20 search results for aether

Occasionally, it is both educational and rewarding to fall down a rabbit-hole of technology and TLAs. A recent announcement from the Aether Project shone a light on progress made in the open source private 5G realm, suggesting that momentum persists for the project, post-migration. The operator-driven Open Networking Foundation (ONF) ‘graduated’ Aether in February, launching the project as an independent directed fund and project inside the Linux Foundation. This move also saw the ONF’s Broadband and P4 programmable networks efforts move inside the open source organization. The ONF is still working on other projects. In mobile, these comprise the Sustainable Mobile and RAN Transformation 5G (SMaRT-5G) project (which is also listed inside the Aether portal, as a project), and the…

The Open Networking Foundation has often distinguished itself from other open telecoms initiatives by boasting of its significant internal engineering team. That has enabled it to stay highly independent of individual vendors’ agendas because it is less reliant that many groups, such as the O-RAN Alliance, on time and engineering effort contributed by its members. However, it is now changing its position, releasing all its internally developed platforms into full open source and transferring its development team en masse to Intel. The ONF will now follow a member-driven model, closer to other industry technology groups, and will just retain a core team of 11 engineers, while more than 40 have transferred to Intel. This highlights the chip giant’s increasing interest…

The O-RAN Alliance has held its biggest plugfest to date, which was spread over seven locations/projects and involved 94 companies (some of them participating in multiple projects). This was the group’s third international event for interoperability testing and integration. “The expanded and diverse participation of companies from across the technology ecosystem is testimony to growing momentum behind Open RAN and its relevance for our industry,” said Deutsche Telekom’s head of technology Alex Jinsung Choi, who is COO of the Alliance. Plugfest tests were held in labs in four Asian countries – Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and India. In Japan, all four MNOs plus research park YRB were hosting activities. NTT Docomo undertook interoperability testing with Fujitsu, NEC, Nokia and Samsung products in…

The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) has announced plans to spin out a new business, called Ananki, to commercialize its Aether platform for private 5G. This will focus on enterprise and Industry 4.0 services, seeking to accelerate and leverage the current impetus behind private cellular 4G and 5G platforms. Early private wireless has mainly been deployed and monetized by operators, but enablers such as shared or industrial spectrum, and open platforms like Aether, can democratize the market and allow a wider range of service and infrastructure providers to take part, in turn opening up new choices for enterprises and accelerating progress. That is the vision of players like ONF, but the organization’s VP of marketing and ecosystem, Timon Sloane, acknowledges it…

Special Report: Open networks   The push for open platforms is nothing new. Common hardware, decoupled from software, crept into the computing industry with the advent of merchant microprocessors in the 1970s and portable operating systems in the 1980s. More recently, open platforms have been driven by the cloud industry and, with technologies like OpenStack and Network Functions Virtualization, started to penetrate telecoms, first in the back office, then in the network itself. Open, disaggregated platforms are now spreading throughout the network in the 5G era, though they are certainly not confined to 5G or to mobile. Vodafone’s latest push into open networking concerns fixed broadband gateways (see separate item). Many initiatives are tied into the rising interest in private…

The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) has been targeting the 5G/edge combination for enterprises with its Aether 5G Connected Edge Cloud platform for connectivity-as-a-service, which combines several of its open source projects. Aether is based on Kubernetes container management and combines edge cloud infrastructure, mobile edge computing, and the 4G or 5G RAN in a single platform. Timon Sloane, head of marketing at the ONF, says the goal is “to support the APIs so that applications that are written to run in those public clouds can also run natively at the edge cloud”. Aether supports licensed and unlicensed spectrum and all the main public clouds, and its foundations are the ONF’s CORD (Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter), ONOS (Open Network…

One of the many aspects of enterprise edge computing which may prove a double-edged sword for operators is the move towards private networking. Many industries are interested in enhancing existing processes, or implementing new ones, with cellular connectivity, and they are also increasingly interested in the edge cloud to improve security, latency and control for these applications. But they want the connectivity to be under their control, rather than just using the public mobile network, to ensure it meets their particular requirements. And so there is a clear logic to combining private cellular networks with edge nodes and even a localized packet core. That could be an opportunity for an MNO, to use its spectrum and radio expertise to offer…

One of the many aspects of enterprise edge computing which may prove a double-edged sword for operators is the move towards private networking. Many industries are interested in enhancing existing processes, or implementing new ones, with cellular connectivity, and they are also increasingly interested in the edge cloud to improve security, latency and control for these applications. But they want the connectivity to be under their control, rather than just using the public mobile network, to ensure it meets their particular requirements. And so there is a clear logic to combining private cellular networks with edge nodes and even a localized packet core. That could be an opportunity for an MNO, to use its spectrum and radio expertise to offer…

Being CES week, all the buzz around the internet of things (IoT) this week was focused on consumer issues like smart homes and cars, and wearables. However, most big platform providers aim to span the domestic and industrial aspects of the IoT, and the bigger profit opportunities almost certainly lie in the latter. So AT&T was focusing on both sides, stressing consumer programs like Digital Life during its CES keynote, but also announcing vertical market plans during its developer summit, which it collocated with the show. One of the centrepieces of that summit was the commercial availability of its open sourced M2X Data Service, which highlights one of the important potential roles for carriers which want to look beyond the…

Where Apple and Google go in the connected home, Amazon follows. It is as keen to be the glue sticking together every household’s media consumption and home monitoring as Google is, though its motivations are slightly different. Like Apple, if it can tie users willingly into its user experience, it will drive additional sales of content, goods and services – and start to collect the kind of data Google craves too. Its latest device is the Amazon Echo, a kind of Siri-style personal assistant, but for the home rather than the handset. Echo takes the form of a connected speaker, but its role will evolve far beyond that. Rather than just monitoring and collecting data, like many home gadgets with…

The short range wireless technology Bluetooth has always promised more than it delivered, and has been facing death at the hands of the emerging, and far faster, UltraWideBand (UWB) technologies. Now the Bluetooth community is poised to avoid that fate by converging its efforts with those of the leading UWB-based technology groups, and creating a future standard based on a UWB physical layer that will deliver higher data rates to Bluetooth customers, while preserving the advantages that the older spec has, such as its qualification program and brand. With a similar move mooted for another key short range IEEE standard, ZigBee, there is increasing likelihood that UWB will become the uniform physical layer for personal area networking from digital home…

The International Telecommunications Union held its third international meeting on UltraWideBand this week, with FCC head Michael Powell seeking to impose the US approach to the technology on other regions of the world, which have not yet regulated UWB. But while an international consensus on UWB would boost its uptake, one that followed the US precedent would also rob the platform of many of its strengths. FCC policy on UWB has been governed by an almost hysterical fear of interference with other devices, created by the ability of the technology to operate across a massive range of frequencies. This has aroused the suspicions of established operators right across the spectrum and handicapped UWB from the start with the often ill-informed…

The potential of wireless sensor networks has caught the eye of most of the giants recently, with Intel and IBM in particular predicting a world where every person, gadget and home appliance is connected by tiny, low power radios. With Harbor Research predicting revenues of over $1bn from this market by 2010, a host of start-ups is coming out of the shadows alongside the high profile projects such as Intel’s digital home and ‘smart clothing’ demonstrations, and research work at universities such as Carnegie Mellon and MIT, and at the US Department of Defense and CIA (see Wireless Watch issue 60). . Interesting small players include Ember, which focuses on meshes of small sensors based on the ZigBee standard; Millennial…

While the politics of the IEEE have dominated the headlines about UltraWideBand recently, actual product advances have been harder to find than soundbites from supporters of the two sides. This week, however, we have seen progress from Wisair of Israel towards real silicon for the MultiBand OFDM implementation of UWB ‘ the Intel/TI-backed contender to provide the IEEE 802.15.3a standard ‘ as well as new funding for one of the most interesting players, Staccato. Wisair demonstrated the first UWB transceiver to meet the physical layer (PHY) specification of Multiband OFDM at this week’s Intel Developer Forum in Tokyo. The chip is designed to support, in particular, high speed video and wireless USB peripheral links over UWB ‘ spanning the PC…

Mesh networking start-up Ember has acquired technology and personnel for ZigBee short range, low power networks from the UK’s Cambridge Consultants. The company, which has pioneered ZigBee-based mesh, will sample a single-chip device for the personal area standard within 18 months, by which time it expects the technology to be running on an UltraWideBand physical layer. Ember’s purchase brings it the CCL team and its ground breaking single chip architecture for the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, also called ZigBee, which focuses low power, low data rate communications for industrial applications, sensors, interactive toys, smart badges, remote controls, and home automation. It runs at10-250Kbps over 30 to 75 meters in the unlicensed 2.4GHz band. This market is expected to explode in 2-3…

Motorola-backed moves to create a compromise solution in the UltraWideBand war appear to be stillborn, since the other side of the debate, the Multiband OFDM Alliance, failed to attend the meeting. The IEEE Taskgroup charged with creating the UWB-based 802.15.3a standard for wireless personal area network this week outlined a framework, which would allow the physical layers of the two competing proposals to coexist without interference (though not interoperate). This was based on the Common Signalling Protocol, devised by UWB start-up Pulse~Link and backed by one of the standard proposers, Motorola. The protocol will be formally presented at the next IEEE meeting later this month and is designed to provide a coexistence platform as both sides in the war push…

The wireless middleware market is set to explode, but to take advantage will require heavy investment from the players, in acquisitions and in strong Wi-Fi enablement of older product sets. Most contenders have come from a heritage of providing synchronized links between mobile users on laptops or PDAs to corporate email servers. Now full wireless access is the key, and enterprises are starting to build a broader set of applications around their mobile information servers, with field workers accessing all kinds of corporate information via the Wi-Fi or cellular connection. This trend will create a 36.5% compound annual growth rate in the mobile middleware sector, according to IDC predictions, and revenues of $1.6bn by 2007. Average seat deployment is rising…