11552 search results for Open RAN

This past week, Lear has dropped $320mn on Xevo, a connected car software provider that is present in some 25mn cars, and ZF has bought trucking ADAS slinger Wabco, for €6bn ($6.74bn). The next three years are going to be full of similar deals, as the OEMs, and the automakers too, try to buy their way into the lead, on the back of new technologies – as the industry grapples with electrification, pollution regulations, and autonomous driving. There is still plenty of room in the automotive sector for the kinds of massive acquisitions seen in the semiconductor market. The automakers themselves seem keen to expand into the realm traditionally governed by the OEMs that supplied them, and among the OEMs,…

Chirp has come a long way since we first encountered the startup, exhibiting a way to use audio bursts to transmit data between toys for kids. We could see the potential for the technology in RF-constrained environments, such as Chirp’s win with EDF’ and in the years since, Chirp has made headway in the sector. Now, it has announced a new SDK for Arm’s Cortex-M4 and Cortex-M7 microcontroller platform, which brings the technology to the lowest-power silicon to date. We spoke to CEO James Nesfield about the announcement, and to catch up with happenings at the firm. Nesfield said that there have been some technical optimizations with the protocol to ensure it runs on the lower-power chips, and that R&D…

While DeepMind was once drawing criticism for over-reaching an agreement with the NHS, hoovering up more data than the government was expecting, it is now showing off the fruits of its labors – a prototype retinal scanner that should have generated a lot more buzz than it seems to have done. This is because Alphabet-sibling Google has managed to shoot itself in the foot, thanks to the controversial make-up of its new AI ethics panel. The Advanced Technology External Advisory Council (ATEAC) has infuriated a sizable part of its workforce (1.796 Googlers so far), who have filed a letter to call for the removal of Kay Coles James, due to her anti-carbon-regulation, anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ sentiment as president of a…

Bavaria’s Ministry for Economic Affairs funded a twelve-month project to test how Multi-Access Edge Compute (MEC) technologies could be used in automotive applications, specifically, in vehicle-to-vehicle communications. However, the project missed its 20ms latency target, which doesn’t bode particular well for the ‘cars as mini data centers’ crowd. The trial involved Continental, a major (but rather troubled) automotive OEM, Deutsche Telekom, Nokia, and research and testing institute Fraunhofer. It was looking to test both the technology and the business case, to see if this was something you could actually make money from. In terms of architecture optimization, the project managed to get latency down to 30ms, which is impressive for mobile networks, but still short of the 20ms target. It…

A headline asking the question, “What if the solar energy grid got hacked?” made us sit up and think last week, and we set up a chat with Sectigo, a Certification Authority for a variety of security eco-systems, one of which includes the SunSpec Alliance, a 100-strong trade alliance of solar plus energy storage players. Sectigo (formerly Comodo) has partnered with non-profit Kyrio, itself owned by CableLabs, the R&D arm of US cable firms, which has driven a number of breakthrough standards particularly in broadband (DOCSIS). The main question is how do you have an open eco-system so that 100 plus providers can interact and share in the US Solar economy, and still make sure everything is secure. The answer…

The Global Mobile Suppliers Association (GSA) has announced that 102 MNOs in 52 countries have deployed one or both of the two Licensed LPWAN (L-LPWAN) technologies LTE Cat-M and Cat-NB. It comes as the LoRa ecosystem begins to shift from private LoRa networks to public ones that support the open LoRaWAN specification, with Semtech saying that the gulf between its private LoRa and LoRaWAN shipments is closing. The report focuses on MNO adoption, rather than footprint coverage or the number of devices. To this end, 149 operators in 69 countries are investing in L-LPWAN, with 102 MNOs in 52 countries having actually pulled the trigger on a deployment. Of the 102 MNOs, just 20 MNOs across 19 countries had deployed…

The FCC’s rising enthusiasm for shared and unlicensed spectrum options, to boost competition and the range of services available to US users, is placing the MNOs on the defensive. From T-Mobile’s point of view, it is wanting to spend large sums on acquiring Sprint, largely in order to boost its spectrum capacity for 5G, while at the same time, growing amounts of shared spectrum for 4G and 5G could enable challengers, such as cablecos and webscalers, for free. The established operators lost the fight, on balance, in CBRS. They did score some points on the rules for the licences in the PAL (Priority Access Licensed) tier of the 3.5 GHz band, but were defeated in their wish to have very…

There are many potential applications for the USA’s CBRS spectrum in the 3.5 GHz band, but the most conventional is fixed wireless access (FWA), and that is likely to offer the first indications of the economics of the unlicensed portion. The CBRS band (Band 48) has been opened up by the FCC with a three-tier priority system. While federal incumbents have guaranteed access, they use the spectrum only sporadically and in limited areas (mainly for naval radar), so there is plenty of capacity available for the other two tiers –PAL (Priority Access Licensed), whose licences will be auctioned this year; and GAA (General Authorized Access). Some WISPs already use spectrum in the 3.65 GHz band, and will be able to…

The automotive sector has mostly stopped blowing its own horn, ending the heralding of the latest advancements that it had made in self-driving or connectivity technologies. To this end, it’s been quite quiet in the past few months, in terms of news announcements, from both vendors and customers. However, Nvidia’s annual conference was the stage for a raft of such news, as the company tries to get over a crash in its share price in the fallout from the bitcoin crash. Nvidia announced a new collaboration with the Toyota Research Institute – Advanced Development (TRI-AD), which will see the pair work on developing and validating self-driving vehicles. This new deal builds on TRI-AD’s parent company, Toyota, using Nvidia’s Drive AGX…

It seems that the LPWAN sector is acutely suffering from the same disease that has afflicted ‘the IoT’ – marketers have lost interest, and the term no longer adorns the booths of many of those in attendance at MWC. This is a good thing, as fewer distractions should mean better productivity, and the marketers have already moved onto AI, blockchain, and soon quantum computing, with 5G proving the current buzzword de jour. But it’s not just the booths of the very big firms that have struck the term from their tradeshow stands. There were a lot less LPWAN-focused exhibitors at MWC this year, and Hall 8.1 that plays host to them, is now much less IoT-focused. More space has been…