11552 search results for Open RAN

The Avanci patent licensing group, originally founded by Ericsson, has announced that Orange has joined the pool, bringing the membership count to 31. While the remit for Avanci was to make licensing of IoT technologies easier and less prone to litigation, a couple of years of malicious litigation have darkened the mood in the industry. When Avanci finally starts to swing the hammer, it could to be very poorly received. Collectively, the 31 companies are contributing their intellectual property to a pool, and then working out how much each piece of IP is worth to any given technology. Then,  Avanci can pursue other companies for payments, distributing these earnings to the members according to that internal valuation breakdown. Given that…

Germany is the latest country to refuse to bow to US demands to bar Huawei from 5G contracts, but the USA is not giving up on its fight to weaken the Chinese giant, and is reported to have been considering financing to help Nokia and Ericsson compete more aggressively with their arch-rival. According to reports in the UK’s Financial Times, one of several ideas being considered by the Trump administration is some form of financial assistance which would enable the European vendors to offer more competitive payment terms and vendor financing. This would level the playing field against Huawei (and ZTE), which can offer very attractive financing deals, underwritten by China’s state banks, argue US officials. Support for new financing…

Nokia and Huawei have both recently been investing significantly in their own infrastructure chips. In an era when hardware is commoditizing and operators want open platforms, there are two key areas of differentiation and therefore value – the silicon and the software will make those open networks perform at the same level as yesterday’s dedicated ones, but with far greater agility and cost-effectiveness. So Huawei has chips for everything from ARM-based cloud servers to base stations to handsets; while Nokia has pushed the limits of router chip performance with its FP4 product and, while it has a close partnership with Intel for cloud hardware for networks, it is extending the range of its own silicon too, with Reefshark. The latest…

Mobile operators still have a curious antipathy to sharing their RANs, despite the increasingly strong case that this will be the only way to make 5G roll-out affordable – at least with the density and indoor penetration many 5G use cases will require. Some operators are starting to get that message though. Vodafone is pursuing higher levels of active RAN sharing in key markets like the UK and Italy than it has before; some MNOs are coming round to the idea that they should encourage neutral hosts in small cell and industrial environments, rather than take on the whole cost burden themselves. A few countries have sought to take sharing a step further and mandate a single network for all…

The US regulator, the FCC, will kick off its third auction of millimeter wave (mmWave) spectrum on December 10, but the large cable operators are sitting this one out, which may prevent prices going too high. All the national MNOs are on the list of those registered to participate in Auction 103, which will offer a massive 2,400 MHz of spectrum across the 37 GHz and 39 GHz bands, and a further 1,000 MHz in the 47 GHz band. However, Comcast, Charter and Altice USA, despite their high interest in adding mobile and small cell services to their cable networks, are not on the list. So far, prices in the mmWave auctions have been far lower than for spectrum in…

The operator interest in open RAN solutions, and willingness to invest in trials, will open new doors for a variety of smaller vendors which have been showing interesting solutions over the years, but have been confined to a small cell market which grew more slowly than most had expected. One such supplier is Belgium’s Accelleran, which has been developing a dyamically reconfigurable RAN platform based on ORAN interfaces. Accelleran’s vRAN architecture centers on a virtualized controller called dRAX Open Interface RAN Intelligence, which supports network functions in a cloud-native, microservices-based environment. The leap from a virtualized to a fully cloud-native environment, with all the flexibility and reconfigurability that brings, is still in the future for most operators, but at least…

These are early stages for the dream of an open RAN in which key elements from multiple vendors can be combined, swapped and reconfigured without sacrificing any performance or interoperability. A few large trials may be mainly meant as warning signals to existing vendors to take a more open, cost-effective approach, rather than a real effort to lower barriers to newer, smaller suppliers. The need to implement 5G quickly and robustly in some markets may drive some operators, albeit reluctantly, to stick with the certainty of an end-to-end solution from a well-established supplier with decades of R&D behind their offerings. But those objections were raised years ago in the data center, yet open source and virtualization took hold there and…

Large mobile operators have been protesting for years about their small selection of RAN vendors, and the way the large OEMs lock them in with proprietary implementations, even of standards-based architectures. With Huawei potentially being barred from some countries’ 5G networks, the choice threatens to get even smaller, with the accompanying negative impact on competition, innovation and pricing. Hence the support of several leading operators for various industry initiatives to promote fully open RAN platforms. Last month, NTT Docomo deployed a pre-commercial 5G RAN in Tokyo, Japan using open interfaces defined by the Linux Foundation’s ORAN Alliance. This month it’s the turn of Vodafone to take a lead, building on last year’s RFIs (requests for information) for open networks and…

A leading UK MNO has become the latest operator to jump onboard the potential life raft that is OpenRAN technology. Vodafone announced Europe’s first large-scale field trial of OpenRAN, in partnership with the Telecom Infra Project (TIP), pioneering an initiative that should lower the cost of 5G deployment and – they hope – keep them competitive. MNOs are doing all they can to stave off marginalization by cheaper, alternative technologies and services. MNOs have been trembling since the arrival of LPWAN five years ago brought the first legitimate threat to their services. Vodafone’s trial of OpenRAN technology is yet another MNO taking action to ward off becoming a dumb pipe. OpenRAN makes Network Function Virtualization (NFV) more convenient for MNOs…

AT&T has embraced the open, virtualized networking idea so wholeheartedly that it has been contributing many of its internal developments into open source efforts, in a bid to drive wide-scale operator support for commoditized white box hardware running network functions in software. The aim is to ensure that the new economics of these open networks do not just deliver savings and agility for one operator, but are extended through the entire supply chain. Among many open initiatives, AT&T has been an originator of ONAP (Open Network Automation Protocol), Open RAN, and Akraino Edge Stack, all housed by the Linux Foundation. It has also contributed developments to Facebook’s Open Compute Project (OCP), which aims to establish commodity economics in the server…

Avanci has announced that European MNO Orange has joined the Avanci patent licensing group, bringing the patent-owner membership count to 31. Ostensibly aiming to make licensing IoT technologies easier, the past couple of years of malicious litigation have darkened the mood in the industry. When Avanci finally starts to swing the hammer, it is going to be very poorly received indeed. Collectively, the 31 companies are contributing their intellectual property into a pool, and then working out how much each bit of IP is worth to any given technology. Then, with the might of all those lawyers, Avanci essentially tells companies it thinks it can sue that they should pay up – distributing these earnings to the members according to…

The US-China trade and security wars drag on, with the USA continuing in its efforts to pressurize friendly nations – from Italy to India – to follow its lead and bar Huawei and ZTE from 5G networks. So far, however, very few countries have fallen into line (though reviews by the European Union, and several of its individual states, are still ongoing). Malaysia and Norway have become the latest governments to say they will not implement bans or restrict the operators’ freedom to choose their own vendors. And perhaps most importantly to Huawei, a truce has been announced with ARM. When the USA placed Huawei on its entity list – which means a US company can only trade with Huawei…