11552 search results for Open RAN

China has been investing billions of dollars in core technologies from semiconductors to artificial intelligence to ensure it reduces its reliance on external, particularly US, vendors and patents. This has been policy for years, but the vast country will redouble its efforts in the face of current trade and national security disputes, and particularly the US sanctions against Huawei. Huawei itself has been increasing its own technology self-reliance in recent years. With ZTE, it is the largest contributor to 5G essential patents. It has developed many key components within its HiSilicon semiconductor arm, and now has processors for servers and smartphones, plus many other chips such as 5G modems. Now, amid the climate of US hostility, it is not only…

It was hard to imagine a trade war with more impact on the telecoms industry than that between the USA and China, but then hostilities erupted between Japan and South Korea, both of them pivotal to 5G R&D, electronics and deployment. Long-running tensions over various issues, some dating back to World War II, have apparently escalated in the course of the two countries negotiating a new trade deal. This has led to Japan threatening to halt exports of three chemical compounds (hydrogen fluoride gas, fluorinated polyimide, and EUV photoresists), which are critical to smartphone manufacture, to Korea. Since Japan produces more than 90% of the world’s supply of these chemicals, and Korea produces about one-quarter of the world’s smartphones, the…

Just as the European Commission got a new president, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) in the US has just published figures which show a dramatic about turn in the approach of energy suppliers – dumping coal and nuclear in favor of renewables – wind and solar, while gas remains strong. While Ursula von der Leyen only won the president’s seat by 2% of the vote, she does have some new carbon taxation plans that might just have swung the newly elected green-leaning seats, which enjoyed success in the recent European elections. So, while the EUC now seems to be pretty set on implementing stronger environmental protections, data from the US shows that despite its president’s best attempts, coal is…

One area where it makes sense for operators and cloud providers to work together is in the emerging market of edge computing. Both have advantages to press in an area where the value chains remain very uncertain. The telcos offer a distributed network of locations and connectivity on which an edge network can be overlaid for at least some applications, particularly those based on mobility and public platforms, such as video delivery and gaming. The webscalers have cloud platforms and are established in the enterprise side of the market, which is more focused on on-premises edge nodes and indoor locations. While MNOs are weak indoors, webscalers have relied on a few centralized data centers, not a distributed system. The synergies…

Volkswagen and Ford have signed a cooperation agreement, which will see the pair develop electric vehicle (EV) and self-driving technologies. Part of the deal sees VW invest $2.6bn into Argo AI, which values the AI-focused startup at $7bn. Ford was an early investor in Argo, buying an undisclosed stake for $1bn back in 2017, and now the pair hold equal stakes – as VW is investing $1bn in cash, while committing another $1.6bn using its Autonomous Intelligent Driving (AID) subsidiary, which will be merged into Argo. To this end, AID’s headquarters is now becoming Argo’s European location, in Munich. While regulators could get involved, it looks like VW and Ford are beginning a process (Ford is selling Argo shares to…

MobiTV’s funding round of $21m two years ago was interpreted as the last chance for the one-time mobile video pioneer to get its newer Connect product off the ground. Connect, in turn, represented the company’s U-turn from serving telco titans with mobile technology to delivering big screen services to Tier 2 and 3 cable operators. Yet here we are with another $50m in funding, led last week by existing investor Oak Investment Partners, which is clearly impressed with MobiTV’s change of direction. It brings the company’s total funding to around $214m since its founding in 1999 and as with the previous funding round, the fresh $50m is intended to accelerate the expansion of MobiTV’s Connect software – shifting from its…

The open, multivendor RAN has been discussed for over a decade, but not achieved outside of WiFi (and only imperfectly there). In 5G, traditional operators and emerging private service providers and neutral hosts are more urgently focused on the issue because of the twin needs to reduce the cost of building another new network, and to be far more flexible in supporting specific industries and use cases. Much of the early work is being done in small cells – they have a broader ecosystem anyway, and most at-scale deployments will be greenfield and so less challenging in terms of opening up or migrating a legacy network. A breakthrough came this week with Small Cell Forum’s release of its 5G FAPI…

The smart factory is simultaneously one of the most talked-about, and most challenging sectors for 5G. Visions of digital twins, advanced robots and autonomous trucks often fade when confronted with the long replacement cycles for factory equipment and the heavy incumbency of wired robots and even optimized low latency WiFi. There is still a deathly silence about 5G at many manufacturing conferences – earlier this year, there was stark contrast between the chatter about smart factories at Mobile World Congress (MWC) and the lack of interest in 5G at a similarly large manufacturing show, the Hannover Messe. Even Qualcomm urged caution recently. Gerardo Giaretta, head of Industry 4.0 at the chip company, said recently that 5G would affect the Industrial…

One area where it makes sense for operators and cloud providers to work together is in the emerging market of edge computing. Both have advantages to press in an area where the value chains remain very uncertain. The telcos offer a distributed network of locations and connectivity on which an edge network can be overlaid for at least some applications, particularly those based on mobility and public platforms, such as video delivery and gaming. The webscalers have cloud platforms and are established in the enterprise side of the market, which is more focused on on-premises edge nodes and indoor locations. While MNOs are weak indoors, webscalers have relied on a few centralized data centers, not a distributed system. The synergies…

Operators have been moving their core networks to the cloud far more slowly than most observers had expected a few years ago. Although the packet core has often been the first element to be virtualized, most early movers have deployed only limited core functions as virtual network functions (VNFs). However, the move from the first 5G Non-Standalone (NSA) deployments to full Standalone systems, which require a 5G core, will be a significant trigger. Many of the promises of the full 5G model rely on a flexible, cloud-native core, and we will see a rising tide of operators moving on from merely virtualizing the core on off-the-shelf hardware, to implementing a fully cloud-based platform built around microservices and containers. Another major…

Last month it was Amazon which was supposedly keen to buy Sprint’s Boost Mobile unit, which it plans to divest to help soften regulators’ views of its proposed merger with T-Mobile USA. Then, last week, Google was reportedly in the frame via a tie-up with Dish Network, another likely bidder for Boost. Google quickly denied such an alliance, but the merry-go-round of speculation over the fate of a fairly minor part of the Sprint business highlights the uncertainty over whether the web giants really do plan to get into mobile connectivity, with disruptive impact on the US telecoms market. From the point of view of Sprint and TMO, although interest from Amazon or Google could push the price of Boost…

The 5G roll-out is as much about fiber as wireless. Nokia executives have often said that 5G is a wireline network as well as a cellular one, and the company has supported that view by abandoning a previous strategy to focus only on mobile broadband, and invest heavily in wireline technologies courtesy of the acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent. Ownership of fiber, or affordable access to it, is critical to the 5G business case. One reason why Japanese operators can move rapidly and boast of far lower capex levels than most of their counterparts elsewhere is the fiber situation. Market leader NTT Docomo says it has invested steadily over recent years in upgrading and expanding its fiber – to support enhanced backhaul,…

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 did not make any room for the Cellular-V2X (C-V2X) technology favored by the GSMA community. This has opened the door for C-V2X, but 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…