11560 search results for Open RAN

Huawei and China Mobile have announced the expansion of the Connectivity Enablement Platform (CEP), opening it up to other MNOs after a year-long development and deployment cycle. China Mobile, the largest MNO in the world, claims that the CEP has over 300mn IoT connections, up 100mn in the past year, with 50,000 enterprise IoT customers. That’s quite the benchmark, and a big win for Huawei – whose OceanConnect portfolio is powering the CEP. Strangely, the CEP is sometimes called the CM IoT Platform, so watch out for that, but China Mobile says it has consolidated 31 provincial systems into the CEP. Huawei says this has reduced time-to-market by 5-7%, as well as providing savings for enterprise users from only having…

// M&A, Strategies, Alliances // Hartford Steam Boiler has acquired relayr, for $300m cash. The deal sees HSB, an equipment breakdown insurance provider (owned by Munich Re), pick up a software company that had found a niche in IIoT hardware-agnostic data flows. NXP has acquired OmniPHY, a company working on using 1000BASE-T1 Ethernet in automotive applications, with NXP eyeing it for autonomous vehicles. GigSky has acquired Simless, a specialist in eSIM subscription management, looking to incorporate the platform into GigSky’s own PaaS for cellular devices. Sierra Wireless might be buying Telit, according to “City sources” speaking to the Mail on Sunday – a move that would create a £1bn company. // Software // The IEEE has published 2050-2018, a standard…

Facebook is one of the most active companies in trying to connect “the next billion” to the Internet, and so open up new markets for its services and advertisers. Increasingly, those new connections will be wireless, and so WiFi and cellular expansion are both critical to the company’s ambitions. Its latest move to make it easier to connect to the Internet is a new partnership program called Express WiFi Certified, which allows WiFi access point vendors to build hardware compatible with Express WiFi. The initial certified partners are Arista, Cambium Networks and Ruckus Networks. The initiative has strong resemblances to the WiFi Alliance’s WiFi Certified branding, but is specific to Facebook. This is the latest attempt by a major company…

The industrial IoT (IIoT) has already proved a graveyard for some start-ups, unable to find a clear focus amid all the competing platforms, devices, standards and formats. Litmus Automation, founded in August 2013 in the San Francisco bay area, appears to have cleared the major first hurdles by finding relevant partners that can help open up the market, as well as some prestigious customers. It has done this by focusing on the unglamorous area of support for legacy devices and protocols, describing itself as a brownfield specialist aiming to help factories and plants manage and collect data from legacy equipment. The firm’s co-founder and COO, John Younes, likened this to having a universal remote that a manufacturer or process control…

Despite opposition from some state and city governments, the FCC remains determined to ease the deployment of dense networks with reforms to siting regulations for small cells. This, the US regulator believes, will be essential to accelerate the 5G roll-out process and support a wide range of new services, especially in cities. Commissioner Brendan Carr last week announced the second set of guidelines which he has spearheaded in this area, following his first success six months ago. That first effort established the principle that small cells should not be treated in the same way as macrocells, and excluded small cells from many restrictions on historic building or environmental grounds. The new set of proposed rules govern other aspects of local…

Poor Juniper has so often been a wallflower in the telecoms industry, despite some strong technology assets. In recent years, it has been linked to acquisition talks with both Ericsson and Nokia, but in both cases was passed over for larger partnerships (Cisco and Alcatel-Lucent respectively). Those deals reduced the value of its existing alliances with the big RAN vendors, particularly its ability to strengthen their end-to-end offerings with its traditional and SDN-driven transport offerings. Now Juniper is back in the limelight, forging a new 5G-oriented deal with Ericsson which could, some speculate, be the prelude to a merger. Ericsson’s ambitious partnership with Cisco seems to be virtually dormant, and is rarely mentioned by executives any more, even though it…

Sprint has teamed up with Ericsson to develop a virtualised core network and operating system to support its IoT services. This is one of the most ambitious elements so far in the MNO’s strategy to move to a virtualized, white box network, to transform its costs and provide agile support for a wide variety of services. The core, which will launch along with 5G from 2019, is specifically optimized for IoT applications which require very low latency and/or critical availability, as well as high security. It ticks many of the hot boxes for the expansion of operators’ revenue streams via low latency 5G/IoT, such as edge compute, artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. It remains to be seen how Sprint leverages…

Telcos and governments round the world are taking a long hard look at the economics of the impending 5G roll-outs, and in many cases, looking for ways to soften the capex blow and so accelerate availability of new services. There are two main schools of thinking – open the market up to share the cost burden with new entrants or new telco partners; or lower the barriers to consolidation, so that the existing MNOs can maximize their economies of scale and not face what Korea has called “excessive competition” in 5G. There are contrasting approaches. The European Union and its member governments are generally slow to push either approach, keeping the barriers both to new entrants, and to telco M&A,…

The Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF) has released v2.0 of its OCF Specification, the device interoperability standard that it hopes will bring unity to the smart home. With some major device vendors promising devices using the standard next year, this could be the push that is needed to get the ball rolling. Or, conversely, the market might carry on with the same apparent apathy that has gripped it for the past four years. Electrolux, Haier, LG, and Samsung are promising to use IoTivity (the open source part that is based on the OCF Specs) in 2019 products, and given their collective weight in domestic and white goods appliance markets globally, this could be a big step forward. There has always been…

The latest threat for sysadmins to worry about is Hakai, carrying on a naming convention that Mirai, Hajime, and Satori seem to have cemented. Translating to ‘destruction’ in Japanese, there has been a sharp spike in Hakai activity in the past two weeks, first spotted by NewSky Security back in June. But for as long as companies are going to be so lax with their security policies, these botnets are going to be a fact of life. Riot has outlined the problem before, which is going to be especially prevalent as smart home devices are commoditized, as the device makers will view security costs as an expense that can be cut, in order to slash the bill of materials as…

Sprint has teamed up with Ericsson to develop a virtualised core network and operating system to support its IoT services. This is one of the most ambitious elements so far in the MNO’s strategy to move to a virtualized, white box network, to transform its costs and provide agile support for a wide variety of services. The core, which will launch along with 5G from 2019, is specifically optimized for IoT applications which require very low latency and/or critical availability, as well as high security. It ticks many of the hot boxes for the expansion of operators’ revenue streams via low latency 5G/IoT, such as edge compute, artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. It remains to be seen how Sprint leverages…