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Smart network ready for LTE Advanced: Rolando Peña

August 18, 2013August 18, 2013 Max Limpag Leave a comment

DAVAO CITY-After hitting LTE Advanced download speeds in excess of 200 megabits per second (Mbps) during tests in Manila, Smart Communications Inc. held another test in Davao City last Saturday.

PLDT and Smart Technology head Rolando Peña said he scheduled the test in Davao to show that the company’s network is able to deliver LTE Advanced throughout the country.

“I want to be able to tell my board of directors that I have personally tested the network up to Davao and that we are able to deliver the next generation LTE on a nationwide basis. To me Davao is the biggest challenge because it traverses several land-sea-land-sea type of combination,” Peña said during the test at the PLDT office in this city.

Peña stressed the importance of the company’s fiber network which spans about 71,000 kilometers. He said the “Philippines’ most extensive fiber network” is what enables them to deploy advanced networks.

LTE Advanced speeds

Saturday’s test was attended by journalists and government officials, including a group from the Brunei Darussalam-Indonesia-Malaysia-The Philippines East Asean Growth Area (BIMP-EAGA).

“We are introducing the next generation LTE. And the next generation LTE is capable of doing theoretical speeds of more than one gigabit per second wirelessly and practical speeds of about 700 megabits per second,” Peña announced before the test of what he said was the “first level of the next generation of LTE.”

LTE ADVANCED DEMO. PLDT and Smart Technology head Rolando Peña (2nd from right) and Huawei Philippines wireless division head Li Zhi Chao pose with a projection of a speed test on an LTE Advanced network demonstration in Davao City. With them are Davao City Councilor Leo Avila III (3rd from left), the chairman of the committee on transportation and communications, his son Lester, a gamer, and Bert Barriga, executive vice president of ICT Davao. (Photo by Max Limpag)

Peña said the current LTE is capable of “practical download speeds of about 65 Mbps.” The first level of the next LTE is capable of more than thrice that, he said.

During the test conducted by Smart and a team from Huawei Philippines led by wireless division head Li Zhi Chao, they were able to hit download speeds of up to 214Mbps. Allan Siao of Smart Access Planning then demonstrated the download of a 100-megabyte file via file transfer protocol to compare speeds of the current LTE and LTE Advanced. The current LTE connection took 43 seconds to download the file while the LTE Advanced connection took just six seconds. They also demonstrated HD video communications via Skype and HD streaming video.

Impact of high-speed network

“It’s very inspiring. It feels like the kind of technology that Davao needs, as well as the rest of the country. Imagine the impact of such a fast speed,” said ICT Davao executive vice president Bert Barriga.

Barriga said LTE Advanced is something that can be used “for empowering small data centers, service delivery centers, across the island. It is very practical and it does not require heavy infra. It’s very efficient and small businesses can run it and manage it also.”

“Having this in Davao would bring so much opportunity,” said Davao City Councilor Leo Avila III, the chairman of the council’s committee on transportation and communications, “business and governance is already about being connected.”

Schedule of commercial rollout

Peña said they are closely looking into two areas to decide on when to do commercial rollout of LTE Advanced: the availability of compatible devices and development of applications that take advantage of the high-speed network.

He said that while Philippine consumers take from two to three years to change phones, portable Wi-Fi devices or “MyFi” units will enable people to take advantage of advanced networks without having to upgrade their phones.

On the application said, Peña said “today, most of the applications can be very well served by (current) LTE connectivity.”

Peña said the Smart network is ready to quickly deploy LTE Advanced.

“We just have to add a certain radio unit to our existing cell site and we will already be able to deliver this kind of infrastructure,” he said.

LTE Advanced pricing

When pressed for a timeframe, Peña said he thinks commercial tests can start early next year.

He also said they are rethinking mobile Internet pricing, especially the practice of setting different fees for 3G and LTE.

“When we launched LTE, it was priced differently from 3G and we are now actually asking ourselves, why are people not adopting LTE that fast? And one answer is and we are finding this out, if we price LTE the same way as 3G – in other words, we don’t make any differentiation, whatever technology is available so long as your device can use it then use it.”

“Anyway today, pricing for mobile broadband is changing from unlimited to volume-based. So if it’s volume anyway, it doesn’t matter whether you use the fast lane or the slow lane. At the end of the day, it’s the volume transaction that matters,” he said.

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Student project that lets you monitor, control lights, appliances via phone wins SWEEP awards

February 17, 2013February 17, 2013 Max Limpag Leave a comment

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A SYSTEM that allows homeowners to monitor and control lights and electrical appliances in their homes from anywhere via mobile technology won the 9th SWEEP Innovation and Excellence Awards last Thursday in Dusit Hotel in Makati City.

Colegio De San Juan Letran’s SMS.AWT: Switching and Monitoring System Using Android in Wireless Technology was picked the best among the 10 finalists that made it to the finals of the nationwide search for student applications with the theme “Technology in Nation-Building.”

The student team, led by 5th year computer engineering student Frances Marie Kagahastian, won P500,000 in cash and an equivalent amount in grants for the school. The team won an additional P50,000 for the Ericsson Networked Society Award.

Frances Marie Kagahastian of Colegio De San Juan Letran receives her award for winning the top prize in the 9th SWEEP Innovation and Excellence Awards. With her are (from left) PLDT-Smart public affairs head Ramon Isberto, PLDT president and CEO Napoleon Nazareno, PLDT and Smart chairman Manny Pangilinan, her teacher-mentor, an official from the Department of Science and Technology, PLDT and Smart technology head Rolando Peña and technology group head Mar Tamayo. (Photo provided by Smart)

Kagahastian, who said her dream was only to be featured in a tarpaulin banner in their school, said she was overwhelmed by the victory. It was the first time her school joined the contest.

She said she was so nervous during the presentation. She failed the first time she demonstrated turning on the lights via text message – with judges ribbing her by asking whether she was using a Globe line inside the Smart Telecommunications Inc. tower. It took her some time to figure out that her team failed to input the destination mobile number in her demo system. It worked in her next try.

Ready for deployment

Kagahastian said the system that they developed is ready for deployment and can be set up in a home for P30,000. She will meet with Smart officials again this week to figure out the next steps for her project.

Tarlac State University’s Smart H.E.A.D or Helmet Engineered for Accidents and Disasters was named 1st runner up. The team led by Ranier Rivera won P200,000 in cash and an equivalent amount in grants for the school. Their project involves a system with a helmet that facilitates rescue via reporting of location of an accident through global positioning system (GPS). Rivera said their project was inspired by a real life event: the death of a friend of their former mentor in a motorcycle accident at night in a remote location in their province.

De La Salle Lipa’s Systematic Market Application for Real-Time Trading was named 2nd runner up and won P150,000 in cash for the student team and an equivalent amount in grants for the school. The system allows people to buy groceries on their phone via an Android application. The buyer can then pick up the groceries later from the store or have it delivered. The app won an additional P100,000 as Best Mobile Application from the Smart Developers’ Network.

Business case

IdeaSpace Foundation handed a Best Business Case award and P100,000 to the University of Southeastern Philippines for Wordify, a phone application that processes images of words and translates these into various languages. According to the student team that created the prototype, the app does not need Internet connection to translate words. During the demo, they were able to translate “hello” into Korean, English and Chinese. The team said they are still working on expanding the database of words and phrases.

Colegio De San Juan Letran 5th year computer engineering student Frances Marie Kagahastian demonstrates the SMS.AWT: Switching and Monitoring System Using Android in Wireless Technology, a system that allows people to control and monitor lights and appliances in their homes from anywhere. (Photo by Max Limpag)

Organizers also announced an on-the-spot award from Voyager, Inc., a new Smart subsidiary that focuses on innovations outside the company’s core business. They gave P100,000 to the Ateneo de Manila University team behind Botika-On-The-Go, a mobile phone application that integrates medicine inventory, database on drugs information and drug stores directory with map integration.

IdeaSpace Foundation president Earl Valencia said the submissions by students show a shift toward mobile applications interacting with electronic systems. “I think more and more that’s where the world is coming to – that the phone is an enabler for a new experience.”

PLDT and Smart technology head Rolando Peña, who started the Smart Wireless Engineering Education Program or Sweep, said the students have “elevated the level of the competition.”

Mobile applications

“This is the first time that we see a lot of these mobile applications. And you can see that they can be useful to our everyday life,” he said in an interview after the awards.

Smart developer evangelist Paul Pajo said the student projects were of high quality and showed extensive integration between various systems. They were also “very practical,” he said.

What’s different about this year’s Sweep awards is the involvement of IdeaSpace, said Smart and PLDT public affairs head Ramon Isberto. It is “no longer just a competition in which you submit a school project to win prizes,” he said.

“There’s now a development path beyond the competition. The products or the innovations that are developed and submitted to Sweep actually now have a…clear path to become commercial products. And even possibly commercial products around which enterprises can be developed and built,” he said.

Starting this year, the students were required to present a business model for their projects.

Isberto said this impacts the way schools approach the contest, which traditionally had been an electronics and communications engineering field.

Closer to real life

“If the school wants to be holistic about it, you should be bringing in your business students to make inputs in the development of these kinds of innovation. I think when they do that, it would be a much more enriching and rewarding experience or effort on the part of the school. Integrating engineering, IT and business I think is an important step forward for many of these schools, bringing them closer to real life,” he said.

Valencia said Smart and IdeaSpace “want to show the world that these student projects don’t end. The ones that are so interesting we should continue.”

FOR SCIENCE. A student of De La Salle Lipa fumbles as he packs a mock order of groceries placed through their Systematic Market Application Real-Time Trade app. They won 2nd runner up and also picked up the Smart Developer Award for Best Mobile Application. (Photo by Max Limpag)

IdeaSpace is incubating three previous Smart Sweep submissions: a Braille cell phone and obstacle detector, a system that allows one to leave a queue and be alerted via SMS when its near your turn in line and a platform for runners and race organizers that started from a project to allow people to donate to charities and relief efforts. Each of team gets P500,000 and undergoes an incubation program meant to set them up as a business.

In his speech, Smart and PLDT chairman Manuel Pangilinan pushed for stronger focus on science and technology. He said the country’s lack of scientists is a challenge and an opportunity for the student engineers.

“I hope you do better than my generation in pursuing careers in engineering, science and technology,” Pangilinan said, “You have a brain, so use it. You have a heart be bold, be brave and take risks. I think you can afford to make mistakes because you’re still young. The opportunities are here before you, via Sweep. Build a bright future for yourselves and for our country. Now is your time.”

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Smart makes country’s first LTE voice call, SMS

September 26, 2012September 26, 2012 Max Limpag Leave a comment

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Smart Communications, Inc. conducted the country’s first long-term evolution (LTE) voice calls and SMS in Cebu last Tuesday.

PLDT-Smart Technology head Rolando Peña described the development as historic and said it was a “major step forward for Smart and the Philippine mobile industry.”

LTE is a telecommunication standard for high-speed data transfer. Being a standard for data transfer, operators need to engineer it to be able to do voice calls, which are currently handled differently.

1ST LTE OVERSEAS CALL FROM THE PHILIPPINES. Huawei Wireless Technology Head Li Zhi Chao calls a colleague at the Huawei head office in China to make the first overseas LTE call from the Philippines at the Smart office in Mabolo, Cebu City. (Photo provided by Smart Public Affairs)

The calls and sending of SMS were made a month after Smart launched commercial availability of its LTE services.

Last Tuesday, Smart conducted several firsts in LTE voice calling: within the Smart network, with a Sun phone and with a Globe mobile. Smart also conducted the first overseas LTE voice call when Huawei Wireless Technology Head Li Zhi Chao called from the Smart office in Cebu a colleague at the Huawei head office in China. A Smart representative also called the NTT DoCoMo office in Japan.

Data connection

Smart Technology Services Division head Mar Tamayo also placed a call from the Smart office in Cebu City to Smart Wireless Consumer Division head Noel Lorenzana in Makati City to inform him about the development.

Smart Technology Services Division manager Hans Alvarez said the network uses circuit-switched fallback to enable voice calling. With the system, data connections are not interrupted when the network handles the call by switching it over to the circuit-switched HSPA network or whatever is available to handle it.

Alvarez said LTE, being a standard for data transfer, handles data by packet-switching.

In their demonstration, Smart showed an LTE-capable phone playing a YouTube video getting a call from a regular mobile phone. When the call was taken, the YouTube video was paused. After the call, the phone was able to continue playing the video at the point where it was when the call was received. Officials said that it showed data connectivity was not cut off when the system handled the call.

Peña said this handling of voice calls over Smart LTE uses the same techniques and technologies used by telcos in the United States and Europe.

Alvarez said that in the future, they wanted the call to no longer be handed over to circuit-switching but to be treated as another data connection within the LTE network. The system, called voice over LTE or VoLTE, is being deployed in South Korea and operators worldwide are watching closely how it fares there, said Peña.

Capability

“As simple as it may sound, not all LTE operators are capable of supporting voice and text. It takes much more than just having both an LTE and a 3G network,” Peña said in a press statement issued yesterday.

“We are now in a position to offer not only high-speed data services on our LTE network, but also seamless voice and SMS services,” he said.

Tamayo said, “The objective of Smart is to provide broadband for all, whether wired or wireless and this is another step to that.”

“On top of our high-speed connectivity, the basic of voice and SMS is there. It’s completing our services on the high speed network,” Tamayo said.

Smart said the LTE data service will be made available using pocket Wi-Fi devices that will enable non-LTE phones, tablets, laptops and even “smart” appliances to access the high-speed broadband service.

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