11569 search results for Open RAN

There’s been a spike in the number of hostile articles in the consumer-facing press singling out cloud-augmented consumer electronics in the past few weeks. It threatens IoT adoption in the consumer markets, but it’s something that the industry is going to have to carefully negotiate in the coming years. The most high profile example is that of Nest and its Revolv hub. The company decided to shut down the Revolv smart home hub servers, without offering a discount or trade-in option for consumers to use to transition. Effectively, they were flipping the off-switch, and leaving the customers in the lurch. The story didn’t do Nest’s public image any favors, and this week has seen a continuation on the same theme,…

The prpl Foundation has announced the launch of prplHypervisor, which it is billing as the industry’s first light-weight open source hypervisor – designed to provide security through separation for IoT devices. The group argues that the IoT needs such a technology due to the fatal security flaws that plague the IoT – and it’s hard to disagree with that assessment. Whether or not prpl’s becomes the standard, there are going to be millions of devices that will require a hypervisor or containerization engine to manage the software and applications that need to run at the network edge. prpl, the group that backs the MIPS processor technology that is pushed in the market by Imagination Technologies, will likely advocate the use…

After being acquired by Audi, BMW and Mercedes-Benz, and fending off interest from China, Here has committed itself to an internal restructuring of sorts – as its new owners look to embrace the opportunities presented by the wider IoT market. The company hosted RIoT in its Berlin offices, where we dived into its plans and strategies for the looming turbulence in the connected car and IoT markets. It was reassuring to hear that Here’s new owners saw it as an asset to help keep the likes of Google and Apple at bay. Following the acquisition, the company is undergoing an internal restructuring, with a focus on addressing the IoT opportunity, bolstered by a large developer community driving a horizontal offering…

The reports that Huawei is building its own smartphone operating system continue to circulate. Initially, these sound interesting – the Chinese company has already created a stripped-down OS, LiteOS, for low power connected things, and has intensive R&D projects around virtual reality user interfaces. So perhaps a platform spanning all manner of connected devices and new experiences beckons? Then we learn that Huawei has hired a former Apple designer, Abigail Brody, presumably to work on this project; and that it also involved an ex-Nokia development team based in Finland. This immediately sounds less radical. Of course, Apple revolutionized the mobile OS and user experience, but its concepts are now the norm across the industry. For the next generation, which must…

Operators are embarking on densification and Cloud-RAN programs, which will require extensive fiber resources as they go commercial over the coming few years. This is creating new opportunities for the companies which have invested in fiber networks, from established telcos to specialist providers. All eyes in the UK are on BT, since its merger with leading MNO EE. This reawakened debate over the future of its Openreach wholesale division, with Vodafone and others querying whether BT could really guarantee that EE would not gain any preferential access to fiber for backhaul. Although regulator Ofcom stopped short of splitting off Openreach when it conducted a review of BT earlier in the year, it made it clear the option was still on…

Despite the hopeful signs coming from Huawei and Samsung, the smartphone is increasingly just a commodity. Now, the covetous glances of gadget lovers are turned elsewhere, to home hubs and virtual reality devices and, of course, driverless cars. These cars were a major theme of last week’s headlines, from the tragic (the Tesla accident) to the over-optimistic (Alibaba’s attempt to resurrect its smartphone operating system, Aliyun, as a connected car OS). And the European Commission was active here too, bringing together a host of organizations to a super-club focused on connected and driverless vehicles. The work program does not even kick off until next year, and the number of bodies involved almost guarantees this effort will spend plenty of money…

Intel, predictably enough given its exit from the smartphone system-on-chip market, is defocusing on its Android developments. Even projects focused on x86-based Android tablets are in question as the company goes through a massive cost-cutting program, which will involve 12,000 job losses. However, this does not mean the once-close partnership between Intel and Google will loosen, any more than Qualcomm has gone cold on its Microsoft alliance because Windows Phone is a wash-out. Intel has made a surprising success of the Chrome OS cloud PC market, and its device-centric efforts with Google are now likely to focus on Chrome – which is taking an increasingly strategic role in the search giant’s strategy anyway. Intel has not commented on specific details…

Iliad’s bid to acquire assets of Italian mobile operator Wind sent shares in incumbent Telecom Italia spiralling downwards by almost 10% as shareholders braced themselves for market disruption similar to that inflicted on France by Iliad’s Free Mobile launch. However, the Italian market is very different to the French one which Free entered in 2012, and the company will have challenges in replicating its French successs – not least a possible legal challenge from fixed-line provider Fastweb, which was also after the Wind/3 assets, and has asked the European Commission to probe the viability of the Iliad plan. Iliad, the French cable/wireless group, has agreed to acquire a portfolio of base stations, spectrum and other assets, which Vimpelcom-owned Wind proposes…

SK Telecom is one of the MNOs which is best equipped to adapt to the new realities of the mobile internet game, and even to continue to drive change. One of its advantages over less experienced operators and vendors is that all its ideas have to pass the test of working in probably the toughest mobile and broadband user base in the world. Another is that it has a highly established ecosystem of vendors and partners, and a significant ability to direct their developments. The operator, together with NTT Docomo, KT and China Mobile, has been experimenting with different approaches to Cloud-RAN as well as broader software-defined networking (SDN) activities. Now it is claiming a world first demonstration of ‘software-defined…

Facebook has outdone even Google recently, in its efforts to shake up the mobile industry and accelerate the delivery of broadband services (and its revenue generators) to the entire planet. This is no longer just about using balloons and new spectrum to push affordable wireless access to underserved communities. It is about blowing apart the traditional mobile network supply chain, and the way those networks are deployed. First came TIP (Telecoms Infrastructure Project), a telecoms network version of its Open Compute Project to drive commoditized, massively scalable platforms. Then came its own R&D projects geared to affordable, easily deployable, but powerful open RANs, Terragraph and Aries. And now it has announced OpenCellular, which brings the two ideas together in many…

Never before have events coincided so neatly to demonstrate the gap between mobile operators’ thinking about 5G, and how future networks will really be deployed for disruptive effect. While Europe’s leading MNOs were presenting a backwards-looking ‘5G Manifesto’ to the European Commission, veiling pleas for net neutrality special treatment with promises of 5G build-out, Facebook was announcing an open source approach to the mobile network, OpenCellular – part of a wider trend which could rip apart the network cost base and the operators’ and 3GPP vendors’ cosy world. Various developments last week highlighted how MNOs are stuck in their traditional thought processes, to potentially fatal effect. This is clear in many critical areas – investment/ROI models; pricing of new services;…

Oracle stands accused of failing the Java community, pulling funding and developer resources from the Enterprise Edition of its Java language – a core component of many internet-based systems, which Oracle acquired when it bought Sun Microsystems six years ago. Members of the Oracle developer community have said that work on Java has slowed in the past months, and for the Enterprise Edition (EE), work has come to a standstill. Talk of forking Java EE has been made, which would see developers essentially copy the code and continue their own development on this forked version, while Oracle presumably lets its own version waste. The company has been silent on the matter, and Gier Magnusson, a member of the Java Community…

‘Never hit a man when he’s down’ is not a motto which applies in business. Apple is in a down phase – by its own standards, if nobody else’s – and the blows are flying. It is under siege from Chinese patent lawsuits, and the old issue of its in-app purchasing policies has raised its ugly head again, with Spotify leading the charge this time. Apple has faced such problems before, but from a position of almost unquestioned dominance of the smartphone space, which gave it the freedom to behave almost as it wished. Now, with iPhone sales slowing and Chinese rivals taking market share, Apple may have to listen harder to its critics. Music streaming service Spotify has sent…

Mobile operators are always calling for more spectrum to be made available – until an option emerges which is not under their control. In the US, the major MNOs are predictably hostile to arguments that the high frequency bands identified for 5G should all be unlicensed or shared, rather than licensed in the traditional way, a process in which the established operators have incumbent advantage. Facebook is vocal in making the case that 5G, to succeed in its aims, must support more flexible approaches to spectrum usage, so it enables a far wider range of services and providers. As Ovum consultant Mark Newman told last week’s 5G World conference in London: “If you think 5G is going to be radically…

The 3GPP may have finalized its NB-IoT specifications (see separate item), but one of the rival technologies in unlicensed spectrum, LoRa, is already pushing into networks with national, commercial coverage, and has attracted heavyweight support from Cisco. The fact that large cellular operators – in this case SK Telecom of Korea and KPN of The Netherlands – are deploying LoRa at scale, even with a 3GPP alternative on the horizon, suggests that the unlicensed spectrum LPWANs (low power wide area networks) will play a significant role in the future IoT – and not just for operators which lack access to licensed spectrum. For some services which do not require the security and guaranteed QoS of licensed bands, technologies like LoRa…

Orange is reported to be planning an investment in fledgling connectivity marketplace BandwidthX, signalling that its services may be on their way to Europe. BandwidthX has pioneered a marketplace system for WiFi, which matches hotspot owners to those needing capacity and calculates a market fee. The company came to life on the prospect of WiFi offload, and said – when we first met its executives in 2013 – that it was talking to all the US tier one operators. No wonder – such a marketplace could radically change the economics of using WiFi either for mobile data offload, or as a primary wireless connection in a WiFi-first model. It allows operators to pay just for the capacity they need, rather…

In the week of Brexit and Iceland, a London event perhaps did not need any more reminders about falling behind the rest of the world – but a final, unavoidable conclusion from last week’s 5G World was that the east Asian operators, always very technically progressive, are also in a league of their own when it comes to detailed deployment plans too. NTT Docomo, China Mobile, KT and other trailblazers are not just showing off the smartest semi-proprietary technologies – they are close to a commercially viable model for 5G too. But not before they have sufficient 4G scale on which to build the next wave – which in China Mobile’s case is almost mind-boggling. In 2011 the operator hit…