AdvancedTCA: Why market predictions don’t always hit the mark

AdvancedTCA is a technology that is deployed in large telecom systems. Designing, testing, and qualifying such a system takes a long time. This is something that market analysts did not figure into their predictions of supposedly skyrocketing sales. In Europe and many other parts of the globe AdvancedTCA has been slow to get tosignificant sales other than test installations. It remains to be seenwhich developments generate big sales in the future. Specifica-tions and standards are in place. There are all types of products available in great variety, including middleware in Europe and worldwide, as a product search at www.compactpci-systems.com reveals.

AdvancedTCA adoption

Because of the nature of the products there are only a small number of users who might require AdvancedTCA products and accessories. Several of them have to be convinced to adopt AdvancedTCA in a big way before we see the market take off. A brief summary of the status of some of these potential users, based in Europe and Asia, follows.

Ericsson AB (Sweden) has said it is sticking with a proprietary architecture, although the company is reportedly interested in adding AdvancedMC cards to the mix. Ericsson produces MicroTCA power modules and sells them to other MicroTCA vendors.

Huawei's (China) AdvancedTCA solution supports both fixed and mobile services. One Huawei customer, Magyar Telekom (Hungary), uses the Open Standard Telecom Architecture (OSTA) platform of Huawei, which complies with AdvancedTCA. Magyar Telekom is Hungary's largest full-service telecom operator and a holding company of Deutsche Telecom (Germany) in Hungary with a 59.2 percent share. T-COM, a subsidiary of Magyar Telekom, has the largest share (80 percent) of the fixed network market and T-Mobile, another subsidiary, has the largest share(45 percent) of the mobile network market in Hungary, with networks that cover Hungary and neighboring countries including Romania and Macedonia.

The Huawei Tecal T8000 platform is another AdvancedTCA-based computing platform. This platform employs AMD64 (Opteron) processors on its BA22 AdvancedTCA server boards. (See Figure 1 courtesy of Huawei Technologies.) A number of other operators including TATA (India), China Mobile, Korea Telecom, Brazil's Vivo, Vietnam's Vinaphone, Pakistan's Ufone, Singapore's StarHub, and Chile's Movistar use the Platform of Advanced Radio Controller (PARC) platform, which Huawei developed. PARC represents a new-generation all-IP hardware platform. Benefiting from the advantages of AdvancedTCA, the third-generation PARC is large in capacity, highly integrated, and highly reliable, while significantly reducing energy consumption and maintenance costs.

Figure 1: (click graphic to zoom)

NEC Corporation in Europe uses AdvancedTCA and MicroTCA modules for its AM3100 Series Multi Service Access Node (MSAN) product range. The AM3110 (AdvancedTCA) and AM3160 (MicroTCA) provide scalable and flexible broadband platforms. NEC claims to have introduced the world's first operational AdvancedTCA-based system for SGSN and GGSN (GPRS support nodes) in September 2003 (Figure 2, courtesy of NEC Corporation, Japan). On December 3, 2004, NEC reported that it had sold more than 100 AdvancedTCA systems using Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) from MontaVista (United States), as developed by the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL) working group, and NEC middleware.

Figure 2: (click graphic to zoom by 2.2x)

Nokia Siemens Networks Oy (Finland), a joint venture of the two companies' networks divisions, claims to be one of the second largest equipment vendors after Ericsson AB. Nokia Siemens Networks prefers the Siemens AdvancedTCA, which is significant, because Nokia has not been enthusiastic about AdvancedTCA in the past. In the mobile packet core, it chose Nokia's SGSN and GGSN products. Fujitsu Siemens Computers (FSC) had high expectations in AdvancedTCA at the first International Service Availability Symposium (ISAS), which took place in 2004 in Munich.

TietoEnator (Sweden) is a Scandinavian IT service company with headquarters in Finland and Sweden, which has taken over Siemens Communications R&D, Germany, and many other companies or sections of companies throughout Europe and other countries. They have an AdvancedTCA signaling blade (Figure 3, courtesy of TietoEnator) that can handle many protocols, from ANSI and IETF to ITU and TTC, including Chinese SS7.

Figure 3: (click graphic to zoom by 2.2x)

Alcatel-Lucent, specifically the company's American section (Lucent), has been active in developing the AdvancedTCA specification.

Predictions

AdvancedTCA sales will close 2007 at $600 million to $700 million ($736 million in 2008), estimated Crystal Cube Consulting (CCC) in December 2007. CCC is fairly confident that AdvancedTCA will hit close to $1 billion in 2008 and they are predicting a$3 billion to $4 billion AdvancedTCA market in 2010, where part of the 2010 sales could be IBM BladeCenter HT revenues. IBM is testing AdvancedMC modules in some systems.

Outlook

According to a survey of telecommunication vendors in Europe (published May 1, 2008), operators are migrating to IP networks at a high rate. About 72 percent still had not phased out their SS7 infrastructure entirely and noted that ongoing support was vital to business. Many vendors are still trying to squeeze as much as they can out of their existing signaling networks and investments before committing to the transition to an all-IP infrastructure. Choices would be AdvancedTCA or IBM BladeCenter HT products.

As can be seen by taking a wide-angle view of 3G Network Architecture, these are very large systems with long-term tested and verified parts, which will only be replaced with newer products (possibly AdvancedTCA) as they become obsolete over the years. This alone puts strong brakes onto fast deployment of new (AdvancedTCA) products.

For more information, contact Hermann at hstrass@opensystems-publishing.com