11552 search results for Open RAN

China Mobile has been prominent in warning of the risks of high 5G power consumption, and now the operator’s EVP, Li Zhengmao, has called on the government to subsidize electricity costs for telcos in order to accelerate 5G expansion. Speaking at a GSMA seminar in Beijing last week, Li said operators had made little progress in reducing 5G power consumption and cost. In the early days of the standards process, there were ambitious claims that the 5G radio would be far more power-efficient than its predecessors, but these gains have been more than cancelled out by the larger number of cells and antennas that are required for 5G. Higher frequency spectrum, from 3.4 GHz up to millimeter wave, are being…

For most parts of sub-Saharan Africa, 5G is not yet on the horizon, but South Africa is an exception. There, MTN says it will roll out initial commercial 5G networks next year and achieve broad coverage by 2022 (though the extent has not been specified). The pan-African group, which is headquartered in South Africa, has named Ericsson as its 5G launch vendor. The operator’s CTIO, Giovanni Chiarelli, told the recent AfricaCom conference: “South Africa is undergoing a huge digital transformation, which will open up new business opportunities and boost the nation’s economy. Launching 5G will accomplish this transformation and, with fixed wireless access, will ensure high quality, increased capacity, and greater reliability for our customers.” Ericsson will supply RAN, core…

Rakuten was the toast of this year’s Mobile World Congress with its ambitious plan to build an end-to-end cloud-native mobile network for 4G and 5G. Since then, the project has lost some of its luster thanks to delays, and reports of significant challenges with tuning up the cloud infrastructure to support the demands of a virtualized RAN. There have also been whispers about ‘too many cooks’, and tensions between the long list of suppliers which are involved in the project, highlighting the downside of an open, multivendor approach. Some of the participants have strong 4G offerings but are not sufficiently 5G-ready for Rakuten’s timetable, sources say, and there is overlap between the responsibilities of some of the partners with integration…

The full potential of 5G cannot be reached until operators implement the Standalone version of the 5G New Radio standards, which involves implementing a virtualized, and preferably cloud-native, core. Until operators have this core, their initial 5G NR Non-Standalone roll-outs, which rely on a slightly updated LTE core, will deliver little more than 4G++. Deploying the new core will be no mean task, however, which is why every MNO with plans to launch 5G in 2019 or 2020 has opted for the simpler first step of Non-Standalone. And while a few will start to deploy the 5G core next year, the majority – according to Rethink’s operator surveys – indicate they will start the process in 2022 or later. Of…

Parallel Wireless has been a leading light in the small cell market with its virtualized architecture, which has been deployed in markets where traditional architectures can be hard to cost-justify, including public safety systems in large venues, and rural networks in the UK, USA and elsewhere. The company is looking to accelerate its progress by becoming a very active player in the Telecom Infra Project, where it gained high profile last year when it was accepted as compliant with five out of seven request for information (RFI) elements, issued by Vodafone and Telefónica. Now, Parallel is piling up trials and some commercial roll-outs based on TIP OpenRAN specifications, with new developments like Vodafone’s major request for quotes (RFQs – see…

A vital element of turning specifications into robust, deployable platforms is a trusted testing program, and in open environments, this will typically be provided centrally, by an independent body. This saves time and money for operators and vendors, which can reduce their own interoperability and performance testing. It can also lead to a certification initiative, which can enable a genuinely mix-and-match, plug-and-play platform akin to that in WiFi equipment. This adds a major dose of confidence for operators which want to buy from multiple, and unfamiliar, vendors; and improves price competition. The TIP community is gearing up for this major testing role as its specs move into commercial products and at the TIP Summit, it announced that it was expanding…

As noted, in the early years of an open platform, there is considerable complexity in integrating unfamiliar products and vendors. Though the end goal is an automated, plug-and-play multivendor environment, it will take a long time to achieve that at a level that brings confidence for operators to deploy the new systems in their central networks. For now, there is a major opportunity for systems integrators to pull together equipment and software from multiple suppliers, some of them small companies with limited integration and roll-out capabilities of their own; and to tune and optimize those systems to work optimally with common cloud infrastructure (that has been a major challenge for Rakuten and its integrators, Cisco and TecMahindra). A major TechM…

The large-scale RFQ (see previous item) was not Vodafone’s only big announcement at the TIP Summit. It also announced the results of a new request for information (RFI), this time for OpenRAN 5G New Radio (NR), the focus of a recently formed new working group. There are two very significant aspects to this. One, although many small vendors responded, the winner was Samsung – not a major RAN vendor, but a traditional MNO partner and a company of huge resources. This did not entirely chime with the focus on shaking up the supply chain, but looked more like an old-school operator attempt to build up a single alternative, but low-risk, supplier to keep the incumbents honest – rather as Vodafone…

While Vodafone and OpenRAN dominated the big news at the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) Summit last week, Telefónica was once again in the spotlight too, this time driving forward TIP’s other commercially mature solution, DCSG (Distributed Cell Site Gateway). The Spanish group will deploy DCSG commercially “at scale” in Germany and also in Ecuador, it said. This will be valuable in building vendor and operator confidence in the DCSG specs, as will new lab trials for the platform, with India’s Bharti Airtel, South Africa’s MTN, TIM Brasil and Vodafone. Vodafone, Orange and TIM Brasil also plan to announce a joint Request for Information (RFI) to assess what the vendors, new and old, can offer in compliance with the new specs.…

The Telecom Infra Project (TIP) is a broad church in terms of membership, but increasingly, its key commercially focused activities look dominated by traditional mobile operators. That has a certain irony, considering TIP was founded by Facebook, whose messaging and social platforms have helped decimate MNOs’ SMS business and push the rewards of mobile revenue growth from telcos to over-the-top players. It is very valuable to TIP’s progress and credibility that Vodafone, Telefonica, MTN and others are conducting field trials and discussing commercial roll-outs. But it is important to the bigger goals of TIP that its operator base, as well as its vendor ecosystem, remains diversified. Otherwise, the risk is that traditional telcos will use the initiative to drive a…

It is almost four years since Facebook initiated the Telecom Infra Project (TIP), with the goal of extending the scalable cloud-based economics of its Open Compute Project to the telecoms networks. It has expanded well beyond the social media giant and its goals of bringing affordable connectivity to ‘the next billion’, though the overall objective of achieving a fully open, disaggregated network on cloud infrastructure remains the same. Large operators, especially European leaders like Deutsche Telekom, Telefónica, BT and Vodafone have become very active, as they seek to open up their supply chains and drive network costs down for the 5G era. At the TIP Summit in Amsterdam last week, it was clear how far the group has progressed. A…

Silicon root of trust (RoT) technology is important for embedding security mechanisms at silicon level for a wide range of products from mobile devices to network cards to web-scale servers. It is increasingly important as fears about 5G and cloud security rise, but it is also highly proprietary to each equipment vendor. To address that issues, an open source project called OpenTitan says it will produce a reference design and integration guidelines for silicon RoT. Although Google is a leading figure in the group, and its own RoT design is called Titan, OpenTitan will not be an open source version of that technology. All participants will co-develop a design from scratch that will be agnostic to platform and vendor, said…

In a major strategic shift, US solar company SunPower has announced its plan to split the company in two, creating two independent businesses to focus separately on the technology and project development sides of the solar industry. With uncertainty mounting around tariffs and subsidies in the US’s renewables sector, SunPower will hope that this move will reassure shareholders and provide protection from Chinese solar manufacturing competition. To some extent US shareholder perception was at the heart of this change – losses last year perhaps showed that SunPower is not large enough to mix it with the global solar panel manufacturers, but is better off working purely at home in the US market, emulating the successes of SunRun, Vivint and SunOver…

  Any hopes of an uncontested cloud-based data standard now appear shaky, thanks to the announcement of the Cloud Information Model (CIM) project. The CIM looks set to compete with the Open Data Initiative (ODI), which launched just over a year ago in September 2018. Both want to solve the problem of cloud-level data interoperability, but we’ve seen how IoT-type standards battles play out. The irony here, as is always the case with standards that seek to unify; as both the ODI and the CIM recruit followers, the desired objective of pooling and standardizing as much data as possible becomes ever more distant. It is not clear why the two organizations could not simply merge now and pool their resources,…