11552 search results for Open RAN

Swiss chip giant STMicroelectronics has announced a new partnership with Semtech, to create a system-on-chip (SoC) that combines one of the former’s STM32 microcontrollers (MCUs) with a LoRa radio. The single-chip offering for LoRa, the unlicensed low power WAN (U-LPWAN) technology, should catch developer attention, and a cooperation partnership with Tencent Cloud won’t hurt its Chinese ambitions either. Semtech, the owner of the IP behind the LoRa physical layer, was initially the only supplier of LoRa radio silicon. Licensing partnerships with Microchip and STMicro came later, expanding the choice of silicon providers for LoRa adopters – but always ensuring that Semtech got a royalty. Now, STMicro seems to have taken things a step further, in building the STM32WLE5 SoC –…

Vodafone continues to extend its UK roll-out of 5G, and it has announced its first implementation of RAN sharing, using the standardized MORAN (multi-operator RAN) approach. Although Vodafone and O2 have an extensive passive infrastructure sharing arrangement through their Cornerstone joint venture, they announced last year that they would also be moving to share active equipment, outside of congested areas like London, where they will take separate paths in order to meet the expected demand for 5G capacity. Active RAN sharing remains rare in most parts of the world – sometimes because regulators restrict it in order to maintain competition; sometimes because of operators’ own commercial sensitivities; and sometimes because it was not necessary until MNOs found themselves having to…

While Telefónica has been defocusing on most of its emerging market subsidiaries (except Brazil), fellow European multinational Orange still has grand plans.  Orange, whose main operations outside Europe are in Africa and the Middle East (AME), has opened a new headquarters for the region in Casablanca Finance City Tower in Morocco, signalling a period of growth and greater independence for the MEA division, and a possible future IPO. Orange now has 125m subscribers in this region and has described AME as its main growth engine. This could encourage it to unlock some of this value via an IPO. The company told Bloomberg that an IPO was “a potential scenario to “provide the group with various options for growth”, but insisted…

This year should see the FCC implementing its pan to open up 1,200 MHz of 6 GHz spectrum for WiFi, creating a significant block when aggregated with the existing 5 GHz allocation. Anticipating this important change for WiFi economics, the WiFi Alliance (WFA) has announced new terminology and certification to distinguish WiFi 6 devices that can use the new spectrum, and those that can’t. The WFA announced its new branding, ‘WiFi 6E’, at the end of last year, with the aim of avoiding confusion, or user disappointment if they expected to be able to use the new spectrum but had the wrong device. As well as adding extra spectrum capacity, the 6 GHz allocation will also provide a band in…

While the US mobile operators remain severely disadvantaged in 5G spectrum terms, because of their limited access to midband airwaves, WiFi service providers are better placed than those in many other regions because the FCC is opening up new and valuable unlicensed spectrum in the 6 GHz band. This should maximize the impact of the latest WiFi standard, WiFi 6, on public, home and enterprise services in the USA, and make this technology disproportionately important compared to other countries. Logically, that should see US MNOs seeking to harness WiFi 6, and integrate it with their cellular networks, including 5G. That would help them to keep up with the needs for more capacity without having to invest huge sums in making…

Like many operators, SK Telecom is proceeding rapidly with 5G roll-out, but knows this will not be enough, on its own, to drive significant revenue growth. Instead, it aims to leverage its high quality networks to build up enterprise, IoT, edge and cloud services to offset the price pressures on its core mobile broadband business in South Korea. The largest Korean MNO has been active in the mobile edge market, and last month announced a strategic partnership with Amazon AWS to host its Wavelength edge infrastructure in SK Telecom hubs (a similar deal to those AWS announced with Verizon and Vodafone). Now SK Telecom has launched the Global MEC [Multi-access Edge Computing] Taskforce. This follows a common pattern for the…

It is no secret that Riot has been very keen on the concept of data marketplaces – platforms on which companies and even consumers can sell and buy data that they contribute. Here has been at the forefront of the trend for some time, but has still not dived in head first. However, its latest CES announcement suggests that 2020 might actually be the year of the data marketplace, although it might have a strong automotive bent to begin with. The news is that Here has added neutral server capabilities for Here Marketplace, meaning that the process can be run on ‘neutral’ platforms, to appease the automakers’ collective unease with letting any other third-party services into their IT backends. Instead,…

This year’s CES saw the annual batch of Connected Healthcare Devices (CHDs) cropping up once again. Looking back over previous years, there seems to be a clear pattern – CHDs appear at CES and then soon vanish due to a lack of supporting infrastructure from Big Tech and insurance firms. Will this year be any different? 2019 saw Big Tech racing to involve themselves with as much of the health sector as possible. This would suggest that CHDs have a more stable footing in today’s market. Both Google and Amazon have been aggressively partnering with and acquiring major players in health and insurance. CEOs are also ramping up their rhetoric. At a Time 100 summit in April last year, Tim…

The resurgence of private networks has been one of the big themes of 2019, as enterprises look for ways to leverage 4G and 5G quickly, and in the best way to suit their transformation attempts. Nokia is the most active of the large equipment vendors in this space, clearly targeting a new set of customers for its networks and services, as a valuable hedge against pressures in its core operator base (though of course, it may also have to deal with conflicts of interest in scenarios where its MNO customers are competing with private operators rather than partnering with them). In the past month, the Finnish company has announced three new private cellular project, including one in Germany concerned with…

STMicroelectronics, a Swiss silicon specialist, has announced a new partnership with Semtech, to create a System-on-Chip (SoC) that combines one of STMicro’s STM32 microcontrollers (MCU) with a LoRa radio. The single-chip LoRa offering should catch developer attention, and a cooperation partnership with Tencent Cloud won’t hurt its Chinese ambitions either. Semtech, the owner of the IP behind the LoRa physical layer, was initially the only supplier of LoRa radio silicon. Licensing partnerships with Microchip and STMicro came later, expanding the choice of silicon providers for LoRa adopters – but always ensuring that Semtech got a royalty. Now, STMicro seems to have taken things a step further, in building the STM32WLE5 SoC – combining the application processor (the MCU) with the…

Just before the industry headed into the holidays, and just as we were putting the finishing touches to our article about Ikea joining the Zigbee Alliance, the news broke that Amazon, Apple, and Google had 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 the venerable Open Connectivity Foundation’s involvement. Well, over the break, the OCF has fired back, and while the Zigbee news is promising, we are still stuck in a protracted standards war. The new initiative is called Connected Home over IP (CHIP), and an image from The Thread Group perhaps best illustrates the proposition. In the stack, you…

Ikea has joined the board of the Zigbee Alliance, and with its retail clout and growing smart home portfolio, the titan of home décor might just be able to whip the industry into shape – bludgeoning the crowd into submission on the back of the smart home’s sunk cost fallacy. However, we’re pretty sure we’ve written this story before, and that is quite telling. It has always seemed obvious that there should be some sort of unification layer, which would let all manner of IoT devices interact with each other. For a time, it looked like this would be the AllSeen Alliance’s AllJoyn, or the OIC’s IoTivity. Those two groups then merged, and are now the OCF, but IoTivity still…

The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) has announced its new Industry Connect Service (ICS) pilot project, which will see the IIC play matchmaker between industrialists that have a desire and the vendors that can provide that service. It is pitching this as open to all, regardless of size, with the lessons learned being fed back to the community by the IIC. The new strategy seems like an attempt to inject some pace into the market, and comes only a week after the IIC released a joint white paper with OneM2M. The industrial sector is a bit of a contradiction in the IoT. It is one of the most advanced fields, but simultaneously, it is an island unto itself, where many would…

Apple’s whims can make or break a supplier, as Imagination Technologies, Dialogic and even Intel’s modem unit know to their cost. However, the iPhone maker’s bid to develop as many components as possible inhouse is not without its own risks, and it looks as though it cannot entirely do without Imagination after all. The UK provider of graphics processor (GPU) IP was forced to sell off several units and refocus its activities in 2017, after Apple said it would no longer need to license Imagination’s technology but would develop its own GPUs for the iPhone and other devices. But now, the companies have signed a new multiyear agreement for Apple to access a “wider range of Imagination’s intellectual property”. There…

Open RAN platforms such as those from the ORAN Alliance and Telecom Infra Project (TIP) remain immature but they are gathering real momentum from the support of high profile operators. The latest is the United Arab Emirates’ Etisalat, which has launched a network using virtualized, disaggregated and open RAN technologies, supported by a group of suppliers including Altiostar, Cisco and NEC. All three vendors are also part of the long supplier list for Rakuten’s more ambitious end-to-end cloud-native roll-out in Japan, and that may indicate the prestige that suppliers to that project have acquired, despite the challenges the deployment has suffered. Rakuten is implementing technology that complies with the ORAN Alliance specifications for an open, cloud-based radio network, as is…