Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
The vision of a new, open, multivendor and disaggregated network was largely epitomized, at Mobile World Congress, by Rakuten, but of course, that is a highly specific deployment by a unique operator in an unusual mobile economy. For most operators, the activities of the various open RAN industry groupings will be more relevant to their own hopes of exploding the current locked-down supply chain. In fact, Rakuten is not a poster child for any push towards industry-wide standards for an open network, and those will be essential to reduce the complexity and integration expense of rolling out multivendor 5G systems. The Japanese company did refer to Open vRAN, an initiative kicked off by Cisco at last year’s MWC, which has…
Japan’s ecommerce company, turned MNO, Rakuten, was certainly the belle of the ball at MWC this year, and not just because they are the lead sponsor for the beloved local soccer team, FC Barcelona. The company acquired spectrum last year and is building a greenfield 4G network to convert its existing MVNO business into a full mobile platform, chiefly to drive usage of its digital services, such as shopping and banking, and to enable new applications. There wasn’t too much hype at MWC this year, certainly not on the network side, but there was a loud buzz around this entirely unproven MNO, which is deploying 4G not 5G, in one of the world’s most saturated markets. But the excitement was…
This year’s Mobile World Congress was a serious reality check. Operators and vendors alike cast aside a lot of the hype and over-optimism of the pre-commercial days and acknowledged that ‘true 5G’ would be really hard. The first wave of 5G – deployed with the 4G, mainly non-virtualized core and the integrated RAN – makes very little difference except to operators’ PR and governments’ self-satisfaction. This is especially true of the 90% of countries where millimeter wave spectrum is not yet available for 5G. This is not to belittle the transformative potential of 5G. It is just not ready yet in any real sense. A faster, more efficient mobile broadband radio is fine, but does not enable brand new business…
Ericsson, Huawei and Nokia all spread their announcements and demonstrations over two weeks, holding physical or virtual preview events the week before for analysts and then topping up the news on their huge stands in Barcelona (or in Huawei’s case, five stands). ZTE was surprisingly buoyant given the challenges of last year and the threats of further sanctions in this one; while Samsung was throwing everything at its attempt to become a major network vendor in the 5G era, with its US deployments, its millimeter wave expertise and the uncertainties about Chinese suppliers all making this the best opportunity ever for it to take significant market share outside South Korea. Here we select a few significant highlights for the three…
So another Mobile World Congress is over. As usual, we endured the jostling, the lines and the hype to trawl the stands and interview the key executives, in order to spot the real trends, issues and challenges among the glossy demoes and fixed-grin optimism. MWC is always a strange mixture of a new beginning – Sunday night is really New Year’s Eve for the mobile industry; and Groundhog Day – most stands in the same locations as before, with remarkably similar messages. The 2019 production leaned more to the latter, with very few major announcements or big surprises. Even the Samsung 5G smartphone had been pre-launched the week before in South Korea, and on the network and MNO fronts, most…
Cobham – MNO buyers shift focus to 5G, fundamental differences Next up, we spoke to network equipment provider Cobham, which was hawking its intelligent distributed antenna system (idDAS) to anyone looking to provide massive wireless capacity in buildings or in specific outdoor locations. To this end, we have spoken to Cobham in the past about the potential for IoT applications, but this year, the tone was a little different. Hebert Sedas, VP of Coverage Sales Americas, noted that despite the hype, the IoT was not moving as quickly as the wireless industry would like, which is also compounded by the carriers not moving quick enough on the 5G front – something that was clear at MWC in general, as the…
Veea – Level-3 network meshing and edge-processing Kicking things off was Veea, a company that made the switch from the software-focused edge-processing firm, to one that combined hardware with software and services – after finding that hardware was in fact a good bit harder than initially expected. As per David Rose, SVP Marketing, the company found that it shared an investor and chairman, and so decided to merge with a prominent customer – Max2. Rose said that Virtousys, Veea’s predecessor, might have been a bit naïve in the ease of putting its specialist software on third-party boxes. To this end, Veea has emerged, with expertise in the retail ePoS and access-point (AP) world, built on Virtuosys’ domain expertise in edge-processing.…
LoRa Alliance – 6 core verticals, proprietary means best of breed Next up was the LoRa Alliance, where we spoke to CEO Donna Moore and Emma Pearce, Director of Marketing, about the recent history of the group – which had just passed 100 operator deployments. A larger piece will outline our current thoughts on the LPWAN sector, in a show that featured little in the way of branding to suggest that the MNO community was particularly interested in LTE Cat-M or Cat-NB, and where Sigfox did not have a booth for the second year running. Moore explained that there had been a big shift from deployments that were using proprietary versions of LoRa to those that were using the open…
Following weeks of speculation, Liberty Global has agreed to sell its Swiss cable operation to local operator Sunrise in a $6.3 billion deal including debt. Liberty Global says the sale completes the rebalancing project, which has also involved the sale of European assets to Vodafone. Liberty Global’s latest results are also out, showing video subscriber losses of 74,900 in total last quarter, spearheaded by Telenet in Belgium which saw 54,400 video subscribers losses. Revenues were up slightly by 1.2% in Q4 to $2.95 billion, to total $11.96 billion for the year, up 2.2%. Operating income increased 73.2% to $252 million, making it $839 million for the year. UK broadcasters the BBC and ITV have finally confirmed the two are teaming…
A significant tie up in the WiFi space was inked this week as Plume and Quantenna were demonstrating the integration of the open source framework OpenSync on Quantenna’s WiFi 6 silicon for the first time. When key rival AirTies agreed to buy the WiFi Doctor business from Technicolor last month, we asked the question, “We wonder what Plume is plotting right now?” – and the answer all along was working with a major silicon supplier to embrace OpenSync with the aim of challenging the recently released EasyMesh standard. The integration comes on the back of a huge OpenSync announcement from Broadband World Forum a few months back with Samsung, adding to a list including Comcast, Liberty Global and Bell Canada.…
Rediscovering a company we last covered in 2014 and finding ourselves equally impressed is a nice feeling. We managed to get our fix at this year’s MWC from a company called Pixelworks, a video processing SoC developer with a few tricks up its sleeve to make the OLED display of a $1,000 iPhone X look like a cheap gimmick in comparison to much cheaper LCD displays with refresh-rates of up to 120 Hz. But what fascinated us most about Pixelworks from the offset and continues to today is its ability to save battery rather than suck it dry as you might imagine, with custom silicon optimized for power and heat dissipation. Its Iris video processing product has notable deals with…
5G is a multiheaded monster compared with its predecessors, with no clear idea which of the heads, or areas of research, is leading the charge. Any hope that this week’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2019 would establish clearly why consumers need 5G, and what the direction of travel should be, will be disappointed amid a plethora of conflicting demonstrations and absence of compelling use cases. This was rather amusingly laid bare at the congress by Qualcomm, BT and fast-growing Shenzhen-based Chinese smartphone maker OnePlus, talking about their collaboration over 5G while appealing to developers for apps that would bring it to life. This absence of apps was dressed up in hyperbole about the wonderful use cases that 5G will enable,…
Mobile World Congress of all places played host to our long overdue catch up with Technicolor this week, gaining an unexpectedly detailed insight into the company’s roadmap. The long-term plan reads more like a suicide note than a masterplan at first, although Luis Martinez-Amago, President of Technicolor’s Connected Home division, did a decent job of convincing us otherwise. We say unexpected, given that our more recent coverage of Technicolor has been reduced to the gradual dismantling of a vendor which still to this day has some fundamentally important technologies. Martinez-Amago was quick to discredit the rumored attempts by Technicolor to sell off its CPE business, which quickly prompted conclusions that the unit was unsellable and therefore irrecoverable. “I was brought…
The US paranoia around Chinese firm Huawei is getting ludicrous. This week a group of 11 US senators have called for a ban on solar panel inverters in the US, and could potentially call for all the installed inverter base to be replaced. An inverter simply changes an electrical source from DC to AC current. It is hard to imagine the kind of danger that a humble inverter can represent to the almost non-existent solar panel market in the US (under 2GW per annum and 14 GW in total). Are we supposed to expect an inverter to be switched off remotely by attacking Chinese hostiles in the event of an invasion? Or as a pre-emptive strike against imposed tariffs? If…
Device and platform-independent SDKs for Android and IOS devices in Java, C++, C# or REST that support edge node discovery, built-in identity and verified location services, with the ability to connect automatically to the nearest edge location. MobiledgeX will release these SDKs as open source to speed development times and flexibility. A Distributed Matching Engine (DME) that is natively borne and integrated into Telekom Deutschland’s mobile network in Germany. The DME allows developers to ensure the identity and location of application users while guaranteeing their privacy as this data remains within the boundaries of the mobile service provider and is not disclosed to MobiledgeX. A fully multi-tenant control plane that supports zero-touch provisioning of edge cloud resources via a Cloudlet…
MobiledgeX, the independent group into which Deutsche Telekom (DT) placed its edge activities, has announced some significant milestones, including the first release of its Edge-Cloud developer solution, which is also powering a public mobile edge deployment by DT. The Edge-Cloud R1.0 solution connects mobile users to containerized cloud applications, which execute close to the user in order to boost performance and responsiveness. Developers can deploy their application back end on the edge in the same way they would on the public cloud. Coming from the telco heritage, DT and MobiledgeX see 5G as an essential part of this highly distributed cloud environment – and the edge cloud as a driver for 5G success. While many players in the edge landscape…
Nothing illustrates the way that 5G and the edge cloud will complement one another, than HPE’s newly announced alliance with Samsung to combine their respective edge and virtualized RAN technologies. Both vendors have the opportunity, at the dawn of 5G, to get deeper into the mobile infrastructure market – HPE because mobile RANs and cores will increasingly be virtualized on servers; Samsung because it has, after years of being a minor player in mobile networks, got several early contracts for its 5G gear, and may be hoping to benefit from the uncertainties surrounding the Chinese suppliers (see separate item). The partners said they will offer a joint edge-to-core vRAN solution based on Samsung’s radio technology and system integration services, and…
At chip level, Intel has predictably driven the development of common cloud and edge architectures. The rapid expansion of cloud servers, whether huge or tiny, are essential to the company’s growth, and it needs to defend this territory against the webscale giants’ inhouse chip developments; the open source community led by RISC-V; the possible revival of IBM Power; and of course ARM. Of course, Intel has other battles to fight in the telco cloud environment, such as stealing greater market share in the Ethernet switch-chip market, from Broadcom, Barefoot, OEMs’ designs and others. But the x86 processor remains the core of its business, and so far it has done a good job of keeping ARM-based challengers at bay. Qualcomm has…
The extension of common cloud platforms from center to edge will be a key theme of Mobile World Congress this year. This may not seem like a mainstream issue for a mobile show, but it is a crucial one for operators. Edge computing and network slicing will be essential enablers of the 5G business model, and particularly the goal of extending 5G services beyond mobile broadband and into many enterprise sectors with specialized needs – needs which will change as they start to look towards mass-scale Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Advanced operators are planning to deploy cloud platforms, or work with those of partners, in order to support their own virtualized networks and new operational processes, and to deliver…
As we have often argued in Wireless Watch (Riot’s sister publication), the edge computing trend has shifted significantly over the past year, and moved further away from the operators’ grasp. New alignments in the nascent sector reflect that, from the recent merger of the OpenFog Alliance and the Industrial IoT Consortium (IIC), to the launch of yet another grouping, the Kinetic Edge Alliance (KEA). This is not an open source or industry standards effort like some of the other edge groups, but has been spearheaded by Vapor IO, around its own edge platform. This Kinetic Edge architecture supports multiple micro-data centers spread across a city, which can be combined into a single virtual facility with citywide coverage using software-defined interconnection.…