11569 search results for Open RAN

Two significant developments have been made public in recent weeks in the area of edge computing – the formation of the Automotive Edge Computing Consortium, and the first demonstration of InterDigital’s FLIPS (Flexible IP Services) solution for distributed video, which supports ETSI’s MEC (Multi-Access Edge Computing) platform. Both of these, among many other recent initiatives, fill in small but significant pieces of the huge jigsaw that will eventually reveal the full 5G picture – not just a connectivity standard, but an open, automated and programmable network integrating cloud, storage and communications to support a host of new services and revenue streams. There are architectural debates between supporters of various approaches to edge computing in the mobile or multi-access world –…

It is clear that network resources, whether physical or virtual, will need to be highly distributed to support low latency, sometimes high bandwidth applications such as emergency communications, connected vehicles and next generation mobile video or virtual reality. Of course, the mobile network is already very distributed and can support large numbers of devices, but only from the point of view of connectivity and data exchange. Meanwhile, cloud computing and storage platforms have also evolved to interconnect many remote physical or virtual end points, but there has been little integration with transport networks. This gap is the subject of many R&D projects, including two EC H2020 initiatives, 5G-Crosshaul and 5G-Xhaul, as operators look to manage resources of all kinds from…

DeepMind has developed a new AI-process that uses a combination of three machine-learning algorithms to match sounds to video – guessing the noises of the objects that it sees. While it sounds a bit dull, this is a significant step forward for the industry, as the process was able to learn this function in a “autonomous manner,” without supervision – and comes in the same week as it announced plans to tackle the videogame StarCraft, as rival OpenAI (see separate article) netted a lot of press for its victory playing Dota. This self-supervision function is much more interesting, as it provides an opportunity for developers to get the ball rolling in a machine-learning function and then put their feet up…

The OpenAI project notched up a victory in online videogame Dota 2, pummeling the world’s best human player at The International – Dota’s global championship, with a $24m prize pool. Backer Elon Musk was quick to sing the praises of the OpenAI bot, declaring Dota 2 “vastly more complex than traditional board games likes chess and Go,” the latter being the game that Alphabet’s DeepMind made headlines in – but the victory wasn’t as one-sided as the PR makes it sound. It comes in the same week that rival AI evangelist DeepMind announced a similar project using the StarCraft 2 videogame (see separate article), as AI developers turn to videogames as a way to train their machine-learning systems in complex…

Amazon Web Services has launched Amazon Macie, a new machine-learning tool for identifying sensitive information inside an AWS deployment, in order to better protect it, and for monitoring anomalies in data access. With data-leaks being something of a constant headline in the technology sector, AWS is hoping that Macie helps its enterprise customers help themselves – and not leave backdoors open. Many of the largest enterprises will go through a period of flux, as they on-board IoT devices and applications to improve their margins – which will both add a huge pile of data to their existing IT infrastructure, as well as greatly increasing their attack footprint. For many of these customers, there will be a sharp difference between the…

Verizon has been building up its fiber reserves with a series of acquisitions and leasing deals, as it pushes forward with efforts to densify its network. Its latest transaction is the $225m cash purchase of much of the fiber in Chicago owned by WideOpenWest (WoW), which will get a further $50m to complete the network build. Verizon said that the network, when completed in late 2018, will provide backhaul for 500 macrocell sites and 500 small cells. WoW said it will continue to focus on residential services through edge-out builds. The deal will close early in the first quarter of 2018 and much of the proceeds will go to pay down part of WoW’s $2.74bn in debt. WoW will lose…

Having acquired 28 GHz spectrum licences in London last month, UK towerco Arqiva is wasting no time in announcing field trials, tapping into rising interest in millimeter wave frequencies to support fixed wireless access (FWA). It will work with Samsung on the London trial, which will use the vendor’s pre-standard 5G equipment to test two-way links able to deliver gigabit downlink speeds over several hundred meters to home or small business routers. The trial is set to run for four months and Arqiva – which is up for sale – aims to prove the stability of the fixed wireless technology as a viable alternative solution to fiber or souped-up DSL. Another UK supporter of FWA, Relish, was recently sold, along…

Brocade was looking poised to be an interesting player in the emerging world of virtualized telco networks, but that was before it was acquired by Broadcom last November. The chip giant wanted Brocade’s core hardware offerings and as part of the process of finalizing the deal, buyers were found for several other smaller, but higher growth businesses. The latest deal concerns the virtual evolved packet core (vEPC) which Brocade built around its purchase of Connectem, and which has now been acquired by Mavenir. This transaction follows the purchase of the Ruckus carrier WiFi business by Arris, and the spin-off of the SDN controller into a start-up called Lumina Networks. Mavenir itself is a recently completed mash-up of telco software companies.…

Despite the high excitement in the US about millimeter wave spectrum, for most mobile services and mainstream devices, the short term focus will be on expanding capacity in the midrange bands. These do not require the same levels of engineering innovation or new regulation to make them practical and affordable for mass market services, beyond the fixed wireless area where Verizon and AT&T are experimenting with high frequencies. But they can significantly add to the device capacity and bandwidth that an operator can support with LTE or 5G (or a combination). The FCC recently voted to adopt a Notice of Inquiry (NOI) to explore opportunities in spectrum bands between 3.7 GHz and 24 GHz, and initiated comment periods related to…

And so the M&A merry-go-round whirls even faster in the fairground of the US telecoms and media industry. The end result looks likely to be a realignment of the sector, with cable and mobile players forming alliances against the big two telcos. The question is, which cablecos, and which MNOs, will join forces? French-based cable group Altice, which has already acquired Cablevision and the smaller SuddenLink, is now making a real power play and reportedly preparing a bid for Charter (which has itself swallowed up Time Warner Cable and BrightHouse). However, to afford a price which could reach $185bn, according to Wall Street analysts, Altice (with a market cap of about $23bn, and almost that amount in debt) is likely…

Make sure to subscribe to get ATW in your inbox, for free, each Monday. // M&A, Strategies, Alliances // Vodafone has joined the prpl Foundation and its board, aiming to spur smart home CPE innovation, using prpl’s experience and ecosystem of open source and secure silicon. Bosch, Geo++, Mitsubishi Electric, and u-blox have announced a new joint-venture, called Sapcorda Services, to pitch GNSS positioning services and hardware to mass markets. Wabco Holdings has acquired AssetTrackr, a fleet management specialist based in Bangalore,to link it with Wabco’s vehicle tracking platform, ahead of an Indian launch. The Automotive Edge Computing Consortium has been founded by Denso, Ericsson, Intel, NTT, NTT Docomo, and Toyota. As for its purpose, the clue is in the…

TV viewing-habit specialist Nielsen has won a pretty major deal in the US, after supermarket chain Aldi announced that it would be expanding a trial project to cover all of its 1,700 stores in the USA. It’s a high-profile win for Nielsen’s retail analytics platform, which analyzes the behavior of shoppers and the impact of in-store advertising, which comes as the company adapts to its quickly shifting core market. Nielsen is best known for its TV monitoring boxes, shipped to participating homes to observe what they watch on television – selling the data gathered to advertisers and TV channels, who then use the viewing statistics to thresh out the ad-spend and revenue. However, the shift from regular TV viewing habits…

A Bosch survey has found more than 52% of new car buyers expect to own at least one self-driving automobile in their household in the next 10 years – but that car buyers still have trust issues for self-driving technology that could cause them to hold back on making a self-driving purchase. Given that many vehicles already offer self-driving features, like advanced cruise control, and that automakers are now planning self-driving vehicles to launch in the next 3-5 years, these expectations are not surprising. The survey reached 1,000 US based car buyers, who have purchased or leased at least one vehicle in the last 5 years, and its findings clearly support that US car buyers are expecting self-driving vehicles. Audi…

Samsung has launched Artik Cloud Monetization, a new service for buyers of its Artik System-on-Chip (SoC) silicon that allows them to sell data from end devices on a marketplace inside Samsung’s Artik Cloud ecosystem. It looks like a nice value-add for its processors, and helps to move Samsung into a place where it can compete against rival hardware products through the value of the marketplace – assuming it gets off the ground. Samsung hasn’t had much in the way of public success for Artik. It’s a project that seems to be ticking along well enough, but not exactly setting the market ablaze. It competes in a pretty crowded ecosystem, but does stand out for the inclusion of the Artik Cloud…

Last week Riot reported that Intel had killed off its attempts in the IoT silicon maker market. This week, Intel revealed its second quarter earnings, with robust growth coming from its IoT segment. Continued interest in its industrial, video and automotive segments supported 26% year on year growth to $720m in revenue for the IoT division – in comparison to just 2% growth in the same quarter last year. The earnings statement seems testament to Intel’s scatter gun approach in IoT. Intel has been under pressure to diversify, as most of its revenue still comes from the PC market, the general trend of which has been in decline – where IDC reported that, for the first time in 5 years,…