11552 search results for Open RAN

Cable TV provider Virgin Media has announced its smart home service bundle in Ireland. This is refreshing news – a major service provider taking the reins of its smart home offering and presenting it in a neat, easy to comprehend package for consumers. Virgin Media Ireland has now partnered with Google, presenting a distinct, all-encompassing offering, the Virgin Media Smart Home. A cinematic advert shows a homeowner take the reins of domestic life with various ‘OK Google’ commands. Service providers need to partner with Amazon or Google in order to cash in on the smart home market. They have left it far too late to introduce their own smart home equipment as the giants now dominate the market. The vast rate at…

A week after Telia and Telenor announced a 5G RAN sharing deal in Denmark, the two operators have announced that they will start to shut down their shared 3G network from April 2021. This is in line with a strong trend among European MNOs to plan to sunset 3G networks long before 2G ones, which contrasts with North America and parts of Asia, where 2G networks are well into the process of shutdown. In Europe, most operators want to keep at least some of their 2G spectrum active to support wide coverage for voice and, particularly, machine-to-machine services like asset tracking. 3G has never been as effective for such applications, and its 2.1 GHz spectrum will be more valuable to…

Dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS) is an important 3GPP-standardized technology which will greatly improve operators’ spectrum efficiency as they deploy 5G to augment their existing 4G networks. It allows the 5G and 4G radios to share the 4G spectrum flexibly, opening up new bands for the newer technology, and allowing the balance of traffic to be shifted between the two networks according to usage. However, DSS is hard to implement and requires very high performance baseband processing. All the major vendors have been working on it, but Ericsson has been most successful in published live trials, and is now the first to claim general availability. This will be particularly important to Verizon, which has committed to deploying DSS throughout its network…

Telefónica has been one of the most enthusiastic supporters of initiatives to open up the proprietary RAN market and replace the old appliance base stations with networks that are not just virtualized and disaggregated, but open and multivendor. It has conducted trials and deployments, and issued RFPs, for equipment supporting O-RAN Alliance specifications and Telecom Infra Project (TIP) deployment blueprints. Now it is seeking to drive more scale into the effort by creating a new consortium to support 4G and 5G O-RAN trials. Collective effort can help keep an open platform from fragmenting, and accelerate adoption by addressing challenges as a body, and boosting confidence and scale. This will be important if large operators really are to believe that open…

The COVID-19 pandemic took center stage in the mobile industry world when it caused the cancellation of Mobile World Congress, which should have been running three weeks ago. Since then, it has become clear that the industry, like the rest of the global economy, is facing a far bigger threat than the cancellation of one event, however large. With many cities and countries in lockdown; a huge rise in home working; and blanket bans on travel and live events, the whole pattern of working has changed, for now at least. Unlike most industries, there is some upside for telecoms, mainly driven by the increased demand for good connectivity for home workers and for people confined to their homes with Netflix…

In the early days of development of 5G standards, there was a lofty ambition that the technology would make dramatic improvements in the energy consumption of cellular networks. However, as real world deployments have come closer, it has been clear that the situation is more complicated. The 5G New Radio design may be power-efficient, but it will be deployed in far greater density than previous cellular platforms, which means total power usage and output in a given area could be higher than in 4G. Switzerland, which has unusually stringent regulations regarding power outputs, has even halted MNOs’ deployments of 5G to new sites while it waits for further assessment of power issues and potential health implications. But the vendors, whose…

Site planning and network optimization have tended to be regarded as housekeeping rather than transformational processes in the mobile network, but that will change as operators migrate to far denser 4G and 5G networks, which need to respond far more quickly to changing use cases and traffic patterns, and which need to consume far less energy (see next item). Operators talk about deploying over 10 times more sites in dense urban areas as base stations move close to the ground; and rolling out highly distributed and disaggregated networks with huge numbers of radio units, especially indoors and to extend coverage to remote, industrial and transport locations. Then there are Massive MIMO antennas to consider, with the need to adjust beamforming…

In the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, which has forced many people to work from home for the first time, T-Mobile USA came up with a novel response which could turn out to be a blueprint for spectrum sharing in future, less troubled times. It is working with owners of 600 MHz spectrum – a band in which TMO is the dominant holder – to contribute their assets temporarily to create a far bigger pipe to support home workers. Dish Network and Comcast are among those loaning their 600 MHz spectrum for 60 days, under an FCC temporary authority to TMO. Others include NewLevel, LB License Co, Channel 51, Omega, Bluewater and TStar License Holdings. TMO is the only company…

Optical network provider ADVA claims its ‘Spectrum as a Service’ offering will enable fiber operators to slice their spectrum in the same way that MNOs do in their radio frequencies. The firm says there is significant optical spectrum around, which could be traded by its owners and harnessed for various applications. This approach could be added to the increasingly complex patchwork of fixed and mobile network capacity added to the pot through various types of wholesaling, sharing and slicing. All of these innovations are geared to the same challenges – allowing operators of all kinds of networks to fill in coverage and capacity gaps, and top up overall bandwidth and quality of service, to cope with the rising data traffic…

The CBRS Alliance, the guardian of specifications, certification and branding in the USA’s 3.5 GHz band – has completed its 5G specs. The first CBRS devices and tests used 4G, which has standards-based ways to use shared spectrum like the general access portion of the three-tiered CBRS framework. The priority access licences, to be auctioned later this year, will support 5G from day one, while in general access, users will have to wait for 3GPP’s Release 16, which will include standards for working in shared spectrum. The Alliance has announced Release 3 of its specs, a little behind its original target of end of 2019. “The CBRS band is fully authorized for commercial service at a moment when enabling 5G…

While the COVID-19 outbreak threatens to slow down or halt activity in many industries, in 5G it may prove to be a stimulus as more people become reliant on their networks to keep working and socializing. But while governments, employers and vendors are already talking about 5G’s potential to change the way business is conducted, even after the crisis is over, many of their visions will be impossible to realize without access to more spectrum, on a more flexible basis, than many regulators currently envisage, in the short term at least. It seems likely that 5G will be deployed by a far greater diversity of operators, including enterprise providers, wholesalers and neutral hosts, in order to share the cost burden…

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…

Status updates on IoT adoption have never provided a united front, but three recent ones caught our eye due to their disparity. First, Kaspersky says that 61% of organizations are using IoT platforms in their businesses, while CompTIA says that in managed services, vendors offering Managed IoT services are seeing significant revenue opportunities. Meanwhile, the Eclipse Foundation says that IoT adoption is notably slower than expected. For Eclipse, the open source software initiative, research suggests that only 40% of organizations are deploying ‘IoT solutions’ today, with 22% planning to deploy in the next two years. On the negative side of things, 10% say they have no IoT plans at all, and 29% answered that they did not know – meaning…