11528 search results for Open RAN

After months of uncertainty, the Canadian Ministry of Innovation, Science, and Industry last week confirmed Canadian MNO Rogers Communications’ proposed $16bn merger/acquisition of Shaw Communications. Initially proposed two years ago in March 2021, the deal to create a Canadian heavyweight of fixed-line and mobile converged services was contentious from the beginning, with dissenting voices proclaiming the steamrolling of consumer interests. The last of the three regulatory holdouts, Canada’s Competition’s Bureau, was defeated in an early January appeals court ruling. Final approval concerned the transfer of some of Shaw’s spectrum licenses as part of the sale of its 2m subscriber-strong Freedom Mobile business to Quebecor subsidiary Videotron, a condition imposed by regulators. Fixed-mobile convergence is also a major theme in other…

Submarine communications cables may prove the next casualty of the growing geopolitical rivalry between the US and China. As this struggle progresses from rhetoric to action, Chinese and Western projects are becoming increasingly decoupled, and extending to provision of essential global infrastructure where cooperation had become well established. Recent media reports have unearthed a comprehensive effort by the US to deny Chinese submarine cable supplier HMN Tech lucrative contracts in large international projects around the world, most notably the SeaMeWe-6 cable connecting Southern France with Singapore by way of Egypt, Djibouti and India. China for its part has sought to increase its capabilities and compete globally through its own specialist companies. This threatens to end the dominance enjoyed until recently…

Convergence might seem right back on the agenda for major telcos now that the long-awaited merger of Canada’s Rogers Communications with cable operator Shaw Communications has been approved at last.  As further evidence for this view, Orange has been cleared to acquire two Belgian cablecos and increase its fixed/mobile capabilities in that market, mirroring similar moves by the French operator in several of its other European territories. Certainly, the past decade has seen mobile-only operators racing to build or acquire fixed-line assets, as the commercial challenges of being too mobile-centric intensified. Vodafone, highly valued at the turn of the century because it was not bogged down by legacy fixed-line burdens, later found that it lacked the scale and range of…

One month on from this year’s Mobile World Congress, just about all the comments and analyses have been written, and the main question remaining, as always, is ‘was it worth it?’. Do all the millions and millions of dollars spent, as well as several weeks of distraction from normal business, actually change the fortunes of a vendor or operator, or influence the course of the industry as a whole in the year ahead? We now have the comparator of two years without a recognizable MWC, of course, as well as a pared-down event in 2022. Many observers speculated large stakeholders would realize that they could function perfectly well without the cost and disruption of the Barcelona show and support something…

The agonies experienced by Cisco as the largest US telco/comms equipment and technology vendor over cellular and especially the RAN have been illuminating and sometimes excruciating to behold. They underline the dichotomy in the USA between mobile service deployment, where the country has advanced from being a laggard in the 3G era to a leader today, and over the underlying technology, where it has become heavily dependent on overseas companies. That partly explains the USA’s onslaught against the Chinese vendors and especially Huawei, where the national security card was played to justify a campaign whose real motivation was fear of these companies becoming too dominant in global 5G on account of their competitiveness. This has led to overdependence on Ericsson,…

Major telcos are enjoying some success partnering with hyperscalers in the burgeoning Mobile Edge Compute (MEC) field, even if they risk being treated as junior partners just providing the underlying connectivity. There is also a sense of urgency among telcos to recoup 5G spectrum and infrastructure investments by tapping emerging demand for applications and services that require low latency. At least with backing from the hyperscalers they are more likely to convince enterprises that they need such applications. There has been a flurry of such recent partnerships between MNOs and hyperscalers, the latest being BT’s declared “multi-million-pound investment” in MEC which will embed Amazon Web Services (AWS) compute and storage services in its network infrastructure. The UK operator, whose mobile…

Everybody wants Nvidia’s company these days as the Californian chip vendor soars on the back of its chips optimized for machine learning algorithms in the latest round of AI hype. This time there are more tangible deployments across multiple sectors, in addition to the high profile chatbots amid claims that some pass the Turing Test. Such claims depend on who is doing the test, bearing in mind that many humans would fail it, such as politicians dodging questions they do not want to answer. The current wave of AI has propelled Nvidia’s stock price to dazzling levels, raising the company’s value to $640bn, six times that of Intel which has failed to exploit this trend anywhere near as effectively. Nvidia…