11561 search results for Open RAN

One of the interesting facets of the 5G era is the way major mobile operators are seeking to wrest control back from the incumbent vendors. It is reminiscent of an earlier age of telecoms, when operators like AT&T and the European and Japanese incumbents designed their own technology, right down to telephones. As the industry developed, most MNOs discarded significant homegrown development of networks and devices (with a few exceptions like NTT Docomo). Some still invested heavily in R&D in order to help shape the future of their services – the UK’s BT is a good example – but at the commercial stage, they turned to their vendors to deliver the equipment. As the vendors have consolidated, operators have increasingly…

The Streaming Video Alliance (SVA) took its time to gain momentum since its foundation in November 2014, but has been boosted by Google’s recent joining and now numbers many big players among its members including AWS, Cisco, Comcast, Intel, Liberty Global, NBCUniversal, Nokia and Verizon. But it has still to land the other great tech players Apple, Netflix and Microsoft, as well as content delivery network (CDN) leader Akamai, and is currently courting some of these along with content firms CBS Interactive, Sony’s PlayStation Vue, Hulu and HBO, among others. Given that many of these are central to its mission, it cannot be said to be a fully representative body of the streaming industry, until at least some of these…

AI techniques have been applied to some degree in retailing for over a decade, but mostly for enhanced recommendations based on preferences, and in various trials designed to exploit emotion during selling. ViSenze, founded in 2012 and based in Singapore with $14 million funding so far, was one of the first start-ups to spot an opportunity applying AI based visual processing to product recommendation. Its technology now supports not just recognition of products but also object-based processing within the image, to develop associations with customers’ personal preferences. It can now combine this with metadata and keywords, so it is no longer confined just to image processing. The firm’s opening strategy was led by the observation that ecommerce was starting to…

President Trump has pulled back from his ban on ZTE buying components from US companies, and is considering alternative penalties for the Chinese firm’s alleged infringement of US rules on exports to Iran. This is all part of a broader set of talks with China over trade relations, which have been worsening in recent months, but some Congress members from both parties have hit back at Trump’s softer stance. On Tuesday, the White House announced $50bn of tariffs on goods imported from China “to protect domestic technology and intellectual property from certain discriminatory and burdensome trade practices by China”. It announced that “the United States will impose a 25% tariff on $50bn of goods imported from China containing industrially significant technology,…

Over the course of two days, the talks and presentations at last week’s LPWA (low power wide area) conference in London revealed a heap of interesting tidbits. However, the industry is still waiting on the sort of scale that would irrevocably prove that the era of LPWAN has arrived. We’re still waiting for a hockey stick, but slow and steady may still win the race. The tipping point is at least closer now, partly boosted by the commercial availability of cellular solutions, NB-IoT and LTE-M, to join the unlicensed spectrum options such as LoRa and Sigfox. Verizon is planning on launching NB-IoT by the end of the year, and pointed to its Skyward drone division as a promising endeavor – with a…

One of the factors which will enable 5G to fulfil its full commercial potential will be support for a variety of unlicensed, shared and dynamic spectrum in addition to traditional exclusive licences. However, these spectrum options will not be available in a standards-based way until Release 16 or later, plus much will rely on the outcomes of next year’s World Radio Conference in terms of global or regional harmonization. That risks limiting the 5G impact in the first years, especially for would-be operators which do not have their own spectrum. It could keep the barriers to private or vertical network operators or ‘thick MVNOs’ high for a few years, which we believe will restrict 5G impact on many enterprise and…

A new healthcare technology alliance has been formed this week, OpenMedReady, potentially a sign of the opportunity for its founders – ARM, ForgeRock, Philips, Qualcomm Life, Sparsa, and US TrustedCare. However, IBM is struggling in this department, and has reportedly begun laying off between 50-70% of the workforce it picked up through a number of health-focused acquisitions. OpenMedReady is essentially a framework that aims to bring together some existing standards and approaches, in order to provide remote patient monitoring. The five areas it addresses are: patient monitoring, patient identity, patient privacy, device identity, data integrity, and consent. Hospitals are extremely interested in remote monitoring, as it allows them to free up in-hospital resources. However, because of the high-risk nature of…

The UK is planning to leverage its NHS to improve its cancer diagnosis procedures, by combining its vast array of data with AI-based technologies to spot early signs of cancer. Combining medical records with population data, the hope is to prevent 20,000 cancer-related deaths annually, by 2023. It’s ambitious, but the UK is well-placed in such projects. Critics will argue that the current government’s economic austerity policies and its budget cuts to the regional NHS trusts are a bigger hindrance than a lack of AI, and that it should look to rectify those aspects before trying something shiny and new. Nevertheless, prime minister Theresa May has called for the NHS, the emerging AI sector, and health charities to collaborate –…

Having first launched its smart home offering in Norway in 2017, Deutsche Telekom has announced a distribution deal with a group of 15 energy companies to bring its Qivicon platform to market – through a new company called Hitch. Over in the US, the other major player in the Smart Home as a Service (SHaaS) game, Comcast, has announced a partnership with a startup called Hippo, to explore using smart home devices to provide data for insurers to use in their pricing – a term known as Usage-based Insurance (UBI). This whole market has been very slow to emerge, despite its clear value to the operators – who can use SHaaS to tie customers into contracts, and enjoy greatly reduced…

The open source community and ETSI may be cooperating closely on edge compute, but they remain divided over standards for management and orchestration (MANO) of virtualized, software-defined networks. The Linux Foundation-hosted ONAP (Open Network Automation Protocol) is gaining ground because of backing from heavyweight operators such as AT&T and China Mobile (which contributed most of the code), plus Orange, Bell Canada and others. This is taking the spotlight away from ETSI’s Open Source MANO (OSM), which is partly based on Telefonica code. At Digital Transformation World, the TM Forum said it would include its open application programming interfaces (APIs) in the forthcoming Beijing release of ONAP, due this summer. That will bring together two major open source initiatives driven by…

The complexity and management challenges of virtualized, cloud-based networks become even higher, and even less understood, when it comes to multi-access edge compute (MEC), or other approaches to integrating computing and storage capacity with connectivity at the edge of the network. This can support greater flexibility for operators to target resources where they are needed, and to support new services which require low latency response, context awareness or caching. Many believe they are naturally well placed, because of their real estate in central offices and cell sites, to provide the grid of locations to enable their own MEC platforms, and to support those of partners such as Amazon AWS. But that will only intensify their NFV/SDN headaches in the short…

Two recent events highlighted the core dilemma for MNOs, as outlined above – open platforms and virtualization are critical for the 5G business case, yet they will not be mature and ready in the same timescales as the new RAN. At TM Forum’s Digital Transformation World in Nice, France, and at the OpenStack Summit in Vancouver, Canada, the same notes of caution and 5G nervousness were struck by operators and suppliers. At the former, Ibrahim Gedeon, CTO of Canada’s Telus, spoke for many operators when he said virtualization was progressing slowly and, as yet, not delivering the hoped-for benefits. That meant telcos were at risk of a “crippling” spike in expected costs, especially as they move into major upgrades such…

We have got accustomed to talking about two types of 5G – fast-track and even pre-standard, as a few operators race to go commercial in 2018 or 2019; and the more mainstream strategy to wait for more mature equipment and a 5G core, and go live between 2020 and 2023. But in fact, there are four distinct stages emerging. One, a combination of premature marketing hype (as in AT&T’s 5G Evolution) with very limited 5G deployment (a small number of 5G radios working with a 4G core, for instance. Four Middle Eastern operators are now claiming ‘world first’ credentials based on this approach (see separate item). Two, a wider scale deployment of 5G New Radio (NR), driven by business case…

// M&A, Strategies, Alliances // CCS has acquired Locatrix, a mobile and location software developer, which CCS plans to use to expand is SaaS offerings. CCS has just fallen out of an acquisition by Veriluma, after CCS failed to raise enough capital. Landis+Gyr is acquiring Acumen, an Australian company managing smart meters that is owned by Pacific Equity Partners. L+G and PEP are forming a joint-venture, intelliHUB Holdings, to do this, gaining 170k smart meters. Worth $203m. Neeco has acquired AirX Technologies, a UK-based provider of internet connectivity for enterprises, which Neeco plans to use to expand its ICT solutions portfolio. // Forecasts, Surveys. Reports, & Blue-Sky Thinking // Navigant Research reports that global utility spending on blockchain technologies will…

Virtual assistants like Alexa, Siri and Cortana have almost fallen victim to their own hype by causing deflated expectations among many of their users. There have been signs of usage declining after an initial flurry as people come to realize that their powers of conversation are very limited, extending little beyond the ability to satisfy a list of basic requests. In some respects, they seem to be little better than rule-based expert systems. This is at odds with the great progress that has been made recently after years of slower advances in natural language processing, the ability to process written text and also spoken words, which is partly why virtual assistants were over -hyped. It was assumed, at least by…

Automotive mapping provider Here, the one owned by Audi, BMW, Daimler, and Intel, has announced a new service called OTA Connect, designed to provide mapping data and software updates to vehicles in a secure and timely fashion. Also announced was an agreement was the launch of the OneMap Alliance, which should help its HD Live Map platform take further hold in the market. Here says it will combine the OTA Connect features into its existing software suite, although it is currently available in a standalone configuration. The system is based on Uptane, a security framework designed by a group US academics and funded by the US Department of Homeland Security. Advanced Telematics Systems (ATS) was one of the first OTA…

Well, it was all a rather nice show – with almost none of the barbed comments and disagreements that have punctuated LPWAN discussions of yore. The lone Sigfox representative, Kevin Maher, wasn’t looking to start fights, nor were any of the LoRa camp going to start singing the success of their ecosystem, given the apparent bumper year that NB-IoT has enjoyed. Wi-SUN took the most shots, but with 89m devices deployed, it’s harder for the upstarts to counter. Were it not for William Webb of the Weightless SIG in the final panel of the show, it would have been far too comfy or pleasant – but he came out swinging, arguing that only open standards have been successful in the…