11569 search results for Open RAN

The smart car was always going to be a major focus at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), though the most-hyped announcement, of a self-driving car partnership between Google and Ford, failed to materialize. The rumored alliance would have been a major boost for Google which, like other wireless giants, is trying to negotiate the right balance of power between Silicon Valley and Detroit in the connected and driverless car platforms. Fields emphasized the difficult fact that the IT companies do not an inalienable right to run the smart car sector, describing Ford as “an auto and mobility company” in equal measure, and announcing that the firm’s test fleet of fully autonomous vehicles now numbered 30. But there was no…

Google is to replace its own Java library implementations with Oracle’s open source alternative, openJDK, in the upcoming Android N. The change of direction, presumably sparked by recent reversals in Google’s five-year legal battle with Oracle, could loosen the search giant’s control of its operating system and even delay the appearance of the new release, argue some industry players. When Oracle filed suit in 2011, accusing Google of Java patents and copyright in Android and its own Java virtual machine, it was seen as an attempt to enhance the power of Oracle’s own Java platform in the mobile world, rather than letting Google entirely dominate smartphone software. Now, the database firm may get its chance to leverage Java in the…

It is unlikely that 2016 will see any single winner emerging to dominate wireless connectivity for the Internet of Things. In the wide area, the 3GPP-backed initiatives – NB-IoT, EC-GSM and LTE-M – will gain momentum, but there will still be an important role for options in unlicensed spectrum, such as LoRaWAN. In the smart home, there will be continued jostling between the various WPAN (wireless personal area network) protocols, as well as higher layer would-be standards like AllJoyn and the Open Interconnect Consortium’s IoTivity. Rather than the hugely diverse IoT uniting around a single platform in each market, convergence is likely to come in certain layers which can then allow multiple standards to interoperate. One will be high up…

The need to control not just the processor itself, but the whole surrounding software and connectivity platform, was very clear in Intel’s CES launches and keynotes. While the PC and smartphone processors or SoCs have been premium products, in semiconductor terms, in the IoT the hardware will be very commoditized, with the exception of a few very specialized components. This change in pattern has seen ARM creating its broad mBed OS and TrustZone ecosystems, and Intel making similar moves to offer a top-to-bottom stack, from silicon to connectivity, security to APIs (application programming interfaces). Intel is moving well beyond processors in its IoT roadmap, as CEO Brian Krzanich made clear in his CES keynote, which focused heavily on full ecosystems…

Samsung Electronics has firmed up its mHealth (mobile health) position this week, following the announcement that it is launching an all-in-one advanced system logic chip. Samsung calls this the Bio-Processor and its current focus is towards the wearables market for the quantified self. There are plenty of popular consumer products on the market that measure body functions such as pulse – like the Fitbit, Jawbone and Nike’s FuelBand, and of course many rather inaccurate ones too, at much cheaper price points. Samsung wants to take its Bio-Processor to the next level for the health-conscious consumer by measuring body fat, skeletal muscle mass, heart rate, skin temperature, and stress level (sweatiness). It’s likely that the Bio-Processor will be used in conjunction…

The likely outcome of the smart home standards race – a head-to-head between Bluetooth LE (BLE) and a unified 802.15.4-based protocol – came a step closer this week, as the ZigBee Alliance announced extended cooperation with rival Thread Group. This sets the stage for Google to achieve its goal of uniting those two ecosystems, bringing together the two main wireless mesh platforms built on the IEEE 802.15.4 physical layer. Google is the thrust behind the Thread Alliance, which was set up in July 2014 to promote the protocol – an implementation of the 6LoWPAN standard devised by Google subsidiary Nest – as the de facto technology for smart home personal area networks (PANs). As such, it was looking to influence…

M&A, Strategies, Alliances Truphone has acquired CoSwitched and its IoT Connectivity Management Platform, to add to Truphone’s global MNO business, which is turning its eye towards IoT customers. PTC is acquiring Kepware for $100m, an industrial software development company that supplies communications tools to industrial customers and factories. Thinfilm has won a $500k grant from the European Commission to develop an open source API platform for connected labelling on packaged goods. The TagItSmart project will see Thinfilm pair its NFC-enabled tags with technology from Evrythng, Siemens and Unilever. Industrial PC vendor Adlink is acquiring PrismTech for $16.6m, to add the Vortex computing platform to its hardware portfolio. Software Amazon has announced that its AWS IoT PaaS is in general release,…

M&A, Strategies, Alliances Industrial PC vendor Adlink is acquiring PrismTech for $16.6m, to add the Vortex computing platform to its hardware portfolio. Semtech has partnered with STMicroelectronics, to allow ST to build LoRa chips for LPWAN equipment. ST joins Microchip as Semtech LoRa partners, with Semtech licensing its designs. IBM is establishing a 1,000-person cognitive computing campus in Munich, the first in a series of Watson-powered innovation centers. Afero has emerged from stealth-mode, with a cloud platform and BLE module that it is targeting at developers for almost any vertical. Philips has been forced to reverse a firmware update to its Hue platform that was intended to lockout third-party bulbs. Vocal protests forced a climb-down from the new DRM stance,…

Bitcoin as a cryptocurrency has had a very varied history, but the technology that powers it quickly came to the attention of technology and financial giants – which recognized the capabilities of the irrefutable system of public ledgers, for managing transactional processes. This week, this blockchain technology has received a significant boost this week, thanks to the founding of the Open Ledger Project. Housed within the Linux Foundation, the full list of members reads: Accenture, ANZ Bank, Cisco, CLS, Credits, Deutsche Börse, Digital Asset Holdings, DTCC, Fujitsu Limited, IC3, IBM, Intel, J.P. Morgan, London Stock Exchange Group, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG), R3, State Street, SWIFT, VMware and Wells Fargo. Notably absent is Samsung, which has previously partnered with IBM…

Mesh networking frontrunner ZigBee has announced a new collaboration with the energy harvesting EnOcean protocol, which will see the two alliances behind the protocols collaborate to further the goal of a self-powered IoT network that is far less dependent on batteries – where light switches can generate enough power from the button press to transmit to the bulb or a thermometer can harvest enough ambient thermal energy to report to a HVAC unit via ZigBee. The ZigBee Alliance and the EnOcean Alliance will work together to enmesh the EnOcean Equipment Profiles (EEPs) for sub-GHz networking with ZigBee 3.0 – the newest iteration of the ZigBee standard, which unites the previously disparate profiles, and adds support for batteryless designs. This week…

A Nokia executive recently attracted headlines by blogging that non-cellular IoT networks like Sigfox and LoRa would be the new WiMAX, doomed to irrelevancy once the LTE juggernaut gets moving. Just a couple of months later, LTE is definitely on the move, accelerating the creation of LTE-based standards for low power wide area (LPWA) networks. But those who think this is destined to be a 3GPP-only world are making the wrong comparison. WiMAX did indeed become marginalized because it left its unlicensed spectrum implementations behind and sought to beard the LTE giants right in their lair. But that did not entirely unify the fourth generation of wireless networks, in which WiFi has played an increasingly significant role. As long as…

Huawei has made its entrance into the IoT smart home market by revealing the first device manufacturers to run its LiteOS lightweight operating system. In addition, the Chinese giant has also unveiled a new communications standard platform, HiLink – which could cause some challenges for AllJoyn and IoTivity. While Huawei will provide the communication framework for devices, the device will come from Chinese smart home technology companies Haier and Broadlink – with a few more suppliers apparently in on it. LiteOS, under Huawei’s sub-brand Honor, is an open source SDK and Huawei claims it is faster and smaller than other IoT operating systems currently on the market – at about one quarter of the size. The open source HiLink platform…

Almost four years after emerging from stealth mode, Cisco-backed Cloud-RAN start-up Altiostar has announced general availability of its Virtualized RAN offering for LTE. Commercial availability comes a year after the platform was launched, boasting Ethernet fronthaul to lower the cost and complexity of deploying this architecture. Like other vRAN designs, Altiostar offers stripped-down cell site equipment, while running most of the network functions in software on off-the-shelf server or router hardware. It offers macrocell and microcell eNodeBs; intelligent RRHs; and virtualized baseband units (vBBUs) which run as virtual network functions on off-the-shelf hardware and a Linux/OpenStack software platform. Clusters of RRHs are connected to the vBBU on standard Ethernet over any medium including line of sight and NLOS microwave, millimeter…

Nokia has now completed the sale of its Here mapping unit to a consortium led by German car manufacturers Audi, BMW, and Mercedes (Daimler-Benz), for $3.1bn. In 2016, it will be interesting to see in which direction the automakers push Here – which currently claims to supply the in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) systems for four out of every five vehicles. The most immediate conclusion is that the purchase was made in order to further the group’s ambitions to drive the development of autonomous cars, which require high definition maps in order to navigate roads safely. There aren’t many choices on the market for these at the moment, so paying $3.1bn to bring that potential functionality inhouse makes a lot of sense,…

A Nokia executive recently attracted headlines by blogging that non-cellular IoT networks like Sigfox and LoRa would be the new WiMAX, doomed to irrelevancy once the LTE juggernaut gets moving. Just a couple of months later, LTE is definitely on the move, accelerating the creation of LTE-based standards for low power wide area (LPWA) networks. But those who think this is destined to be a 3GPP-only world are making the wrong comparison. WiMAX did indeed become marginalized because it left its unlicensed spectrum implementations behind and sought to beard the LTE giants right in their lair. But that did not entirely unify the fourth generation of wireless networks, in which WiFi has played an increasingly significant role. As long as…

Google continues to chip away at the traditional mobile operator business model in the US, this time by extending its Project Fi multi-network MVNO service to data-only devices such as tablets, including iPads. Using a free data-only SIM card ordered from their Project Fi online account page, customers can access cellular networks at a flat rate of $10 per gigabyte. The option is only available, for now at least, to those who already subscribe to the main Fi service, which charges $20 a month for unlimited domestic talk and text, unlimited international texts, WiFi tethering to use the phone as a hotspot, and cellular access in more than 120 countries. The tablet cannot be used as a hotspot. Up to…

Unlike Hewlett-Packard, eBay, Yahoo and, before them, Motorola and Nokia, Qualcomm has resisted the pressure from shareholders to break itself in two. For the third time in its history, it has considered the option of separating its licensing and chip technology arms, and has decided its whole is still worth more than the sum of its parts – a conclusion which, despite the firm’s rising antitrust travails, is surely correct. Since July, Qualcomm has been going through a strategic review process, sparked by rising market pressures, the firm’s worst stock performance since the global crash, and the activist investor Jana Partners. At the company’s board meeting this week, it decided not to go for the most extreme option, a break-up.…

The mobile device supply chain has been transformed in the past couple of years, and will continue to be so. It is being reshaped by the falling margins and price wars of the competitive and commoditizing smartphone sector, and by a market which is polarized between two Herculean tasks. At one end, companies like Samsung and Apple need to assert as much control as possible over their components and suppliers in order to differentiate themselves, creating value while also keeping costs low. At the other, a rising band of regional and international players need to achieve ultra-low costs in order to take part in the pricing bloodbath at the commodity end, and still emerge with some profits. In the middle…

If there’s one new year’s prediction which will certainly come true in 2016, it’s that – with 5G looming – most vendors will be unveiling, or at least polishing up, a new network architecture. Virtualization, software-defined networking (SDN) and applications-driven platforms will be common factors, but as the buzzwords become familiar and operators start to make real world plans, there will need to be some firmer details of how the next generation mobile network is really going to look and behave. Of course, another factor in 2016 will be the emergence of combined roadmaps from Nokia and Alcatel-Lucent, once their merger is fully finalized. In the whole area of turning mobile carrier networks into software platforms, Nokia has, in our…