The POPClock tells us that there are 6,807,230,170 of us on this planet when I looked it up at 22:26 UTC (EST+5) Feb 26, 2010. In the meantime we are about to connect the 5 billionth cell phone user this year according to ITU Secretary-General Dr. Hamadoun Toure. At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona he also mentioned that the current recession hardly put a dent in the subscriber growth. Gartner Research shows 1.2 billion cell phones sold in 2009, down 0.9 from the previous year but a strong growth in smart phones which saw sales of 172.4 million units growing by 23.8% for the year, 58% in the fourth quarter only! On the network side, a February 26th press release from the GSA association announced that 59 operators in 28 countries are now committed to LTE compared to 39 operators in 19 countries six months ago. A further 16 operators are running technology trials. By the end of 2010 22 LTE networks will have entered commercial service. The first two commercial LTE networks were launched last December in Sweden and Norway. And let us not forget Mobile Wimax which is also gaining some momentum.

As Global Insight speculates, we are indeed likely to see the smart phone war starting to get more acrimonious in 2010 as software platforms and manufactures slug it out, hopefully to the benefit of the consumer. Mobile web browsing for the masses should not be that far away as smart phone prices start dropping seriously. On the network side we are likely to witness a titanic battle amongst mobile network operators trying to walk the fine line between the cost of G4 licenses and network upgrades, affordable end-user pricing, growth in market share and EBITDA. The only certainty is a decoupling between the growth in traffic volumes and the growth in revenue.

As markets and technologies evolved so fast it was rather interesting to see the sudden scramble on how to do voice and SMS over LTE. The most basic, and let us admit, most lucrative, services seemed forgotten in the data deluge. Would it be Volga (Voice over LTE with generic access) using existing circuit switched networks or would it be One Voice which is IMS based with real VoIP calls. One Voice now seems to be gaining the upper hand.

IMS implies addressable IP addresses, lots of them, no need to say more.

Time has come for an IPv6 address population clock to complement the
IPv4 address exhaustion clock .

This post originally appeared on CircleID.

As a technology that enables consumers to gain greater access to better Internet services, WiMAX has captured significant attention in today’s marketplace. In particular, WiMAX can make important inroads to the Indian SME and consumer markets.

Driven by basic broadband needs and VoIP, WiMAX is increasingly being considered as the most viable last-mile solution. The important factors enabling that are

1. penetration of broadband in India is particularly low as there are approximately 6 million broadband connections out of a population of 1.2 billion;
2. there is an underdeveloped last-mile infrastructure in this region; and
3. from a capital expenditure perspective, last-mile buried networks tend to be very expensive.

Since mobility in India is growing at a feverish pace and last-mile routes are limited, WiMAX is the most stable, cost-effective and scalable solution that can deliver last-mile broadband services to most homes as well as small and medium enterprises.

Due to scale, India is the largest single-country WiMAX opportunity in the world. The adoption of WiMAX remains a critical ingredient for prosperity in India by enabling it to become a knowledge-led economy. Tata Communications intends to invest $500 million in the next three years in the wireless broadband space.

Although WiMAX has universal appeal, as it creates ubiquitous broadband connectivity, the key drivers for the deploying WiMAX in emerging and developed markets differ.

Over the last few years, WiMAX has gained a strong foothold in developing markets, where there is a latent demand for broadband, but poor infrastructure. In emerging markets, businesses are often forced to subscribe to expensive leased lines or satellite links while residential users typically pay high fees for a much less efficient DSL or cable modem service. In such environments, WiMAX provides a cost-effective alternative to wired technologies that is faster to deploy and to maintain.

The impact of WiMAX in extending broadband availability for residential and business users is substantially higher in developing markets than in developed ones, where broadband access is already available to most households and businesses. In this instance, WiMAX is not used for broadband connectivity, but rather personal services or mobile needs.

Whether WiMAX solutions are being used in emerging or developed markets, the future seems promising. WiMAX is expected to be integrated into the next generation mass-market consumer devices with speeds similar to cable and metropolitan area coverage while on the move, at a much lower price point.

As Neptune’s trident has struck Port Alberni this December 8th 2009 he must have remembered the day more than a century ago when the All Red Line was completed close by at the Bamfield Cable Station in October 1902. The first Global network circling the Globe, projecting the might of the British Empire and Neptune’s first globe spanning copper belt.

I would suspect that not many current Tata Communications employees formerly from Teleglobe are aware that the Canadian All Red landing stations became part of what one day would become the COTC (Canadian Overseas Telecommunication Corporation) renamed Teleglobe in 1975. No current employee, for sure, remembers that the initial cable station was in Bamfield on Vancouver Island. The Bamfield Marine Centre happens to be located on the old cable station property and its website provides some interesting tidbits. The original cable station was constructed in 1902, with the underwater telegraph cable laid in October of the same year by the cable ship Colonia and operated by the Eastern Pacific Board (EPB). The cable ran nearly 4,000 miles across the Pacific from Bamfield to Fanning Island, an atoll in the mid-Pacific which the British annexed specifically for that purpose as they wanted the cable completely on British territory. From there the cable continued to Fiji, New Zealand and Australia. We further learn that The Canadian Pacific Railway Company constructed the Cable Station plus Bachelors Quarters and Manager’s House in 1901-1902, and that on November 1st 1902, the first two telegraph messages to encircle the globe were relayed. In 1926, a second building was constructed and at the same time, a second cable was laid via Hawaii to Suva, Fiji.

In 1950 the Canadian Government nationalized international telegraph cable assets and formed COTC taking over the Bamfield Cable Station. In 1953, the two cables were extended up the Alberni Canal and in 1959, a new state-of-the-art cable station was built in Port Alberni and the Bamfield Cable Station was shut down. The last messages were sent from Bamfield on June 20th, 1959.

The next highlight would take place in late 1963 with the inauguration of the British Commonwealth COMPAC, the first global cable system suited for telephony landing in Port Alberni. COMPAC was to a certain extent a post colonial successor of the Imperial All Red Line. The idea was to link the UK, South Africa, Sri Lanka, India, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and back to UK with an undersea telephone cable system ringing the world. For the Canadian portion of the ring, Teleglobe, still called COTC in those days, completed the transatlantic Cantat-1 in 1961 while the Trans Canada portion was microwave based and installed by Canadian Pacific Railways across the continent all the way to Vancouver Island. HRH, Queen Elisabeth inaugurated the COMPAC system with a call to Australia. The capacity of COMPAC was 80 telephone circuits and one telephone circuit could carry 22 telegraph channels!

Then came ANZCAN in 1984, as a replacement for COMPAC. The cable had a capacity of 1,380 telephone circuits, quite amazing compared to COMPAC twenty years earlier. The Canada-Hawaii portion of good old ANZCAN went into retirement in 1997.

The crowning achievement and grand finale at Port Alberni was the installation and activation of TPC-4 in 1992. This cable pioneered deep-sea cable branching as two cables, one leaving from Port Alberni and one from Point Arena north of San Francisco in California, joined together with at a deep-sea junction and continued as one cable to Chikura in Japan. Naysayers at the time said such undersea branching would never work but business and political considerations plus the persuasion of our VP Engineering at the time, Martin Fournier, prevailed. Needless to say that today, undersea branching is common place.

The early days of 1997 then saw TPC-5 coming on-line with two landing points in the USA, one at San Luis Obispo, California and the Northern landing at Brandon, Oregon. By then the political imperatives to have a landing point within Canadian waters had all but vanished in the context of competition, efficiency and liberalization of the telecom market. It made more economic and business sense to connect terrestrially to Bandon. The days of¨Port Alberni as a cable landing station were counted. It was a matter of how long TPC-4 would still continue to be commercially viable. Marking the end of an era, TPC-4 was decommissioned late 2003 and for the first time in more than a century no transpacific cable traffic reached or left the Canadian shores.

In the fall 2004 the cable station was sold to the University of Victoria for a most worthwhile project. The Neptune initiative is run by a consortium of university and scientific organizations, lead by the University of Victoria and received its first funding in 2003. University of Victoria bought the former Teleglobe cable landing station building on Mallory drive. The 800-kilometre cable network launched this month starts and ends in Port Alberni describing a 800 km long ring at the ocean bottom. The cable was specially built by Alcatel as it has non conventional power requirements for sensor arrays, cameras, hydrophones, automated submarine robotic vehicles and the like. How many telegraph channels could the 10 gigabit backhaul to UVic carry?

It is rejuvenating and most enjoyable to see Teleglobe’s two former cable landing stations used for natural sciences especially in these days of growing concern about global warming and sustainable development of the planet; I look forward to see the science produced by Neptune and to stream some ocean views to my laptop screen or my smartphone.