Bell Canada: Network 3.0

By Jason Patterson

Openness, transformation, and innovation are all musts in the telco industry, but an incumbent embracing advanced broadband communications, like Bell Canada, has a lot of legacy services to consider, especially with business customers who may be particularly inclined to stick with what works. Bell’s Chief Technology Officer Stephen Howe recently sat down with WinWin to discuss this interesting balancing act.

Regardless of technology

WinWin:How will Bell Canada’s broadband deployments evolve over the next few years?

Stephen Howe: Our priority at Bell is to continue to ensure our consumer and business customers have access to emerging applications and the ability to access features, services, applications and content regardless of network technology or platform. We’re focused on staying ahead of unprecedented demand for more and faster network connectivity through each & every mobile wireless, Wi-Fi and Internet access point.

Right now, our broadband deployment is a combination of fiber and copper as well as LTE and HSPA+. Going forward, we will shift to network technology that’s entirely fiber and LTE. It’s a global evolution that will happen over the next several years as millions of customers around the world gradually transition from copper-based technologies as well as from HSPA and earlier mobile variants like GSM, GPRS and EDGE.

Whether it’s wireless or wireline, the key for us is to make sure fiber and cell sites are deployed as close as possible to the customer so that we deliver the fastest and best experience. This is an ongoing process with no end in sight. Meanwhile, we’ll continue to evolve alongside broadband advancements such as the transition from GPON to 10 GPON and LTE to LTE-A to 5G.

WinWin: What challenges do you see in driving down CAPEX and OPEX during this evolution?

Howe: We’re further automating network operations to manage our CAPEX and OPEX. We are also managing network capacity in a more dynamic way and making new services available to customers much faster.

Because of the high demand for our services and our continued focus on product innovation, CAPEX and OPEX challenges are always a primary consideration. The biggest thing on the CAPEX side is, as we build our networks, it’s not necessarily the electronics that we are deploying that are expensive, it’s all the construction that goes along with fiber deployment, cell site builds, the municipal work we need to do with permits and things of that nature. We’re always working to drive these costs down in terms of both process improvements and people improvements with education and training.

On the OPEX side, it’s all about how we become more efficient as a network operator. How we can drive our cost-per-bit down so our consumers can benefit from better prices, or build better services for the same price.

We are also driving our data centers and central offices toward a single-entity resource pool, really a data center strategy where, through technologies like SDN and NFV, we can enable dramatic changes in time to market, customer experience, as well as improved OPEX and CAPEX.

Content is king

WinWin: Telcos are increasingly becoming integrated media companies and Bell is a well-established player in this area. What are the challenges?

Howe:We at Bell believe that content is king, and that is one of the reasons why we are such a big media competitor. Bell Media broadcasting operations serve a vast array of consumers across Canada, extending beyond Bell network customers to audiences outside the company. As a provider to cable companies and other telcos with IPTV and satellite operations, we’re challenged to ensure we deliver the highest-quality media product.

One of the biggest opportunities for us or for any network operator that moves into media is to experiment with new forms of content delivery and manage the transition from traditional broadcast to a new unicast form of delivery on various platforms and devices. Integrating media is also an opportunity to broaden our relationship with customers beyond our traditional role as a network provider. With our focus on broadband innovation, it also gives us the ability to compete with international OTT providers with our own content-rich viewing experience that works equally well on any device and access technology. Whether it’s wireless, wireline or Wi-Fi, Bell ensures that people can access their choice of content anyplace, anytime, in a seamless kind of way.

WinWin: CES 2015 saw 4K become the mainstream for home video content moving forward. How is this affecting Bell?

Howe:4K drives a huge bandwidth requirement relative to SD and HD. One of the things we need to do as an operator, and Huawei needs to do as one of our partners, is to drive efficiency into our networks on both the CAPEX side as well as the operating side. Drive more bandwidth to our customers by getting fiber closer to people’s homes and businesses so that they can maximize the speed required for 4K TV.

4K is already a reality for movie and TV files of 24 or 30fps, but live streaming big events will pick up quickly with images at 60 or 120fps. 4K capability is also showing up on mobile phones with mobile video. It will take much longer to transition existing linear TV channels to 4K, however.

Balancing the new with the old

WinWin: What do you see as the biggest challenges to the telco evolution process itself in terms of networks and infrastructure as they transition to next-gen service support?

Howe:Our biggest challenge in evolving any of our services is our legacy networks. Bell has been in business for 135 years and was an early innovator in all communications technologies. As a result, we have a lot of legacy in both network systems and IT systems. Retiring legacy networks and services can be a challenge from a business perspective because customers are often comfortable with them and these services continue to deliver strong profit margins.

Customers will often be happy with their current service and not want to move to all-IP from Centrex PSTN-type services, as an example. We can often transition in a seamless way so that we’re seamlessly providing the service to them through a different transport mechanism, but we also need to work with customers closely to ensure they clearly understand the benefits of the move to broadband.

The NFV/SDN transition is also a challenge. Even with newer infrastructure, moving from proprietary software and hardware to the NFV/SDN era needs to be balanced with business considerations, especially managing the timing and the significant additional investment required. The reality is that future network evolutions must deliver against much faster time-to-market demands. Ideas need to be transformed into products faster to match the move from telco speed to Internet speed. IT strategy is another important consideration as billing, provisioning and assurance systems quickly evolve.

WinWin: What else is Bell is doing to overcome these challenges?

Howe: We are embracing openness in everything we do, from APIs and protocols to interfaces. In that way, we are able to move to an open ecosystem where Bell can be an orchestrator, drawing on various third parties – application developers, service providers, vendor partners – to deliver for the end user. To do that, we’ll need to continue moving our people beyond traditional telco skill sets towards enhanced capabilities in things like software, programmability, IT/DC architectures and open protocols. We are very active in doing selective in-house development of solutions rather than simply deploying what vendors sell to us.

One of the biggest challenges, or I would say opportunities, that we have at Bell is evolving our people in line with our business transformation. It requires process change. It requires ongoing team education matched with new hiring policies to drive more of an Internet type of model instead of the traditional telco model. I think one of the benefits our customers will see is in time to market, more Internet-speed than telco-speed. A lot better customer experience is the result.

We have an initiative within the network team at Bell to transform our legacy to a very open API-centric network. We are loosely calling that “Network 3.0.” Network 3.0 is all about enhancing the customer experience, improving our time to market, and reducing our cost to deliver services. Our plan is to remove the legacy networks over time and replace them with open-API Internet-like networks using technologies like SDN and NFV. Newer technologies such as SDN & NFV may be right around the corner, but the transition from our legacy will take some time.

WinWin: How do you feel about Huawei as a partner?

Howe: Bell has the best networks because we have the best people and the best partners. I’d like to thank the Huawei team for being one of the most important partners in Bell’s transformation.