11542 search results for Open RAN

At Wireless Watch, we keep a very regular eye on the activities of challenger companies that may break into the closely guarded 4G/5G RAN and core fortress. The competitive landscape, static ever since Huawei entered the market with such disruptive force, is now shifting again. This time, there is no single new force to up-end the industry. Instead, the landscape is a kaleidoscope, with many elements constantly rearranging themselves. Riding on the wave of interest on open architectures such as O-RAN, and by the start of the slow progress to a fully virtualized and disaggregated network, the prospect of a more diverse and competitive supply chain seems more real than it did at the start of the 4G era. Then,…

After two years, TPG and Vodafone Australia finally merge The merger of Australia’s third and fourth operators – Vodafone Hutchison (VHA) and fixed provider TPG – has finally taken place after two years of negotiation with the Competition and Consumer Commission. As in many other markets, Australia’s antitrust agency was concerned about the reduction of the number of MNOs from four to three. But the Federal Court overruled the Commission in February, arguing that TPG would not invest in 5G infrastructure if it were left standalone, whereas a stronger third player would increase competition to the leaders, Telstra and Optus, and improve consumer choice. The combined entity will be worth AUS$16.63bn (€10.03bn). It will be called TPG Telecom. TPG has…

One of the fears about the USA’s deteriorating relationship with China, which has resulted in intensifying sanctions against Huawei, was that this would disrupt standards processes and international cooperation in organizations such as 3GPP. That could delay or weaken future 5G and other standards, and even lead to the mobile world splitting into two regional camps, with a return to the old days of GSM versus CDMA. However, the US government recently said US firms could work alongside Chinese ones in standards bodies without requiring special clearance. “The United States will not cede leadership in global innovation,” said Wilbur Ross, the US Secretary of Commerce, in his statement about the decision. “The Department is committed to protecting US national security…

Large-scale deployment of open RAN, or indeed any virtualized RAN, in the established macro network footprint remains a medium term option at best, for most operators. However, many large telcos want to take the measure of emerging platforms and suppliers by putting them through their paces in greenfield sites, or in rural and emerging economies. Here, a low cost base is essential because of limited numbers of subscribers or limited disposable income; and in underserved areas, the risks of a new network being overwhelmed by traffic are lower, and quality of service expectations tend to be lower. Even if O-RAN for primary, high traffic macro networks is a way off, rural areas are a different matter. Smaller operators working in…

A consortium led by giant integrator Tech Mahindra has emerged as a bidder for an LTE upgrade project for India’s state-owned operator BSNL, after Chinese vendors were banned from the project. The Indian government has not banned Huawei and ZTE completely from 5G networks but has indicated it will impose stricter security regulations (on top of already stringent rules introduced more than a decade ago), and is likely to keep Huawei and ZTE out of the state-controlled networks of MTNL (in Delhi and Mumbai) and BSNL (everywhere else). The approach ties in with Indian policies to stimulate usage of locally produced equipment in telecoms networks; to build up its homegrown cellular equipment business (which is extremely small); and to encourage…

Amid the wider turmoil over 5G and national security, operators and their customers are more concerned in the immediate future over threats to emerging use cases, especially around the IoT (Internet of Things). To date, damaging attacks relating to the IoT have tended to involve recruitment of relatively dumb devices such as CCTV security camera in botnets for launching DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks. However, the attacks that brought down the Ukrainian power grid around Christmas 2015 gave an early, if as yet almost unique, demonstration of the potential threat posed to both national infrastructure and the Industrial IoT (IIoT) from the increased connectivity. In that case, the attack exploited the connectivity between the grid’s operational systems and the…

For operators with relatively new and modern 4G networks, upgrading base stations and antennas to 5G can be primarily a software update rather than an old-style rip-and-replace. Deutsche Telekom, for instance, has announced the software upgrade of an additional 15,000 antennas for 5G, serving Nuremberg and Hanover among other cities, as well as rural areas like Schwanebeck in the Harz Mountains and Westerland on Sylt. These are using 2.1 GHz refarmed 3G spectrum, joining some of the antennas already converted, which are in the 3.6 GHz band. The telco is already providing 5G coverage to over 16m people in Germany, spanning over 1,000 towns and cities. The operator claims that, in the rural areas, the network is achieving more than twice its previous…

In the transition from 3G to 4G, the idea of software upgradeability really took hold in the macro RAN. However, the proportion of the time and cost of a major upgrade that really could be moved from physical processes to code updates remained limited, and projects to upgrade or replace networks were still long, expensive and heavy on labor. In the transition to 5G, in which networks are inherently more software-based, the software upgrade is becoming a more meaningful term. Of course, antennas still have to be mounted on towers and fibers run for backhaul, but many of the 4G radios installed in recent years are 5G-ready, and even some physical processes are becoming more streamlined and automated, as operators…

The rising pressures on Huawei (see separate item) provide an opportunity for the emerging open RAN architectures, and their suppliers, that previous attempts at a new open mobile platform did not enjoy. When a vendor is incumbent and doing a decent job, the disruption and risk of swapping equipment and trusting to a less familiar partner often outweighs the temptations. But when a vendor has to be compulsorily removed – and at a time that coincides with the adoption of new technologies in 5G and virtualized networks – there is far more incentive for operators to try something new. In the parliamentary hearings that led up to the UK government’s decision to ban Huawei from the country’s 5G networks, two…

The UK government’s decision to ban Huawei entirely from its operators’ 5G networks, and to force them to remove any equipment already deployed, has thrown a harsh light on the thorny issue of rip-and-replace procedures in the mobile industry. In the run-up to the new policy announcement, Philip Jansen, CEO of incumbent telco BT, said his firm was already set to spend £500m ($630m) to remove Huawei from the core network of its EE subsidiary, and to reduce Huawei’s presence in its access networks to 35% (the cap set, under an earlier UK policy decision, on the Chinese vendor’s share of 5G or fiber infrastructure). To replace Huawei completely in 5G would increase that financial burden by adding up to…