Nokia Siemens Networks hosted a media Liquid Net roundtable this morning, 11 October 2011 to discuss the company’s plans to meet Africa’s high broadband demands.
Liquid Net allows an operator to set up its network to self-adapt to meet capacity and coverage requirements based on demand.
According to Nokia Siemens Networks, Liquid Net is a new way to deliver broadband that can easily adapt to meet changing and unpredictable broadband demand, which globally is predicted to increase 1000 fold by 2020, with the Zettabyte age of the Internet set to dawn by 2015.
South Africa is set to experience a 12 fold increase in mobile data traffic over the next five years, with mobile data set to overtake mobile voice traffic by 2013.
“Our Liquid Net solution enables the networks of operators to self-adapt and meet the capacity and coverage requirements by sharing resources based on demand,” said Manfred Rauh, Nokia Siemens Networks Head of Network Systems for Southern Africa.
Liquid Net is currently on trial with some of the major mobile operators and will only be commercially available at a later stage.
ITNewsAfrica conducted an interview with Manfred Rauh regarding the benefits of Liquid Net Technology.
1. How will Liquid Net assist in resolving Africa’s mobile broadband network challenges?
The challenge is due to the very low penetration on the fixed line side. In other more developed countries, nearly every household is connected via a fixed line, not here in South Africa. This is why a lot of the traffic will go to the mobile side.
With this traffic moving from one location to other locations, presents a special challenge for the mobile operators and to not invest into areas where there’s only traffic during a certain hour and the capacity there sits idle.
Liquid Net assists by being able to move the capacity wherever the amount is needed.
2. With so much technology turbulence and unpredictable demands from consumers, how will Liquid Net technology meet individual broadband demands?
The main characteristic of Liquid Net is wherever the demand comes, the network detects the demands and allocates the resources accordingly. This is without any human intervention but based on statistics by very sophisticated management system.
3. Do you firmly believe that Liquid Net can meet the high network resource demands?
The basic principle is to run software on a commercial hardware. You can freely assign software to the hardware or assign hardware capacity to the software.
The other principle is to pull the resources like base band into one space and assign the base band capacity to the different locations. You need the connection of it all between the core and the radio, which is the transport.
Today we have a very sophisticated way to design transport networks to be able to transport the traffic exactly where we need it or the capacity exactly where we need it.
4. Do you firmly believe that Africa needs more broadband capacity than speed?
The speed was an issue when we were talking about 3MBps/5MBps (Megabits per second) per base station, not per user.
In the optimal wave, if there’s only one user in the base station, he or she gets all the speed.
Now this is no longer an issue, that’s why the topic of speed has disappeared. Now we’re talking about 330 MBPs, which was shown in China quite recently, so speed is not an issue.
The issue is really the capacity, the amount of data available for watching videos.
5. Which African mobile operators have shown an interest in Liquid Net?
We’re currently doing trials with some of the major operators in order to gather some experience. The operators have asked us at this point not to disclose any details. We will however disclose more information soon regarding the experience they had with the allocation of capacity.
6. Are there any Liquid Net trials taking place in Africa?
At the moment we don’t have a trial in Africa. This is an evolution, not a revolution technology. This means that no-one can say now I’ve built Liquid Net and put a new hardware and software.
You simply use the existing hardware and use the concept of pulling platforms and transmissions a bit differently compared to the past and then suddenly you’re in the middle of Liquid Net.
7. What is the advantage of Liquid Net technology?
This is a gradual process into a full blown Liquid Net. There are many steps and everything starts with the first step, which is the hardware platform gets unified and you design your transmission network a bit differently.
There is no additional investment – you simply do it a little bit smarter.
Bontle Moeng – ITNewsAfrica Online Editor
