11528 search results for Open RAN

Dell is the latest tech giant to announce major job cuts – 6650 positions or 5% of its global workforce. But notably, the company insisted it was still investing in 5G and edge compute, where it anticipates sustained long-term growth. The job cuts will be focused in weak consumer areas, especially PCs and laptops, most directly affected by the global downturn of late 2022, which showed up clearly in Dell’s latest financial results for its fiscal third quarter (ended December 31). They revealed quarterly revenue down 6% year-on-year to $24.7bn, and net income down 93%. Yet the losses were incurred almost entirely by its Client Solutions Group (CSG) where revenues were down 17% year-on-year, while its smaller but faster-growing Infrastructure Solutions…

UK incumbent BT’s latest infrastructure project is focused on “towers in the sky”. These are more commonly known as high-altitude platform stations (HAPS), and have been the focus of several projects in recent years – led by operators, hyperscalers and space companies. These aircraft can support backhaul or even longhaul access. BT Group is working with a specialist company, Stratospheric Platforms (SPL), to test new antenna technology installed on a hydrogen-powered HAPS aircraft, aiming to demonstrate 4G and 5G connectivity to remote areas. SPL is in the process of raising €148m in Series-B funding to build a prototype of its aircraft, called Stratocast, this year, and is putting together a consortium to build the vehicle, ready for a commercial launch slated for…

NextWave was a big name in the US wireless industry in the early years of the century, as it went on a turbulent journey to try to establish itself as a disruptive operator, years before Dish ventured into mobile networks. It appeared that the name had disappeared when most of the firm’s assets were acquired by AT&T in 2013, but in fact, the rump of the company continued to operate in the private wireless sector, particularly building public safety networks. Last week saw NextWave emerge into the limelight again, announcing that it had deployed 120 base stations, supplied by Airspan Networks, as part of a private network roll-out across the New York metro area. The operator is using its 2.5…

Deutsche Telekom admitted recently that the results of its main Open RAN trial have been disappointing  so far, but Franz Seiser, its head of access disaggregation, says the operator will persevere. In an interview with TelecomTV, Seiser said that the main trial, called ‘O-RAN Town’, had been completed. The trial took place in Neubrandenburg, a town of about 65,000 people north of Berlin. “We have assessed our learnings,” Seiser said. “We came across a couple of issues, as expected – some of them probably more expected, some less – but it was super-valuable learning.” One challenge was the lack of an ecosystem when the trial started in mid-2021, which meant DT had to do most of the systems integration and…

Japan’s NEC has been a prominent vendor in successive mobile network generations in its home country, but has not translated its RAN engineering prowess internationally. For 5G, it aims to change that by riding on Open RAN, and particularly on many operators’ and governments’ desire to widen their choice of RAN suppliers. However, the bid to expand its RAN business will require considerable investment, and is inevitably hitting profits in this early stage. For the first nine months of its current fiscal year – which will end on March 31 2023 – NEC reported an operating loss of ¥600m ($4.6m) at its Networks unit, reversing an operating profit of ¥15.8bn ($120m) for the division at the same stage last year,…

Last week, Serbia’s state-owned mobile operator, Telekom Srbija (TS), announced the launch of a wide area IoT network supporting dual technologies – NB-IoT and LoRaWAN – an approach that remains unusual among MNOs. It is deploying the network with two partners, French IoT platform provider Actility and Belgrade-based systems integrator Teri Engineering. The deal will see TS expand on its existing LoRaWAN network, which runs in unlicensed spectrum, upgrading cell sites so they can also support NB-IoT, which is based on 3GPP 4G standards and runs in licensed frequencies. The dual-mode approach maximizes the spectrum that TS can use for IoT, and enables it to support a range of different applications with different connectivity requirements. The operator has been operating…

T-Mobile has maintained its lead for 5G speeds and availability in the USA, with its main rivals only slightly narrowing the gap, according to the latest results from two mobile analytics firms. Boston-based Opensignal and London’s Ookla both confirm TMO’s consistent lead, which has been established over the past two years. But panning out globally, recent survey results indicate the rapidly rising impact of 5G in some emerging economies where deployments are starting to play a significant role in reducing broadband deficits domestically and also with other nations. Against these backdrops is the need for caution interpreting these results and equating them to real user experiences. There is a confusing array of metrics with individual operators, and nations, often ranking…

The USA’s National Science Foundation (NSF) has announced new 5G R&D projects focused on open source platforms, while acknowledging that mobile broadband networks had proved the hardest platform to implement in open source. This throws light on the burgeoning discussion about how far future 5G and 6G networks can, or should, be based on open source technology, as opposed to just open systems? The NSF operates a research center in Salt Lake City, Utah, called Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR), and its new experiments are based on a 5G testbed called POWDER (Platform for Open Wireless Data-driven Experimental Research), which was first announced in 2019. The POWDER team has implemented open source software on top of an outdoor 5G…

The progression of the 3GPP’s 5G standards releases, and associated technological trends such as AI-enabled network management and network slicing, are bringing new challenges for testing smartphones, as well as other end user devices. Testing has always been an unsung hero of wireless progression, and now the leading players in that field are trying to make their voices heard, and not just for competitive reasons. They believe that various participants in the 5G ecosystem need to be aware of the testing implications for them of technological advances, and also of the need for a more harmonized approach across the industry. Smartphones are very much on the critical path for testing because 5G through successive releases is adding to the already…

Energy efficiency, and broader sustainability, will be an essential aspect of next-generation telecoms networks and the industry needs a joined-up strategy that takes in the whole telecoms supply chain, not just the networks and the operators themselves. The 5G standards framework set out by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) established ambitious targets for reduced power consumption compared to 4G, which 5G radios have come close to meeting, but the efficiencies of a single base station can be cancelled out by the larger numbers of cell sites and antenna arrays that 5G involves, compared to 4G. This example highlights how a different, and far more holistic, view will need to be taken to telecoms sustainability in future, engaging the whole industry…

There has been much discussion lately about 6G being truly AI-native, building on an increasing level of AI and machine learning (ML) being embedded in networks as the 5G-Advanced standards are implemented over the coming years. This raises the question of what difference an AI-native network would make for operators and users, as well as what is actually entailed. AI in the network context is primarily a means of harnessing the vastly increased computational power and storage density now available, compared even with a decade ago, and 5G/6G applications mainly focus on ML. In wireless communications, there are three pillars underlying AI/ML, which have been established, in principle at least, for at least a century. These pillars are: tensor calculus,…

  As Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2023 looms, minds inevitably turn the future. Though the real-world launches and major deals that happen in Barcelona will be firmly focused on the near-term challenges of 5G deployment and monetization, the event is also a forum for discussion of what may come next. Some of that will be ill-defined or merely hype, but such debates are also important for vendors and operators to understand what they may need to build into their technology roadmaps now, in order to maximize return on investment and avoid dead ends and wasted effort. There are several aspects of next-generation mobile networks that, judging by the pre-event build-up, will be particularly prominent at MWC. We address various aspects…