11559 search results for Open RAN

The Facebook-driven Telecom Infra Project (TIP) held its third annual Summit this week, for the first time outside Silicon Valley. In a well-attended and lively gathering in London, the TIP community made several announcements of significance for those who seek to disaggregate the telecoms network, and therefore disrupt the established order of suppliers and drive down cost. There were new working groups, including one focused on edge compute; a rapprochement with the Linux Foundation’s Open RAN (ORAN) Alliance; and recognition of the vendors which had best responded to the first TIP-based RFIs (requests for information), issued earlier this year by the OpenRAN Project Group. The proceedings were heavily focused on the wireless network, and especially on the looming prospect of…

// M&A, Strategies, Alliances // Smartfrog has acquired a controlling interest in Canary, investing $25mn into the smart home security product company, looking to tackle a warming market. // Laws, Regulation, and Lawsuits // The UK government has published a Code of Practice for Consumer IoT Security, aiming to ‘support all parties involved in the development, manufacturing, and retail of consumer IoT with a set of guidelines.’ // Forecasts, Surveys. Reports, & Blue-Sky Thinking // The World Energy Council (WEC) and PwC have released the ‘Blockchain in Energy’ report, canvassing 39 companies about the technology’s potential. // Hardware // STMicroelectronics has announced its new STM32L5 microcontrollers, building on ARM’s TrustZone hardware-based security, running a Cortex-M33 core. // Networks, Protocols, &…

Intel has unveiled its new Vision Accelerator Design Products, a new suite of accelerator cards with two distinct flavors; one based on Intel’s Movidius vision processors, and the other on the Arria 10 FPGA. Both of these are technologies that Intel acquired, from Movidius and Altera respectively, as it tries to remain on top in a turbulent semiconductor market – one that has now been rocked by Huawei unveiling two of its own AI processors. On the one hand, Intel has been trying to spend its way out of difficulties it might face in its core data center market. Buying Altera was a way to ensure its continued strength in networking cards, and its other huge acquisition, Mobileye, was a…

ARM’s Pelion PaaS has signed new ecosystem partners, as ARM tries to extend up the stack from its chip designs to a fully-fledged platform offering. To this end, Intel’s support is quite notable, but the addition of Arduino and myDevices is a sign of developer buy-in too. ARM is looking to build on a recent win with MNO Sprint, which is using Pelion as the basis of its Curiosity IoT service, and just to spice things up a little more, ARM has also launched Mbed Linux OS too. Some have been too quick to liken this to a coming-together of rivals, but nowadays, Intel has effectively conceded defeat in the low-power IoT silicon world. And while Intel threw in the…

The UK government has finalized its IoT code of conduct, but has not outlined anything in the way of repercussions for non-compliance. As such, the document is pretty toothless, but is a useful guide for people who are entirely unfamiliar with the issues at stake. Attempting to get ahead of the curve, and have device makers ship secure devices, approaches like these require some form of penalty for those that ignore them. The twenty-four page document, available here, comes from the UK’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS), and is titled ‘Code of Practice for Consumer IoT Security.’ However, even if teeth are introduced, it seems highly likely that the big-name brands will comply, while their overseas bargain-basement…

The past couple of months have not been kind to the stock markets, and certain areas inside the Riot 50 performance tracker have been hit harder than most. To date, since we started tracking it, our index of some of the most influential companies involved in the IoT has lost 10.28% of its value on the stock market, when measuring the beginning and end period values. In raw dollar amount, as we would measure an index like the FTSE 100, it is only down 4.12%. To date, the four indexes that we use for reference are down 1.74% since May, whereas the Riot 50 is down 10.28% or 4.12%, depending which measure is more useful to you. Opening at $6,314…

// M&A, Strategies, Alliances // Trimble has acquired Veltec, a Brazilian fleet management provider with 900 customers that Trimble will be rolling into its Transportation Segment. Apple is acquiring part of Dialog Semiconductor for $600mn, bringing the power management circuitry in-house. Some 300 staff are joining Apple, with half the amount paid in cash up-front and the other half for a three-year supply deal. Wejo is buying Carjojo, expanding on its automotive vehicular data trading service, looking to sell telematics data into insurance firms. // Networks, Protocols, & Wireless // Advantech has expanded its LoRa portfolio, with the WISE-6610 gateway and the Wzzard LRPv2 LoRa node, which can be used for private sensor networks. Pycom has made a pretty big…

There are many tensions between the cellular and satellite industries when it comes to 5G spectrum, especially when MNOs eye frequencies in the C-Band which are currently occupied by satellite. However, there are also many opportunities to work together, and advances in satellite technology are raising its value as an integral part of universal, next generation connectivity. Cheaper, more powerful satellites with lower latency and more commoditized ground equipment and devices – these can be the key to truly universal coverage. At last week’s IP Expo event in London, senior NASA astronaut, Chris Hadfield, laid out the vision of global wireless. “If you can own the transportation market to the rest of the universe, the opportunities are huge,” he said.…

The Wi-SUN Alliance has launched its Field Area Network (FAN) certification program. Starting a little later than planned, the program aims to certify products according to the alliance’s low power mesh networking standard. The target is still utilities, but the alliance is hoping to expand into smart cities too. Wi-SUN has already proven popular among utilities, using it to connect both smart meters and grid infrastructure. Now, there is a formal certification for compliance, which should improve the device and product ecosystem. According to the group, the first approved products will appear in Q4. The alliance argues that proprietary systems are no longer sufficiently flexible or cost effective, compared to open standards like Wi-SUN – itself mostly based on IEEE…

With $47.5mn raised since its foundation in 2014, FogHorn is one of the better endowed start-ups specializing in the rapidly growing field of industrial edge computing. It takes its name from fog computing, a term coined by Cisco to describe processing in a layer between the enterprise or consumer and the cloud – and now the basis of the dominant emerging edge compute standard, OpenFog. This area attracted a new breed of start-up, but mostly still with an emphasis on bringing data into the cloud where possible so that enough affordable resources could be brought to bear upon it. This led FogHorn’s co-founder and CEO David King to decry such technologies as being little more than glorified store-and-forward mechanisms. Although…

The white spaces in the TV spectrum were once the focal point for the IT industry’s push for more open access to airwaves, to reduce the cost of extending internet access t to the whole world. The hype around them died down, when many regulators failed to follow the US and UK into opening up the spectrum, and when some applications were compromised by the relatively low capacity, and inconsistent availability, of the spaces. However, some of the work on TVWS (TV white spaces) – especially on spectrum databases to assign access to vacant channels and prevent interference to incumbents – has been very influential on other shared spectrum schemes such as the USA’s proposed CBRS multi-tiered system in 3.5…

Re-programmable chips are becoming increasingly important in the mobile world. The main variety, FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays), can greatly accelerate the performance of the kind of heavy duty processes which will be central to 5G services, from advanced beamforming to artificial intelligence (AI). Their flexibility also allows them to be adapted to changes in standards or network processes. Just as the FPGA is taking center stage in the mobile market, Xilinx – the largest independent provider of these chips since rival Altera was acquired by Intel – says it is no longer an FPGA company. At its recent developers’ conference, CEO Victor Peng proclaimed:  “Xilinx is not an FPGA company; Xilinx is a platform company.” With its new Versal…

The early 5G-focused spectrum auctions are important to provide indicators about the likely pricing of the airwaves, which will help MNOs firm up their business cases. As usual at the start of any auction in Europe, since the massively inflated prices of many 3G sales in the region two decades ago, there have been protestations that history would not repeat itself this time. Governments claim they are more interested in accelerating 5G deployment than lining their pockets; MNOs claim they will refuse to bid if fees go too high. But the result of the recent 3.5 GHz auction in Italy shows how, once the process starts, such claims often disappear out of the window. In the past, midband, mainly unpaired…

Of Facebook’s two major open hardware initiatives, the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) has gained most attention in the mobile industry because it is specific to telco networks. However, its older stablemate, the Open Compute Project (OCP), is also important to operators, as their cloud and network platforms converge, both in equipment and services terms. AT&T, the most aggressive of all the carriers about introducing open source norms to the closed telco supply chain, is putting an operator slant on the OCP’s work, by submitting its own specification for white box cell site gateway routers to the project. Both OCP and TIP aim to establish open, unified specifications for commoditized white box hardware, which will support cost-effective deployment and massive scalability…

One of the many myths about 5G is that it is a mobile network only.  Unlike its predecessors, 5G is reliant on deep integration with high speed wireline connectivity – not just for backhaul, but for fronthaul to enable the new virtualized RAN (vRAN) architecture, and to support access network convergence. The latter will, in turn, support a range of new business models. Some operators are looking to deliver fixed broadband over a combination of fiber and 5G links – with wireless extending the network to rural areas or deep inside buildings. Others envisage  quad play bundles that go deeper than just a shared bill, and allow seamless movement between different types of connectivity according to the use case’s requirements.…