"Broadband & Beyond" conference highlights WiMAX technology

This was announced by Noel Kirkaldy, Motorola's Middle East and Africa (MEA) Director of Wireless Broadband, during his presentation delivered at the "Broadband & Beyond" Conference organized by Etisalat Academy on November 14th and 15th.

In his session on WiMAX opportunities and challenges, Kirkaldy discussed the WiMAX 802.16e standard, spearheaded by Motorola, commenting that most of the leading telecom players with a long-term vision are supporting the 'e' standard revision, which offers at least 20% more efficiency.

Conference delegates were also introduced to Motorola's next generation wireline networks and the revenue opportunities that these offer to operators by Morgan David, Strategic Marketing Manager for Motorola Networks in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA). David showcased Motorola's expertise in the IPTV market, which will enable regional operators to differentiate their offerings in the Middle East's increasingly competitive telecoms sector. During his presentation, David discussed Motorola's recently awarded contract with North American player Verizon, which is one of the world's largest fiber-to-the-home deployments.

Additionally, Alcatel presented its vision of the evolution of the broadband services towards 'user centric services' and the associated impact on the end to end network solutions.

Bernard Grave, Marketing and Solutions Architect Director, Alcatel: "New customer requirements urge telecommunication providers to reinvent the way to do business. Customers increasingly want tailored, personalized services anytime and anywhere. As a result, broadband service providers move from offering connectivity to value added services in order to increase ARPU (average revenue per user). Additonally, the debate surrounding broadband entertainment has been significantly amplified with the evolution towards new concept, known as IP TV (IP for Internet protocol and TV for the media specifications)."

As a consequence, Alcatel introduced its new Amigo TV and My Own TV concept which respectively offer the possibility to communicate and share information. This new concept allows guests within dedicated communities (friends, families, sport clubs, municipalities, etc.) to share voice and visio communication watching the same program to interact with video calling, messaging and SMS TV.

Lucent Technologies was another active participant at the two-day conference. Taqi Baiq, Manager, Technical Support, Access and Data Networks, delivered a presentation entitled "Next Generation Broadband Access Network, Triple Play Solutions". The presentation provided market insights on the evolution of Broadband Access technology focusing on Triple Play as a revenue generating service. The presentation also included a comparison between the different DSL technologies available in the market and presented alternative deployment technologies.

Khaled Rifai, Director of Marketing and Business Development, highlighted in his presentation entitled "Service over IP, Enabling Lifestyle Enhancing Video and Data Services", the road map for the evolution of telecom and multimedia services and highlighted some of the key requirements that service providers have to undertake as they start migrating their existing infrastructures towards a service intelligent network. The presentation also provided an overview on the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) and highlighted Lucent's activities in this area.

Huawei's NGN Marketing Manager, Nazih Fattal, and Henry Wu, Director of Access Network, focused in their presentations on the Next Generation Network Architecture and Protocols as well as the Development of the next Generation Access Network.

The two presentations touched mainly on the current and the future NGN architecture and the migration road map. It also focused on the mutual benefits for the service provider and the user, where the service provider increases the Average Revenue per User along with enhancing the customer experience. They also highlighted the evolution of access network in terms of delivering more bandwidth required by new services.

It should be highlighted that in response to the worldwide attention WiMAX is attracting, Etisalat Academy and Motorola will be hosting today (November 16) an exclusive half-day Motorola workshop to highlight WiMAX's benefits for the region's telecoms providers.