11552 search results for Open RAN

Samsung’s SmartThings appears to be stuck in a fatal lull. Samsung is forever trailing behind Amazon and Google in the smart home market. It recently revealed to Wireless Watch’s sister service, Rethink IoT, that SmartThings now has over 50m monthly active users (MAUs), spread across 10m homes. While five active SmartThings users to every one home seems a very high ratio, the overall figures are dwarfed by Google Assistant’s 500m MAUs, announced in January. Amazon’s smart home ecosystem also has a far larger footprint. Amazon announced at the beginning of 2019 that 100m devices with Alexa on board had been sold. It is hard to imagine there is space in the market for a third major player – and Apple…

Sharing of the active network has long been shunned by operators, fearing loss of control and differentiation, but the economics of a saturating market are driving some MNOs to take a kinder view. And emerging technologies, especially in the virtualized RAN and 5G core, will make it easier for operators to maintain full control of their network experience on common infrastructure. Before those standards mature, however, rising numbers of MNOs, especially in Europe, are sharing their RANs using existing mechanisms. A new example is that of Telenor and Telia in Denmark, which are working to roll out a shared 5G network based on Nokia equipment, using the 3GPP MOCN (multi-operator core network) approach. This allows for each MNO to have…

Nokia is often referenced by industry insiders as a major force in WiFi, which is not immediately obvious from its cellular-centric public face. However, given Nokia’s substantial work in 5G, it is in a strong position to blend the two technologies, as it has done with its Nokia Beacon 6 portfolio, and support for the multi-access point (AP) standard EasyMesh. Nokia’s Beacon breakthrough comes in the same week that the Wireless Broadband Alliance released results from the first phase of WiFi 6E trials (see below). Low latency technology from Nokia’s R&D division, Bell Labs, forms the basis of the Beacon 6 WiFi/5G FWA (fixed wireless access) gateway, which works by offloading 5G traffic to WiFi and fiber networks. Beacon 6…

Network slicing is one of the most significant promises of the broad 5G platform, though one whose full impact may take a decade to be felt. However, there has been a slow but steady stream of practical advances in this area over the past couple of years, and the latest comes from Deutsche Telekom, which is claiming the world’s first implementation of end-to-end slicing using a multivendor network. With slicing, operators can segment a single network into multiple virtual slices, each operating independently and securely, and optimized for a particular traffic or service type, vertical industry or user. Some companies already claim variations of slicing. An end-to-end personalized connection can be achieved using a virtual private network (VPN) of course.…

HPE has been pushing increasingly hard into the telco market in recent years, aiming to take advantage of operators’ migration to cloud-based platforms, and their interest in technologies like edge computing, in which the vendor has well-established offerings. Last week, the company unveiled a new family of as-a-service offerings designed to help MNOs to accelerate deployment of 5G and plot a simpler course towards cloud-native systems and the 5G core. The flagship of the launch was HPE 5G Core Stack, a cloud-native platform which will be offered on a pay-as-you-go, hosted basis from HPE’s cloud. The delivery and charging for the service will be via the vendor’s consumption-based IT model GreenLake and the core stack will be available globally from…

Network testing supplier Viavi is claiming the “first comprehensive test suite” for O-RAN specifications. Interoperability testing will clearly be essential for operators which want to deploy multivendor networks, especially if they do not have extensive inhouse capabilities. Back in the days of WiMAX buzz, one of the benefits that platform promised was a centralized, open interoperability testing program, similar to the WiFi Alliance’s for WLAN, which would lower costs of entry for deployers and vendors. The same will be necessary to make O-RAN deployable by operators which do not have deep pockets and large teams of experts. Even for those engineering-focused MNOs, there will still be many challenges. As Viavi put it, ensuring interoperability in a multivendor RAN environment “will…

Some US policy makers have leapt onto the emergence of open RAN architectures as an opportunity to provide smaller operators with a low cost way to expel Huawei from their networks, and simultaneously to support the rebirth of a homegrown industry. The latter died when European companies acquired North American RAN suppliers, Lucent, Nortel and Motorola Networks. But some of the leading lights in the open RAN movement, including Mavenir, JMA, Parallel Wireless and Altiostar, are US-based. A group of senators have gone as far as to propose a bill which would offer funding to help operators rip out Chinese network equipment, but would make this contingent on their networks being certified by the O-RAN Alliance within seven years. However,…

Now that T-Mobile USA’s merger with Sprint looks set to be finalized within two months, the company can start to discuss, publicly, the challenging process of combining two very different networks, and delivering the many 5G promises the companies made to justify their marriage to regulators. One approach may be to adopt O-RAN architectures to try to reduce the cost of migrating two networks to a common 5G system and expanding this rapidly to compete with AT&T. The two operators have very different histories and cultures when it comes to their mobile networks. Sprint has been more focused on engineering and on bold technical decisions, although that has backfired in recent years as it has gone through some unnecessarily complex…

Some operators see open industry initiatives like the O-RAN Alliance as a chance to encourage a broad base of suppliers, and contribute knowledge to the common pool via open source cooperation. Others see them mainly as a way to reduce inhouse development cost while reducing reliance on major suppliers – and indeed, putting pressure on them to reduce prices. UK incumbent BT seems to fall into the latter camp. Its chief architect, Neil McRae, told FierceWireless that its membership of the O-RAN Alliance is mainly justified by the access it gains to the group’s work on next generation MIMO antenna arrays. He said: “When you look at O-RAN it’s still not clear to me that’s there’s a really strong single…

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…

At the last count, there were at least 10 operator-driven collaborations focused on edge computing. Some, like the Asia-centric Bridge Alliance, are very tactical, looking to extend existing relationships for roaming, cross-billing and other core processes to the edge and Internet of Things. These are extremely important for helping operators build a global, relatively seamless connected edge presence (see introduction), but do not address the more thorny issue of creating a global developer base and service platform on top of that framework. Here there are open source initiatives like Linux Foundation’s group of edge projects, some of which, like the AT&T-initiated Akraino, are telco-focused. There are projects that were started by individual vendors or operators, like Deutsche Telekom’s MobiledgeX and…

As the idea that telcos could go it alone in the cloud died, so they have become attractive partners for webscalers, and that symbiosis will be stronger in the edge cloud where MNO’s 5G and location assets will carry more weight. Last year, Amazon AWS had seemed the most advanced in cultivating operator partnerships, especially when it signed up Verizon, Vodafone and SK Telecom for its Wavelengths edge program. But Microsoft Azure has been pushing strongly into the telco space too, and late last year, scored a flagship win with AT&T. Google Cloud was the outsider, a smaller cloud business and with only Telecom Italia publicly announced as a tier one telco customer. However, that is changing. Google is reported…

As noted in this week’s Special Report, Intel and Marvell have benefited from Nokia’s shift away from its homegrown base station chip architecture, towards a system-on-chip (SoC) based on merchant products. Nokia’s high-profile change of heart may have thrown the spotlight on the two chip providers’ latest 5G-related announcements, but it is not the only news. Both companies have been discussing the developments they would have unveiled at the cancelled Mobile World Congress, and these reflect a rapid pace of change in the mobile network chip space. This change is driven, of course, by the migration of the macro RAN from proprietary platforms based on equipment vendors’ own ASICs (application specific integrated circuits), to basebands running as virtual network functions…

  Cable TV provider Virgin Media has announced its smart home service bundle in Ireland. This is refreshing news – a major CSP taking the reins of its smart home offering and presenting it in a neat, easy to comprehend package for consumers. So just how far have we come? CSPs are well equipped to cash in on the expanding smart home market, but none seem to have a coherent strategy. Most major companies seem to offer a mish-mash of own-brand products and platforms alongside major brands and second-tier equipment. Our Smart Home as a Service (SHaaS) forecast in 2018 estimated that by 2023, there would be a $1.57bn opportunity for CSPs to sell their own starter kits, as well…

Hopefully, dear readers, you trust Riot to be straight with you, and value our take on the latest happenings in this industry and the overarching trends. When interviewing companies, we try to present what they put forward after being challenged by our questions, to remove spin and frame what has been said with some context. Well, this week, Signify, formerly Philips Lighting, has come out swinging, but entirely missed the point. Speaking to Enterprise IoT Insights, part of RCRWireless, Jacques Letzelter, SVP of Signify’s (formerly Philips Lighting) commercial public business segment, has claimed that cellular is the only suitable protocol for connected street lighting (CSL), and targeted Telensa’s Ultra Narrowband (UNB) as an example of an unsuitable technology, because they…