11561 search results for Open RAN

The UK government has set out a package of measures to accelerate nationwide build-out of fiber and 5G, with the aim of bringing gigabit fiber-to-the-home to a majority of households, while also providing the backhaul grid for 5G. However, there are risks in this plan, and the UK would do well to learn lessons from the disasters of the government-run national broadband network (nbn) project in Australia. The Future Telecoms Infrastructure Review was published late last month by the UK government, as part of the wider Industrial Strategy. The UK is well behind several European counterparts in terms of fiber broadband, which currently reaches only 4% of homes (compared to 71% in Spain, 89% in Portugal and 28% in France). The…

The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) is becoming a powerhouse in the mobile world, as operators look to combine 5G with open, virtualized network platforms and investment in cloud and edge compute resources. The ONF published a new strategic plan in March, and is now following up in the key areas, for telcos, of the edge cloud and 5G. The organization’s chair, Andre Fuetsch – who is also AT&T’s CTO and president of AT&T Labs – outlined several projects in these areas, in a newsletter to members. Most significantly, he referred to the idea of the ONF becoming an open source arm for the recently formed ORAN (Open RAN) Alliance, which is being formed from a merger of the xRAN Forum…

As happens so often nowadays, Nokia and Ericsson could only watch in envy as Huawei posted yet another strong set of results. Ericsson’s quarter had shown some small shoots of recovery, while Nokia’s was lacklustre. By contrast, their Chinese rival – despite being subject to mounting suspicions and trade tensions with the US and other countries – turned in 15% year-on-year revenue growth for the first six months of 2018. That took total sales to RMB325.7bn ($47.7bn), and the growth rate was the same as for the first half of 2017, even though Huawei is virtually excluded from the US equipment market and has been finding barriers raised against it in Australia and some other markets too. It also saw…

Nokia may have won a landmark 5G RAN contract with T-Mobile USA, but it is still battling for its share of the US 5G market, which is set to provide the largest number of dollars in the first year of the new technology going commercial. CEO Rajeev Suri admitted Nokia had lost some Verizon 5G markets as the US telco extends its program of trials and plans to launch its first fully commercial fixed wireless access (FWA) later this year. Suri insisted only a “small number” of Verizon locations had been lost, after Ericsson boasted of winning additional markets, while Samsung announced that it would provide the equipment for Verizon’s launch in Houston, Texas. All three vendors have been providing…

Nokia’s announcement of a $3.5bn 5G network deal with T-Mobile USA will be music even to the ears of its competitors, because it reinforces the notion that at-scale 5G RAN spending will start at an earlier stage than was earlier assumed. It is certainly true that some operators are bringing forward deployments of initial 5G New Radio Non-Standalone (NR NSA) networks, under shareholder and regulatory pressure to act quickly on 5G, and to seize any first mover advantage that may be possible. However, Rethink Research’s most recent operator survey, which questioned senior executives from over 70 Top 200 MNOs, indicated that, as usual at the start of a new generation, the headlines are dominated by a few fast movers, and…

Many car drivers are surprised if they discover how much data their vehicles already collect about them, and increasingly determines actions such as braking, acceleration and also gear changing, if they have automatic transmission. This is only going to increase, for even if it is years or even decades before full autonomy becomes widespread, the technology will march forward at a faster and more predictable rate so that vehicles will be ready to roll as and when regulations allow. Features of autonomy will infiltrate both driving and navigation in any case, testing the boundaries between privacy, safety, performance and insurance. Rather different issues and priorities arise according to the vehicle and journey type. Owners of fleets for example will be…

AI’s glowing reputation has been tarnished a little this past week, with two major players managing to draw ire for falling short of the mark. IBM got flak for dodgy cancer diagnoses, while Amazon’s Rekognition system reckoned 28 members if the US Congress were criminals, based on their faces, after a trial carried out by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Amazon’s failure here, part of the ACLU’s attempt to flag the problem of using such facial recognition systems in law enforcement, flustered five of those congress people to demand an immediate briefing with CEO Bezos. However, because we can’t see the data set, there’s a definite chance here for them to get egg on their face, if it transpires…

Sierra Wireless has launched a new LTE router for IoT applications, the AirLink LX40. Ahead of its launch, we spoke to Chief Engineer Ashish Syal, about the designer and manufacturer’s IoT strategy. Broadly, we were interested in how Sierra Wireless views mangOH, its open source hardware development platform that Riot covered recently. Syal explained that mangOH’s focus on industrial grade hardware was key, better suited for Sierra Wireless’ typical customers than the likes of the Arduino and Raspberry Pi platforms. Growing the partner ecosystem has been a main focus, as well as boosting community participation on the forums, with Syal noting that the ecosystem is what often needs the most investment. According to Syal, mangOH is progressing well. He points…

// M&A, Strategies, Alliances // Ituran is acquiring Road Track for $91.7m, with Ituran looking to expand its automotive location services via Road Track’s OEM telematics business, focused on Latin America. Qualcomm has abandoned its $44bn acquisition of NXP, after failing to gain regulatory approval in China. There’s a $2bn exit fee, and QCOM is now buying back $30bn shares. ARM is planning to buy Treasure Data for $600m, according to Bloomberg, a data analytics firm. ARM had sent out invites to an announcement in this area – cat seems out of bag. // Networks, Protocols, & Wireless // Facebook is planning on launching an internet satellite, according to FCC emails obtained by Wired – proof that it still wants…

One by one, the big names in the 5G and IoT worlds are backing away from cloud hosting, and therefore from any shot at an end-to-end offering for distributed or industrial cloud services. AT&T and Verizon, for instance, gave up on the idea of competing with AWS and Azure and have been forming strategic partnerships with them instead – which may not stop the cloud giants from reaching further and further down into their world of connectivity (via shared spectrum) and networks-on-demand. Now the same is seen in the Industrial IoT, where the giant of this space, GE, has shifted its Predix platform away from being a GE-hosted PaaS (platform-as-a-service) to one that can be spun up in private clouds,…

Vodafone has launched its V-Home smart home-as-a-service (SHaaS) offering in the UK and Italy, following a launch in Spain in May and Germany in June. The MNO is the latest entrant into this nascent market, but will have to battle against the consumer offerings from the likes of Google and Amazon – the latter just sold a million smart home devices during its Prime Day promotion. For service providers – mostly TV providers, fixed-line ISPs, and MNOs – an SHaaS offering can massively increase customer retention, preventing them from churning away to the competition. The service is also a way to address what looks like clear, if not massive, consumer demand for these systems, and the operators are well-placed here…

Until now the role of wireless in motion detection has been confined to communicating the information, but now it is ready to become the sensing medium as well. There are a few emerging consumer systems available, but the most significant development so far has come from Quantenna, which has incorporated wireless motion sensing in its WiFi chips. This has a similar range of applications to conventional visual detection systems such as security cameras, but with some clear advantages. Among these are avoiding need for new hardware, because motion detection can be added as a software upgrade to wireless routers and repeaters already present in many homes and businesses. It also does not rely on line of sight so provides ubiquitous…

Lower power wide area network (LPWAN) provider Actility has announced a deal with Here, the automotive-focused mapping platform that has major IoT ambitions. This will see Actility use Here’s Open Location Platform (OLP) to augment location services, which it offers as part of its ThingPark network platform. Fellow LPWAN provider Sigfox is also a Here customer, as of June, and the two deals indicate Here has an opportunity to become a default platform for location-aware services on these wide area machine-to-machine networks, which target sectors like smart cities and public utilities. This is a nice win for Here, which should also help flesh out the OLP. Currently, cars using Here’s mapping systems are the main source of data to refresh…

Western Europe’s operators are on a regulatory seesaw. Will the European Union members’ regulators become more open to consolidation, as the MNOs face saturated markets and falling ARPUs? Or will they insist on additional players as they allocate 5G spectrum? The EU, and many member state authorities, have been hostile to any mergers that reduce the number of MNOs in a single country (usually from four to three). Some have been allowed, with significant concessions required (usually mandatory access to networks for a new MVNO, with the idea that a strong MVNO should, in effect, be an additional choice for consumers). This happened in Germany, Ireland and Italy, but similar deals were blocked in the UK and Denmark. Now, the…

The latest project within the IEEE 802.11 standards effort (the basis for WiFi) could challenge 5G’s projected latency, throughput and coverage targets, even in unlicensed spectrum. However, the EHT (extreme high throughput) goal of delivering these capabilities to affordable equipment would depend on 6 GHz being freed up for unlicensed usage in most of the world – and it will only be ratified in 2023. EHT shows how the 3GPP and IEEE are pursuing similar goals, even if they seem as unprepared as ever to converge their work. A couple of years ago, there were real hopes that there might be meaningful cooperation between the main standards bodies active in wireless connectivity – 3GPP and IEEE 802 – to achieve…