11534 search results for Open RAN

All the big three US MNOs can claim a 5G lead by some selected metric and meaningful comparisons are elusive. Verizon stole an early lead for headline speed by virtue of its millimeter wave capacity but only in the limited areas where users could get a signal, and has generally lagged behind T-Mobile USA and AT&T by most other metrics. The operator was therefore eager to trumpet a sustained increase in data traffic of 249% for its flagship 5G Ultra-Wideband network, between January 2021 and May 2022.    This figure is rather meaningless on its own but does signify the traction being gained for 5G in the USA and Verizon’s increasing ability to capture some of the gains. Initially Verizon…

Most private cellular networks will connect people rather than things or industrial equipment and so can be fully served by LTE rather than 5G at a far lower cost, according to California-based electronics test and measurement company Keysight Technologies.     Speaking at the recent industrial technology exhibition, Hannover Messe in Germany, Keysight’s general manager of private and dedicated networks, Jagadeesh Dantuluri, argued that about 90% of use cases for private networks were being driven by desire for reliable and secure connectivity around a site or campus for devices such as tablets and IoT wearables, to support a variety of needs that cannot be met with existing WiFi networks. This may be because wider coverage is required, higher levels of resilience,…

One of the drivers behind various countries’ attempts to invest in homegrown 5G platforms is to reduce reliance on foreign technology and to build up valuable intellectual property assets. For 5G, however, that bird may have flown when it comes to standards-essential patents (SEP), and some major patent holders, and their governments, are already starting to look to 6G.    For all the efforts by US-aligned countries to dominate the latest wave of 5G technology, most of that success has related to open platforms or software layers, not to the foundational IPR of the mobile networks. In that area, according to US-based patent advisory firm Tech+IP, China’s Huawei is clearly in first place, a finding that will raise many concerns…

The start of 6G is being portrayed, with some credibility, as a race between the USA and China, bound up with their political and trade wars. Other countries, too, regard 5G and 6G prowess as an important way to increase their broader global power, as well as building up local industry and wealth, and reducing reliance on foreign technology. As well as the two superpowers, India, South Korea and the European Union fall into this category, as do some smaller players that happen to have strong mobile assets, notably Sweden and Finland; and others that have more ambition than real technology firepower (from the UK to Russia).    One country is a constant power player in each mobile generation. As…

Special Report: Towards 6G    The drum beats about 6G are getting louder, even though work on official 3GPP standards will not start for several years – there are three releases of 5G-Advanced specifications to get through first.     It may seem rather premature to be having serious conversations about 6G, at least outside the rarefied realms of academic or industry research labs. Yet if the mobile industry continues to follow its usual pattern, we could expect 6G equipment and devices to start to be deployed at the end of the decade, just 7-8 short years away.  The big question is, will operators deploy another generation of networks? One argument says that they will be financially incapable of bearing the…

Ericsson and UK incumbent BT Group have announced a multimillion dollar partnership to provide 5G private networks for the UK market, targeting the manufacturing, defense, education, retail, healthcare, transport and logistics sectors in particular.    The news came hard on the heels of BT’s announcement that it would invest more than $100m over the next three years in its Division X unit to accelerate the development of enterprise customer solutions that incorporate 5G as well as emerging technologies such as IoT, edge compute, cloud and artificial intelligence (AI).    “This UK first we have signed with Ericsson is a huge milestone and will play a major role in enabling businesses’ transformation, ushering in a new era of hyper-connected spaces,” said…

Deals that see operators selling towers or other infrastructure continue to pile up, as economic uncertainty promises to boost the value of infra assets still further. Some operators may see that as a reason to hang onto towers and property, to boost their overall valuation, but others are keen to offload them in order to cash in on the boom and reduce debt.    Some seek the best of both worlds by retaining a majority stake in the infrastructure carve-out. Sweden’s Telia is the latest to announce this kind of deal, selling a 49% stake in its tower business to a consortium of infrastructure investment firms led by Brookfield and Alecta. It will make €524m (SEK5.5bn or $562m) on the…

The three leading low power WAN protocols have all been embracing several techniques to enable efficient transport of IP Internet traffic over bandwidth and resource-constrained IoT networks. This is significant because it will extend the scope of LPWAN, and outdoor IoT, beyond traditional domains such as smart metering and environmental monitoring, into industrial markets and wider smart city deployments.     It will also enrich the scope of existing deployments in domains such as smart metering through deployment of more sophisticated applications that add value. In any case, the step up to efficient IP transport has become increasingly necessary as it has become mandated by utilities and other key players in the IoT realm.    The most public announcement has just…

    It might seem hypocritical for a company like Akamai to preach about green content delivery networks (CDNs), while accusing others of greenwashing, when Akamai CDNs are significant power-guzzlers, but the CDN heavyweight can’t be faulted for trying to educate the world to improve on its own fundamental flaws.    Akamai had several representatives at the recent Streaming Media East conference in Boston, USA, including its director of corporate sustainability. The company took issue with marketing departments that make wild claims about 50% energy savings through more efficient compression techniques, while ignoring the reality that increased compression complexity at the decode side might increase energy consumption by 10%. Scaled by millions of users, each adding gigabytes of data to…

Moving towards Open RAN is not a “magic bullet”, Rakuten Symphony has warned operators, even as it seeks to commercialize the network platform, operations systems and integration services that were used by Rakuten Mobile for its open 5G roll-out in Japan.    Symphony’s CMO Geoff Hollingworth told media interviews that operators need to change their whole mindset, not just their key vendors. They will need to adopt new approaches to their ecosystems and supply chains, and to rethink their network requirements and their relationship with vendors.     For instance, if they issue the same kind of RFP as in the past, they are likely to end up with only Ericsson and Nokia being able to respond. Traditional RFP processes are “the death”…

Telefónica is one of the ‘Gang of Five’ large European operators that threw their weight behind Open RAN, and the chance of a localized ecosystem, when they signed a memorandum of understanding in 2020. Each of them – the others are Orange, Deutsche Telekom, TIM and Vodafone – has embarked on trials and provided deployment commitments of various levels of vagueness.     But each has also expressed caution about when the technology will be ready for primetime in the urban macro network. Vodafone has been the most aggressive about setting quotas for Open RAN deployments by 2026, and has some commercial sites running, but has acknowledged that the focus will be on rural, suburban and small cell networks for some…

Much of the discussion about potential cost savings from virtualized and open RAN centers on capex, and the possible impact of increased competition on equipment and software costs. But the bigger issue is whether the new architectures can reduce the cost of running the network. After all, network opex is as much as 25% higher than network capex on an annual basis and tends to increase over the network’s lifetime of, perhaps, 10 years, as it starts to age.     Early indicators from the Open RAN trailblazers such as Rakuten and Dish suggest that, after an initially cost-intensive deployment and integration period, a cloud-based network will enable high levels of automation and a dramatically leaner workforce than in a traditional…

Vodafone is pushing to lead the Open RAN systems integration movement and liberate associated cost savings as well as service opportunities in a white paper just published. The subtext is that Vodafone is impatient for faster progress and concerned that despite various piecemeal efforts involving equipment vendors, operators and systems integrators themselves, there is a lack of coordination, combined with fragmentation and duplication of effort.     The paper seeks to put operators in charge of Open RAN integration and promote Vodafone’s own model for how it should be coordinated with vendors. The operator is clearly aiming to become the lead evangelist for Open RAN, after in January 2022 claiming pole position in its domestic UK market by switching on its…

Special Report: Open RAN impatience    When any major change of architecture is looming in telecoms, intense impatience sets in. Repeated generations of experiences tell us that large telcos move slowly and that changes to networks and processes will take years to be fully adopted, in the face of the overriding risk of degrading the customer experience, with a knock-on effect on key KPIs from ARPU to churn to usage. But operators, investors and users continue to react over-optimistically to each new development, amid over-promising by some vendors and a strange brand of wishful thinking.     So 5G is not yet delivering the ARPU increases some had targeted (see item below on Lightshed’s analysis of this issue), largely because it…