11561 search results for Open RAN

Security services provider Radware has warned that the Mirai-offshoot Satori has reemerged, using a new worm-syle propogation method to spread its malicious payload. Although small, compared to the potential amount of botnet devices that could be used simultaneously, it’s another example of a problem that seems to be going nowhere. And with such an infectious web landscape, it becomes very worrying that a company like INSINIA can demonstrate an attack on an industrial manufacturing system that can cripple it with just four lines of code. Presented at the BSides London conference, researchers from INSINIA claimed that their attack would have cost the target around £1.6m, using a device planted inside the factory to identify local networks, which then provided ways…

IBM’s Project Debater should be congratulated on its success – matching two seasoned humans in debate. But on closer inspection, and contrary to media euphoria, it shows how much further AI-based natural language has to go before it really can match people, at least at the highest level. In some ways it flattered AI by coming out with what superficially sounded like compelling arguments, but were more like reasonable efforts in a school debating society. It represented significant progress but also reminded us of challenges like approaching absolute zero or reaching the speed of light – where it is those last few degrees or meters per second that are hardest to achieve. It is not fair to call media reaction…

Adoption of the newly released multi-AP EasyMesh standard will be a key theme in the WiFi industry in 2018 and beyond. A significant step was made this week as US equipment powerhouse Arris announced support for the specs, developed by the WiFi Alliance to encourage interoperability between multi-access point hardware and software from different vendors. Arris will submit products from its HomeAssure whole-home WiFi portfolio to gain the Alliance’s WiFi Certified EasyMesh badge. However, EasyMesh is considered to be a few years behind proprietary mesh architectures from the likes of AirTies and Comcast, whose technologies cannot interoperate, giving customers that age-old choice between openness and the best performance. If the standard gains momentum, it would be likely to be adopted…

One of the newest initiatives within ETSI, the Zero-touch network and Service Management Group (ZSM), has unveiled its first proof of concept (PoC), focused on 5G network slicing. The PoC is called ServoCloud, and is the first step towards its goal of delivering a full reference architecture for automating network operations in a lightweight environment, in order to support dynamic services including slicing. The service provider champions for ServoCloud are Deutsche Telekom, which contributed much of the initial code for ZSM and chairs the group, plus Sprint and Amazon Web Services (AWS). The latter is hosting the NFV infrastructure, but is also interesting in other ways, given its intensifying efforts to define a major role for itself in 5G, whether…

The move to 5G will open up opportunities for Cisco to increase its position in the mobile operator market, an important development given that the company’s service provider revenues have remained challenged in recent quarters, despite the recovery of its enterprise businesses. So 5G was an unusual, but significant, theme of this year’s Cisco Live event in Orlando, Florida, with CEO Chuck promising a “5G innovation” that will be launched later this year, in time for the first wave of deployments from 2019. The radio access network will remain the largest portion of the mobile operator’s capex spend in 5G, but spending on base stations and antennas will fall, and traditional suppliers will have to share the spoils with other…

The GSMA exists to promote the interests of mobile operators, so it is bound to have a particular angle on one of the biggest potential changes in the 5G era, the changing patterns of network deployment and ownership. But in recent pronouncements on topics from network slicing to wholesale mobile platforms, it has been in danger of having its head in the sand, trying to preserve an MNO landscape which is bound to change if the economics of providing mobile services are to stand up. There are threats to its members from new operators, shared spectrum and programmable, federated networks, of course. But it needs to coordinate their efforts to adapt to that change, not just resist it happening at…

No sooner than 3GPP had announced the completion of its Release 15 standards for 5G, than some operators and vendors were starting to look ahead to Release 16, which should be finalized in late 2019. This is not only a marketing ploy – it reflects the fact that, as in previous mobile generations, the first release does not address all the operators’ requirements. Indeed, many of the most potentially powerful weapons that 5G will put in the hands of service providers, such as dynamic spectrum support, dense device-to-device communications, and extreme reliability, will have to wait for Release 16 or even beyond. This does not take away from the achievement of getting Release 15 largely completed on time. Of course,…

Preferred Networks stands out among Japan’s mostly mediocre start-ups through its partnerships and ability to attract people with vision and ambition. Most of the country’s brightest graduates in science and technology subjects tend not to be entrepreneurial, and are more likely to take safer big corporate jobs than participate in new businesses. But in recent years, many of Japan’s formerly world-leading big corporates have been flagging, and this gave Preferred Networks the spark it needed to get off the ground in 2011. The firm was started by two young graduates, Toru Nishikawa and Daisuke Okanohara, who had already shown rare ability at writing software for image analysis. Their idea was to develop deep learning for robotics and the IoT, which…

The motor insurance industry is warning that vehicles should not be marketed as autonomous until they are capable of completely taking over under almost all conditions. This opens a new chapter in the saga for insurance companies, which until now have cautiously welcomed autonomous driving with concerns largely confined to disruption of their traditional model and how policies should evolve to reflect changing liabilities. The paper has come from the Association of British Insurers (ABI) arguing that some advanced vehicles are marketed misleadingly as self-driving, when at this stage they only offer partial autonomy. For that reason the association is urging auto manufacturers to drop terms such as “autopilot”, “propilot” and “autonomous” itself from marketing literature and promotion, because they…