11552 search results for Open RAN

VC outlet Fifth Wall Ventures has announced that the oversubscribed second funding round of $503mn has closed, giving the firm over $1bn to invest into the proptech sector. However, much of the market still understands proptech to constitute websites and applications that make renting or buying property easier, and are asleep to the opportunity that smart building technologies could provide. Founded in 2016, Fifth Wall is the largest proptech-focused fund in the market, and has substantial clout when it comes to crowning victors. However, if all it focuses on are mechanisms to better facilitate leasing and selling, then it will miss a raft of opportunities in using smart building technologies to improve the retail and rental value of property on…

Like Ericsson a week earlier, Nokia reported second quarter results which were cautiously optimistic though not exciting. It increased revenue and reduced losses as the first phase of 5G business gathers pace, though its challenge, as for Ericsson and Huawei, will be to keep that new source of revenue flowing smoothly, by creating the right conditions for operators to gain confidence and start to implement ‘true 5G’, awarding the high value deals for cloud-native cores and densified RANs (see special report). Nokia’s net sales for the quarter were up 5% year-on-year to €5.7bn ($6.3bn). Its net loss of €191m ($213m) was better than a year-ago loss of €271m ($302m). The biggest division, Networks, reported revenue of €4.39bn ($4.9bn), up 8%…

T-Mobile USA and Sprint have finally got the go-ahead from the US authorities for their $6.3bn merger, which will create a stronger counterweight to AT&T and Verizon, while ushering in a potentially disruptive fourth MNO. The concession which the two MNOs made to the FCC and Department of Justice – which were concerned about the reduced competition if national MNOs were reduced from four to three – was to divest some spectrum and customers, and offer favorable MVNO terms, to Dish Network. There were many rumors last month that Dish would be supported by a large web player like Google or Amazon in the much-anticipated deal with ‘the new T-Mobile’, but in the end, the company went alone. That will…

If demanding telecoms workloads like virtualized RAN and 5G core are to move to the public cloud, the cloud providers will need to ensure their infrastructure is based on processors capable of supporting these functions. Suppliers like Intel are already investing in accelerators to surround their processors, for cloud hardware that can cope with artificial intelligence (AI), vRAN and other very high performance tasks. But in some cases, the webscalers themselves are also designing or commissioning their own processors to meet the demands of the new generation of cloud-based services and make sure their clouds are a match for specialized private cloud platforms. Google, Amazon AWS and others have periodically announced such developments, raising new challenges for Intel and other…

Three UK has emerged as a perhaps unlikely frontrunner in the race to deploy a cloud-native 5G core, and therefore have the capability to deliver the diversity of services promised for ‘true 5G’, as well as achieving the cost efficiencies that will be essential to make its low cost challenger strategy towards pricing economically viable. The Hutchison-owned MNO has two advantages over its UK rivals – EE, Vodafone and O2. One is its lean IT infrastructure and staffing, which is enabling it to move to cloud platforms and full automation more rapidly than many. It has made a string of announcements recently, relating to many of its operations from BSS/IT, to network operations, to the 5G core (though not a…

AT&T will certainly not be the only telco considering whether and when to move its networks to a public cloud (see above). Whichever decision they make about the infrastructure itself, they will need to decide on their approach to the cloud infrastructure platform, and that will mean introducing new vendors into their supply chains. The traditional equipment suppliers are busily developing their cloud-native offerings and underlying infrastructure platforms, but there are plenty of new names joining the telco party too. Mirantis has scored at AT&T, Reliance Jio and other operators, while the UK’s incumbent, BT, has given Canonical a big boost in the 5G game. The company is starting to plan the cloud-native 5G core it intends to deploy in…

The move to the cloud is still years away for some MNOs, but those in markets which are already embroiled in 5G price wars, from the UK to South Korea, are likely to feel the pressure to make the move to a cloud-native core in the next two or three years. The UK’s Three and BT/EE have already outlined their plans in some detail, as have AT&T and Verizon in the USA, Rakuten in Japan and others. One of their key decisions will be whether to build their own cloud infrastructure to host the core and RAN, or rely on a public or hybrid cloud from a partner. AT&T has set an important precedent by talking up a “public cloud-first”…

Microsoft has announced a $1bn investment into OpenAI, the non-profit AI research project that counts Elon Musk among its founders, and signed a completely totally separate honest-to-goodness “exclusive computing partnership” that will see Microsoft become the sole provider of computing resources for OpenAI. Because OpenAI is a non-profit, Microsoft can’t really just give the firm $1bn, and so, the investment looks like a somewhat roundabout way to pay for the Azure instances that OpenAI is going to be using. There’s still an element of philanthropy here, but Microsoft wants to get in at the forefront of this AI research, which should have some beneficial affect on the combined Azure platform – which now represents around a third of Microsoft’s quarterly…

The changes in the radio access networks (RAN) that operators are hoping to see as 5G matures give Samsung its best, and probably last, chance to have a major impact on the mobile network market. Its track record in fixed wireless access (FWA) gave it a position in the early US 5G rollouts, which started with an FWA focus; Huawei’s troubles have led some MNOs to build up the Korean company as an alternative counterweight to Nokia and Ericsson. However, outside its home market and FWA, Samsung has a very small installed base compared to the big three, and almost no position in Europe (where its flagship customer, Three UK, is ripping out its 4G equipment and replacing it with…

The UK MNOs have announced a prospective collaboration that will bring LTE coverage to rural areas, and in so doing, have illustrated the problem that scaling out the IoT presents in the marketplace. The Shared Rural Network (SRN) proposal demonstrates why overlapping efforts from competitors are inefficient, and given the slow progress of the LPWAN sector, makes a strong argument in favor of wholesaling wireless networks. Currently, the UK can claim 99% population coverage for LTE, and around 93% landmass coverage too. However, according to O2, one of the UK MNOs, only 67% of landmass receives coverage from all four of the MNOs, with 7% of the country receiving no LTE coverage at all. There are no stats given for…

There’s a definite air that progress in the self-driving ridesharing services realm involves throwing a lot of money at a wall and hoping some of it sticks. For all the talk of it being the future of mobility, public opinion remains wary, with academia now trying to show ridesharing’s environmental claims are bunkum. GM’s Cruise is only fueling this narrative, postponing the 2019 launch of its driverless taxi service, while Toyota has found another $600mn burning a hole in its pocket, and decided to stick it in Chinese ridesharer Didi Chuxing – the firm that chased Uber out of China. The Toyota deal is a bit complex, but that’s largely due to Chinese rules on private ownership. Toyota Motor Corporation…

The European Union has rejected the European Commission’s recommendation that the WiFi-based (802.11p) ITS-G5 standard be mandated as the requirement for vehicle-to-X (V2X) capabilities, in a recommendation that opened the door to the Cellular-V2X (C-V2X) technology favored by the GSMA community. However, it is important to note that this win is not equivalent to the EU mandating C-V2X. Given the number of times this decision seems to have flip-flopped back and for, this hardly seems the end of the process. Some 21 of the 28 member states, including the three countries with major automotive markets (France, Germany, Italy) voted against the EC proposal, but the European Transport Commissioner has said that she will try to address these concerns and find…

Ever since Apple launched the iPhone and Google responded with Android, vendors and open projects have dreamed of breaking the smartphone operating system duopoly and establishing a ‘third way’. So far, these efforts have failed, whether they came from giant players (Microsoft Windows Mobile), established mobile majors (BlackBerry OS or Samsung-backed Tizen), operators (LiMo) or open communities (Firefox and Canonical). Of course, Huawei is now being pressurized by US hostilities to develop its own OS (see separate item), and could establish a major base in China, though despite the weaker position of Google and Apple relative to western markets, an ‘all-Chinese’ smartphone OS has yet failed to make big impact, despite the efforts of giants like Alibaba and Baidu. And…

The changes in the RAN which operators are hoping to see as 5G matures give Samsung its best, and probably last, chance to have a major impact on the mobile network market. Its track record in fixed wireless access (FWA) gave it a position in the early US 5G roll-outs, which started with an FWA focus; Huawei’s troubles have led some MNOs to build up the Korean company as an alternative counterweight to Nokia and Ericsson. However, outside its home market and FWA, Samsung has a very small installed base compared to the big three, and almost no position in Europe (where its flagship customer, Three UK, is ripping out its 4G equipment and replacing it with Huawei 4G and…

Building on a partnership established last year, CableLabs and the WiFi Alliance have developed a standard way to collect and analyze data on WiFi networks in order to predict and pre-empt problems more automatically. The resulting specifications are called WiFi Certified Data Elements, and they aim to provide service providers with deeper visibility into their wireless networks’ performance, which in turn could reduce the need for customers to report issues, with resulting implications for cost and subscriber satisfaction. CableLabs estimates that cable operators waste more than $1bn a year on troubleshooting residential WiFi problems, and that about two-thirds of customer complaints are WiFi-related. Proprietary WiFi proactive network maintenance (PNM) tools are already available, but CableLabs said there was no global…