11542 search results for Open RAN

Qualcomm has been making a lot of noise about Infrastructure 2.0 (I 2.0) in the context of 5G over recent months, but there is still a lot of confusion over a term that is at least 10 years old, with roots going back almost to the dawn of commercial enterprise computing in the early 1960s. Qualcomm’s consciousness-raising over a new take on I 2.0 probably reflects the company’s conviction it now has all the pieces in place to address this at the RAN level, with its new radio unit, distributed unit and distributed radio unit system-on-chip platforms. The next step to achieve a full platform is to deal with the core too. Although Qualcomm does not address core systems directly,…

Wind River may well turn out to be the one that got away for Intel. The chip giant acquired the software company – a specialist in real time networking and virtualization long before 5G put these technologies in the spotlight – in 2009, but in 2018, spun it out and then sold the resulting unit to TPG Capital. We have always argued that Wind River brought some crown jewels that Intel could have exploited better, and these advantages are becoming clearer as a few operators start to deploy 5G virtualized RAN (vRAN). Verizon deployed its first 5G macro vRAN last summer, running on Intel technology (Xeon Scalable processors, FPGA-based accelerators and FlexRAN reference architecture), Samsung network equipment and Wind River’s…

Intel has invested a lot of capital both literally and metaphorically in its target of gaining a 40% share of the 5G infrastructure chip market by 2022. The company is now boasting it has reached that target a year ahead of schedule, which does reflect a highly successful campaign to seize a significant market share of this burgeoning field Major competitors in various aspects of 5G infrastructure include Marvell and Broadcom, and equipment vendors’ own chip arms, notably Huawei’s HiSilicon and Samsung. Qualcomm is stepping up its 5G infrastructure activity (see separate item), as is ARM on the processor IP side. Intel’s arch-rival Nvidia is working with network vendors on several projects including GPU-based cloud platforms for virtualized RAN, and…

It seems that Google is on the cusp of mandating native support for the AV1 codec for Android TV devices. However, if the rumored deadline of March is indeed correct, that would be a severe shake-up in this market, as only a few silicon designs are currently available. Given that Google’s own hardware doesn’t have AV1 support yet, this is a bit bemusing. The latest round of reporting was triggered by XDA Developers, after the outlet saw an internal slide from a Google presentation that seemed to corroborate the much older rumor mill reports. So, it does seem that March is going to be a cut-off, of sorts, for any media player device that runs Android 10 or 11. This would…

Disruptive changes in the technological landscape can be mixed blessings for those previously well-established in parts of that domain. So it is for 5G in the enterprise sector. While 5G will improve the experience and spawn some new cases for consumers, there is widespread expectation that enterprises will drive faster growth and new revenues. In fact, 5G is the first generation of mobile technology likely to have a greater impact on enterprises than consumers. Until now, mobile networks have supported growing rates of business-focused mobile broadband traffic, and have created security and data protection challenges for IT departments because of BYOD (bring your own device) models. But now mobile networks will become foundational to many enterprises’ efforts at digital transformation.…

Two events not entirely unrelated dominated midband spectrum news in the US last week with implications for the rest of the 5G world. One was the widely publicized conclusion of the C-band auction of spectrum in the 3.7-3.98 GHz range, being vacated by satellite operators and their space-to-ground operations. The second event, of less immediate note, was the decision by the CBRS Alliance to rebrand as the OnGo Alliance, as part of a drive to extend its role in managing shared spectrum initiatives beyond American shores to the rest of the world. The US-specific CBRS band, which has been the Alliance’s focus so far, covers 3.55-3.7 GHz, referred to as the 3.5 GHz band, and so is adjacent to the…

The top tier mobile network vendors are chasing one another to launch virtualized RAN (vRAN) platforms, with varying degrees of commitment to emerging open RAN specifications. The centralized architectures of the last wave of virtualized ‘Cloud-RAN’ products – which applied to 4G and merely implemented the higher layer network functions in software – are forgotten. Open or not, the new wave of 5G vRANs seek to run some Layer 1 and 2 functions in virtual machines or containers, which means deploying high performance cloud infrastructure close to the cell site, in a virtualized distributed unit (vDU). Nokia, Ericsson and Samsung have all announced major vRAN architectures in the past six months, while Huawei – once an exponent of first generation…

Among the companies from the IT world that see open RAN as a route into the 5G market, Juniper has moved particularly quickly. Last week it announced its contribution to the emerging market for RAN Intelligent Controllers (RICs), a key element of the O-RAN Alliance architecture. The RIC abstracts control functions that were traditionally embedded in the base station and runs them as xApps on cloud infrastructure. Juniper has established stronger credentials than some mobile market newcomers by co-developing its offering with an operator, Türk Telekom. It worked with Netsia, the US arm of the telco’s R&D arm, Argela, which has been at the cutting edge of technologies like network slicing for several years. The two companies claim the RIC…

In September, the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) added a welcome dose of heavyweight experience with open telecoms platforms when it announced its SD-RAN initiative, though it also injected a further note of confusion into the open RAN debate. Now it has made its intentions clearer with the publication of version 1.0 of SD-RAN, a cloud-native platform that provides developer frameworks based on O-RAN’s underlying architecture. A key focus of the O-RAN Alliance, and its most significant new contribution to vRAN architecture, is the RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC), which abstracts control functions that were traditionally embedded in the base stations. It has two strands, addressing non-real time and near-real time processes. The non-real time RIC is relatively uncontroversial, since many higher…

The O-RAN platform, and its attempt to drive a multivendor ecosystem for virtualized networks, gained a significant credibility boost last week when four major Europe-based operator groups offered very public support in the shape of a memorandum of understanding (MoU). Signing up were Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica and Vodafone, which between them have 1.4bn customers (see lead article for analysis). The four operators said in their joint statement: “The signatories individually commit that Open RAN will be the technology of choice for RAN… The signatories will collaborate to support Open RAN reaching competitive parity with traditional RAN solutions as soon as possible,” they said, agreeing to “prioritize” the implementation of Open RAN (without really defining that). They said: “This initiative is…

Perhaps new lockdowns and impending recession cast a shadow over optimism in every quarter at the start of 2021, but the discussions about open RAN certainly came with a hefty dose of weary scepticism compared to the enthusiasms of 2020. Would O-RAN be yet another example of a vision of resetting the rules in the wireless industry, that crashed on the rocks of entrenched interests and the practical challenges of deploying large-scale wireless networks? There are plenty of past examples after all. To name just a few, we can remember the push for patent pools to standardize royalty payments in 4G handsets; the open equipment ecosystem that was supposed to accompany WiMAX; even the open source base station (which was…