11569 search results for Open RAN

It now seems likely that, as reported and analyzed last week, Yahoo will look to sell its core web and content activities rather than spin off its valuable stake in Alibaba. Most of the companies which might be interested in these assets would be looking to boost existing mobile content and advertising platforms, putting Verizon and AT&T in the forefront of speculation, along with other web players such as Microsoft or Twitter. Verizon CFO Fran Shammo went as far as to say the company would be interested in exploring a deal for Yahoo, if it did indeed come up for sale. “If we see there is a strategic fit and it makes sense for our shareholders and we can return…

Nokia and ARM are at the heart of a bid to revamp the ageing TCP/IP stack to make it better suited to networks that need to operate at very high speed and/or low latency. Among the plethora of industry alliances at the intersection of telecoms, IT and IP, this looks like one with a genuine contribution to make to the evolution of future standards, including 5G. The network connection itself is only a part of the total telecoms platform these days, and in the evolution of 5G, it will be critical that the 3GPP’s core standards are closely aligned to work being done in the IP, cloud and data areas too. LTE may be IP-based, but it was a complicated…

M&A, Strategies, Alliances GE has said that Quirky, the smart home startup it acquired in 2009, has damaged its reputation, after Quirky has filed for bankruptcy. GE is currently undergoing an extensive reorganization, which includes selling off its gigantic real estate portfolio. Software Microsoft has added predictive maintenance to its Azure IoT Suite platform. PrismTech has announced its Vortex 2.0 data sharing platform, adding the Vortex Fog suite to allow real-time data connectivity between distributed low-latency fog computing applications and the cloud-hosted applications. Apple has open-sourced its Swift programming language, under an Apache 2.0 license. Hardware Lattice Semiconductor has launched a new FPGA development platform, based on its iCE40 FPGA, which the company claims is 60% smaller than alternative MCUs,…

Following the launch of the OpenFog Consortium, the new HP Enterprise division has announced a push into the fog itself, with the launch of its new Edgeline portfolio. The new products aim to process more data at the network edge, alleviating the central cloud applications from backhauling and processing data that may not need to make the trip to the core, or for data that needs to be processed and acted upon in real-time and consequently can’t afford the latency inherent in cloud computing. Announced at its Discover conference in London, alongside a mobile-first WiFi platform for its Aruba WiFi subsidiary, both of these flesh out HPE’s strategy of collecting, sharing, analyzing and managing all the rising tide of data…

Industrial software startup PrismTech has launched v2.0 of its Vortex data-sharing platform, with a major update to provide greater capabilities for edge-network computing – known as fog computing. The new Vortex Fog feature promises secure real-time data connectivity between low latency Fog applications communicating with each other at the network edge and cloud-hosted applications. The update comes on the heels of the launch of the OpenFog Consortium, which saw ARM, Cisco, Dell, Intel, Microsoft, and Princeton University’s engineering school form a new industry body to advance the technology that powers fog computing – so called because the computational processes take place closer to the source (ground) than the cloud (sky). HP Enterprise has also announced a similar strategy this week…

The internet has been vocal in its negativity about delivery drones since the idea was first announced around two years ago – this week is no different as Amazon has taken another step towards “realizing its vision” by revealing some concept models of its PrimeAir drones – aptly placed on Cyber Monday. The drone starring in Amazon’s first advertisement sports multiple propulsion systems – a pair of propellers on each side to lift the UAV up to “almost 400 feet”, and a rear-mounted propeller to drive it forwards. Amazon says the drone can fly for 15 miles, and claims it will “deliver packages to customers around the world in 30 minutes or less,” – but that’s about as detailed as…

Telefonica has outlined a five-year plan to become an ‘Online Telco’, under the new slogan ‘We choose it all’. Executive chairman Cesar Alierta presented the plan, which is comparable to Orange’s Essentials 2020, at the firm’s Madrid headquarters, and his address was streamed to all 125,000 employees across 20 countries in Europe and Latin America. The plan is based on six foundations. Three relate to Telefonica’s value proposition – outstanding connectivity, integrated or multiplay offerings, and a differentiated user experience. The other three are ‘facilitators’ of new digital services and strategies and consist of big data and innovation, end-to-end digitalisation, and capital allocation and simplification. Telefonica has many pressures – a huge debt load, the ongoing economic slowdown in southern…

Batteries have consistently lagged far behind other key components of computational systems to the extent that many large electronics firms and even academic institutions almost gave up on research in the field during the early noughties. While progress in storage and CPUs was explosive, keeping up with or even exceeding the curve defined by Moore’s Law, battery improvement has been iterative with increases in performance being soaked up by ever greater demands on power, from consumer electronic devices such as smartphones and tablets. Instead attention turned to efficient power saving, for example turning off system components when not in use, but since that did not on its own do enough, there has been renewed interest in battery technology over the…

It must be depressing to invest vast sums in world-leading network deployments and still only have enough capacity to last for the next four years. Yet that is the situation in which Verizon finds itself, according to calculations by analysts at New Street Research. Verizon is hardly unique – for most MNOs in advanced mobile economies, building out 4G is a game of running just to keep up. That is why, if mobile data usage is to continue to grow at its current rate – and there is little reason why it should not – operators need to accelerate their adoption of the new network architectures which will increase capacity in a more affordable and targeted manner. Small cells, fully…

Two years ago, Samsung set out its strategy to retain leadership in smartphones by investing more heavily in software and its own chips. Its plans have been only partially successful, as highlighted by a reshuffle at the top of the mobile business unit, with the elevation of a software-driven executive, Koh Dong Jin. Shin Jong Kyun, or JK Shin, steps back as head of the division, though he retains his co-CEO role for Samsung Electronics. The changes reflect growing desperation about Samsung’s smartphone business, which faces its lowest operating profit in four years in 2015, according to analysts. While the semiconductor business has been a source of growth and profit in recent quarters, and enabled Samsung to differentiate its Galaxy…

Cisco seized the high ground when it came to catchy slogans for edge-based computing, when it dubbed this distributed approach ‘fog computing’ (fog being closer to the ground/source than cloud) and then extending that into ‘mist computing’ (even more diluted), which involves processing at the extreme edge or the device itself. All this sits well with Cisco’s view of the world, founded as that is on the distributed, ubiquitous Internet and all the network cogs that make that happen. Cisco predicts that 40% of IoT-created data will be processed in the fog by 2018 while over 25 of its network products are now enabled with its fog or edge data processing platform, IOx. And also true to the company’s historic…

One month into its new life as an independent firm, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) held its first conference, Discover 2015, in London. The highlights were a mobile-first enterprise platform from WiFi subsidiary Aruba, and a suite of products called Edgeline, which allow significant proportions of IoT data to be processed and filtered near its source via gateways at the edge of the network. Both these flesh out HPE’s strategy of collecting, sharing, analyzing and managing all the rising tide of data that an enterprise or vertical organization produces. That involves integrating network, hardware and software offerings into a single framework which, while supporting open standards for connectivity, data formats and SDN (software-defined networking), still makes it very hard for a…

The big enterprise players are finally finding their rightful role in the mobile and IoT worlds. They have cast off their ill-advised attempts to provide devices and are building strategies around processing the data from those devices. Hewlett Packard’s acquisition of Palm and Cisco’s of Flip related to a time when these firms wanted to control the mobile end points as well as the networks and the cloud platforms. Both efforts have been closed down amid major corporate reorganizations, HP’s involving the break-up of the company. Even IBM is making painful adjustments which have involved the sale of far more well-established device businesses. Now that millions of mobile smartphones and tablets are morphing into billions of connected devices and sensors…

M&A, Strategies, Alliances Volkswagen appears to be using Google Glass on its assembly lines, although wouldn’t explicitly name the device itself. The “3D smart glasses” will be used as a HUD information portal, as well as a barcode scanner, with voice control. 30 staff are using the device currently, with plans to expand it to the rest of the divisions. Nokia Networks and Oi Brasil are launching an LTE IoT development lab in Brazil, expected to open in Q1 2016. Software Telecoms software provider Redknee has launched its Connected Suite software platform, aimed at utilities, transportation, and connected homes. The platform can handle payments, and Redknee has previously worked with Elster to create a prepayment solution for customers to use…

The Mexico AWS Spectrum auction, which is part of a major shake-up of Latin America’s second largest telecoms market, will start on February 15. This will come just after the sale of 700 MHz spectrum, which Mexico is reserving for a shared 4G network, and which it will award from January 29. Mexico’s young and aggressive telecoms regulator Ifetel pledged this week that it would clear the 700 MHz airwaves by the middle of December, well ahead of the sale. This process will start on December 17 in six states. In some countries, mobile operators have faced a long wait between acquiring licences and being able to deploy networks, because of phased or delayed programs to move incumbent broadcaster users.…

The Internet of Things (IoT) is splintered between a huge number of industry groups, all jostling to influence standards, and consolidation is bound to follow. That will sometimes see technologies which were once regarded as cutting edge, being swallowed up by the shiny new alliances of the IoT, and that is happening in the smart home environment, with the acquisition of the UPnP Forum by the Open Interconnect Consortium (OIC) The OIC was set up last year to define a standard way for embedded devices to discover one another and connect. The UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) Forum was established 15 years ago with a similar aim in mind, but with different technologies and use cases at its fingertips –…

Samsung Electronics has unveiled two IoT access points, claiming two industry firsts – the smallest outdoor mesh AP (supporting BLE and ZigBee), and the first AP that combines WiFi, Bluetooth LE and ZigBee. Emerging from trials in shopping malls, Samsung has opted to branch outdoors with network hardware that should enable users to build out consumer-facing IoT (internet of things) networks. This sees the Korean vendor keeping its options open in the thorny world of short range IoT connections. All three options run in the 2.4 GHz ISM band, and Samsung said that it had developed interference management technology, to prevent the protocols from clashing during simultaneous communications. Bluetooth is nearly ubiquitous in smartphones, and for mass market IoT offerings,…