11568 search results for Open RAN

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…

The European operators have been the most vocal in warning major vendors that their entrenched position will be under threat from open platforms and start-ups in the 5G era. Orange’s deputy CEO Gervais Pellissier has made the warning even more explicit, telling a press briefing in London last week: “We need to keep freedom vis-à-vis suppliers and introduce new ones with 5G ideas. I’m not sure we will order 100% of 5G infrastructure needs from existing suppliers.” He, along with allies like BT, Deutsche Telekom, plus AT&T in the US and Japan’s Softbank, have said that operators learned their lesson from previous lock-ins, and have made it their business to seize control of how future platforms develop. Their argument goes…

In its fifth year, Vodafone’s IoT Barometer report has found that, compared to the first edition’s findings in 2013, IoT adoption among enterprises has risen from 12% to 29% in 2017, with the number of companies with deployments of over 50,000 devices having doubled in the past year. Vodafone says that nearly all companies (95%) say that they have already seen some return on investment (ROI) for their IoT projects, and that the average increase in revenue from these projects was 19% – although that figure is only based on those projects that had reported an increase. The operator says that there’s a correlation between the scale of adoption and the ROI. Of those who had the smallest projects (of…

Internet of Things services provider Cradlepoint has enjoyed considerable success shipping its enterprise M2M routers to customers looking to provide both primary and redundant LTE connectivity to their assets. This week, the company has unveiled a reinvented business model, which bundles its cloud services into its new IoT-focused routers, in a move to create a stickier offering. The new family of LTE routers, the IBR200 range, is the basis for a reinvention of the Cradlepoint model, which will see the company bundle more of its software and services with the hardware – in the new NetCloud Solution Packages, and their subscription-based model. It’s a big change, but one that is becoming more common among hardware providers – which see the…

Google has finalized its $1.1bn acquisition of HTC’s mobile teams, and though the Taiwanese firm will continue to make its own handsets and its Vive virtual reality gear, the deal is still firmly focused on Google’s counter-intuitive ambition to be a mobile device giant. Android may be the most successful mobile software platform ever, but Google has not been satisfied with that, or even with the huge amount of mobile searches, adverts and transactions the operating system drives its way. It has struggled with the open source nature of Android, which means device makers can design user experiences which sideline the actual Google services, or blemish the operating system’s reputation with poor performance. The Open Handset Alliance, which sets rules…

Open source platforms are becoming more and more fundamental to the new telecoms network architecture, raising exciting prospects for a more democratic ecosystem and rapid innovation. But open source also comes with the risk of fragmentation, which has already been seen in industry splits over different approaches to management and orchestration (MANO) in virtualized networks. A large number of open projects has emerged in the areas of virtualization, software-defined networking (SDN), MANO and even telecoms hardware initiatives like Facebook’s OpenCellular. Many of the most prominent are hosted by the Linux Foundation, and that increasingly powerful force in the telecoms landscape has announced that it will be combining six major projects under a common “horizontal umbrella” called the LF Network Fund…

It has come full circle for the big mobile vendors. They used to control every aspect of the design of their platforms, from antennas to processors to devices, but increasingly they looked to reduce cost by focusing on a few key elements and delegating the rest to partners. In the age of virtualized networks, it seemed that trend would intensify, as the game became all about software on commodity boxes. Except that it didn’t. In the access and backhaul networks, the remaining physical components, such as antennas, have to perform at unprecedented levels to meet the demands of the massive data loads the virtualized architectures promise to support. There is differentiation, once again, to make in the chips and the…

The World Economic Forum (WEF) has published a report that warns of the dangers of AI-based automation on the current workforce. Its focus in on the ability to spot the types of jobs that are most at risk, and the WEF claims to have created a formula to help identify the workers that are most in need of retraining – so that our human capital can be redistributed in the upcoming machine upheaval. ‘Towards a Reskilling Revolution: a future of jobs for all,’ to use its full name; the report opens by saying that as the types of skills needed in the labor market change rapidly, individual workers will need to embrace life-long learning to remain employable. For businesses, reskilling…

The Trump Administration has been announced a tariff on the import of solar panels into the US. Solar operators have warned that it will slow the growth of the market for solar and associated storage, and cost tens of thousands of jobs. Solar panels are one of the critical distributed energy generation assets, and any disruption to their adoption has the potential to slow the transition towards a decentralized smarter energy network. The tariff will start at 30% and then step down over the next four years to protect domestic manufacturers. The tariff will depreciate by 5% every year until finishing in 4-years’ time at 15%. Neither Suniva nor SolarWorld, the two companies that brought the original case to the…

In its fifth year, Vodafone’s IoT Barometer report has again found growing adoption among businesses, and compared to the first edition’s findings in 2013, IoT adoption among respondents has risen from 12% to 29% in 2017, with the number of companies with deployments over 50,000 devices having doubled in the past year. Vodafone says that nearly all companies (95%) say that they have already seen a return on investment (ROI) for their IoT projects, and that the average increase in revenue from these projects was 19% – although that figure is only based on those projects that had reported an increase. Vodafone says that there’s a correlation between the scale of adopt and the ROI. Of those who had the…

Cradlepoint has mostly stayed under Riot’s radar, enjoying considerable success shipping its enterprise M2M routers to customers looking to provide both primary and redundant LTE connectivity to their assets. This week, the company has unveiled a reinvented business model, which bundles its cloud services into its new IoT-focused routers, in a move to create a much stickier and well-received package. The new family of LTE routers, the IBR200 range, is the basis for a reinvention of the Cradlepoint business model, which will see the company bundle more of its software and services with the hardware – in the new NetCloud Solution Packages, and their subscription-based model. It’s a pretty big change in the business model, but one that is becoming…