11559 search results for Open RAN

While the leaders of the USA and China rant and rave at one another, western companies continue to work closely with those in China, aware that 5G will be a global platform, and will only achieve its full potential with input from as many organizations as possible. In the past, Chinese companies have been associated with proprietary technologies and closed ecosystems, but in the run-up to 5G, it has been China’s operators, especially China Mobile, which have been a driving force behind open, disaggregated and virtualized RANs. China Mobile’s vision of the Cloud-RAN, set out early this decade, was over-ambitious and too radical for most operators to emulate. But it laid down the gauntlet to the network hardware industry –…

Two reports have arrived that show how far the IoT still has to go in terms of security. Nokia has found that CSPs are failing to control the number of infected devices on their customer networks, and Trend Micro managed to intercept millions of messages sent using two backbone IIoT protocols – MQTT and CoAP. It’s a painfully all too familiar story, unfortunately, and one that still shows no real sign of changing. Nokia’s Threat Intelligence Report, the 2019 edition, found that IoT botnet activity accounted for 78% of malware detections in CSP networks, in the past year. That’s more than twice what it was in 2016 (33%), when these botnets first reared their heads. The IoT botnets now account…

One of the most interesting aspects of 5G is the way it will drive new approaches to deployment, and a rebirth of private networking. 5G has the capabilities to enable many new services and experiences for enterprise and industrial organizations, including those which require very low latency, high availability or strong security. But in many markets, MNOs find it very difficult to make a strong business case in industrial or IoT sectors, and prefer to focus on their familiar consumer broadband user bases. That has created damaging misalignment, and lack of trust, between industry and telecoms in many areas. But it is also opening the doors for enterprise-focused service providers to offer mobile services which are optimized specifically for certain…

Multi-access point and mesh networks are the driving force behind the home WiFi business this year, and in the past week, Nokia has got into the game, while UK telco BT has taken an unconventional approach to its latest launch. Nokia has entered the multi-AP market, with a design win at AIS Fibre, a broadband challenger brand in Thailand, which goes up against True, ToT and 3BB, which between them have around 8m broadband lines. The deal is the first to use the technology which Nokia acquired from US mesh specialist Unium in February this year. It first showed the product at Mobile World Congress, adding features such as analytics to report to the cloud system and to a smartphone…

The uncertainty about the position of the Chinese vendors in 5G markets continues to mount, with reports that ZTE may have contravened US trade rules again, and New Zealand the latest country to put restrictions on Huawei. News agency Reuters has obtained a letter from two US senators, requesting that the government investigates whether ZTE worked with individuals on the Department of Commerce’s blacklist. Previously, ZTE incurred sanctions – including a short-lived but disastrous ban on access to US components – for dealing with barred countries such as North Korea. The new reports relate to Venezuela. The senators claim ZTE has been helping the Venezuelan state build a database to support an ID card called ‘the fatherland card’. According to…

The use of Ethernet technology for fronthaul (the links between centralized basebands and remote radio heads in a virtualized RAN) has been hailed as the change that will make vRAN viable. While operators used to talk about deploying vRAN even before 5G came along, in reality, 5G is being deployed in the conventional way as the MNOs wait for vRAN to mature. Ethernet, as an alternative to the semi-proprietary CPRI fronthaul protocol, will certainly address some of the performance and economic shortcomings of that technology. But it has drawbacks of its own, many of which are finally being mitigated by a new IEEE standard called 802.1CM. A few chips, notably Broadcom’s Monterey high performance Ethernet offering, have already supported 802.1CM…

Kumu Networks is best known for its work in full duplex radio, a technique which promises to increase spectral efficiency dramatically because it allows transmit and receive to occur in the same channels. Though this is a technology that has already been implemented in some wireline networks, it is considered cutting edge in wireless, and has been heavily associated with 5G. Like many ‘5G’ innovations, however, it is likely to find its first commercial home in other sectors, such as backhaul and WiFi. So Kumu’s first trials were in fixed wireless/backhaul, and the RF chip it has released this month for customer evaluation seems to be targeted primarily at WiFi, and particularly at the new spectrum allocations, in the 6…

The webscale businesses have, in recent years, become increasingly engaged in developing their own hardware – first their own Intel-based server designs to drive down their costs, as in Facebook’s Open Compute Project; then starting to experiment with their own processors to underpin those servers. The threat of some of these processors being ARM-based rather than x86-based has hung over Intel, which dominates the data center chip space, but which is heavily reliant on the cloud giants to keep that business growing. Google was said to have been in trials with Qualcomm for a customized ARM-based server processor – though the apparent relegation of that project to Qualcomm’s back burner suggests Google did not decide to proceed. Now, Amazon AWS…

The trends outlined in the preceding articles have seen the webscale companies moving further into investing in their own connectivity to form their global networks. Last year, AWS launched PrivateLink, which enables software-as-a-service developers to provide private cloud connections and endpoints. In the same year, Google launched connectivity between enterprise private clouds and its own cloud, allowing customers to choose between telco connectivity or that of Google’s own global infrastructure. Investment in physical connectivity – moving beyond the software-defined networking (SDN) which cloud giants pioneered – has risen. Google and Amazon have both been part of undersea cable deployments – AWS is putting money into several current projects, including a cable between Australia and the USA, one between Japan and…

­ // M&A, Strategies, Alliances // BlackBerry has acquired Cylance for $1.4bn, an AI and ML specialist that BlackBerry will put to work in its device security and services offerings. Nuance Communications is spinning off its Automotive segment, planning to float Nuance Auto as a pure-play firm, used in 50mn new cars annually with $279mn annual revenues. There are lots of regulations to clear, first. Lowe’s is looking to offload its Iris smart home device family. Aviva has acquired Neos, a small insurance company that has made a name for itself by bundling smart home devices in with its insurance offerings. Apple has acquired Silk Labs, a smart home startup that was developing AI-augmented smart home devices, which will likely…

The place that edge compute will play in the telco’s network, and its business model, is a topic we have been tracking with interest this year. While there is a strong logic to convergence of compute, storage and connectivity – all in locations close to the user to improve service response times – it is not clear that operators will always take the leading role in deploying and monetizing edge networks. Many industrial and IoT applications will rely on edge locations that go far beyond the sites and central offices in a telecoms grid, and as some of those sectors look for edge cloud resources on a global scale, the real power may lie with organizations that can aggregate physical…

The Linux Foundation’s Deep Learning Foundation – an umbrella group for several projects in this area – has announced Athena, the first release from the Acumos AI initiative, which is based on code originally submitted by AT&T. The US operator kicked off the program with a view to lowering the barriers to entry to AI, which it intends to use aggressively in its own operations, including planning and optimizing its networks. AT&T has donated code in order to kickstart several open source projects, and as these start to release their first software one by one, it is becoming easier to join the dots between them and discern a broad, telecoms software platform being driven heavily by this one operator. For…

The inevitable consequence of being over-hasty to evaluate autonomous cars under more testing conditions is that accidents occur and confidence in their safety declines. So, if autonomous driving is actually safer even with today’s technology that is hard to prove until far more miles have been accumulated under varying conditions. What is beyond doubt though, after a spate of surveys both in Europe and the US, is that public perception of safety has plummeted. That as well as the accidents themselves has caused some major players to decelerate their trials and deployments, with General Motors postponing testing of autonomous vehicles in New York City, after Mayor Bill de Blasio expressed concerns over safety at this stage. The latest survey, conducted…