Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
With many Open RAN companies forsaking major telco projects for the burgeoning private enterprise 5G market, and only a few holding out for the prized Tier 1 contracts, the dynamics of much of the Open RAN movement are changing. The entrance of a new type of player, the systems integrator (SI), widens Open RAN companies’ target base to enterprises that lack the inhouse resources to knit together a multivendor network. On the other hand, their involvement will potentially drive up costs for customers. Open RAN vendors must find a way around this dilemma, relying on SIs for functions that they cannot easily support themselves, while also circumventing them wherever possible in order to increase their share of the value chain,…
Frustration among operators over unfulfilled promises of the telco cloud have been simmering for at two years and have now boiled over for some. Orange has become one of the harshest critics, after Laurent Leboucher, group CTO at its Innovation Networks division, condemned the current state of the telco cloud as a “nightmare” during a keynote at the NGMN Industry Conference and Exhibition 2022 held in Paris in September. Leboucher accused the industry of allowing competition to create new silos as vendors sought to establish their own vertical combinations of hardware and software in complete contradiction to the original concept founded on virtualization, as was already well established in the non-telco world of enterprise data centers. This was denying operators…
Growing availability of shared spectrum for enterprises globally is spawning subscription based wireless-as-a-service (WaaS) offerings for private mobile networks. The USA is in the vanguard after opening up of mid band CBRS spectrum in 3.5 GHz to 3.7 GHz band for commercialization in January 2020, having previously restricted use of this band to prevent interference with military applications. This has set the tone for comparable liberalization of midband spectrum in Europe and elsewhere. Such moves have opened the door to a variety of services and platforms targeting enterprises seeking private cellular networks, both 4G and 5G, especially those below the top tier lacking resources to manage deployments themselves. Federated Wireless has just come up with a comprehensive subscription-based services targeting…
Special Report: New RAN models The main topics of debate around Open RAN focus on architectural challenges, and on the impact on the supply chain. Clearly, a genuinely open and virtualized network platform has the potential to broaden the ecosystem, lower barriers to new entrants, and allow deployers to mix and match their networks from a broad base of innovators. However, there are other potential and significant impacts of Open RAN on the mobile telecoms business model. It is not just the vendor and components ecosystems that could be disrupted if the new platforms become widely adopted. They will also enable, or accelerate, transformation of the operator business models, as well as changing the patterns of ownership and deployment of…
Five years ago this week… Nokia became the first major company to throw in the towel on virtual reality (VR), announcing big cuts to its OZO VR camera sector. This left virtually the entire 360-degree camera business to Facebook, which had developed the Surround 360 camera for its Oculus Rift headsets. Faultline could not shake the feeling that other leaders in VR would start falling like dominoes, instead preferring to pursue opportunities with more immediate return on investment. Mixed reality darling Magic Leap being one prime example. — The European Commission has taken an admirable step towards reducing e-waste, by voting that all mobile devices sold in Europe from the end of 2024 must support USB-C charging. Laptops…
The European Broadcasting Union’s (EBU) Bram Tullemans was surprised by Faultline’s remark about the emerging 5G-Emerge project coming across as a secretive members-only club. As Program Manager, Tullemans wants to rectify any opacity encountered on our search for information, regarding both the underlying technologies and future business cases that underpin the project described as a “distribution revolution.” We scratched the surface before and during IBC, but even our queries about 5G-Emerge at the EBU’s sizable booth returned blank faces from colleagues. Weeks later, we have our guy. Conceived over summer this year, a consortium of 20 technology companies with deep experience in the satellite industry decided to rally around 5G once and for all as a convergence technology. Superior speeds,…
Twitch has downgraded its streaming quality in South Korea, citing the rise in operational costs in the country as the reason. Twitch confirmed that it has explored peer to peer (P2P) technologies as a workaround, but says these require more testing before they could be implemented. Unsurprisingly, there is more to this than initially meets the eye – with ISPs waiting to file lawsuits. It appears that a 2016 government decision has led to this tipping point. That was the year when a revision for the Interconnection Standards for Telecommunication Facilities was enacted, which essentially required the country’s big three ISPs (SK Broadband, Korea Telecom, and LG U+) to pay their rivals’ additional peering costs, and culminated in the targeting…
Market share can always be a touchy subject for vendors – they are easily speculated and just as easily denied. With San Francisco-based CDN provider Fastly picking up a lot of traction in the past couple of years with its edge-focused approach, it was only a matter of time before it ruffled a few feathers. Speaking to Faultline this week, Xavier Gregoire, Fastly’s AVP Sales in UK and Central Europe, seemed outraged by our assertion that Fastly did not scratch our top three ranking of CDN providers – Akamai, AWS and Edgio. “We are undoubtedly a top two or three provider in the US and Europe,” Gregoire said, while also pointing to the company’s growing presence in Asian markets like…
Now six months in the hot seat, Brightcove CEO Marc DeBevoise has done his homework on Faultline. Speaking over video call this week, the US online video platform provider’s new boss challenged certain conclusions made in Faultline’s early August 2022 article, in which we compared the financials of Brightcove and fierce rival Kaltura side-by-side. At the time, we observed that while Brightcove remains the bigger beast in revenue terms, Kaltura was growing sales at a faster rate. “Kaltura doesn’t make any money,” DeBevoise implored. “Kaltura has merged its segments to try to make money. It hasn’t been profitable and Q2 growth plummeted. Go back and revisit those results.” We have, and while our write-up of Brightcove’s Q2 2022 results were…
Hydrogen UK (HUK), a trade association for the hydrogen industry, has launched its Hydrogen Accelerators at the Conservative Party Conference (CPC), providing a blueprint for the continued development of Britain’s entire hydrogen value chain. The Hydrogen Accelerators are a set of recommendations from 50 industry members directed at Government to ensure the successful deployment of hydrogen in the UK. The 50 members include names such as: Bosch, Shell, BP, EDF, First Hydrogen, National Nuclear Laboratory, SSE Thermal and Uniper among others. The main topic of discussion at the “Cheap, Clean & Green: The Future of British Energy” CPC panel, was once again the strategy that the UK should adopt not only to navigate its way out of the current energy…
Lausitz Energie Bergbau AG (LEAG), a German energy company, wants to deploy 7 GW of wind and solar power in the Lusatia region by 2030 with an investment of $10 billion, with the first 1 GW solar tranche potentially being commissioned in 2026. This renewable energy complex portfolio is called GigawattFactory and will include unquantified battery energy storage, heating, and hydrogen elements. LEAG sells it as a “modular, intelligent system that makes green electricity baseload-capable” that will apparently also include thermal storage. The capacity is to be built, in partnership with developer EP New Energies GmbH (EPNE), on LEAG’s own former open-cast lignite mining areas, which are a 33,000-hectare resource. Hopefully that will spare these projects from the worst of…
Dell creates Open RAN reference architecture with Fujitsu At MWC Americas, Dell showed off its promised Open RAN Accelerator card, which uses Marvell’s chipset for inline Layer 1 acceleration. Dell also announced that it would work with Fujitsu on a joint reference architecture based on its Open RAN card and Fujitsu’s O-RAN radio units and lifecycle software. Both companies are suppliers to Dish Networks’ Open RAN. Fujitsu provides some of the radio units, along with Samsung and MTI, while Dell supplies the edge servers that support most of Dish’s virtualized distributed units (though some of its centralized units, and packet core functions, are in the AWS cloud). “With Fujitsu’s O-RAN technology, we’re bringing more value to communication service providers…
An Indian Open RAN ecosystem is starting to develop, largely driven by Reliance Jio, which has worked with partners on innovations from RAN control to small cell designs to open fronthaul, and also owns 5G stack provider Radisys. This work by Jio, and similar efforts by Bharti Airtel, tie into the Indian government’s strategy to build a homegrown technology and manufacturing base around 5G and Open RAN, and to strengthen its Made in India program, which mandates local supply for a rising percentage of telecoms network equipment deployed by the MNOs. Mavenir is one of the Open RAN companies that is seeking a strong position in this emerging ecosystem, alongside more established Jio partners such as Samsung and Airspan. The…
Europe’s leading telcos have renewed their periodic demands for big tech firms, whose services consume so much of their bandwidth, to help pay for ongoing infrastructure deployment, especially fiber and 5G now. This is the latest in a long-running saga dating back two decades, with operators baying for cash from the firms they consider profit most from the capacity they provide. Such clamors are not confined to Europe but have also come from operators in the USA and Asia-Pacific, but the loudest clamor has come from the big European Union-based telcos, perhaps reflecting concerns over the seemingly ever-increasing dominance of the big USA Internet giants in the continent. There has been a slight changing of the guard over the years,…
In a recent Wireless Watch issue, we reported on a collaboration between Vodafone and US precision positioning systems designer, Topcon Positioning Group. The focus of their collaboration, Vodafone GNSS Corrections, aims to improve the accuracy of global navigational satellite systems (GNSS) from multiple meters down to centimeters when connected to Vodafone’s IoT network. For this, it will rely on Topcon’s own system of GNSS stations, in particular its European presence. Sub-meter accuracy is a critical barrier to be broken for many IoT and autonomous automotive or robotics applications. Knowing the position of a car to an accuracy of five meters may be useful for general navigation, but for autonomous driving purposes, this could very quickly prove fatal. Centimeter precision could…
Altiostar, Mavenir and Parallel Wireless have been three of the most prominent Open RAN challengers since its inception. All three have had their ups and downs commercially, but they have all set out to challenge RAN incumbents by developing Open RAN software that can run on common cloud infrastructure. Altiostar, of course, was acquired by Rakuten and is now a key element of the Rakuten Symphony platform, which includes another of the Japanese firm’s acquisitions, Robin.io, as the cloud layer. Mavenir and Parallel Wireless have worked with more established cloud partners such as VMware, but at MWC Americas, were particularly focused on cooperations with the public cloud providers, to help make Open RAN more scalable and affordable for a wide…
The software challengers in Open RAN are facing a potentially daunting new competitor in the shape of NEC, which has introduced a software suite encompassing the virtualized CU and DU. The Japanese firm has already achieved a strong position in the fledgling Open RAN market through its high performance radio units, which it supplies to Rakuten and NTT Docomo; its systems integration capabilities; and the 5G core it is co-developing with Rakuten Symphony. Now it appears to have an end-to-end solution, though its credentials on the virtualized network functions side are less well-established than its generations of expertise in radio and wireless xHaul. NEC was keen to emphasize that it would still work in multivendor environments and keep its RU…
Rakuten Symphony had a substantial presence at MWC Americas, no doubt keen to promote its platform to US operators – and if Symphony is spun off, as is widely rumored, its likely new home base would be in the USA, where there is hefty political will to build a homegrown 5G RAN industry again. The vendor/integrator arm of Japan’s Rakuten made a string of announcements and demonstrations, including an Open RAN distributed unit (DU) that Symphony claims will address many of the cost and complexity challenges that concern would-be O-RAN adopters. The DU is based on Symphony’s own server design, running on an Intel Xeon D processor with FPGA-based acceleration for Layer 1 network processes. This supports DU software from…
Qualcomm has begun sampling its promised 5G RAN products, in what could be a significant boost to the scale of the Open RAN industry from mid-2023, when brownfield operators are expected to start deploying the technology in earnest, if mainly in small cell or rural environments rather than urban macrocells. The products – the X100 5G RAN Accelerator Card and QRU100 5G RAN Platform – were first announced two years ago. They see Qualcomm returning to the macro network infrastructure market for the first time since 1999, when it sold its infra-side assets to Ericsson to concentrate on devices. It has a small cell system-on-chip family, FSM, but it has been clear that its roadmap for 5G RAN extends to…
Special Report: Open RAN at MWC Last week saw Mobile World Congress (MWC) staging its Americas edition in Las Vegas, Nevada. While a small event compared to the mothership in Barcelona, MWC Americas nonetheless generated significant buzz and a range of interesting launches. Unsurprisingly, the biggest topics – in terms of solid developments and of hype – were Open RAN, the metaverse and the increasingly intertwined worlds of telecoms networks and cloud. The hyperscalers were prominent, and AWS and Google managed to combine all three of these themes in their discussions, as this issue’s round-up of Open RAN and other MWC news indicates. Providers of 5G network software are flocking round the public cloud platforms now as operators become increasingly…