11561 search results for Open RAN

Nokia has been loosening the ties with cellular technologies and cellular operators in a bid to expand its business model and appeal to enterprises and alternative service providers. In doing so, it may start to compete with some of its traditional customers, potentially offering services – especially in the Internet of Things – which bypass the MNO and go straight to the enterprise or vertical industry. In the longer term, much of that business-to-business activity revolves around Nokia’s platforms for cloud-based core networks and network slicing. In the near term, a clear step towards the slicing nirvana is seen in its rising support for unlicensed spectrum technologies alongside cellular. Last week, for instance, it said it was working with the…

Qualcomm continues to rebuff Broadcom’s advances, but is set for a Valentine’s Day meeting, the first time it will have agreed even to discuss the fellow chipmaker’s takeover bid, which was raised last week to £121bn. The prospects for a deal which would significantly reshape the mobile chip industry have looked poor so far, with the two companies engaging in wars of words and aggressive moves to persuade Qualcomm shareholders of their case. However, the increased price, and Qualcomm’s continuing difficulties with Apple and other legal challenges, may tip the balance in favor of Broadcom. That outcome would almost certainly lead to settlement of the litigation with Apple and other clients and antitrust bodies, but at the expense of Qualcomm’s…

If the 5G-era network is to be more than a superfast radio upgrade, operators also have to rethink the whole architecture that surrounds it. On its own, the new RAN will not deliver the fully flexible, programmable, resource-efficient and automated network that advanced MNOs have in their sights. One of the casualties, along with a lot of jobs in manual planning and optimization, will be the traditional OSS/BSS. Current OSS/BSS platforms will not be fit for purpose for a fully virtualized and automated world, and the TM Forum has been putting a series of frameworks in place over recent years, to try to ensure that the new approaches are based on open, interoperable foundations. Its latest contribution is the Open…

The biggest RAN vendors have got into the habit of starting their Mobile World Congress (MWC) battles a couple of weeks in advance, offering previews of their main launches and messages in the hope of winning some hearts and minds even before the mega-show in Barcelona kicks off. Last week saw Huawei holding its pre-MWC event in London, while on the same day, Ericsson announced a series of enhancements to its 5G-ready portfolio. Of course, 5G will be the dominant theme for these vendors and their rivals, now that the first set of standards has been finalized and the first working network deployed (for the Korean Winter Olympics). Ericsson has been promising simple upgrades from 4G kit, and general 5G…

The annual release of the Californian DMV’s self-driving car testing report has arrived, publishing the progress of autonomous vehicle development on public roads. Local law requires that companies tell the DMV how many times they had to override a car in autonomous mode, providing a crude benchmark of sorts. As expected, Google’s Waymo still leads the pack, but based on these numbers alone, the rest of the industry has a lot to catch up on. Of course, the early-stage testing is going to incur the higher number of disengagements, which the DMV defines as ‘a deactivation of the autonomous mode when a failure of the autonomous technology is detected or when the safe operation of the vehicle requires that the…

Eighteen months ago, it looked like Google was preparing to offload Nest, its rather expensive acquisition that still likely hasn’t seen a return on its investment. This week, it was confirmed that Google is holding onto Nest, but bringing it back in-house. The news comes as Control4 and Crestron announced new offerings in the professional installation space – one that will remain lucrative, but does not promise the scale that retail or operator channels do. Control4’s new CA-1 Automation Controller does what it says on the tin. The $350 box is aimed at installers looking to provide customers with comprehensive smart home installations – whether that’s for a single home, an MDU, or even hotels. The CA-1 includes WiFi, ZigBee,…

Apple’s move last month to join the Alliance for Open Media and rumors that Samsung may follow have thrown the codec world into turmoil, prompting MPEG’s founder and chairman Leonardo Chiariglione into writing a blog urging desperate action to repair the broken codec licensing model before it collapses completely. This model enshrined by MPEG has served the digital media industry for 30 years, encouraging participating companies to invest in and donate Intellectual Property (IP) with high expectations of making a healthy profit. This has spawned a succession of standards, including MPEG-2 for digital TV in 1994, followed by AVC for reduced bitrate video in 2003 and finally in 2013 MPEG-H Part 2 or H.265, which has become better known as HEVC,…

The spectrum famine will ease in the 5G era, because of the increasingly practical ways to harness higher frequencies, but it really could end if the industry manages to deploy commercial services and usable devices above 100 GHz. Most of the R&D in this area has taken place in Asia (much of it, as far as cellular goes, by Samsung), but the US regulator wants to take a lead in kicking off the regulatory discussion. On February 22, the FCC has an item on the agenda of its open meeting, to consider how to open up spectrum above 95 GHz, as part of its ongoing Spectrum Horizons initiative to extend the airwaves available and usable for various commercial services including…

Every week brings a new development in the rapidly moving area of open source platforms for telcos, many of them driven by operators which want to free themselves from the stranglehold of their established vendors and shake up their cost base. In this context, one of the demonstrations at this month’s Mobile World Congress will be particularly important. Run by the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), it will show the latest code written for the P4 programming language, running on powerful white box switches based on merchant switch-chips from Barefoot Networks, Cavium and Mellanox. The operators supporting this demonstration include AT&T, China Unicom, Comcast, Deutsche Telekom, NTT Group and Turk Telecom, and significantly, they are joined by Google. Significantly because, while…

As if the US’s CBRS band in 3.5 GHz hasn’t been hyped enough as the future face of mobile spectrum, cableco Charter Communications has placed it at the center of what it shamelessly dubbed its ‘6G’ trial. This seemed to ignore the fact – much bewailed by T-Mobile USA – that the US regulator, the FCC, has actually focused on LTE usage in this band, rather than 5G. That is shortsighted, TMO argues, because elsewhere in the world, the C-Band spectrum (various bands between 3.4 GHz and 4.2 GHz) is being earmarked as a pioneer band for 5G. That is being driven heavily by China and Japan, but is also seen as a way to accelerate early 5G deployments, because…

Researchers from Harper Adams University in the UK have partnered with startup Precision Decisions, in a successful trial to grow barley using autonomous farm machinery. This should be a shot in the arm for agricultural automation, which is looking for ways to improve its margins – and cater for rising global populations. The robotic tractors and harvesters were augmented by surveillance drones, in a project called the Hands Free Hectare (HFH) project – the first to achieve a barley without a single person stepping foot in the field itself. The crop is going to be used to make beer, and while still in early stages, the approach has great potential. Although the project was successful, after completing the harvest in…

Corinex and IBM have won what looks set to be a very big contract with E.ON, a German multinational utility and major player in energy markets, to supply broadband over powerline (BPL) technology for E.ON’s low voltage grids – the bits of the network nearer the end-users, after power has been stepped down from the high-voltage distribution network. It seems that IBM is reanimating BPL, after an abortive attempt to use it for commercial broadband back in 2009. E.ON says it plans to deploy the BPL tech to support its German smart meter and smart grid rollout, and will be implementing it in transformer stations and street cabinets – roughly 60,000 systems. The protocol being used is SNMPv3/IPv6, but E.ON…