Your browser is not supported. Please update it.

Searching Weekly Analysis

11552 search results for Open RAN

Faultline
12th March 2020

NAB OFF – searching for silver linings from 2020’s global event crisis

Faultline’s very foundations are built on disruption – reporting on how seemingly small shifts in the landscape can eventually rip through markets with devastating long-term effects. Very few shifts have disturbed the global Faultline to the extent of the coronavirus crisis, as tradeshows close their doors and technology budgets become increasingly squeezed. But – believe it or not – there are silver linings (aside from saving lives). NAB 2020 is the latest victim among many, sparking various reports on how the time is ripe for the rise of virtual events, as vendors scramble to cut their losses. Some have even prophesized that a sudden surge in virtual events could provide a platform for virtual reality going mainstream among B2B use…

Wireless Watch
6th March 2020

Telcos back three new initiatives to extend 5G with satellite and HAPS

Terrestrial networks are increasingly overlapping with satellite systems as 5G evolves towards being a multi-access environment in which the two can complement each other to achieve ubiquitous coverage for human or IoT services. The two industries may be quarrelling over C-Band spectrum (see separate item), but three new initiatives highlight the bigger picture of convergence. In the first, Orange became one of the first telcos to adopt O3b mPower, a next generation medium earth orbit (MEO) offering from SES Network. This will support  consumer and business services for remote areas in many of Orange’s African subsidiaries, stating with the Central African Republic. Jean-Luc Vuillemin, EVP of infrastructure and services at Orange International Networks, said: “This long-standing partnership fully aligns with…

Wireless Watch
6th March 2020

TIP supports OpenSync in its WiFi infrastructure platform

It was fitting that the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) should make its presence felt in the absence of Mobile World Congress 2020. Founded by Facebook and a consortium of telcos at the Barcelona mobile show four years ago, TIP celebrated its birthday by implementing OpenSync, the open source software best known for powering adaptive WiFi architectures, and co-created by Samsung and Plume Design. The importance of WiFi to TIP was realized rather late in the day, and only last year did the cellular-focused organization form a dedicated project group designed to accelerate the development of WiFi technologies. TIP’s WiFi Infrastructure and Systems working group will use OpenSync in the software stacks of both the TIP Access Point and the newer…

Wireless Watch
6th March 2020

Rakuten shows what open RAN enables, halving the cost of unlimited data

Japan’s new MNO entrant, Rakuten Mobile, has maintained hugely high profile for the whole of the past year, as the poster child for how a greenfield operator can deploy new cloud-native architectures in order to transform the conventional cost base of the mobile network. Excitement about what Rakuten is trying to do has almost overshadowed launch delays – themselves a sign of just how difficult this type of deployment is – and doubts thrown over its low-capex predictions by its rivals. Other operators, especially new entrants like Dish in the USA and Reliance Jio in India, have raced to pledge similar architectures and cost reductions. Now, finally, Rakuten has given a date, April 8, and information about services and pricing,…

Wireless Watch
6th March 2020

After years of trying, Intel rises to the challenge of the base station SoC

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…

Wireless Watch
6th March 2020

Ericsson CEO claims 5G leadership, fuels M&A speculation

With Huawei and ZTE living under a cloud of uncertainty or outright bans in Ericsson’s key regions – Europe and North America – and Nokia going through a turbulent time, Ericsson’s CEO Börje Ekholm might be forgiven for sounding rather smug as he boasted of his firm’s 5G leadership in the newly published annual report. After all, three years ago, when he took the helm, Ericsson was going through its own problems, amid speculation that it would have to seek an acquirer or become less reliant on the hoped-for 5G boom in spending. That boom has only materialized to a certain extent. In terms of deployments, 5G is expanding more quickly than was forecast a few years ago, but most…

Wireless Watch
6th March 2020

NEC set to take lion’s share of Rakuten’s radio deal from Nokia in 5G

One of the cautionary tales for vendors that has emerged from Nokia’s current tribulations is – don’t rely too much, for market kudos and confidence, on one customer. Nokia has been central to the extremely high profile deployment of an end-to-end cloud-native 4G/5G network by Rakuten Mobile, Japan’s disruptive new entrant (see separate item for Rakuten’s commercial launch last week). Like the other 17 players in Rakuten’s diversified supply chain, Nokia has made considerable capital out of its involvement, and only two weeks ago, it announced its latest engagement, to orchestrate over 160 virtual network functions (VNFs) across Rakuten’s telco cloud as a managed services deal. This was a significant win, giving Nokia a strategic position in arguably the most…

Wireless Watch
6th March 2020

Ericsson merger is a red herring as Nokia explores its options

Nokia had a difficult end to 2019. Some of its challenges were the result of familiar pressures – price competition and delays in operator decisions about 5G. Some related to the unambitious nature of early 5G roll-outs. Nokia is the best positioned of the big three, in our opinion, for supporting a fully software-based, cloud-native core and RAN in future. But operators are hesitating to deploy such radical architectures, and instead rolling out 5G in the conventional way, usually with existing 5G suppliers – which suits Ericsson and Huawei, with their greater scale and installed base in the RAN. By the time operators catch up with Nokia’s software networks, its rivals may have caught up, and smaller challengers from the…

Wireless Watch
6th March 2020

Nokia’s crisis – just the latest step to make the supply chain unrecognizable

The mobile equipment supply chain is almost unrecognizable from the days of 3G. There has been huge consolidation as vendors have sought economies of scale, with the disappearance of Nortel, Motorola Networks, Alcatel-Lucent and others from the cellular market. The entry of Chinese vendors Huawei and ZTE was a major factor in that, increasing competition and changing pricing structures so that vendors needed greater scale and reach to survive. Vodafone’s decision to make Huawei an approved global supplier in 2005 was a catalyst for change on a par with the same operator’s pledge, last year, to offer its whole European footprint of 110,000 sites to tender based on open RAN platforms. That open RAN-based request for quotes (RFQ) was symbolic…

Wireless Watch
6th March 2020

Panasonic and Tesla have Solar Roof bust up, kill partnership

Tesla and Panasonic have ditched a production partnership that centered around the Gigafactory 2 site in Buffalo, New York, which has thrown more questions into the mix regarding the future of Tesla’s Solar Roof product. The pair say that they will continue to work together in the automotive sector, but the latest news brings an end to a troubled partnership that was first kicked off in 2016. The Gigafactory 2 was meant to be the keystone of Tesla’s Solar Roof strategy, creating the solar cells that would be integrated into the roof tile form factor that promises to significantly under cut the cost of conventional rooftop solar (when installed as part of a roof renovation, at least). According to The…

Wireless Watch
6th March 2020

Samsung’s SmartThings pushes on into obscurity

  SmartThings appears to be stuck in a fatal lull. Samsung is forever trailing behind Amazon and Google’s relentless domination of the smart home market and it seems the company has completely taken its foot off the gas. Samsung revealed to Riot that SmartThings is now at over 50mn monthly active users (MAUs), spread across 10mn homes. Five active SmartThings users to every one home seems like an unrealistically high ratio to us. Most homes likely have just one individual responsibly for its ‘smart’ infrastructure, so the numbers don’t seem to add up here. Perhaps impressive without any context, these figures are unfortunately nothing compared to Google Assistant’s 500mn MAUs, announced in January this year. Amazon’s smart home ecosystem also…

Wireless Watch
6th March 2020

The two main groups driving open RAN come closer together

The two main organizations working on open radio access network (RAN) specifications, Telecom Infra Project (TIP) and the O-RAN Alliance, have addressed a major perceived barrier to a common RAN platform by announcing a liaison agreement to ensure their efforts are aligned. Although the two groups have very different starting points, and their work is largely complementary, there has been a widespread perception that they were in competition to provide specs for some key elements of an open network, such as a common fronthaul interface or a distributed cell site gateway (DCSG). The fact they each had different initiatives for such elements, and different operators appeared to be the main drivers (AT&T in O-RAN, for example, and Vodafone or Telefónica…

Wireless Watch
6th March 2020

Cisco still flailing in IoT, latches onto Microsoft with edge partnership

We were pretty excited about Cisco’s IoT opportunity, back when it acquired Jasper in 2016 for $1.4bn. Having netted the then-leading IoT ‘connectivity platform,’ effectively a business that specialized in making sure that an IoT device had a valid IoT network connection through a series of operator integrations, we could see a lot of upside for Cisco to expand into the wider IoT. However, Cisco seemed to lose interest in Jasper, instead making a series of tweaks that seemed to move the Jasper offering away from the IoT and into Cisco’s business software realms – managing things like enterprise mobile phone subscriptions, so you wouldn’t be shafted by roaming charges. Since then, we’ve heard essentially nothing from the Jasper camp,…

Faultline
5th March 2020

OTT Video News, Deals, Launches and Products

At this rate, 2020 will be remembered as the year void of technology trade shows and conferences, with next week’s DVB World in Valencia the latest cancellation victim. However, there is some good news for event-goers as Amsterdam’s popular RAI venue announced the deployment of WiFi 6 technology. Some 500 Cisco APs are being installed this week and will be fully tried and tested by the time IBC 2020 rolls around in September (fingers crossed), powered by Cisco’s OpenRoaming software. It promises to be Europe’s first public deployment of equipment supporting the WiFi 6 standard, covering 110,000m2. Even the US is starting to feel the pressure with Fox News taking the drastic step of cancelling its upfronts over coronavirus fears,…

Faultline
5th March 2020

Nokia Beacon blends WiFi 6 with 5G, as 6E scores high in first exam

Nokia is often referenced by industry insiders as a major force in WiFi, which is not immediately obvious going by the company’s cellular-centric press activities. However, given Nokia’s substantial work in 5G, the Finnish vendor therefore embodies how WiFi 6 is a game changer, blending in 5G technologies into the Nokia Beacon 6 portfolio along with the multi-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, which are expanded on later in this piece. Blink and you’ll miss it. Low latency technology from the R&D division Nokia Bell Labs forms the basis of Nokia’s new Beacon 6 WiFi/5G FWA (fixed wireless access) gateway,…

Faultline
5th March 2020

Get goes for Zyxel WiFi 6 router without EasyMesh

Norway’s Get is the latest major operator to roll out WiFi 6 equipment, opting for the EX5501 gateway from Zyxel. This isn’t even Zyxel’s latest WiFi 6 capable model, but we think the reason Get has gone for a slightly older version is because the newer EX5510-Bo dual-band AX gigabit ethernet gateway is installed with EasyMesh, while Get is a relatively recent beneficiary of the AirTies mesh system. Of course, AirTies has offered EasyMesh support for approaching two years now, but with adoption of the WiFi Alliance’s multi-AP standard ramping up, the Turkish vendor told Faultline last year that it was looking to extend the next EasyMesh release to cover the full functionality in its own mesh version. So, to…

Faultline
5th March 2020

Six months of sweat—but has Dalet done enough to revive Ooyala?

By acquiring a bunch of questionable workflow assets from Ooyala in July 2019, French broadcast technology vendor Dalet marked its expansion away from news production and into a number of new verticals. The deal raised concerns about Dalet’s ability to breathe new life into technology hit hard by commoditization in markets it has little experience in, but this week Dalet has unfurled something resembling a comprehensive strategy for the Ooyala Flex Media Platform. Over the past six months, Dalet has been busy accelerating the engineering of Flex across four fields – UX, APIs, OTT workflows, and Core Platform Performance and Features. The announcement boats of Flex’s new “firepower” – capable of serving a broader set of customers seeking to “take…

Faultline
5th March 2020

Quickplay sale highlights scale of AT&T’s unicast migration

The following story was not part of the original AT&T script. Disposing of Quickplay Media is a move that hammers another nail in the coffin of the operator’s U-verse IPTV service. It’s absolutely no coincidence that AT&T is selling off the technology arm in the same week that the Android TV-based AT&T TV launched across the US (see separate story in this issue) – paving the way for the migration of 20.4 million subscribers (U-verse, DirecTV and DirecTV Now) over to AT&T TV. Not only will the subscriber casualty count be substantial during this mammoth migration effort, but the technical challenges ahead are huge. U-Verse is a multicast IPTV service, while DirecTV is delivered via satellite broadcast, and the newer…

Rethink Energy
5th March 2020

Renewable orders this week

MHI Vestas has confirmed that it will supply the turbines for Japan’s 140 MW Akita Noshiro offshore wind project. The company will supply 33 of its V117-4.2MW turbines to the fixed-bottom project, which is set to start in 2022. Vestas has been awarded a service agreement for 35 Senvion turbines at the Lincoln Gap wind farm in South Australia. The Danish OEM will deliver long-term maintenance and output management for 126 MW of the farms 212 MW capacity. Colbun has applied for environmental approval to build its 788 MW Inti Pacha solar project in Antofagasta, Chile. Repsol has purchased the 860 MW Delta 2 Wind Project in Aragon, Spain, from Forestalia, and will develop it over the next three years.…