11561 search results for Open RAN

Tata Communications has partnered with South African IT firm, Dreamtime Technologies (DTTech), to build a cloud-based virtual mobile network to serve mobile and IoT service providers across national borders in Africa. DTTech will also use the cloud-based network to give MNOs the flexibility to introduce new services and extend their geographical reach rapidly, with limited upfront investments. This virtual mobile network will support DTTech customers in sectors such as healthcare, transport, mining, agriculture, banking and retail, said the companies. They will be able to buy mobile network access from MNOs across Africa cost-effectively, on a pay-as-you-go basis. The new infrastructure will use Tata’s MOVE mobility and IoT platform, which will support regional break-out to Internet providers in Africa. That means…

Reeling from a heavy blow in its long-running copyright battle with Oracle, Google has quietly published more details of its Fuchsia operating system. The OS, designed on a non-Linux kernel, could be a long term strategy to help Google shift to a platform without exposure to the same claims of infringement, though while IoT developers might be drawn by its promised performance, to shift all the Google IoT devices from Android to Fuchsia would be an impossible task. Google has been ordered to pay Oracle damages for infringing on the Java API (application programming interface). Oracle reckons this figure should be close to $8.8bn, but a separate case will decide that final amount. The most recent ruling rejected a 2016…

Speculation is mounting that the US government will impose similar sanctions on Huawei to those announced last month on ZTE, as trade tensions with China worsen. The DoJ launched an investigation into whether Huawei violated US sanctions against Iran as early as last fall, as a result of the ZTE affair. The probe has now widened to include the FBI, the Treasury Department’s sanctions unit, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), and the Department of Commerce. This was the issue which originally sparked the current policy towards ZTE. The ZTE case began with a similar probe and resulted in the firm paying fines of $892m last year. However, last month the US government imposed a seven-year ban on sales…

There have been various reports in the Chinese press that Huawei is developing its own mobile operating system, to reduce its reliance on Google and Android. This has been widely reported as a response to the recent escalation of trade tensions between the US and China, though in reality, Huawei has been living with virtual exclusion from the US market for years now – and has been reported to be developing its own smartphone OS since 2012. But perhaps the current tensions will accelerate its efforts, and spur the wider Chinese effort to achieve technological self-sufficiency. The vendor played down the rumors, saying it had no such plans “for the foreseeable future”, but the fact remains that it has been…

At Wireless Watch, we have lamented the UK regulator’s failure to use the recent 3.5 GHz auction to enable a new entrant to the market. Other countries – Ireland already, and many others considering it – have seen the relatively plentiful supply of this midband spectrum as a way to set some aside for an additional operator with a new business model. That is the key however – a new business model, such as the neutral host, business-to-business platform proposed in Ireland by new licence winner Airspan, which would enable new services while not touching the MNOs’ central revenue streams. Introducing a newcomer to compete with the established MNOs in their core consumer retail business is a far riskier prospect,…

Nokia has arguably been the most edge-focused of the major network vendors, throwing heavy support behind ETSI’s MEC (Multi-access Edge Computing), and behind services that would leverage a combination of wireless connectivity and a distributed cloud. Now it has gone a step further and announced its own edge server, a compact addition to its AirFrame cloud infrastructure platform, sporting an open architecture and Nokia’s own new ReefShark chipset. First shown at the recent Zero Touch and Carrier Automation conference in Madrid, this is designed to support ultra-low latency processing, whether to support the links between the edge and the central cloud in a Cloud-RAN, or to enable IoT services for consumers and industries. As such, it fits well with operators’…

Deutsche Telekom (DT) will be hoping that third time’s a charm for its plans to acquire Sprint, as its US arm, T-Mobile USA, agrees to a deal which would value Sprint at about $56bn. Together, the two companies, based on their 2017 results, would generate annual revenues of $73.9bn, have about 30% of mobile customers, and about 50% of spectrum (though divestments would be likely to be imposed). The companies have been engaged in merger talks twice before, but these previously collapsed amid disagreements about valuations, and fears that the transaction would be blocked by antitrust regulators, because it will reduce the number of national MNOs from four to three. This time around, they have managed to agree a deal…

// M&A, Strategies, Alliances // Verizon has reported that its IoT revenues have risen 13%, at double the pace of its other Q1 revenues – which topped out at $31.8bn. Its automotive telematics revenue, part of the IoT wing, hit $234m in the quarter Cyient has acquired AnSem, a Dutch semiconductor specialist spun out of Imec, for around $17m, to boost its analog and mixed signal ASIC offerings. // Forecasts, Surveys. Reports, and Blue-Sky Thinking // There will be 5.4m connected vending machines by 2022, according to Berg Insight, growing from an estimated 2.6m in 2017 at a CAGR of 16.2%. // Hardware // ARM has announced a new set of security and development features for its Mbed Platform, which…

Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks (SSEN) has partnered with Open Utility, a cloud and utility software provider, to help SSEN shift from being a Distribution Network Operator (DNO) to a Distribution System Operator (DSO). Simply put, Open Utility will be providing the platform to help SSEN shift from its one-way network to a system that can accommodate renewables, storage, and other smart grid technologies. The DNO to DSO transition topic has been hot for a few years, but seems to be picking up steam – although the shift itself is going to take until 2030 or so. Key to the shift is the creation of a system, of interconnected components that can provide cost-savings and efficiency improvements. These systems need…

There was a smack of desperation about the call from scientists around Europe to set up a hub to compete with the US and China over AI. It seems that this proposed Ellis Institute, detailed in an open letter, may be motivated by the wrong reasons – to stem an already flowing drain of talent to US firms (primarily), rather than representing a coherent strategy to be a world leader in AI. The European Commission itself was also rather nonplussed, having been setting out its own plans for AI some of which sounded reasonable if confused and inadequate in scale to meet the challenge from east and west. To some extent, in the case of AI, like other fields of…

These are still early days in the evolution of connected car ecosystems, and too soon to judge which ones will dominate when the dust settles, as Android and iOS have done in the mobile sphere. As in that market, the big manufacturers are contenders along with major infrastructure providers such as Google itself building around the Android Auto app. China’s principal provider of search, Baidu, has emerged as a major player with its Apollo platform, which has just been upgraded in its version 2.5 with features designed to stimulate development in the two closely related key fields of safety and security against cyber-attack. Another Chinese giant, Huawei, is also a contender with its OceanConnect platform – developed for the whole…

Automotive startup Gluon was on show at the IoT Tech Expo, looking to spread the gospel of its marketplace service offering that it hopes to use to carve out a slice of the vast market for automotive care and servicing. Using an OBD dongle, Gluon plans on using vehicle data to link cars to businesses looking to service them. Sharing its name with the AWS and Microsoft Gluon library, an open source deep learning interface that the pair hope will allow developers to more easily build machine-learning models, Gluon’s OBD-II device pulls data from the car that can be presented to the user via a smartphone application – offloaded via Bluetooth, WiFi, or cellular in more expensive models. Currently, Gluon…

Reeling from a heavy blow in the courts, Google has quietly published more details on its Fuchsia operating system. The OS, designed on a non-Linux kernel, could be a long-term strategy to help Google avoid IP or copyright claims, and while IoT developers might be drawn in by its promised performance, to shift the entire Android ecosystem from Android to Fuchsia seems like an impossible task. Currently, Google has been ordered to pay Oracle damages, for infringing on that API. Oracle reckons this figure should be close to $8.8bn, but a separate case will decide that final amount. The most recent ruling rejected a 2016 decision that Google’s use of the copyrighted Java API was acceptable under fair use, and…