11569 search results for Open RAN

The firm line on net neutrality, drawn by former president Barack Obama and his FCC chairman Tom Wheeler, is likely to be drastically moved under the new administration. President Trump has appointed FCC commissioner Ajit Pai, an outspoken opponent of the toughened-up neutrality rules, to be promoted to the chairman role. However, while Pai’s stance on neutrality is certainly telco-friendly, he is no operator yes-man. One of the other issues on which he has strong opinions is opening up more wireless spectrum, in particular by driving more sharing of airwaves, and accelerating the adoption of high frequency bands for consumer services. So far, Verizon and AT&T have led the way in the latter, but the opening of new bands, including…

In the UK, O2 UK CEO Mark Evans has called on the prime minister Theresa May to intervene to correct an “imbalanced” spectrum landscape and relax planning laws, to encourage easier deployment of dense small cell networks. Evans was responding to May’s announcement of a new industrial strategy on January 23. He said mobile networks must be at the heart of that strategy, but that will mean changes to the way infrastructure is planned and built. He said: “This is absolutely vital because in London alone, mobile operators will need to install around 500,000 new transmitters to deliver 5G. In reality, this means improving planning laws, the Electronic Communications Code and opening up BT’s cable network to allow operators to…

Sprint has a track record of making left-field, even mystifying, decisions. The latest is its plan to buy a 33% stake in music streaming service Tidal for an estimated $200m – even though Tidal is a minnow compared to Spotify or Apple Music, and made net losses of $28m in 2015. Tidal can be accessed in 52 countries, but is not making an impact outside the US. This looks like a desperate attempt by Sprint to slow the momentum of T-Mobile USA, which offers Music Freedom as part of its Binge On service, allowing users to stream music from all the major players without being hit with overage charges. Its partners include Tidal itself plus Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora, Napster,…

Apple has confirmed that is was the sixth founding member of an AI (artificial intelligence) research group formed last September by Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and IBM. The non-profit alliance aims to establish best practice in AI, and improve public understanding and appreciation of it. There is significant concern that public worries about AI’s possible impact on jobs, privacy and other areas of life will slow or even stall its recent progress in commercial applications. The alliance is open to academics, non-profits and specialists in policy and ethics. Key issues which the group says it needs to address to bolster confidence in AI include privacy, interoperability and collaboration between people and AI systems. If such challenges are met effectively, AI…

Too often the barriers to entry for a brand new mobile operator have proved to be too high, and while regulators round the world may push for increased competition, in reality mobile services remain the preserve of a narrowing clique. MVNOs can help increase consumer choice, of course, but control of the pace and quality of infrastructure expansion, and the pricing for wholesale and retail services, is to a greater or lesser extent in the hands of a few. Occasionally, there is a dramatic exception, as seen in France with the launch of Iliad’s Free Mobile. Free harnessed a clever combination of its existing broadband lines, a roaming deal with Orange, and WiFi, to minimize its need to invest in…

As if Apple’s lawsuits against Qualcomm in the US were not dramatic enough, the company has followed them with two similar actions in Beijing, alleging violation of China’s Anti-Monopoly Law less than two years after Qualcomm came to its landmark settlement with the country’s authorities. Apple is also demanding a ruling on the terms under which Apple licenses Qualcomm’s cellular standards-essential patents (SEP), adding to the hailstorm of attacks on the chip provider’s licensing practices, which took the shine off its otherwise positive quarterly results announcement. “These filings by Apple’s Chinese subsidiary are just part of Apple’s efforts to find ways to pay less for Qualcomm’s technology,” said the chip giant’s general counsel Don Rosenberg. “Apple was offered terms consistent…

The advantages of network sharing seem glaringly obvious in a world where the mismatch between mobile data demand and mobile data ARPU is rushing MNOs’ profits. The need to reduce the cost of delivering those rising tides of data is urgent, but many operators are ready to discuss almost any tactic – WiFi offload, automation, outsourcing, even an early move to more spectrally efficient 5G radios, or an outright merger – rather than consider sharing the RAN load with others. So will that reluctance to lose control and ‘enable the competition’ end up weakening the 5G business case, delaying deployments and letting non-MNOs, with a more open approach to infrastructure, into the market? Even in the rising number of markets…

M&A, Strategies, Alliances Silicon Labs has acquired Zentri, a low-power WiFi specialist, for an undisclosed price, in a move to expand SL’s IoT hardware and software connectivity portfolio. Cisco is buying AppDynamics for $3.7bn, on the eve of its IPO, which was valued at around $2bn. The premium secures its application monitoring software, and the company will be added to Cisco’s IoT division – alongside Jasper. Verizon has announced its Q4 results, with IoT revenues up 21% compared to Q4 2015, reaching $243m. Notably, that’s less than 1% of its $3.2bn quarterly revenue. Solera Holdings has acquired Digidentity, an online identity specialist with smart home and automotive ambitions that was founded in 2005, and has built a security platform. Bosch,…

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) are running away with a poker competition, thanks to their Liberatus AI. The program is pitting itself against four professional players, playing heads-up (two-player), no-limit Texas hold’em, at the Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh, in a test that is being hailed as a significant step forward for AI. We came across the news in the MIT Technology Review, although we missed the first announcements in the blaze of CES news at the beginning of January. As it stands, Liberatus is up $800,000 at the half-way point in the competition, and while an errant all-in could scupper its chance of success, Liberatus is putting on an impressive display – although it has a noted rival in…

The IoT Tech Expo in London, a show well-worth your time, hosted a section of the convention center dedicated to blockchain companies. With two days of presentations and a host of booths, Riot looked to find the places where the distributed ledger technology was bleeding into the IoT. SatoshiPay and Monax were the two that caught our eye, in a venue surrounded by IoT companies that collectively are starting to wake up to blockchain’s potential. Riot often covers blockchain news, and recent announcements have seen IBM and the FDA sign a healthcare pilot program in the US, Siemens move into the smart grid sector via LO3’s microgrid project, and Filament’s LoRa-mesh network. However, we’ve also addressed the hype from the…

M&A, Strategies, Alliances ETSI has launched the Context Information Management industry specification group (CIM ISG), to develop a spec to give data points contextual relevance. TomTom has acquired Autonomous, a Berlin-based autonomous driving startup that emerged from the Free University of Berlin. This is a move to challenge Here. MSD Telematics has acquired Heuristics Info Systems, in a deal that combines the pair to target the $120m telematics market in India – in an all cash deal, with no price given. u-blox has acquired SIMCom’s cellular module product line, for $52.5m, including its R&D team and customer base. u-blox says this deal makes it one of the world’s largest suppliers of cellular modules. Laws and Regulation Forbes has published a…

Many network virtualization trials revolve around the core network, but few are fully commercialized yet. Belarussian operator Velcom claims to be in the vanguard, having moved all its 2G and 3G traffic to the cloud. Velcom, a subsidiary of Telekom Austria, has worked with ZTE on the project for the past nine months, and is in the unusual position of introducing a radical virtualized new architecture before it has even moved to 4G. Its legacy core network components, including evolved packet core (EPC), mobile switching center, home location register (HLR) and policy and charging rules function (PCRF) have all been moved to a virtualized platform running on OpenStack-based NFV implementations and standard hardware. The operator says its new platform, which…

The huge New York City public WiFi project, LinkNYC, has declared a milestone this week, announcing that its 547 kiosks have reached one million registered WiFi users and 4m sessions, one year after deployment. This is only the tip of the iceberg for the smart city venture, with plans to grow to a total of 7,500 kiosks. These kiosks provide a number of modcons for the general public – free WiFi, charging stations, maps and a large, red emergency services button. But when companies like LinkNYC have such prominent commercial interests, their impact and influence over citizens and their cities needs to be a major consideration – or councils risk handing over the keys to their smart city experience to…

Now that cellular standards for low power wide area networking (LPWAN), such as NB-IoT, are commercialized, there is a powerful incentive for the alternative technologies, many in unlicensed spectrum, to present a more unified alternative. Currently, systems like Sigfox, LoRa, Telensa and Weightless are longer established than NB-IoT (though GSM is the standard with the biggest installed base), but they are siloed and fragmented. Yet for all the advantages of licensed spectrum in terms of assured performance and availability, the broad world of machine-to-machine services does need a strong platform which can be deployed by non-MNOs in licence-exempt bands. A standards effort by ETSI this year could finally provide that, or at least bring together several of the similar but…

Reuters reports that Arris is about to offer Brocade $1bn for its Networking assets, which include its Ruckus division. “People familiar with the matter” cite $1bn as the upper threshold, but Brocade is apparently in talks with other potential buyers. A decision is expected by the end of the month, and if Arris were successful, it would be a rather expansionist move for the CPE provider. Back in May, Broadcom acquired Brocade in a $5.9bn transaction, which saw it immediately promise to shed the Ruckus WiFi service division that Brocade had bought earlier in the year for $1.2bn, as well as other IP assets. Broadcom (itself recently acquired by Avago, which opted to retain the Broadcom brand) also said it…

The stakes have really been raised in the poker game that is mobile patent licensing. Apple has filed suit against Qualcomm, claiming the chip giant is withholding over $1bn which it owes the iPhone maker, and that it is operating an “illegal scheme” to monopolize the smartphone chip market. While Qualcomm has been the subject of a string of probes and actions by national antitrust authorities in the past few years – in China, South Korea, the European Union, Taiwan, and most recently the US – it has rarely been attacked directly by its clients. In some cases, customers may have been deterred by Qualcomm’s greater size and its famous legal teams, and by the difficulty of finding alternative sources…

Huawei’s upcoming launch of a smartphone incorporating Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant will mark a new phase in one of the most important battles for the modern internet experience. Voice-activated assistants – which use powerful AI (artificial intelligence) engines to deliver detailed, context-aware and personalized answers to users’ questions – are the way in which web giants hope to place themselves at the heart of a user’s whole range of activities, whether they are in their smart home, connected car, at work or on the phone. Apple Siri kicked off the race, though the company seems to be have lost its early momentum in voice interfaces – rapidly taking over from touch/text for many uses. Google Now and Microsoft Cortana added…