11528 search results for Open RAN

Since acquiring Xilinx, AMD has moved far more deeply into wireless networks that before. Once, it could only play in 5G networks via its processors, which could compete with Intel’s to power the servers running virtualized RAN functions. However, it did not take much interest in that application until it bought Xilinx, adding RF and FPGA chips to its portfolio and enabling it to offer a full 5G solution. In its second year as Xilinx’s parent, AMD is likely to raise its profile at Mobile World Congress, and it has announced some new 4G/5G RF chips for the occasion, as well as a telco solutions testing lab, created with testing firm Viavi. There are two RF system-on-chip products, targeting digital…

The South Korean government has gone one better than fellow hi-tech nation Japan by targeting 2028 as the start date for 6G services in the country (Japan previously said 2029). That would mean having key 6G technologies ready by 2026, just three years away, a feat that Korean science minister Lee Jong-ho said was achievable as he unveiled the K-Network 2030 plan last week. The aim is to ensure South Korea is in the forefront of the next wave of developments and intellectual property, which will mean moving ahead of official standards. “We will pre-emptively invest in next-generation network technologies such as 6G, Open RAN and low-orbit satellite based on public-private cooperation,” Lee said. The Plan calls for South Korean…

The low-power wireless smart home, buoyed by the big-name buy-in from the Matter project, is now paving the way for Thread dominance. This is according to a trio of senior Thread Group leaders, which spoke to Wireless Watch’s sister service, Faultline, last week, on the matter of whether Matter matters for the operators. Matter is an open standard being developed by the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) – the body formerly called Connected Home over IP (CHIP). Matter ultimately boils down to a framework that allows devices to interact with each other. This starts with giving the devices a common messaging language, classifications, and then enabling a multi-vendor cross-talking environment where a lightbulb is happy to be linked to a motion…

At last year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC), private cellular networks were one of the hottest topics. HPE and Cisco both announced their cellular/WiFi enterprise platforms and Dell made a significant pitch for enterprise Open RAN. This year, some operators, such as Verizon, have played down the success of their private networks ventures, and there may be a more tempered tone of debate. However, this will still be a busy area, and on the eve of the show, Dell announced a partnership with Athonet, provider of 5G cores for private networks, only to see the start-up acquired by HPE. HPE acquired the Italian firm for an undisclosed sum, saying this would enhance its position in the private wireless market, whether for…

Mobile video streaming was held up as an application that would benefit greatly from 5G’s extra speed and capacity, especially under the enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) use case increasing bit-rates and capacity. While that promise has clearly been met by many 5G services deployed so far, we now have firmer evidence of significant QoS improvements on a large scale from a study conducted by London-based mobile analytics firm Opensignal. The firm benchmarked video streaming performance in 100 countries and concluded that 5G has improved the mobile viewing experience of live video considerably, especially in European countries and some Asia-Pacific markets, but less so across the Americas. European countries dominated the leading positions in Opensignal’s performance table with only three outside…

Deutsche Telekom has published a paper detailing the results of its largest Open RAN trial, the ‘O-RAN Town’ testbed it ran in the small city of Neubrandenburg last year. The paper, as the operator has commented before, hails some achievements and important learnings from the projects, but also highlights some challenges that must be met before multivendor Open RANs can be deployed at scale in macro networks. A year ago, the operator said it was aiming to do whole-city deployments in the near term, but at the end of 2022, it told LightReading that it was still in the process of qualifying vendors, and was looking for commercial roll-out in 2023-2024. Now the only build-out it envisages in 2023, according…

Open RAN, and virtualized networks in general, are often held up to be a strong solution for network sharing or neutral host models, because different operators’ network functions can all be deployed on the same cloud infrastructure to save cost and complexity. Network sharing is particularly important in rural areas where it is hard for operators to build and run an individual RAN profitably, and Orange and Vodafone have kicked off a partnership to drive Open RAN into this scenario. The prospect of shared rural networks should be further helped by Open RAN’s support for a broader ecosystem of radio vendors. If radio units and basebands can be mixed and matched, there is improved opportunity for makers of low-cost radios…

Samsung, as well as being Dish’s flagship supplier (see previous item) also provides non-Open RAN to Verizon, AT&T and US Cellular, should be well-positioned to be part of their Open RAN developments as those evolve. It also signed a deal last September with Comcast, the USA’s largest cableco, for 5G RAN equipment. Indeed, all four large US cablecos are ramping up their mobile strategies as their TV businesses come under pressure, but are generally sticking with traditional vendors and, despite being greenfield in mobile, failing to be major Open RAN flagwavers. Comcast announced more details of its vendor strategy last week, as it prepares to roll out its own 5G networks in CBRS and 600 MHz spectrum, building on its…

The USA is proving to be an Open RAN hotbed, housing several of the RAN challenger vendors that will be showing off their wares at Mobile World Congress, such as Mavenir, Parallel Wireless, Airspan and JMA. It is also very active on the operator side. AT&T and Verizon may be developing their own interpretations of Open RAN rather than supporting vanilla standards, but the USA has several significant new deployers – Dish of course, but the large cablecos, led by Comcast, are also mapping out plans to deploy some of their own 5G equipment, often in CBRS spectrum, to reduce their reliance on their MVNO deals with the tier 1 operators. The USA’s politicians hope that all this activity will…

A group of five top European telcos and the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) have separately addressed various concerns over progress with the Open RAN model, which aims to enable greater supplier diversity for the 5G ecosystem, especially the RAN. This reflects dissatisfaction with progress among some service providers, and also fears that the model will fail to achieve its primary goal of diversification by merely transferring the dominance from infrastructure vendors to systems integrators (SIs). The five operators – Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telecom Italia, Telefónica and Vodafone Group – have published a report seeking to rally the cause by highlighting progress made over the past year in the three core areas of maturity, security and energy efficiency, while also outlining…

There are usually plenty of surprises at Mobile World Congress (MWC) along with the well-previewed launches and debates, but as the Barcelona show gets back to its full scale in 2023, one dead certainty is that Open RAN will be very prominent on the agenda. At last year’s scaled-down event, there was plenty of discussion about the technology that seeks to blow open the RAN supply chain and turn the mobile network into a cloud-based, programmable and multivendor platform instead of a set of base station appliances available from a handful of large vendors. But the discussion and demonstrations were still in the context of a largely pre-commercial technology (with the exception of Rakuten), and had the rosy glow of…