11569 search results for Open RAN

Europe’s collective smart meter rollout has come under further fire as the University of Twente published a report this week that found the devices to be as much as 583% inaccurate. European Union members agreed smart meters would be installed across Europe’s 220 million households by 2020 – a policy decision which now looks shaky. If there is now an apparently reputable study that calls into question the accuracy of these meters, there will be even less enthusiasm from the utilities to speed up their deployment schedules to meet those EU targets. In this environment, full installation by 2020 is looking less and less likely, with utilities moving painfully slowly, and consumers not being swayed by the perceived benefits. The…

HPE and its Aruba subsidiary have released a report that paints a simultaneously great and awful picture for IoT adoption. While adopters are reporting very promising results, they are experiencing a horrifying amount of security attacks, which seem to indicate that we’re doomed to chronic insecurity in the IoT – at least until enterprise bottom-lines start getting savaged by security lapses. The headline figures from the study say that 57% of the 3,100 professionals interviews had already adopted IoT technologies at their business, with the respondents coming from 20 countries. By 2019, that figure is expected to hit 85%. HPE notes that it found conflicting definitions of what IoT means (hardly surprising), but more worryingly, the report found some pretty…

Chinese EV manufactures have had a tough month after the central government’s subsidy programme was overhauled, leaving them searching for support from their regional provinces as the central administration gets tough on the industry. They are hoping that bulk orders from local government should keep sector growth moving. Recently, the City of Beijing council announce plans to replace its entire taxi fleet with electric vehicles (EVs), by 2022. Beijing’s 70,000-strong fleet of taxis, is currently made up of gasoline and diesel fuelled vehicles, with running costs and air pollution concerns at the fore. As the auto industry moves towards vehicles-as-a-service (VaaS), these kinds of fleet-scale deals are going to become more commonplace, and China looks to be leading this trend…

Sigfox: 3x revenues in two years, nets Telefonica deal, passes 13m (ish) subs Our first appointment at MWC was with Sigfox, the French LPWAN startup that is fresh from news of a significant channel deal with Telefonica, that sees the MNO purchasing Sigfox device subscriptions in rather large numbers – in a channel deal that is quite similar to the one Sigfox signed with Altice. Sigfox notes that Telefonica’s backing of Sigfox is a strong endorsement of its technology, especially as the industry gears up to LTE Cat-M1 and NB-IoT (collectively under the umbrella term of LTE-M), with Sigfox benefiting from only requiring one hardware skew to function globally – with the limiting factor being whether there is a Sigfox…

NetScout: Herzog-backing software sees Communities of things Although not entirely software (in a strict sense), we’re including NetScout here in our MWC roundup – the business behind the ‘Lo and Behold’ documentary from Werner Herzog that you might have caught on a late-night Netflix binge. In more commercial activities, NetScout is best known for its network and server performance and health monitoring software offerings. At MWC, we spoke to John English, who explained that NetScout has been embracing the IoT, pointing to its recent acquisition of Arbor Networks – a DDoS and threat protection firm that is seeing a rise in IoT-related attack traffic. With NetScout itself moving into big data and analytics, core components of IoT applications and platforms,…

Bragi: hearables and the IoT We sat down with CEO and Founder of Bragi Nikolaj Hviid, as an announcement about hearables had caught our eye in the run-up to MWC. We were suitably impressed by the devices; in-ear wireless headphones that house contextual computers, which Hviid is pushing as the next step in human-machine interfaces (HMI). Explaining that a digital screen was a serial immersive interface, Hviid advocates for the benefits that the parallel discrete interface that the Dash devices provide – allowing users to listen to audio media and track their activity on the standalone ear buds that don’t require a smartphone to operate. With activity tracking (steps, strokes, cadence, and heartbeat) and a microphone to provide speaking capabilities…

M&A, Strategies, Alliances ZTE has joined the OpenFog Consortium, as a board-level member. ZTE and Intel have announced a cooperation agreement, focused on establishing an R&D lab for IoT technologies. Libelium has announced a revamped cloud partner program, as well as the addition of new kits for its IoT Marketplace – the platform it wants to turn into the “Amazon for the IoT.” ARM believes it will ship a trillion IoT chips by 2040, according to Softbank’s CEO. HPE has joined the IoT M2M Council as a board member. relayr has acquired Neokami, an AI and machine-learning data security specialist, adding it to relayr’s IoT platform offerings. Jaguar Land Rover has invested in Mycroft, an open-source AI communication platform that…

M&A, Strategies, Alliances ARM has acquired Mistbase and NextG-Com, two Swedish and British NB-IoT developers, adding a PHY and low-level stack to its IoT offerings. No prices have been disclosed. Apple has acquired RealFace, a facial recognition startup based in Israel. Wireless Telecom Group has acquired CommAgility, adding its 4G/5G processing and RF module expertise to WTG’s own designs, citing 5G and IoT as development targets. Avnet and relayr have announced the 5-4-3 Acceleration Process, a rapid prototyping and development process for potential IoT customers looking to build hardware and software. Arris is buying Ruckus Wireless from Broadcom for $800m, a lower than expected price that includes the ICX Switch assets that Broadcom bought when it acquired Brocade. Innit has…

AT&T has announced the latest addition to the inner circle of partners which will help it adopt SDN (software-defined networking) throughout its organization over time. The telco is working with Broadcom in an alliance focused on software-driven innovation at silicon level. Initially the initiative will center on the wireline network, but AT&T has aggressive plans to extend its SDN and virtualization right out to the RAN. In that context, the Broadcom partnership is highly strategic, and also sounds some warning bells for Intel, which is positioning itself as the natural chip platform for the new virtualized networks. Susan Johnson, SVP of global supply chain at AT&T, told LightReading: “Working with chipset providers allows us to guide innovation at the chipset…

As widely anticipated, cable supplier Arris is to acquire Ruckus Wireless when the carrier WiFi firm’s current owner, Brocade, is taken over by Broadcom later this year. Brocade/Broadcom will not quite get the $1bn which was predicted at the start of the year by Reuters sources, but it will get $800m for Ruckus, along with the Brocade ICX business, which makes data center, campus and carrier Ethernet switches. This is a drop from the $1.2bn which the company paid for Ruckus last April, when it was trying to expand its wireless and service provider activities by acquiring a leading public WiFi equipment vendor. Only a few months later, Broadcom said it was buying Brocade, primarily for its Fibre Channel storage…

So Apple has joined the Wireless Power Consortium (WPC), which has sent the press into a rush of speculation concerning the next iPhone’s potential inclusion of the WPC’s Qi charging tech. It should be noted that it was heavily rumored that the iPhone 7 would include wireless charging tech, and that did not come to pass, but should Apple opt for Qi, it would likely continue its habit of setting de facto standards for smartphones and laptops. Whether you believe Apple has earned this reputation from its sage wisdom and always backing the right horse, or because its competitors are beholden to Apple’s marketing clout and ape it to retain consumer interest, this move looks like a win for Qi…

Mobile TV has had a painful gestation. In the 3G era, it was tough to interest consumers in brief and often poor quality clips and sketches. With 4G, interest rose as users became heavily video-oriented, but they were mainly viewing YouTube, not channels broadcast by a mobile or pay-TV operator. This drove investment in more optimized technologies to create a differentiated experience, but the process was distracted for years by a battle between several options which all required specialized infrastructure – making it hard for operators to make the business case. Qualcomm’s FLO, DVB-Handheld and others all fell by the wayside, except in isolated markets, but another technology, now called LTE-Broadcast, was emerging with significant advantages – fully standardized, and…

The cellular vendors and operators have had little involvement in open source in the past, but such discussions highlight why they need to change that situation quickly by participating in open hardware initiatives like TIP and the associated Open Compute Project; and in software projects like OpenStack. Better still for the survival of the traditional telco, they need to establish their own technologies at the heart of open source de facto standards. AT&T’s early work with Domain 2.0 partners and with chip firms like Intel and Broadcom has been focused on internal platforms, but some of these could find their way into a more open environment, as has already happened, on the software side, with the operator’s ECOMP orchestrator for…

So Mobile World Congress is here, and Barcelona will be full once again with up to 100,000 people from the mobile and wireless industry worldwide. Many of the familiar MWC players will make their usual splash – recent issues of Wireless Watch have looked at what Nokia, Ericsson and Huawei will be demonstrating and discussing. But each year there is a shift in the landscape, which draws some new high profile companies into the Barcelona sunlight. Virtualization, distributed cloud, fog computing, vertical market networks, the Industrial Internet of Things and flexible spectrum will be among the key themes of the show, and while these offer ways for mobile operators to diversify their revenues and transform their cost bases, they are…