11569 search results for Open RAN

M&A, Strategies, Alliances The Alliance for Wireless Power (A4WP) and the Power Matters Alliance (PMA) have merged and become the AirFuel Alliance, following the June announcement of a closer working relationship to develop wireless charging. Intel has unveiled 3 new Quark SoCs, two microcontrollers, and more cloud software to fill out its IoT portfolio – in the week before ARM announces its own initiative at its annual developer conference. 1248 is launching its DevicePilot PaaS at ARM’s TechCon event. The service will run asset management and sensor network systems on behalf of business customers. Swisscom has picked Telit’s IoT Platform to form the backbone of its new IoT services business. Mysterious electric car startup Faraday Future is apparently building a…

Google has now opened up its Brillo operating system and Weave application framework to the broader developer community, after rolling it out to early access partners. The goal of the initiative is to get Brillo out into the wild, and boost Android’s creeping penetration in the IoT. With its huge share of the smartphone market, Android is an obvious entry-point for Google to use into the physical things that comprise the IoT – as Google is already heavily involved at the cloud and internet level. Google has also positioned itself at the head of a smart home platform via its acquisition of Nest, with the potential to launch a smart-home-as-a-service offering – with Nest devices and third-party devices linked via…

In what promises to be the biggest LPWAN deployment to date, Indian telco Tata Communications has announced that following successful trials based on LoRa technology, it plans to roll out the first LoRa network in India – with Phase 1 covering 400m people, from Tier 1 to Tier 4 cities. If Tata follows up on its promise, this a huge win for LoRa – with that 400m larger than its collective population coverage to date. Full Indian coverage would extend that to 1.2bn people, although being the seventh-largest country by area, realistically it’s unlikely even a very expansive rollout would not manage to achieve universal coverage. Nonetheless, this is a very big deal, which is why it’s a little disappointing…

The IoT will present such a huge variety of applications that chip designers will face a daunting challenge. On the one hand, the components and software they use will need to be as standardized and tightly integrated as possible to hit the ultra-low price points required to enable billions of end-points. On the other, different use cases will require different combinations of functions, demanding flexible and easily customizable platforms. Addressing that dangerous dichotomy may be the biggest justification for Marvell’s radical new approach to system-on-chip (SoC) design, MoChi. A modular chip concept, it supports the first ‘virtual SoC’, the firm boasts, and while it has initially sampled MoChi products targeted at midrange embedded products like storage processors, the most urgent need…

In a digital society, electricity is paramount, and a lot of technical innovation occurs behind the scenes, out of sight of the consumer. The most prevalent trend in the increasingly smart grid is the adoption of smart meters, and this week, Finnish mesh networking specialist Wirepas has announced a 1.4m meter deal in Norway, while the Wi-SUN Alliance has announced support for new spectrum to handle the 802.15.4g protocol that the industry body advocates for. The Wi-SUN Alliance was formed in 2011 to form an organization to push adoption of the IEEE 802.15.4g standard, which aimed to improve utility networks using a narrowband wireless technology. The peer-to-peer self-healing mesh has moved from its initial grid focus to encompass smart city…

iPass adds FON to its huge global WiFi network WiFi hotspot aggregator iPass is on target to offer its customers access to 50m hotspots worldwide, adding a deal with FON to the recently announced agreement with Devicescape. iPass claims to be the largest WiFi network in the world, followed by FON, which pioneered the approach of extending coverage cost-effectively through homespots (home WiFi routers with a second SSID left open for public access). Now the US firm is adding 9m hotspots from FON’s service provider partners to the base it offers its business customers, bringing its worldwide total to 50m by the end of this year. The companies are also in discussions to provide members of the FON community with…

Verizon has launched its ThingSpace developer portal, declaring that it wants to make the process of building and connecting IoT projects easier for all. Key to it all is the MNO’s cellular network, and in the short term, the transition to LTE Cat-1 and eventually Cat-M will be key – as will the emergence of a LPWAN standard from the 3GPP. ThingSpace is intended to allow developer to create applications, for customers to manage their devices, for partners to market their services, and for Verizon to leverage to launch integrated vertical solutions in what it calls an open environment – not that a vendor-owned platform sounds particularly open to our ears. Under development for two years, ThingSpace already has a…

Last week we focused on how the R&D lines between 4G and 5G are blurred – many technologies which are likely to end up in the 5G standards are already being trialled and even deployed as part of the evolution of LTE, creating a continuum which may save operators from another big bang upgrade. And the announcements just keep coming, only stimulated by the start of the World Radio Conference 2015 this week, with hopes for some pointers on 5G spectrum; and by the kick-off of the 3GPP standardization process. Qualcomm, of course, has the critical challenge of trying to get its technologies into the heart of those standards as it did in 3G, CDMA, and even, to some extent,…

The IoT (internet of things) will present such a huge variety of applications that chip designers will face a daunting challenge. On the one hand, the components and software they use will need to be as standardized and tightly integrated as possible to hit the ultra-low price points required to enable billions of end-points. On the other, different use cases will require different combinations of functions, demanding flexible and easily customizable platforms. Addressing that dangerous dichotomy may be the biggest justification for Marvell’s radical new approach to system-on-chip (SoC) design, MoChi. A modular chip concept, it supports the first ‘virtual SoC’, the firm boasts, and while it has initially sampled MoChi products targeted at midrange embedded products like storage processors,…

Only weeks after the 3GPP forced a compromise between two groups looking to define the low power LTE standard, Huawei and Deutsche Telekom have claimed the first commercial installation of the platform. Of course, what they were really doing was showing off the existing, non-standardized technology they both favor, seeking to build support and confidence even if the actual 3GPP work is reportedly weighted towards rival ideas backed by Ericsson and Nokia. The NB-IoT (Narrowband IoT) technology, which is now the subject of a 3GPP work item and hopeful future standard, is an attempt to unite two submissions (led by Huawei and Ericsson respectively) and provide a strong LTE-based alternative to specialist LPWA (low power wide area) networks like Sigfox…

Despite past failures, Intel continues to explore every angle to win itself a significant role in the wireless market. The growing trend for WiFi-first services is a logical one for the chip giant to support – the firm has been a driver of public WiFi’s success ever since it launched Centrino in 2003, and it has always supported the open web model against the closed 3GPP one. And the cablecos and MVNOs which are pushing WiFi-first most aggressively would be easier customers to target than the MNOs with their entrenched supply chains. So the announcement that it is taking a stake in pioneering US WiFi-first MVNO FreedomPop comes as no surprise, and could be the blueprint for bigger partnerships in…

The dilemma for any platform provider has been the same since operating systems were first decoupled from specific hardware. Should the organization seek to deliver a unified, fully quality-controlled experience, for users and developers, by asserting iron control? Or should it encourage maximum adoption and innovation by giving partners freedom to differentiate and create added value? Google has been spiked by the horns of that dilemma many times with Android. Attempts to assert Microsoft-style control have caused anger and rifts in the community, from the attempt to confine the initial release of the first tablet variant, Honeycomb, to a select few partners; to the rules and regulations laid down by the Open Handset Alliance and the Android One program. Where…

Evrythng has submitted a Web of Things standard proposal to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which aims to create a web-based standard to improve IoT interoperability with a global open standard application layer. The W3C was founded back in 1994, by Tim Berners Lee, and today works towards on developing standards for the web. Following three years of collaboration between the W3C, IBM, and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center for the European COMPOSE research program, Evrythng was tasked with turning the group’s findings into a usable product – which is now the Web Thing Model that the W3C Interest Group has submitted for consideration. You can read more through the document here. The COMPOSE project was begun in November 2012,…

As the internet of things (IoT) gets closer to commercial reality, the solutions flooding into the market are increasingly targeted at a real world use case. Some of these are extremely specific – smart meters and smart streetlights are commonplace now, but start-up Helium Systems says its initial focus is on smart refrigeration. Helium does not mean the over-quoted ‘smart refrigerator’ which automatically replaces the milk, but a far more significant application aimed at the lucrative industrial side of the IoT – at the food, drink and healthcare sectors, specifically. More broadly, though, this application will be a proof of concept for its ambition to create a full IoT software platform with underlying wireless network. That is a very common…

US cellular incumbent Verizon has launched its ThingSpace developer portal, declaring that it wants to make the process of building and connecting IoT projects easier for all. Key to it all is the MNO’s cellular network, and in the short term, the transition to LTE Cat 1, Cat 0, and eventually Cat-M will be key – as will the emergence of a LPWAN standard from the 3GPP. ThingSpace is intended to allow developer to create applications, for customers to manage their devices, for partners to market their services, and for Verizon to leverage to launch integrated vertical solutions in what it calls an open environment – not that a vendor-owned platform sounds particularly open to our ears. Under development for…