11542 search results for Open RAN

Many operators are evaluating major changes to their procurement processes and functions, to make them more appropriate to emerging open, cloud-based networks. The UK’s BT is in the forefront, having recently set up a new procurement unit called BT Sourced, which may now establish itself as a commercial unit, selling services to other operators and to large enterprises. Chief procurement officer Cyril Pourrat says the Ireland-based unit, which was carved out of BT’s main structure in April, could form purchasing clubs with other operators to boost buying power, and even with companies from other industries with similar purchasing needs. But speaking during the unit’s official launch, he suggested it could go further than joint procurement, in its approach to partnerships,…

Liberty Global is the latest operator to hold hands with a private equity firm to create a 50:50 joint venture dedicated to deploying fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) in Europe. Through its Liberty Global Ventures arm, the company has partnered with InfraVia Capital Partners, initially on a project that is “assessing opportunities” for FTTH networks in Germany, before committing to any actual digging. Effectively, the venture marks Liberty Global’s re-entrance into the German market, two years after it sold the Unitymedia cable TV business to Vodafone. Without striking a deal with the devil (in Liberty Global’s view, as a rival), it would likely not have been able to secure the funds or regulatory approval to form this independent FTTH business. Allowing Vodafone to…

‘The Quad’ is a grouping of four nations – Australia, India, Japan and the USA – that are putting significant efforts behind Open RAN. In their first in-person meeting, the members pledged to promote a “diverse, resilient, and secure telecoms ecosystem” and claimed Open RAN was a key vehicle to achieve that goal. “In partnership with industry, we are advancing the deployment of secure, open and transparent 5G and beyond-5G networks, and working with a range of partners to foster innovation and promote trustworthy vendors and approaches such as Open RAN,” the leaders wrote in a joint statement. The group specifically said governments must play a role in creating a  wider set of choices in 5G infrastructure and committed to “facilitate…

Juniper has an increasingly strategic partnership with NEC, which spans many aspects of 5G end-to-end networks and particularly looks to leverage operators’ moves towards open networking. While Open RAN has been the high profile aspect of this alliance, there are also activities in transport networks and other domains. Most recently, NEC and its OSS subsidiary Netcracker announced a multiyear partnership with Juniper to deliver professional services to support 5G transport. The multivendor solution also includes open optical connectivity from ADVA, and will form part of NEC’s xHaul Transformation Services portfolio. The aim is to provide a single system that can address challenges such as multi-layer orchestration across IP and optical domains to support network slicing. The software and services offering…

Helium is a US-based start-up that has been trying, since it was founded in 2013, to initiate a new way of building cellular networks, that could change the economics and democratize the platform. Its biggest chance to hit the commercial mainstream came earlier this year when it was approached by Boris Renski, co-founder of FreedomFi, which has built over 30 private cellular networks in the USA using its low cost platform and shared CBRS spectrum. Now, FreedomFi has started shipping Helium 5G gateways, which allow consumers to mine cryptocurrency as payment for opening their gateways to others, enabling service providers to offload mobile traffic. This model echoes the homespot idea in the WiFi market, which was pioneered by companies like…

In Japan, the second MNO, KDDI, has had a far lower profile than leader NTT Docomo, or newcomer Rakuten Mobile, when it comes to open, cloud-based RANs. But KDDI has started trials of 5G virtualized RAN, with at least some elements of Open RAN, in its midband spectrum, with a view to commercial deployment next year. The operator is working with Samsung, which has been expanding its South Korean RAN base into the USA and Japan, among other countries, by leveraging its advances in vRAN and in Massive MIMO. KDDI has been a landmark customer for Samsung. Along with AT&T and Verizon in the USA, the operator provided early 5G contracts for the Korean vendor, greatly boosting its credibility as…

Truphone, a London-based international mobile operator specializing in voice and IoT connectivity, has joined forces with chipset maker Sony Semiconductor Israel and Belfast-based SIM specialist Kigen to develop an integrated SIM (iSIM) package for global IoT deployment. Sony Semi, formerly called Altair, and Kigen, which was spun out of ARM in November 2020, had worked separately on a proprietary version of iSIM technology for remote provisioning of IoT devices on networks using either of the cellular LPWAN protocols, NB-IoT and LTE-M networks. Indeed, that iSIM capability from Sony Semi and Kigen had already been demonstrated in a proof of concept (PoC) during June 2021 by Soracom, another global provider of advanced IoT connectivity. Now Truphone has gone further by bringing…

Getting ahead of China in the ‘5G race’, building a US-first mobile ecosystem, and excluding Chinese vendors from US telecoms networks – these are key goals of US policy, and have scarcely been modified under the Biden administration, even if the rhetoric is less overblown than in his predecessor’s tenure. They are now becoming intertwined with Biden’s flagship Covid recovery plans, particularly massive schemes to boost spending on infrastructure, including telecoms. The $1 trillion infrastructure bill, if it passes Congress, would allocate $65bn to improve broadband coverage and quality and reach every community. The aim is to improve the return on investment (ROI) case for broadband providers to extend their wireline or 5G networks to underserved areas, while also making services…

The neutral host model and Open RAN have a natural synergy since both aim to reduce costs and accelerate innovation around 5G in dense urban environments and inside large public buildings. The neutral host concept itself has been a long time in gestation, although there have been a few notable deployments preceding 5G, for example in the City of London financial district in 2017. That was before Open RAN and in fact featured ubiquitous outdoor WiFi, pitched as an attraction for one of the world’s leading financial centers. It was advanced in concept for the time, also featuring a 4G small network as a precursor to 5G, all self-backhauled wirelessly by CCS Metnet from Cambridge Communication Systems, and available to…

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…

Vodafone has become one of the most prominent advocates of Open RAN, but now seems to be applying the same logic of disaggregated networks and new supply chains to the fixed broadband network. The days of Vodafone being primarily a mobile operator are long gone, of course, and now it is examining how to apply common cloud architectures across different access and transport infrastructures, and how to approach future convergence, especially in major fixed/mobile markets like Germany. Its latest activity focuses on the broadband network gateway (BNG), and it is claiming the first test implementation of the Broadband Forum’s (BBF’s) TR-459 standard, which enables control/user plane separation (CUPS) in the BNG for the first time. CUPS, which has started to…

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…