11552 search results for Open RAN

Sierra Wireless is pinning hopes of salvation on software and bundled services increasing the appeal of its wireless modules and edge devices. A depressing performance on the stock market in recent years has prompted a rethink. Octave, the company’s newest offering, is aimed at Industrial IoT (IIoT) customers that want a simplified way to connected devices to their cloud environments. The company’s share price has hovered around $10-15 since falling from a peak of $47 in 2015 – likely a result of the initial hype surrounding the IoT dying off, and the consequent decline of investor enthusiasm. Formerly a hardware manufacturer, the company has pivoted to focus on software development that could be bundled with its equipment. We now know…

Since the announcement of Sidewalk, a new low power long(ish)-range protocol, rumors have persisted that Amazon would be using LoRa as the basis for Sidewalk. The FCC filing for Amazon’s Ring Bridge device confirms that it houses a LoRa chip, and while this might be the best proof of the rumors’ validity to date, this news is not necessarily good news for the wider LoRaWAN ecosystem. For those new to the area, LoRaWAN is the open (but not open source) standard that defines the technology stack that can be used to create LPWAN networks. LoRa itself is the intellectual property of Semtech, a company that makes the radio transceiver chips that power these networks. In terms of nomenclature, every LoRaWAN…

When broad-based engineering group Altran acquired Aricent in 2017, it pushed into the mobile market, with a particular focus on small cells. In the past week, it has announced a range of partnerships with vendors to create 5G solutions, and its string of news highlights how the supply chain for many elements of the disaggregated 5G RAN – including small cells and fronthaul connections – will be very different from the world of 4G. As the large end-to-end vendors shift their emphasis towards software, orchestration and integration, many virtualized and physical components of the network will be provided by a wider variety of smaller companies, which will rely heavily on reference designs and engineering blueprints to reduce their cost and…

It is 20 months since AT&T announced that it planned to deploy a white box router on every cell site (about 60,000 over several years) and to open source the network operating system they will run, DANOS (disaggregated network operating system). Things have gone rather quiet about this ambitious plan to drive openness and low cost into AT&T’s network edge, while also stimulating a broad open ecosystem for white box routers in general (the telco has also contributed its router specs to the Open Compute Project). Now the operator has announced that it will donate DANOS – which it developed itself, based on its acquisition of Vyatta from Brocade – to the Linux Foundation on November 15, a year later…

After years when consolidation was the main trend in Europe, now there are rising numbers of new entrants appearing to diversify the market. Some of these will be focused on specific enterprise or private network opportunities, and will increasingly be enabled by the opening up of shared, flexible or vertical-specific spectrum. But there are also new mainstream operators, which have acquired national spectrum in order to challenge the incumbents in the consumer mobile broadband space. The most famous example is Free Mobile of France, which was launched by its parent Iliad to massively disruptive effect in 2012. Iliad went on to acquire spectrum in Italy – divested as a result of the merger of Three Italia and Wind – and…

The US MNOs no longer have to worry only about the competition from one another in the 5G era. They are facing challenges from new entrants to the mobile space. Dish Network plans a national 5G build-out enabled by divestments of spectrum and customers from Sprint (assuming its merger with T-Mobile finally goes through). And more dangerously, the major cable operators plan to build on their existing services, based on MVNO deals and WiFi, by launching their own cellular networks in selected areas. The two largest cablecos, Comcast and Charter, are particularly ominous for the MNOs, since they have a far-reaching collaboration deal ranging from R&D to roaming to cross-marketing. If other cable firms were to join, these regionally-based operators…

Of the big four US mobile operators, AT&T has been the most innovative in pushing open, disaggregated architectures to prepare for 5G, while Verizon has stood out for its early commercialization and its hunt for new revenue streams. Its fixed wireless access (FWA) service has so far been underwhelming in performance or impact, by all accounts, but it does demonstrate some bold thinking by a telco which is under intense pressure in many other areas of its business. Verizon has insisted that FWA is a standalone business case, not just a way to get services out quickly before the challenges of mobility – such as broad coverage and affordable handsets – are addressed. And while AT&T has demonstrated complex architectures,…

The slow shift of the mobile industry towards virtualized RANs (vRANs), in which many baseband functions are run as software on common cloud infrastructure, is mainly perceived as an opportunity for Intel. Finally, networks will run on cloud infrastructure – platforms dominated by Intel processors – rather than dedicated chips designed by the equipment vendors specifically for RAN functions. This has appeared to be Intel’s game to lose. Some challengers have suggested ARM-based alternatives targeted at vRAN and other high performance cloud applications. Cavium and Huawei both have very credible offerings, though Qualcomm seems to have backed away. At a future stage when operators might deploy their vRANs in third party clouds such as AWS, there could be more presence…

Last week’s Mobile World Congress Los Angeles (MWC LA) was inevitably preoccupied with the progress of 5G so far, given that the four major US operators all have commercial services. There was considerable focus on the realities of 5G, with the hype phase almost over in the USA, and attendees more interested in how MNOs planned to navigate the choppy waters ahead – in technical terms, as they looked at difficult migrations to the next generation of 5G standards and to new, cloud-based architectures; and in commercial terms, as they reach for a business model that does not rely on the unforgiving world of mobile broadband, where even  US operators are seeing their legendary ARPUs eroded by new competition and…

  Remember the HomeGrid Forum, the alliance supporting G.hn technology deployments and famed for its aversion to public appearances? Well, HomeGrid showed its face at last week’s Broadband World Forum, announcing a surprise merger with KT-backed GiGA Wire Alliance in a fusion of G.hn-based groups pegged to create a new force in broadband access. This is a deal all about taking G.hn technology above and beyond the MDU to achieve the smart city dream, and the newly merged alliance entity (new name pending) already faces plenty of hurdles. HomeGrid has enjoyed virtually unrivaled control of the powerline network market since rival technology alliance HomePlug capitulated a year ago, shipping millions of devices over the last couple of years. Now, a…

When a technology is in its hype phase, it usually results in a flurry of start-ups and acquisitions, and there are signs that the M&A process is beginning in edge computing. In the past week, Intel has acquired Pivot Technology’s Smart Edge platform, while data center operator EdgeConnex is said to be in acquisition talks with a Swedish would-be buyer. Intel is paying $27m for Smart Edge, which provides a cloud-native platform to support edge deployments, largely deployed within mobile networks. The chip giant is clearly keen on the distribution of the cloud, because it will involve larger numbers of chips than a very consolidated infrastructure model, and may be less susceptible to the pressures of dealing with the webscalers.…

Sierra Wireless is pinning hopes of salvation on software and bundled services increasing the appeal of its wireless modules and edge devices. A depressing performance on the stock-market in recent years has prompted a rethink. Octave, the company’s newest offering, is aimed at Industrial IoT (IIoT) customers that want a simplified way to connected devices to their cloud environments. The company’s share price has hovered around $10-15 since falling from a peak of $47 in 2015 – likely a result of the initial hype surrounding the IoT dying off, and the consequent decline of investor enthusiasm. Formerly a hardware manufacturer, the company has pivoted to focus on software development that could be bundled with its equipment. We now know that…

Since the announcement of Sidewalk, a new low-power long(ish)-range protocol, rumors have persisted that Amazon would be using LoRa as the basis for Sidewalk. The FCC filing for Amazon’s Ring Bridge device confirms that it houses a LoRa chip, and while this might be the best proof of the rumors’ validity to date, this news is not necessarily good news for the wider LoRaWAN ecosystem. For those new to the area, LoRaWAN is the open (but not open source) standard that defines the technology stack that can be used to create LPWAN networks. LoRa itself is the intellectual property of Semtech, a company that makes the radio transceiver chips that power these networks. In terms of nomenclature, every LoRaWAN device…