11561 search results for Open RAN

There are many reasons why the virtualized RAN (vRAN) is emerging more slowly than other elements of the mobile network, and more slowly than many industry watchers were predicting a few years ago. According to a recent survey of 74 mobile operators by Rethink Technology Research, barriers to commercial deployment include uncertainty over how virtual network functions (VNFs) will be priced and managed; recent investment in physical RAN equipment; and lack of confidence in the robustness of the platform. But the biggest obstacles to large-scale vRAN deployment have been vendor hostility, and the fronthaul issue. Both these are being addressed, to some extent, by new specifications from the xRAN Forum (soon to merge with the C-RAN Alliance to form the…

// M&A, Strategies, Alliances // Uber has acquired Jump, a bike-sharing startup based in New York. Tech Crunch says that the company was contemplating a new round or a $100m buyout. The Industrial Internet Consortium has published a new paper on its IoT Security Maturity Model (SMM), designed to define security approaches for applications. Asure has acquired OccupEye, the maker of an employee-tracking sensor, for use in Asure’s business management and operations software offerings. Splunk has acquired Phantom for $350m, a security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) provider that will augment Splunk’s machine data analytics. SleepScore Labs has acquired Sleep.ai, a Dutch company that provides and app and wearable to detect snoring or teeth-grinding, founded in 2014. Siemens has acquired…

The utility sector has been one of the most receptive markets for blockchain-based technologies, with a number of test projects demonstrating its potential value. To date, however, the big boys aren’t diving in – but a wealth of smaller startups are. Energo Labs has announced a new deal with First Gen, in the Philippines, and German battery and solar vendor Sonnen has joined NEMoGrid – a European project for blockchain-powered energy trading. Both announcements are interesting because they are trying to answer the question of how one goes about consuming electricity without involving the utility. This kind of distributed market requires a completely different business model, and would relegate the utilities to being only the supplier of the pipework that…

This is a shortened version of an article that appeared in Wireless Watch, another Rethink publication. To read more, click here. Intel has a frustrating pattern of choosing the right companies to acquire, and then failing to capitalize on their advantages. Now, Wind River, in our view one of its most strategically important purchases of recent years, is joining a line that also includes DEC StrongARM/XScale, TI’s cable modems, Level One, Dialogic and Trillium. Intel is selling off Wind River to investment firm TPG (the same firm which acquired half of Intel’s McAfee unit last year). The company – headed by the unit’s current president Jim Douglas – is already pledging to pursue an aggressive strategy in Internet of Things…

AI and machine-learning (ML) could be held back by lack of skills in building applications and applying the technology effectively if rate of deployment comes anywhere close to matching the rampant hype currently sweeping the field. There have already been reports of skills shortages and a drain of the best developers and data scientists away from academia and smaller emerging AI specialists towards the big players such as Google, Amazon and Facebook, as well as the Chinese, which are investing huge sums in their programs. This threatens to segregate the field into islands of development peddling different technology stacks and combinations of standards – rather than the open innovative model that has stimulated other movements in the IT realm such…

The FCC is considering opening up the 4.9 GHz public safety band for 5G, potentially to support specialized allocations for low latency, critical communications applications such as drone and robot operations in future. This would be a good example of a regulator considering options to enable 5G to fulfil its objectives of supporting a diverse range of enterprise use cases rather than just an increasingly fat and generic mobile broadband pipe (see lead item). However, it would be controversial, given that 4.9 GHz is already allocated for a critical application, safety. However, the FCC considers the band has “fallen short of its potential” in that sector because, according to its filing, out of “nearly 90,000 public safety entities eligible ……

ARM and Nvidia have announced a partnership that will combine Nvidia’s open source Deep Learning Accelerator software and framework (NVDLA) with ARM’s recently announce Project Trillium – to create a chip design that can be used for machine-learning and AI applications at the network edge. Essentially, this is a way for developers to take advantage of Nvidia’s development ecosystem, to more easily create applications for ARM-based chips. Project Trillium, announced in the run up to MWC, continues ARM’s strategy of designing chips that can then be licensed by other companies and manufactured. ARM had said that third-party designs could be integrated under the Trillium umbrella, and the Nvidia NVDLA seems to be the first instance of this. Strangely, Trillium won’t be the…

Massive MIMO antenna arrays, combined with beamforming, will be mainstays of 5G cell sites. The former greatly enhances capacity by allowing up to 1,024 antennas (more, no doubt, in future) to work in parallel; while beamforming enables them to be directed far more precisely, increasing performance and spectral efficiency. Pivotal Commware claims to be taking beamforming a step further with its technology, Holographic Beamforming, and is drumming up OEM and operator support to try to establish industry standards for the advanced approach to “beam management”. As with smart start-ups working on other potential enablers of high 5G performance – like mobile full duplex, for instance – Pivotal knows that, with technology operating at this fundamental radio level, success is reliant…

The UK has become something of a hotbed of activity by alternative fiber providers, aiming to reduce the power of BT’s Openreach wholesale division. CityFibre is one of these companies, and scored a significant boost to its plans last year when it secured Vodafone as a key partner. Vodafone, which has acquired wireline companies in markets like Germany and Spain, in order to move from mobile-only to quad play services, has more limited reach in its home market. It owns C&W Worldwide, but this is mainly focused on the enterprise, so CityFibre could provide an economical way to add fiber-to-the-premise (FttP) access, and small cell backhaul, to its portfolio. CityFibre said it would start work on its latest fibre network,…

Google has openly criticized the FCC’s management of the critical C-band spectrum debate, claiming a third of all FCC-registered C-band satellite dishes are abandoned and calling the US regulator to free up spectrum for a new fixed wireless service. The tech giant has now weighed in with a potential solution which would apparently satisfy satellite, mobile and fixed wireless players – while simultaneously bashing the recent, similar plan from SES and Intelsat. By opening up a 100 MHz slice of spectrum at 3.7-3.8 GHz for mobile 5G in densely populated urban areas, Google claims this may enable some level of global harmonization – in a “win-win-win” situation. In a proposal submitted last week in collaboration with the BAC (Broadband Access…

It gets harder and harder for the big smartphone vendors to come up with an eye-catching new feature every year, and Apple is no exception to the rule, having been dogged for some years by accusations that it has lost its innovative touch. The iPhone X created a splash, but the firm will have to plan for more dramatic changes in future, if it is not to lose ground to the increasingly inventive Huawei, as well as incumbent Samsung and a host of up-and-coming firms from China and India. This is all the more urgent, since the company repeatedly fails to invent a whole new device which might reduce its dependence on its flagship product significantly. Tablets and watches have…

Intel has a frustrating pattern of choosing the right companies to acquire, and then failing to capitalize on their advantages. Now, Wind River, in our view one of its most strategically important purchases of recent years, is joining a line that also includes DEC StrongARM/XScale, TI’s cable modems, Level One, Dialogic and Trillium. Intel is selling off Wind River to investment firm TPG (the same firm which acquired half of Intel’s McAfee unit last year). The company – headed by the unit’s current president Jim Douglas – is already pledging to pursue an aggressive strategy in Internet of Things (IoT), edge compute and intelligent devices. But those are all areas which Intel has identified as highly strategic, as it looks…

There are exceptions to the gloomy picture outlined in the previous item. As noted, Ireland – whose regulator, ComReg, has often awarded short term or low cost licences – awarded a 3.5 GHz licence to Airspan and another to fixed wireless provider Imagine. And it split the airwaves between rural and urban allocations to ensure 5G would reach country areas too. In total, in that auction (concluded in May 2017), 350 MHz of spectrum in the 3.6 GHz band were sold for more than €78m, split between upfront fees and usage charges. Vodafone Ireland won the biggest chunk, claiming 85 MHz for use in rural regions and 105 MHz for the cities, at a cost of €22.8m. Meteor, a subsidiary of…

In our view, one of the most important factors which will determine whether 5G will be a commercial and socio-economic success is whether it will trigger the blowing apart of the tight circle of the mobile industry to date. This has been much discussed in terms of the supplier ecosystem. The combination of a virtualized, automated platform based on white box hardware, with the efficient and agile 5G radio, should allow mobile operators finally to achieve their long-held dream of introducing a wider variety of vendors into their domains, in a multivendor architecture with significantly reduced upfront and operating costs. But in opening up the platform and the supply chain, MNOs may also expose themselves to new competition. 5G is…

This article originally ran in Riot’s sister-service, Wireless Watch. Click here to find out more about this service. Telefónica is one of the most vocal and enthusiastic operators about the 5G idea of a highly automated network, which can use artificial intelligence (AI) to plan and optimize a RAN dynamically according to the needs of particular use cases, and can proactively identify likely faults and heal itself. At the recent Zero Touch & Carrier Automation Congress, the Spanish carrier said it was planning to increase its investment in automation tools, including a “cognitive self-optimizing network (SON)” technology based on AI. This would see Telefónica making an early move towards what Rethink Technology Research, in its recent report about AI-driven SON,…