11552 search results for Open RAN

In what was only very recently a merciless battleground of controversy and royalties spats, the video codec patent scene has been suspiciously quiet of late. This year could see the return of codec disruption though, as patent pool licensor administrator HEVC Advance was awoken from its slumber by the arrival of Huawei as a member company, a week after South Korean electronics firm LG also signed up. Two nods of support in as many weeks from Asia-Pacific is an encouraging sign for HEVC patent holders as AV1 adoption fever has taken hold in recent years. Huawei has become a licensor and licensee of the HEVC (H.265) patent pool, meaning all Huawei’s essential HEVC patents will become available to member companies,…

Start-up Pivotal Commware has made some interesting moves in advanced antenna beam management, with its ‘holographic beamforming’ technology. It has announced its first public deal with a major operator for its Echo 5G subscriber units, incorporating the beamforming system – which LightReading reports is to Verizon for its 28 GHz network. The Echo 5G is a fixed wireless repeater that can be attached to a window to improve indoor penetration by the millimeter wave signal – something that, by all accounts, will be important to Verizon, which has had very mixed reviews for the quality of its 5G fixed wireless access (FWA) services. The window-based unit harnesses Pivotal’s beamforming to counteract mmWave penetration, reflection and structural shadowing signal losses so…

India’s Sterlite Technologies (STL) has taken a 12.8% stake in vRAN developer ASOCS via its Global Venture subsidiary. The two companies will work together to develop vRANs based on open specifications, to be deployed on COTS hardware. “Open RAN architecture and virtualization are key to building software-centric networks to meet the exploding demands of networks of tomorrow. The joint solution of STL and ASOCS will empower MNOs to build best-in-class networks and enable them to build vendor-neutral, autonomous mobile networks using 5G radio, SDN, NFV and AI technologies,” said STL’s group CEO, Anand Agarwal. The technology may play a part in a contract worth INR18bn ($253m), which STL recently won to deploy high speed rural broadband networks for Telangana Fiber…

The Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) specifications from standards body ETSI once led the way in defining a telco-led vision of the edge network architecture. As many non-telco players have piled onto the edge bandwagon, MEC’s influence has waned somewhat, in favor of platforms that support a greater diversity of service providers, edge locations and enterprise applications. However, it still has considerable support among operators, and as such will retain a role in the broader edge platform, even if it now mainly provides APIs (application programming interfaces) that work with other frameworks like OpenFog, rather than the entire architecture. ETSI has announced its latest brace of MEC reports, which focus on two topics of great interest to forward-looking 5G planners –…

SK Telecom has been a flagwaver for open multivendor platforms for years. It was only the second MNO (after NTT Docomo) to implement a virtualized packet core based on virtual network functions (VNFs) from multiple vendors. With a few other brave operators, like Telefónica it has announced concrete plans to deploy a multivendor, cloud-native 5G core. And it has been working hard to ensure its 5G RANs do not lock it into a single supplier per geography, but allow it to mix and match virtual and physical elements from multiple vendors flexibly. Last November, it successfully trialled a 5G Non-Standalone (NSA) network that paired a Samsung core with base stations from both Nokia and Ericsson. Now it has followed that…

The biggest reason why the US government has not got its way in trying to get all its allies to bar Huawei and ZTE from 5G contracts is operator hostility. MNOs resist anything that would reduce their supplier choices – and therefore price and feature competition – even further. Competition in large-scale network equipment has been steadily eroded by a wave of vendor consolidation, but the growth of the Chinese suppliers has brought both huge R&D investments and affordable solutions to the mix. Anti-Huawei activists argue that barring the Chinese companies would actually open up opportunities for newer or smaller suppliers – many of them American – to achieve scale and so drive more, not less, choice. They have seized…

While US lawmakers lobby for state aid for small mobile network vendors (see below), two of Europe’s big operator groups are providing a far bigger boost for alternative suppliers by embarking on large-scale open RAN projects. Telefónica and Vodafone have both been major supporters of the Telecom Infra Project (TIP), issuing a high profile RFI (request for information) for open networks in 2018, and following up with a series of trials and, now, commercial plans. The Spanish telco’s UK arm, O2, says it will deploy open technology both for urban small cells and rural networks, to improve its cost base and foster a wider supply chain. It will support both ORAN Alliance and TIP OpenRAN specs, which cover common fronthaul…

ZTE is in a difficult position. Considerably smaller in terms of network revenues and market share than Huawei, Ericsson and Nokia, it is also under the same threat of western sanctions as its larger compatriot – with less global scale to mitigate the effects. But it has some potential remedies. One is that it is less exposed to western markets than Huawei, since its customer base is more concentrated in Greater China, and in emerging Asia-Pacific and Africa/Middle East regions. This makes it very reliant on China in the near term, since many of its other strongholds will be making slower progress towards 5G, but it should provide a steady stream of opportunities in 4G expansion and future 5G. The…

Multivendor networks came a big step closer last year when the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), one of the most important open source initiatives in the telecoms world, announced its Open Mobile Evolved Core (OMEC) platform at Mobile World Congress. Now, it has a commercial deployer, in the shape of T-Mobile Poland, the first carrier to go public with a “production-grade” evolved packet core (EPC) based on OMEC. The operator is following what is likely to become a common pattern in open networks – deploying OMEC not in its main mobile broadband network, but to support a new service, fixed wireless (which it labels ‘fixed mobile substitution). As with proprietary virtualized EPCs (vEPCs), it is seen as lower risk to deploy…

One of the most fascinating questions in the 5G networks market in 2020 is how far operators’ dreams of a more open, multivendor supply chain will come true. A sceptical view says we have heard all this before, especially when the WiMAX and 3GPP communities were fighting to set the 4G agenda – one of the appeals of the former was the promise of a more WiFi-like ecosystem with lower barriers to entry, pooled patents and communal support for expensive processes like interoperability testing and certification. In that case, and in other attempts to break open the market – in small cells, in unlicensed LTE and so on – there has been limited impact. Operators have been too nervous, in…

The American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy (ACEEE) has published a report that outlines how most US utilities are not properly using their smart meter programs, arguing that this constitutes a waste of taxpayer funds – given the municipal-ownership of utilities being rather common in the US. If the report gains momentum, many utilities are going to start to feel the heat, which might be a boon for those in the smart grid sector looking to sell them software, services, or even entire platforms that can use this data. The US is something of an oddity when it comes to utilities, in that many are owned by the municipality and therefore enjoy a monopoly on the local market –…

Sonos has had enough, and has filed a lawsuit against Google alleging the infringement of its intellectual property in Google’s smart speakers. The dispute stems from an old partnership, and comes as Sonos realizes its days are numbered – as former partners Google and Amazon push it out of the home-audio market. Sonos plans to win the suit against Google, before turning its aim towards Amazon, and if a judge sides with Sonos, it could be a turning point for the current consumer smart home duopoly. Unfortunately for Sonos, which doesn’t have the cash to tackle both Amazon and Google simultaneously, these titans could just drag the case out and smother Sonos with legal costs. But, it seems that Sonos…

As we briefly covered in last week’s edition, Amazon, Apple and Google have come together to create a working group within the Zigbee Alliance to focus on a new open source standard for the smart home – with no sign of involvement from a far older group with a similar aim, the Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF). But the OCF quickly fired back, raising the specter of yet another standards battle in the smart home environment. The new ZigBee initiative is called Connected Home over IP (CHIP). Rather than the current situation, in which multiple radio options are connected to multiple application layers via an IP connection, CHIP wants to create a common application layer, sitting above the common IP layer,…