11569 search results for Open RAN

Norwegian printed-label specialist Thinfilm announced a number of wins in the weeks leading up to MWC, so we decided to catch up on progress with Bill Cummings, the firm’s VP Marketing and Communications, who told us about the highly promising NFC RFID tags, which are being trialed in an increasing number of verticals across industries that create and package products. The NFC tags allow Thinfilm to create labels that can be tapped by a phone or reader to open a URL, or simply used as a tracking function within a supply chain. Tying into the cloud platforms that keep tabs on the tags, provided by IoT PaaS specialist Evrythng in the past, the complete solution provides a much more compelling…

Struggling in the consumer CPU and GPU markets, faced with seemingly unrelenting improvements from Intel and Nvidia respectively, AMD is placing more of a focus on areas outside its core desktop and laptop processors. Winning the contracts for both the PlayStation 4 and the new Xbox One was a notable victory, and eating into Intel’s absolutely dominant share of the server business has also been an area that AMD has cited for expansion. But the IoT (Internet of Things) represents another market opportunity for AMD that won’t require a complete overhaul. Lots of the terminals and video interfaces that consumers and businesses will use to interact with IoT deployments will require the sorts of processing power that AMD already provides,…

New network architectures are often promoted initially on the basis of cost savings, but then acquire more nuanced justifications as they near real deployments. Small cells, carrier WiFi and now virtualization: all major shifts which seemed to promise to slash operators’ capex budgets, but are now being adopted for a far wider range of reasons (often because the dramatic cost savings prove elusive in reality). The benefits of new architectures in terms of quality of experience and the ability to support new revenue-generating services often move to the heart of carrier thinking as deployment day approaches, and this was clear in discussions of virtualization and software-defined networking (SDN) at last week’s Mobile World Congress. Running network functions as virtual machines…

To date, the public cloud operators have been largely kept at arm’s length by telcos, citing their particularly demanding performance and service level requirements. But that is changing, as the cloud platforms invest heavily in proving their capabilities for the most demanding scenarios, and as the telcos look for improved economics in their quest to become digital companies. So Ericsson’s announcement, at MWC, of a global alliance with Amazon Web Services (AWS) is significant. The two giants aim to help operators drive new services like Internet of Things, apps development and big data analytics from the public cloud, opening up the hyperscale and the economics that over-the-top players enjoy. Ericsson said it will leverage AWS services to help its operator…

Apple has formally appealed the court ruling that the FBI obtained in February, which would force it to decrypt the iPhone at the heart of a terrorism investigation via a signed operating system update. Apple appears to have the support of a federal judge, who has ruled that the law the FBI is citing is not applicable. Whether the written ruling helps Apple win its appeal remains to be seen, but the vendor has appealed to a higher court and asked the original judge to vacate her ruling. Syed Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik killed 14 people and wounded 22 in a mass shooting on December 2 2015. There has been no concrete link to an external terrorist organization…

In the race for more and more spectrum, it was not surprise that both of the most promising sources of wireless capacity – unlicensed bands and high frequencies – were prominent themes at Mobile World Congress last week. The US may have been uncharacteristically ahead of the game in deploying LTE, but its spectrum policies could hardly be said to have been equally ground-breaking. Most first wave 4G has been rolled out in spectrum which was acquired and run in the traditional way – long term, exclusive licences in sub-3 GHz bands, bought for huge sums at auction. But in recent times, the US is becoming a leader in new thinking about spectrum too, both for expanding 4G services and…

In the first instalment of Wireless Watch’s Mobile World Congress special edition, we looked at a selection of operator trials of pre-5G networks and services. Now we turn our attention to the vendors’ roadmaps, and the most interesting insights they provided in Barcelona, into developments which may well find their way into future standard or de facto technologies. Nokia was the most aggressive of the big names in claiming to be 5G-ready – although it was a heavily overused term throughout the show. The Finnish vendor went a step further and said operators would be able to offer ‘5G’ services as early as 2017 using its new AirScale RAN platform (clearly angling for those operators which are promising ever-earlier ‘5G’…

As noted above, the RAN will often be the last area of the network where mobile operators introduce virtualization. Among the first, for many, is the evolved packet core (EPC), and a string of MNOs were talking up their vEPC trials in Barcelona last week. Vodafone has been using a vEPC from Affirmed Networks – also part of AT&T’s Domain 2.0 inner circle of suppliers – to support live machine-to-machine and connected car traffic, in Germany, Brazil, Spain and the US. Scott Petty, director of group enterprise technology at the carrier, said: “We are committed to optimizing all facets of our business, including our network infrastructure. After reviewing both legacy and emerging architectures, we decided for our EPC platforms that…

M&A, Strategies, Alliances Icon Labs and Micrium have partnered to pair Icon’s Floodgate Security Framework with Micrium’s µC/OS-III RTOS, aiming to provide a complete embedded security platform. ZTE and TeliaSonera have announced an IoT partnership, with an initial focus on telematics. Actility is joining the Cisco Partner Ecosystem, integrating its LoRa-based ThingPark platform. BlackBerry has acquired Encription, a cybersecurity consulting firm that will form the core of a new consulting offering that is being aimed at the IoT. Avnet Memec’s Silica subsidiary has launched its Visible Things evaluation and development platform, a blend of hardware and software. Visa is adapting its Visa Ready mobile payments platform to accommodate IoT applications. Microsoft is acquiring Xamarin, the company that brought native Android…

One of the key debates around 5G is whether it will be a clean break with past generations, or an evolutionary change, built on some elements which are already part of 4G. Most operators, weary of major migrations with uncertain ROI, favor the latter view, and believe that the parallel shift to IT-centric architectures such as virtualization and SDN will enable them to move in a gradual, as-required way towards 5G, with the software-driven platforms allowing old and new technologies to work together seamlessly. Telefonica is perhaps the best poster child for this approach. While other 5G frontrunners are heavily focused on getting to the newest technologies as quickly as possible, the Spanish group is running major trials, in parallel,…

Fresh from the acquisition of leading UK mobile operator EE, BT says it will be in the forefront of 5G deployment in the country, probably around 2020. More immediately, the telco avoided the threatened compulsory break-up which might have emerged from a recently completed review of the communications market by regulator Ofcom. One of the options under consideration was the separation of its wholesale infrastructure arm, Openreach, to boost broadband competition and to ensure that EE did not get favourable access to mobile backhaul lines. But despite demands for that from BT quad play rivals such as Sky and TalkTalk, as well as Vodafone, Ofcom has held back from structural separation, for now at least. However, the regulator ordered changes…

While NFV (Network Functions Virtualization) has been embraced at lightning speed, in telco industry terms, as the core framework for carrier virtualization, many concerns have remained over other apects of the technology, and how interoperable NFV-enabled systems really would be. ETSI, the architect of NFV, has taken one important step to addressing these fears with the creation of another initiative, the Open Source MANO (OSM) Community. With 23 initial members, this group will create a multivendor open source software stack for service creation and orchestration on virtualized networks. The founding participants are operators Telefónica, BT, Telekom Austria, Telenor, Korea Telecom, SK Telecom, Sprint and Telmex; plus Canonical, Intel, Mirantis, RIFT.io, Benu Networks, Brocade, Comptel, Dell, Indra, Metaswitch, RADWare, Red Hat,…

Mobile World Congress saw some strange role reversals this year, especially when it came to the uneasy relationships between web giants and mobile operators. Google lent much-needed support to RCS (Rich Communications Services), an MNO technology which was meant to fend off over-the-top challengers; while Deutsche Telekom dismissed it, with CTO Bruno Jacobfeuerborn saying: “RCS was much too complex. This is something we shouldn’t do again. We need to focus on simplifying services for consumers” (usually, surely, the argument made by the web players). Then there was Facebook, whose recent setback in India, where Facebook Basics has fallen foul of net neutrality rules, sprung from trying to work more closely with MNOs, rather than in the OTT free-for-all the social…

Small cells are a familiar fixture in Mobile World Congress post-match analysis. The narrative is usually that the technology is poised to take off, but hasn’t quite got there yet. This year was different, partly because the numbers really are mounting up, especially in the enterprise market, but more importantly, because the small cell discussion is no longer about one specific platform or access point design. Instead, it is about a range of wider 4G and 5G trends, which will define the new generation of networks, and are heavily enabled by small cells. Those cells may be traditional integrated mini-bases stations, distributed radio or distributed antenna designs, or miniature Cloud-RANs. What they will all have in common will be short…

The 5G talk in Barcelona last week was far more grounded in reality than 2015’s dreams, but still walked the whole line from concrete roadmaps to pure fantasy. On the other side of the world, something even more important for 5G evolution was going on – the Internationl Telecommunications Union (ITU) was holding the first meeting of its 5G group, ITU-R Working Party 5D, in Beijing. The group will set the core specifications for the IMT-2020 standards, the official label for 5G, drawing on the work of standards bodies and industry efforts round the world. The deadline to submit the key definitions of proposed candidate technologies is June, though it remains to be seen whether there are alternatives to the…

These were the biggest themes this year in Barcelona – no big surprises on the topic list, though there were plenty of unexpected twists within each area, many of them concerned with unexpected new alliances (Qualcomm joining the rebranded Open Interconnect Consortium; Facebook luring Deutsche Telekom and SK Telecom into its Telecom Infra Project). In Wireless Watch’s two special MWC editions, published today and on Friday, we distil the essence of each of these big topics from a mass of announcements, debates and hype. 5G: Inevitably at the center of serious discussions and marketing hype, though lent a touch of reality by the start of the first meeting of the ITU’s IMT-2020 working party, which will specify frameworks and assess…

Anite pitches Virtual Test Drive to connected car devs Here pushes enterprise mapping, claims 80% presence in new cars Intercede announces Solacia Android security partnership Accelerite finds Aepona IoT PaaS diamond in the rough oneM2M warns industry of data silo threat MYCOM OSI aims for IoT expansion for its networking software Anite pitches Virtual Test Drive to connected car devs: Over in Hall 6, we met Anite, and spoke to Richard Jacklin, the company’s Business Development Director in the Device and Infrastructure Testing wing. Anite’s key focus is in the wireless network testing and management systems market, with over 20-years’ experience. Now with the IoT, Anite is expanding into providing specialized testing platforms for automotive players looking to create repeatable…