11552 search results for Open RAN

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

  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…

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…

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,…