News: Trends in Telco

I like statistics. Sometimes it can be misleading or data can be hard to interpret. But it can help us when we struggle to see the forest for the trees.

The last two years the IP-based mobile technologies were booming. If you are working with 4G networks you know it well. This year however the number of new deployments decreased significantly (Sep 2017, source GSMA).

IP Deployments Sep-17

Well, there can be many reasons for that. Rather than guessing, let’s have a fun and take a look on how popular are some telco topics on Google in the last 3 years.

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VoWifi Overview

“Wi-Fi” is a trademark of the Wi-Fi Alliance and the brand name for products using WFA programs based on the IEEE 802.11 family of standards.

When I worked in R&D we used to say that patents are like hostages. The advantage is that we can create them ourselves.  In April 2009, 14 technology companies agreed to pay CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization in Australia) $250 million for infringements on CSIRO Wi-Fi patents. Hence Australians labeled Wi-Fi as an Australian invention, though this has not been accepted by everyone without objections (especially in US). CSIRO won another $220 million settlement for Wi-Fi patent-infringements in 2012 with global companies in the US required to pay the CSIRO licensing rights estimated to be worth an additional $1 billion in royalties. Guglielmo Marconi or Joseph Fourier would be bambillionaires these days.

In our post the Wi-Fi refers to a WLAN access to ePC, both trusted over S2a interface or untrusted over S2b interface (3GPP TS 23.402). The VoWifi is then a voice and video over Wi-Fi IMS profile, defined in GSMA IR.51. If you are familiar with VoLTE (IR.92 and IR.94), the VoWiFi defines the same set of services, just over a different access network. The service network – the IMS – remains the same. Sure we need to be more sensitive when it comes to muli-device scenarios or access transfer.

VoWifi

This article is focused on the technical aspect of the VoWifi definition. Would you like to know a bit more about why to deploy the VoWifi, check out this post written by Alberto Diez.

Headers in User-centric networks

One of the key reasons why we need the IMS is the support of multiple devices for the same public identity. Simply put we don’t care what physical device our counterpart has, we just call and it is up to the network to select the particular device or more devices. For example my buddy can be connected via 3G or 4G and wifi from his smartphone, and he can be also connected from a web browser using the WebRTC (and well there are already some operators testing this).

As the logic says the key headers which are being used for routing will remain the same.

The examples here are taken from real networks (AS/CSCF). The exact ids and IPs were modified. You can enjoy the diversity of headers we can find all around the world. There could be much more of them, but I don’t want to have the post too long and boring.

 

Request-URI

INVITE sip:0123456789;
phone-context=ims.mnc000.mcc000.3gppnetwork.org@ims.mnc000.mcc000.3gppnetwork.org;
user=phone SIP/2.0

or

INVITE sip:+12345678912@ims.operator.com;
user=phone SIP/2.0

or just

INVITE sip:12345678912@server.networks.operator.com SIP/2.0

 

P-Prefered-Identity

P-Preferred-Identity: sip:+12345678912@ims.operator.com

P-Asserted-Identity

P-Asserted-Identity: sip:+12345678912@ims.operator.com

P-Served-User

P-Served-User: <sip:+12345678912@ims.operator.com>;
sescase=orig;regstate=reg