11528 search results for Open RAN

The USA’s  telecoms regulator, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), last week announced plans to split its International Bureau into two new divisions, the Space Bureau and the Office of International Affairs. This recognized the growing importance of satellite services within mainstream telecoms. Space affairs had previously been handled within its own sub-division of its International Bureau. FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel made the announcement on November 3, citing the explosive growth of the satellite industry, and resulting workloads, exemplified by operating licence applications for an additional 64 000 satellites over the past two years. Rosenworcel also emphasizedthe need to streamline resource allocation to fulfill “statutory obligations and better support the satellite industry. More broadly, the creation of the Space Bureau signals…

The greenfield Open RAN operators, notably Rakuten Mobile of Japan and the USA’s Dish Network, are fascinating for their at-scale deployment of architectures that, for most established operators, are futuristic or out of reach. But the commercial results of investing in a radically new mobile network are less impressive to the older MNOs, as Rakuten Mobile continues to drag down financial performance at its parent group, and both firms announce new spending that somewhat shadows their aggressive claims to have achieved dramatically new capex levels for deploying 5G RAN. In the third quarter of 2022, Rakuten Mobile dragged down operating income for its parent group –  a giant in ecommerce, cloud content and digital services. The group blamed ongoing investments…

Casual observers might have been surprised by the prominence given to voice at the recent 5G Core Summit in Bangkok, hosted by Huawei and Informa Tech. After all, voice has long been relegated in favor of asynchronous communications such as texting, email and social media and many consumers almost actively avoid it when they can, except for more intimate communications at one level or participation in business conferences on platforms such as Zoom and Teams on the other. Yet in 5G, voice is now pulling some of these threads back together as new interactive and immersive features come into play, Huawei contends. At the Summit, the role of what Huawei has christened ‘5.5G Core’, as an enabler of enhanced voice…

While India’s public 5G infrastructure roll-out accelerates there is great interest also in the contest behind the scenes for private 5G customers, seen as more likely to generate significant revenues for operators and other technology players in the immediate term at least. The two largest operators, Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel, have been jockeying for position, but as in some other countries – such as Germany especially – a number of major enterprises are determined to obtain their own spectrum and bypass the operators. In India there is also one provider, Adani Data Networks, that came in through the back door during the summer’s 5G spectrum auctions. The subsidiary of Adani Enterprises acquired 20-year rights to 400 MHz of spectrum…

Many large vendors, start-ups and operators have been working on addressing the key challenge of using millimeter wave spectrum, above 20 GHz, for 5G connectivity – the short range that is achievable in these high frequencies using standard and affordable technologies. One breakthrough was announced last week by Samsung, which reached 1.75Gbps downlink and 61.5Mbps uplink over a 10-kilometer millimeter wave connection, in a trial with Australian wholesale fiber operator nbn. The vendor noted this demonstrates the expanded reach possible at such high frequencies when there is line of sight, with potential for widespread broadband coverage in rural areas of suitable terrain. Samsung used eight component carriers (8CC) to aggregate 800 MHz of mmWave spectrum. Ray Owen, CTO at nbn,…

Dish revenue falls and it seeks $2bn more for network build Dish Network, the fourth national mobile operator in the USA, which is still building out its mobile network, has reported a year-on-year drop in overall revenues and net income for Q3 2022. Its revenues, mainly from its core business in satellite pay-TV, fell  from 4.45bn to $4.10bn while net income was down from $557m to $412m. The operator also announced it was seeking an extra $2bn for ongoing 5G infrastructure construction despite its many boasts, in recent years, about its highly capex-efficient approach based on Open RAN. The company currently has over 10,000 base stations reaching at least 35% of the USA population and is adding around 1,000 towers per…

In recent years, Crown Castle has been the most aggressive of the three major US towercos about expanding its business beyond macro towers and rooftops and into small cells, fiber xHaul and edge computing – all of which will, together, be increasingly important to enable new dense and virtualized 5G RAN and core architectures. Its major rivals, American Tower and SBA Communications, were more cautious, focusing on expansion through new geographies, but they too have recently focused on the potential to add data center and small cell infrastructure to their neutral host portfolios. During SBA’s third quarter earnings call last week, executives were heavily focused on the temporary boom that is coming from AT&T’s and Verizon’s rapid build-outs of their…

It is a chilly climate for chip manufacturers, even those in high-growth, strategic areas such as 5G devices or infrastructure. The global economic crisis and ongoing supply chain disruptions are creating challenging business conditions, and these are worsened by the geopolitical tensions between the USA and China, and their allies. For Qualcomm, the pressures are piling up. It did, nonetheless, report 22% year-on-year revenue growth for its fiscal fourth quarter of 2022, but it was downbeat in its future guidance. There was some short-term joy in its assurance that it would continue to supply the bulk of the iPhone’s modems in 2023, despite Apple’s efforts to wean itself off Qualcomm chips. But that leaves the cloud of potential loss of…

British Telecom (BT) last week announced its participation in the UK government-led Robotics Highways programme, which aim to provide a robotics platform and management system for its stakeholders. Robotics Highways is a research and development project which seeks to develop use cases for IoT devices and robotics for agriculture. Funded through Innovate-UK, the project is led by Saga Robotics and counts the Universities of Lincoln and Reading, the Manufacturing Technology Centre, two soft-fruit agriculture businesses, and BT as its partners. Saga Robotics is a spin-out from the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, which had explored, and developed, use cases for robotics in agriculture. These efforts culminated in Thorvald, a modular robotics platform, which can be readily customized to support different…

Vodafone Germany recently announced a collaboration with BMW and Nokia to trial a new 5G indoor positioning system at BMW’s Leipzig smart factory. The system is to be deployed over an area measuring 4500 square meters, mainly in the assembly hall and the logistics centre. The vision is for machines, tools, cars, and spare parts to be constantly tracked to high centimeteraccuracy to optimize processes and improve security. Until now, a number of different positioning systems were in use across the factory, mainly Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), WiFi, io-frequency identification (RFID) and iBeacon. While the precision for those systems in this particular factory was not revealed by BMW or Vodafone, a 2019 report places BLE tech in the 1-2 meter…