11528 search results for Open RAN

Foxconn will spend $1.6 billion on manufacturing facilities in India through its subsidiary Hon Hai Technology India Mega Development. Orange has withdrawn from plans to buy a 45% stake in Ethio Telecom, blaming market conditions. SK Telecom will work with tech partners in South East Asia on its in-house metaverse platform ifland. CelcomDigi from Malaysia, Agate from Indonesia and Cosmic Technologies from the Philippines are the publishing partners. In a bid to expand its offering, SK Telecom will add Indonesian, Malay, Hindi and Spanish to its metaverse platform. TIM has scythed off its fixed networks and business unit in preparation for sale to KKR. The new unit, NetCo, includes the fixed network infrastructure and related real estate and management, The…

The onus is on the radio access network to reduce electricity bills for telecom companies, and fortunately for operators, a group of researchers at UK universities have taken on the challenge – designing power amplifiers than can reduce some of the 80% of energy used by the RAN, so they claim.  5G promises to deliver far better energy consumption than previous generations, and in the nick of time, because traffic is starting to boom. By 2025, there is set to be 100 billion connections, including 40 billion smart devices according to the Next Generation Mobile Networks Alliance (NGMN). Key to that energy reduction is the radio access network (RAN), which consumes the largest portion of energy across the network, at nearly…

Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA) technology has been doing the rounds as a turbocharger of existing residential coaxial wiring for two decades. For that reason, MoCA is often viewed as a technology fast fading from relevance, threatened by aggressive fiberoptic network overlays. Yet MoCA is not rolling over. The alliance itself is pushing the boundaries of MoCA’s premium coverage, for WiFi backhaul and Intelligent NID (Network Interface Device) for operators offering triple play media services to customer homes – extending this into MDU fiber broadband and fixed wireless access (FWA) use cases. Voted into the role 8 months ago, MoCA President Marcos Martínez Vázquez, whose day job is Director of Standards Engineering at MaxLinear, tells Wireless Watch’s sister service Faultline…

Nokia has announced its support for the Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC), an organization that is aiming to develop specifications and APIs for AI and High Performance Computing (HPC) deployments. The UEC was established in July, and is housed inside the Linux Foundation. Its founding members are AMD, Arista, Broadcom, Cisco, Eviden (part of Atos), HPE, Intel, Meta, and Microsoft. A collaboration with the Open Compute Project (OCP) followed in October, which is developing open HPC compute infrastructure specifications. The process for accepting new members also began in October, and now a raft of 27 firms have joined. The most relevant for Wireless Watch are Dell, Fujitsu, Huawei, Juniper Networks, Nokia, and Samsung SDS, but the full list includes: Alibaba Cloud,…

Picocom, the Open RAN semiconductor and software specialist, is in an interesting position in the Open RAN chip game. The firm is funded by venture capital from China, and has offices in Bristol, Hangzhou and Beijing, and uses a foundry in Taiwan. It may be a small outfit, but with a footprint across the globe, it is well placed to give a reading on the market. Picocom’s VP of Product Management, Vicky Messer sat down with Wireless Watch this week, to talk about the slow uptake of O-RAN based architectures and the fertile ground for expansion in India. This month, Picocom announced its second chip to market, the PC805, which the company describes as the first system-on-chip (SoC) for 5G small cell Open…

The just-published Mobile Economy Report Europe 2023, from the GSMA, makes familiar reading – repeating longstanding concerns over Europe’s lagging roll out of advanced 5G capabilities, citing policies that hold back investment. The GSMA noted that only 5% of live 5G networks in the continent yet support 5G Standalone (SA), compared with 25% in APAC. Operators are caught in the familiar ROI (Return On Investment) trap, meaning that they must first find the investment to sustain 5G deployment and bring on SA before the additional revenue that would pay for it comes in. The GSMA report confirms that the demand is there, reflected in rapidly rising traffic levels on the principle that users and apps consume whatever capacity is there.…

Enthusiasm for Reduced Capability (RedCap) 5G as a fourth primary use case has grown markedly during 2023, coming from operators and major mobile infrastructure vendors across Europe, North America, the Middle East and APAC. Interest has picked up particularly strongly in China, where the three major telcos, China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Telecom, have implemented end-to-end commercial RedCap services in over 10 cities in collaboration with Huawei as equipment supplier. This capability is already serving applications in manufacturing, electric power, city management and automotive V2X, with the next step being to establish a series of commercial RedCap benchmarks, according to Huawei. This follows the introduction of RedCap with the current 3GPP Release 17, first introduced into commercial services in…

Nokia claims successful interoperability testing of its base band distributed units (DUs) and centralized units (CUs) with Mavenir’s radio units (RUs) lays the ground for a multivendor Open RAN ecosystem for operators, and will encourage deployments. Mavenir’s reaction is more muted, merely posting the Nokia release on its website without adding any comment of its own. However, this most likely reflects Mavenir’s reluctance to be seen praising Nokia’s strengthening commitment to Open RAN, after having been a critic of its tardiness until quite recently. Until well into 2022 Mavenir had continued to bemoan Nokia’s slow progress on Open RAN, putting it in the same camp as Ericsson, and also for that matter Huawei, as probably the greatest Open RAN skeptic…

Uproar at OpenAI saw the firm go through 3 CEOs in a weekend. First, the board sacked Sam Altman because “he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board.” Interim CEO Mira Murati only lasted the weekend after she tried to reinstate Altman and was promptly replaced by Emmett Shear. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has offered Altman a job leading an advanced AI research team at his firm. SK Telecom has developed an Open RAN AI-based virtualized base station with Samsung Electronics, Ericsson, Nokia, and Intel. The technology used AI-predicted traffic conditions to control the on/off operation of each CPU and reduce CPU consumption by more than 20% the firm said. The CEO of Australian operator Optus, Kelly…

As we head into the final month of 2023, the three segments we track in the Wireless Watch Stock Tracker have all grown, with the Vendors up 32.88% in the year, compared to just a 5.39% growth in the index funds. It suggests that an investor would do well to sink their cash into the Vendors but given that the Operators stand at an adjusted average value of 86.5% of their start value, there is no apparent safe bet in that crowd. Diving into the calculated average weekly performance, the average improvement for the Vendors was 3.34%, with the Operators up 1.3%, and the Indexes up 2.36%. The only Vendors to see their share price fall in the past week…

South Korea’s two largest operators SK Telecom (SKT) and KT Corp (KT) have seen steady growth in share price over the past five years, while the laggard, LG Uplus, has been in a period of instability and tells a more complex story. SKT dominates mobile subscribers and is a leader in 5G in South Korea. In 2022 SKT had a share of 43% of mobile subscribers, KT had 31% and LG Uplus had 26%. While KT has the monopoly on landline infrastructure, with a share of around 63% of subscribers. LG Uplus has built an increasing portion of the market in recent years. As LG Uplus has grown, it took a larger share of subscribers from SKT than from KT,…

Well, here’s a turnout for the books – Apple has relented, and committed to adding support for the Rich Communication Services (RCS) messaging framework to its iMessage service in 2024. This comes as the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) looms large, which could classify Apple as a ‘gatekeeper’ and force it to open up its app store and iMessage platforms, and as Google is grilled on its own dominant position in the US – much of which hinges on the default search engine agreement for Safari. Specifically, Apple is committed to integrating the RCS Universal Profile specification, as endorsed by the GSMA – using elements from both the 3GPP and the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA). It has said that “we…

Dish Network continues to be weighed down by loss of subscribers in its core pay TV business, raising fresh doubts about its ability to finance its ambitious 5G business plan. This year has seen many changes of direction and personnel in the wireless business, as well as Dish’s ailing satellite TV operations, but the would-be challenger MNO continues to innovate in terms of its network architecture. However, the risk – as for the other Open RAN innovator, Rakuten Mobile – is that Dish becomes a very valuable case study in how to deploy new architectures and leverage the cloud, but finds its funding and its competitive position inadequate to deliver commercial success. At least Rakuten Mobile’s parent has a strong…

Telcos almost incessantly talk about services as a salvation for flat or falling revenues, or are being told they should do it, but now Vodafone has committed to the therapy – in league with Accenture. As the world’s leading consulting firm by employee count, with 2023 revenue of $64.1 billion, Accenture can put flesh on Vodafone’s services skeleton, built so far around serving its own multinational subsidiaries in Europe, Africa, Asia and Oceania. The company has persuaded Accenture to stump up $150 million for a minority stake in a joint venture that will expand on its existing shared services unit called Vodafone Intelligent Solutions (VOIS), with a mission to “create a scaled, commercially driven and more efficient organization.” Vodafone CEO…

Cellnex, the largest pure-play tower operator in Europe, has gone through multiple changes of strategy in the past couple of years, as its massive acquisition drive finally came to a halt in the face of reduced opportunities and potential antitrust barriers. Earlier this year it changed CEO, and said it would focus on organic growth rather than M&A, including in relatively new areas such as private networks and active small cell RAN. But it may be changing its mind about these strategies. It has announced the sale of its main private networks business, Edzcom of Finland, to a more established player in this field, Boldyn. This revives a long-standing argument within the infrastructure community – whether towercos, despite their keen…

Having failed to break into the European legislature, at least for now, the ‘fair share’ debate has arrived in the US Senate, in a bill sponsored by three senators that proposes to enable the FCC to extract cash from ‘Big Tech’ providers. Ostensibly, the funds will be used to shore up the withered Universal Service Fund, but this is a landgrab – make no mistake. Some history is in order. The Universal Service Fund (USF) was set up in 1997, in the wake of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. It is funded by contributions from ISPs and has an annual budget of between $5 billion to $9 billion. The money is intended to support the 1996 Act’s target to provide…