made possible by the BBC, which streamed all of the Olympics’ 302 events live, showing over 2,500 hours of coverage through 24 alternative HD streams during the games.
As much as technology is changing us, our insatiable appetite for sleeker, faster solutions is also changing technology, and as Brazil is now learning first hand, mobile carriers and internet exchanges in particular are feeling the pressure. In preparation for the onslaught of mobile and internet traffic during the London Olympics, the London Internet Exchange (LINX),one of the leading exchange points for Internet traffic, made major upgrades to both of its local area networks (LANs). UK mobile carriers also made significant investments in their networks in order to handle the onslaught of mobile traffic. For example, Vodafone told TechRadar: “We are investing well in excess of £1.5 million per day in our network this year and weighted that investment towards the first half of 2012 in preparation for a busy summer”.
As for the Olympics themselves – according to Atos, the lead technology integrator for the London 2012 Games, the technology infrastructure required to serve the needs of the 200,000-plus members of the Olympic Family, as well as the broadcasters to the four billion viewers worldwide, comprised more than 10,000 computers, servers, and network and security devices.
The Brazilianmobile broadband, especially 4G broadband, is already in heavy demand as the growing Brazilian middle class adopts smartphones and dives into social networking. As the London Games amply proved, the 2014 World Cup, 2016 Rio Olympics, and other international sporting events, will put an even greater strain on Brazil’s communications infrastructure.
Meeting demand with room to grow
Brazil is learning from London’s example. In recent years the government has taken steps to improve its national communications infrastructure to meet the needs of its citizens and demonstrate world-class capability as it steps into the world spotlight over the next four years.
The push for better telecommunications began in May 2010 when the Brazilian government launched the National Broadband Plan, designed to take nearly 12 million households online over a four year period and provide mass internet coverage at a low cost through 2014 while promoting infrastructure development. The government took yet another step to upgrading their mobile communications infrastructure in June 2012, auctioning off many 4G telecom licenses to a group of six bidders including Soros Fund Management’s Sunrise Telecomunicações. Winning bidders are required to make 4G networks available in all World Cup host cities by the end of 2014, with even earlier deadlines for cities hosting the FIFA Confederations Cup in 2013. Most recently, on August 23rd, the government announced that it was considering auctioning off more 4G licenses by the end of 2013. The auction would sell off airwaves currently held by television broadcasters in order to convert those airwaves for use with 4G wireless services.
A Technology game plan for Brazil
With major 4G infrastructure mandates looming, and many communications networks already lagging behind demand, it is imperative that Brazil and its mobile communications providers implement mobile backhaul solutions that can meet existing demand with plenty of room to accommodate growth. Today, Ethernet is the primary choice for 3G and 4G backhaul networks, but within that category there are a number of design considerations that will impact the Brazilian mobile carriers’ ability to achieve long-term success, as measured by revenue growth, subscriber churn, and adaptability to changing market requirements. These considerations include scalability; resilience; synchronization; Operations, Administration and Management (OAM) and operational simplicity.
The core of Brazil’s next generation mobile networks will require three fundamental building blocks: the cell site, cell aggregation, and the mobile core. Carrier networks and regulators should also consider the emerging solutions that can further streamline mobile communications in the country in order to ensure greater adaptability. One such solution is Software Defined Networking (SDN) which would assist in creating more flexible, dynamic, responsive, and intuitive networks as part of a long-term build-out and maintenance plan.
A key benefit of SDN for Brazil in particular is that it will aid in a gradual, seamless phasing out of existing infrastructure in order to facilitate next generation adoption. For Brazil’s carriers, the logical approach is to leverage existing investments while gradually building out and transitioning to the next-generation mobile network, and SDN can assist in bridging existing and next generation hardware by reducing or eliminating vendor dependence.
By using a vendor agnostic interface to separate the control/management plane from the data/forwarding plane, SDN enables network operators to choose the best of breed solutions from a variety of different vendors at the control and data levels. Using this approach, mobile carriers can continuously and seamlessly update their networks to meet the demands of customers in real time, without forcing the carriers to completely overhaul their existing network infrastructure due to single-vendor dependency, something that will be especially important as Brazil moves rapidly to meet the challenge of world-class sporting events head on.
Conclusion
Brazil’s telecommunications industry is faced with a tall order over the next few years, and a rapid infrastructure upgrade and build out will be required to meet the demand. As network milestones are achieved and next generation solutions are rolled out, however, Brazil and its people and businesses will be better prepared to compete on the world stage at all levels.
