11583 search results for Open RAN

UK banks have teamed up with all four of the country’s MNOs and the GSMA to counter the growing scourge of authorized push payment (APP) fraud by correlating the fraudulent actions with associated phone calls. In this way, banks aim to identify the transactions in near real time so that they can block the money transfers to the fraudsters’ accounts. Called Scam Signal, the platform accesses live data about phone calls from the UK’s mobile services via network APIs, in line with the GSMA’s Open Gateway initiative, to stimulate development of applications that exploit capabilities of mobile infrastructure. Scam Signal is significant both in underscoring the potential of network APIs to generate new services through cooperation among MNOs, and for…

Canadian telco Telus stood out as a meaningful example of a macro brownfield Open RAN deployment at this year’s FYUZ event in Dublin. While the authenticity of AT&T’s Open RAN network is often called into doubt, given that it is largely single vendor with Ericsson, nearby neighbor Telus provides a promising example of an open network with a diverse range of vendors, in rural and urban environments. However, just 4% of Telus’ nationwide network is operating to Open RAN specifications. Telus had something of a push into the arms of Open RAN in 2022, when the Canadian government decided to banish Huawei from national networks by 2027. At the time, Huawei was Telus’ primary vendor. “Given the innovation in Open…

M&A, IP, Patents­­­­ The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has said it will approve the Vodafone UK and Three merger if the two legally commit to spending £11 billion on network upgrades over the next eight years and impose a three-year price freeze on certain tariffs. These measures would provide “a path to final clearance,” the CMA said. Financials Meta’s Q3 earnings beat analysts’ expectations with net profit up 35% to $15.7 billion, driven by revenue growth of 19% and lower taxes. Though shares fell over 3% on the earnings news, possibly on the news that daily active users across Meta apps missed expectation by growing 5% to 3.29 billion, just short of the expected 3.31 billion. Capital expenditures…

Though Samsung Electronics slightly beat its own expectations in its third quarter sales and operating profit last week, the news from its network unit was disappointing. The vendor is stuck in a tight spot and is losing share to Nokia and Ericsson. This could be a turning point; where Samsung decides whether the juice is worth the squeeze in the mobile networking business. But the firm has pinned some hope for growth into its role as an Open RAN equipment vendor. While overall revenues reached a record high of KRW 79.1 trillion ($57.2 billion), growing over 17% from the same period of last year, the figure missed analysts’ expectations of KRW 10.8 trillion. The same was true of operating profit…

The O-RAN Alliance has published its latest technical report on spectrum aggregation, and Mavenir has sung its praises. This is unsurprising, as Mavenir led the report’s creation, but the document investigates the ways that spectrum could and should be aggregated in the multivendor environments enabled by Open RAN. Spectrum aggregation, the process of combining different spectrum bands together into a unified experience, enables higher throughput in both uplink and downlink connections. It allows MNOs to piece together disparate bits of spectrum holdings, to create something greater than the sum of its parts. The Open RAN angle is that this has historically been easier in single-vendor deployments – where the likes of Ericsson or Nokia can mandate how the stack functions.…

Security has been considered a liability for providers of private 5G technology, but Celona is trying to make it a trump card by playing on zero trust as a way of uniting industrial IT and OT (operational technology) systems within a common wireless network. The success of this approach will depend on whether enterprises believe that the combination of zero trust architecture and 5G network slicing can deliver the security as well as performance demanded by industrial enterprises. Traditionally in sectors such as manufacturing, mining, engineering and transportation, IT systems running applications such as enterprise accounting, and resource planning, and email, have been kept separate from OT, since they have different computational and communication needs. OT may not be more…

The great disruptor T-Mobile was the first US operator to offer network slicing and also the world’s first major MNO to deploy 5G Standalone (SA) on a broad basis. The operator has a clear strategy to capitalize on slicing on a nationwide scale, for consumer and enterprise products. T-Mobile’s Head of RAN Automation, Muhammed Shakil, described how the ‘Uncarrier’ is building slicing products for its next stage of growth. T-Mobile unveiled its network slicing beta at MWC Las Vegas in September 2023, on the back of its 5G SA network. The operator then opened the program to Android developers of video calling applications on Samsung Galaxy S23 phones, who could then test them on a customized video calling network slice…

The newly merged MasOrange has selected Ericsson to both join up the two existing networks, in a sustainable and programmable manner, and to provide Open RAN compliant rural network upgrades. Sources put the latter deal at some 10,000 sites, with much speculation about the extent to which new Ericsson equipment will replace old Huawei gear. For the Open RAN community, this is Ericsson’s second major Open RAN deal, and fears that this ‘single vendor Open RAN’ approach could distort the market are still rife. This Spanish deal is not on the same scale as the $14 billion contract with AT&T, announced at the end of 2023, where Nokia was the party that lost the most. The Finnish vendor did net…

The spate of new partnerships between terrestrial mobile operators and satellite platform providers continues amid growing urgency to plug coverage gaps for backhaul and primary connectivity. A burst of activity in part driven by the latest 3GPP NTN standards which have fostered collaborations between terrestrial and satellite operators. Such partnerships between telcos and primarily LEO constellation providers also open up new use cases in IoT, such as logistics management and asset tracking. Both the GSA and GSMA, respectively representing mobile technology vendors and operators, have been counting and the numbers are accumulating fast. The data is inevitably a few months old by the time it has been collated, with the GSA’s latest count dating back to the end of March…

M&A, IP, Patents­­­­ As part of its global expansion ambitions, UAE operator e& has completed the acquisition of a controlling stake in PPF Telecom Group’s operations in Bulgaria, Hungary, Serbia and Slovakia. The €2.2 billion deal was first announced in August 2023. South American multi-national operator Millicom has agreed to sell 7,000 sites to towerco SBA Communications for $975 million across Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, El Salvador and Nicaragua. The agreement is a 15-year leaseback deal plus a build-to-suit agreement that covers up to an additional 2,500 new sites. Financials Verizon reported flat third quarter revenues of $33.3 billion, but had the highest EBITDA the company has ever reported, of $12.5 billion. Wireless service revenue was up 2.7%, driven by an…

A group of UK semiconductor buffs are splitting ways with the China-UK joint venture they founded in 2018, to establish a UK-owned firm called RANsemi. The new entity will make and sell the chips designed by Picocom to markets outside of China and will also develop new products. Picocom will still exist as a Chinese entity solely. The plan has been some years in the making and aims to attract a customer base which had previously been wary of Picocom’s partial Chinese ownership. RANsemi will initially make and sell two system-on-chip products that it has licensed from Picocom. Both of these were originally largely designed in the UK, these are the PC802 for 5G Open RAN basebands and the PC805,…

Arm is reportedly gearing up to cancel Qualcomm’s ARM developer license, as the dispute between the two escalates, and has now allegedly served Qualcomm with a 60-day notice of cancellation. The news stems from Bloomberg, and so should be taken with a pinch of salt, but the move would damage Qualcomm’s development roadmaps significantly. The roots of this trace back to Qualcomm’s 2021 $1.4 billion acquisition of Nuvia, a startup founded by former Apple developers, which developed server-class ARM-based chips. Since then, Nuvia has helped Qualcomm move away from ARM CPU cores, developing its own designs, as Qualcomm typically only lightly changed the ARM cores used in its SoCs. Qualcomm’s latest design, the Snapdragon 8 Elite, houses the new Oryon…

The Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) is taking aim at ‘moving’ WiFi networks, outlining how the latest improvements to the venerable connectivity standard can better serve buses, trains, planes, and ships. This is a convergence driver, and the WBA is attempting to demonstrate how various specifications can be combined to great effect. The report sets out the problem. “The traditional focus of WiFi operations has been on fixed locations with reliable and guaranteed connections, such as homes or offices. While this has meant that our connected lives in these locations have been enhanced immeasurably, this has not been universal with those WiFi networks sitting outside the “fixed location bubble” being largely an afterthought if present at all. Networks in places like…

No firm has been more vocal about the opportunities surrounding network APIs than Ericsson in recent months. The firm launched an API JV with operators in September, announced a deal with Singtel’s Paragon platform this month, and is clearly very keen to monetize its expensive investment in API unit Vonage. As a result of the need to find new revenues, there has been endless hype around APIs, and wide-ranging predictions for the potential revenue opportunities. There is a lack of detail on revenue opportunities, and even Ericsson admits that to some degree operators will have to build the systems and hope that the revenues follow. At Ericsson’s recent OSS/BSS conference in Paris, Wireless Watch sat down with Ericsson’s Head of…

Interest in Mobile Edge Compute (MEC) among operators is being revived by the demands and potential of Generative AI after five years or more of lackluster growth. This will continue and propel the field to 11-fold growth over the next seven years to 2031. This conclusion has been reached by RAN Research, the analytics arm of Wireless Watch, in its latest report and forecast setting out how MNOs and enterprises can capitalize on the opportunities presented by MEC, as well as address the challenges arising. The report predicts that revenues generated by wireless edge connectivity equipment will rise from $2.6 billion worldwide in 2023 to $28.7 billion by 2031. These totals break down quite evenly between operator and enterprise deployments,…

Singtel and Ericsson have teamed up to provide a Network-as-a-Service product that enterprise customers will be able to use for ordering and provisioning 5G services, such as network slices. The pair also plan to sell the product to other operators, to use in their own networks, although this element of the service will be highly complex for operators with legacy networks to adopt. This deal combines Ericsson’s Service Orchestration and Assurance (SO+A) platform with Singtel’s Paragon platform via APIs. The project is in its very early stages, the pair have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to build this into a commercial offering that will allow enterprise customers to request and manage services through Singtel’s Paragon platform then executed in…