11569 search results for Open RAN

One reason why smartphone-based payments have not lived up to their considerable hype is that most deployments have been confined to one country at a time, led by the US. Apple Pay will take a significant step towards global relevance if, as reported, it launches in China early next year, a move which could throw its emerging challengers onto the back foot. Although Apple Pay undoubtedly injected some new life into the disappointing US m-payments sector when it went live last year, and has since come to some additional countries, it has not created the revolution some had expected in the way we pay for goods and services. While simpler mobile money systems, often SMS-based, have genuinely opened new horizons…

Mobile operators are facing a familiar timing dilemma when it comes to smart cities. They can target wide area IoT applications aggressively, but make technology compromises, or they can wait for a year or two until it becomes clearer which of the many network choices will have staying power. Or they can keep all their options open, as Orange is doing in France. Despite the buzz around low power wide area (LPWA) applications like smart lighting and traffic management, most MNOs are playing a wait and see game, but with other players moving into the field – including broadband providers, private networks and city authorities themselves – they risk wasting a significant opportunity. Those non-MNOs are, of course, forced to…

As always, the World Radio Conference has had to attempt a difficult balancing act between competing claims on spectrum resources, and that gets harder on each occasion, particularly as the mobile industry’s demands for ever-greater broadband capacity grow. While recognising the social and economic impact of mobile broadband, the WRC also has to be mindful of the needs of other users. And while this year’s conference did not have a specific remit to examine 5G spectrum options, the likely explosion in capacity which that will drive was the ever-present elephant in the room. Decisions made for current mobile broadband platforms will have their impact on 5G too. In some countries, the now-harmonized 700 MHz and 3.5 GHz bands will be…

So after all the months and even years of preparation, lobbying and manoeuvring for position, the ITU’s World Radio Conference 2015 (WRC-15) ended on Friday after more than three weeks of deliberations. It achieved some delicate balancing acts and most of the interest groups which had been most at loggerheads in the run-up to the event pronounced themselves satisfied. There might have been a moment of hope, as each group put out its triumphalist statement, that this might signal a new era when mobile, satellite, broadcast and other major spectrum users decided to work together in the spirit of compromise which, of necessity, prevailed in Geneva. That was quickly over however. The end-notes to those same statements, and the interviews…

The 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 – it mainly governs…

Mobile operators are facing a familiar timing dilemma when it comes to smart cities. They can target wide area IoT applications aggressively, but make technology compromises, or they can wait for a year or two until it becomes clearer which of the many network choices will have staying power. Or they can keep all their options open, as Orange is doing in France. Despite the buzz around low power wide area (LPWA) applications like smart lighting and traffic management, most MNOs are playing a wait and see game, but with other players moving into the field – including broadband providers, private networks and city authorities themselves – they risk wasting a significant opportunity. Those non-MNOs are, of course, forced to…

Professional developers and hobbyist tinkerers have both enjoyed a boost this week, with the introduction of two new development boards. MIPS-peddler Imagination Technologies has launched the follow up to its Ci20, and the Raspberry Pi Foundation has unveiled the rather tiny Pi Zero. These sorts of developer boards play a vital role in prototyping all manner of devices, any one of which could have a transformative impact on the IoT. In addition to laying the groundwork for those sorts of potential changes via their affordable hardware and software environments, these kinds of projects also have a significant educational value, and are often found in schools and colleges. While Imagination’s Ci40 is a lot more expensive than the new Raspberry Pi,…

M&A, Strategies, Alliances HP and Intel have partnered to launch three global labs to focus on developing customer IoT applications, based on open standards, pairing Intel’s IoT Platform with HP’s Enterprise Services. ON Semi is buying Fairchild for $2.4bn cash, with the new company set to become the number-two semiconductor player. SAP has announced a number of partnerships with IoT security companies, including azeti Networks, Certified Security Solutions, Panoramic Power, Check Point Software Technologies, and Intel. The OpenFog Consortium has been launched by ARM, Cisco, Dell, Intel, Microsoft, and Princeton University’s Edge Laboratory, to develop and deploy technologies that move compute power closer to the network edge, as per Cisco’s ‘Fog Computing’ definition. Completing its acquisition of Cisco’s CPE business,…

In the Stuttgart Messe International Conference Center, PTC announced a new partnership with Bosch Software Innovations, as well as a new version of its Windchill technology. The launch follows a recent alliance with General Electric, which saw PTC contribute its ThingWorx platform to GE’s Brilliant Factories initiative, as well as the closing of PTC’s acquisition of Qualcomm’s Vuforia augmented reality (AR) platform. The combination of these separate elements adds up to a more complete ThingWorx platform for PTC, and one that is being used by two of the largest industrial businesses in the world. With Vuforia (which RIoT covered a few weeks ago), ThingWorx gains a transformative machine-interaction tool that can have a transformative effect on the way remote operators…

ARM, Cisco, Dell, Intel, Microsoft and Princeton University’s Engineering school have formed yet another IoT-focused industry body. Called the OpenFog Consortium, as its name suggests, the group is working on advancing the technology needed to move computational power closer to the network-edge – a model that Cisco calls fog computing, due to its closer proximity to the ground/source than the cloud. The five technology companies have their fingers in many of the other IoT industry groups, with overlapping membership in the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC), Open Interconnect Consortium (OIC), and the AllSeen Alliance, and while Dell isn’t as active now, after its record-breaking acquisition of EMC, it will look to become a lot more active in the cloud-computing and storage…

The two leading LPWAN players continue to make headlines, as the LoRa Alliance begins its LoRaWAN certification program, and Sigfox signs up VT Networks to bring a nationwide network to Ireland. With more than 130 members joining its ranks since its launch back in March, the non-profit LoRa Alliance made the announcement that it would be launching its certification program at its members evening in Rotterdam. The certificate should ensure the compliance and interoperability of devices with LoRa networks. Certification testing will initially be carried out by IMST and Espotel, who have already implemented the required test suites, and both promise additional RF and regulatory compliance testing for those devices if required – since that is a key part of…

Like many areas of technology, wireless charging is going through simultaneous waves of consolidation and expansion. In core application areas, like smartphone charging, competing approaches are starting to come together in a unified whole, which will help achieve de facto standards. However, other groups are introducing new techniques which address other applications, such as electric cars, or enhance the capabilities for mobile devices. The past couple of years have seen device charging efforts largely coalesce around three groups. The Wireless Power Consortium’s Qi is the best established technology, but its magnetic induction approach is less flexible than the magnetic resonance systems adopted by newer specifications. This was pioneered in the mass market by the Alliance for Wireless Power (A4WP) with…

Like many areas of technology, wireless charging is going through simultaneous waves of consolidation and expansion. In core application areas, like smartphone charging, competing approaches are starting to come together in a unified whole, which will help achieve de facto standards. However, other groups are introducing new techniques which address other applications, such as electric cars, or enhance the capabilities for mobile devices. The past couple of years have seen device charging efforts largely coalesce around three groups. The Wireless Power Consortium’s Qi is the best established technology, but its magnetic induction approach is less flexible than the magnetic resonance systems adopted by newer specifications. This was pioneered in the mass market by the Alliance for Wireless Power (A4WP) with…

The Thread Group has announced that certification for its 802.15.4-based low-power mesh network protocol has begun. The smart-home focused group has seen 30 devices put forward so far, and Freescale Semiconductor has told us that its stack and hardware are powering over half of them. Qualifying products will receive clearance to use the Thread logo, in an attempt to create a brand that consumers will recognize and adopt. Stacks from ARM, Freescale and Silicon Labs will be available at the end of the month, with Freescale, NXP and Silicon Labs all launching Thread-compatible chips for sale. At the alliance governance level, lighting company OSRAM has also come on board as a board member, joining ARM, Big Ass Fans, Freescale, Nest…

As the network OEMs race to show off the latest enhancements for LTE and future 5G, ZTE has demonstrated two innovations – Distributed MIMO and dual connectivity across TDD and FDD networks. The Chinese vendor said it had completed the world’s first pre-commercial test of D-MIMO, within its Cloud Radio architecture, which was launched in 2012 and is a proprietary platform for dynamic coordination of transmission networks, aiming to improve cell edge performance, especially in dense RANs, and to work smoothly with emerging MIMO architectures including Massive MIMO. The company said it succeeded in showing up to nine times faster data rates at the cell edge. The test used commercial devices in an outdoor environment with multiple overlapping base stations.…

Opera Software is a company which, behind the scenes, has had a significant influence on the modern mobile experience. The Norwegian firm had the most functional handset browser for years before Safari, Android and Chrome colonized the smartphone. Some of its innovations – such as compressing data searches on the cloud side to save on device and connection resources; as well as tabbed browsing, user-defined search engines and speed dial – have become standard practice. One of Nokia’s many strategic errors, when trying to put together a platform to challenge Apple’s, was to acquire fellow slimline browser maker, Novarra, rather than Opera (it finally made Opera Mini the default for its ‘smart featurephones’ in 2014). Buying Opera would not have…

Mobile operators have been engaged in a largely losing battle to seize back control of the user experience from Apple and Google. Some carriers, especially in emerging markets, have had some success, often by working closely with over-the-top players or by branding strong white label offerings like the Opera browsers. But in the developed mobile markets, where iOS and Android rule, the MNOs just can’t resist going step further than trying to create their own alternative operating system. Increasingly, however, these are variants of Android – from overlays to full forks – rather than completely original platforms. And while that fragmentation is a headache for Google, because it reduces the number of Android devices on which its user experience and…

Debate rages on about whether LTE can live harmoniously with WiFi in the 5 GHz unlicensed band, but meanwhile supporters of the idea are pushing forward with trials to try to prove their point. Vodafone has conducted the first live trial of LTE carrier aggregation, in which licensed and unlicensed spectrum is bonded together. Working with Ericsson and Qualcomm, the operator said it had demonstrated that adding 5 GHz spectrum to the downlink would improve speeds for LTE users, and that there was fair coexistence with WiFi. The over-the-air test ran between Ericsson RBS 6402 small cells and a Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X12 LTE modem, on Vodafone’s commercial network in the Netherlands. In total, 20 MHz of Vodafone’s 1.8 GHz…

The pressures on Qualcomm continue to mount, and may call for drastic action in 2016. Some activist investors favor a break-up, hiving off the licensing business to unlock more shareholder value and reduce the impact of antitrust probes like the latest one in Korea (see separate item). But the semiconductor industry is in a phase of consolidation, so it may be more logical for Qualcomm to join that, either by making major acquisitions of its own to accelerate its move into new markets (as it did in WiFi with the Atheros buy); or by becoming a target for investment or takeover itself. Interest from China is reported, and some pundits even wonder about a merger with Intel. Whatever the outcome,…