11534 search results for Open RAN

Google Cloud’s acquisition of edge computing software company MobiledgeX for an undisclosed sum has been greeted by some commentators as a failure for the company’s ambition of providing an independent platform for operators that keeps the hyperscalers at arm’s length, coming four years after Deutsche Telekom founded the company early in 2018.     It can certainly be seen as a strategic failure, although it looks like DT had given up on the idea of being independent of hyperscalers some time ago, having conceded total ownership of MobiledgeX in 2020 when the company raised external funding from VMware, Samsung, SK Telekom, Worldwide Technologies and Odin Ventures.     That was presented as a step to dilute ownership among multiple operators to prevent…

Comcast and Charter, the two biggest US cable operators, are converging on a common 5G strategy by exploiting their own midband CBRS spectrum at 3.5 GHz to reduce dependency on Verizon as the wholesale network provider for their MVNO services.     The two cablecos signed a 5G cooperation agreement in 2017, and enhanced it in 2018 with a deal to develop a joint back office system. This added a cellular dimension to their existing CableWiFi alliance, which saw leading cable operators building out large networks of hotspots and homespots and then providing access for one another’s customers.    More recently, the two leaders formed a joint venture related to CBRS small cells, as well as modifying their MVNO agreements with…

Dish Network has finally launched its first commercial 5G services in the USA after a series of delays, holding a launch event in its initial market of Las Vegas, Nevada. At the same time, the company shed some light on its tariffs, and announced that it had added Samsung to the supplier roster for its multivendor Open RAN.    Dish told Axios that its service would cost $30 a month. That includes “truly unlimited Smart 5G data, talk and text. Additionally, we include unique perks, such as exclusive access to the Project Genesis app and a white-glove delivery experience”. The first device available is the Motorola Edge+, priced at $899.99.    This tariff comes in below typical deals from major…

Special Report: The US 5G market evolves  The US operators are ramping up their 5G roll-outs, each of the big three having secured the all-important midband spectrum that really makes 5G economics work with a balance of coverage and capacity. T-Mobile acquired its plentiful 2.5 GHz airwaves along with its Sprint acquisition, while Verizon and AT&T were big bidders in recent auctions, especially for C-band spectrum.     The public pronouncements of the big three MNOs are often cast in terms of direct opposition to one another, especially TMO’s ‘Uncarrier’ briefings (it held the latest last week). But in reality, the US mobile landscape is far more diverse and interesting than these public comparisons suggest, and there is the potential for…

BT and Toshiba launch quantum cryptography service BT and Toshiba are deploying a metro network secured by quantum key distribution (QKD), claiming this to be a world-first. This will connect customers across London, transmitting data between multiple physical locations over standard fiber optic links using quantum cryptography, which makes it impossible for hackers to intercept encryption and decryption keys in transit without detection. In the event of detection, new keys can be redistributed. The objective is to eliminate eavesdropping of encryption keys as a security vulnerability, although this does not avoid other potential threats associated for example with corrupt employees. Nonetheless, this offers hope for highly secure communications, with professional services group Ernst and Young (EY) announced as the first…

The NAB event, the huge US-based TV and video conference, was held last week in physical format again, providing an update to the progress of the ATSC 3.0 broadcast standard. Also known as NextGen TV, this has a heavy focus on hybrid and mobile-first TV. In the run-up to NAB, the ATSC organization put out a teaser announcement, updating the world on its progress. The headline claim is that the NextGen TV coverage in the USA has hit 50% population coverage – now available in almost 60 markets. Some 120 receivers (set-tops and USB-based dongles) have been designed, and the ATSC reckons 4.5m compatible devices will be sold in 2022. Some rudimentary modelling suggests that TVs have an average lifecycle…

Canonical, the German company that develops the Ubuntu Linux distribution, has had various attempts to take a bigger position in the mobile market. The launch of a mobile version of Ubuntu, as a rival to Android, fizzled out, but now there are potentially more fruitful opportunities in the emergence of virtualized and Open RAN. The more the network is virtualized on cloud infrastructure, the more Linux-based operating systems will be embedded in the mobile infrastructure as well as the Android devices. Canonical was highlighted last year, when five major European operators published a study of the local Open RAN ecosystem, as an EU-based firm that could play an influential role in this platforms. Now Canonical has announced the latest release…

Dish Network is six months behind on its 5G network roll-out plan, something its chairman, Charlie Ergen, acknowledged on the company’s most recent earnings call. “We’re six months behind where we thought we’d be. It’s my fault. We just didn’t maybe anticipate that we would have to do as much on the technical side,” Ergen told analysts. Dish is required by the FCC, as a condition of its licences, to cover 20% of the US population with 5G by June 14 this year, but so far has no commercial services on offer, despite its original pledge to launch in several cities by the end of 2021. Ergen’s comments highlight some of the challenges that face greenfield deployers of virtualized, open…

The recent volatility of global energy markets has promoted the role of IoT in reducing costs, improving efficiency and even insulating against fluctuations in spot prices. Water utilities have also been subject to growing stresses in many regions, occasioned by arguably greater extremes of weather but more particularly increasing demand and tighter regulations over quality and management. While roll-out of smart metering is a common factor across energy and water utilities, IoT has also figured increasingly across the whole distribution pipeline for maintenance and quality control. Most of these utility IoT applications now require wireless communication, not usually because mobility is involved but because wired communications for multiple metering and sensor points would be too expensive or practically impossible. Low…

The European Union has been criticized by some enterprises for failing to emulate the USA in making midband spectrum readily available to a wide range of deployers and in a harmonized way across all member states. This would enable greater scale economies in RAN components and adoption of common components by multinational enterprises, claim proponents of spectrum allocations for enterprise or neutral host operators as well as MNOs. This has happened in the USA with the decision to allocate 150 MHz of shared spectrum in the 3.5 GHz Band 48 to support the CBRS scheme, which offers unlicensed access as well as flexible, relatively inexpensive licences. This is expected to enable non-MNOs to deploy 4G and 5G to support a…

Dish Network is moving forward with its private 5G strategy in the USA in a partnership with Duke University. This will seek to establish a campus network using a mixture of licensed and unlicensed 3.5 GHz spectrum, based on a neutral host model that will also admit rival MNOs – Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile USA. The initial plan is to build a pilot network starting around July 2022 covering the university’s sprawling 8,600 acre (3,480 hectare) campus using a combination of licensed spectrum from Dish and adjacent unlicensed spectrum in the general authorized access (GAA) layer of the 3.5 GHz CBRS band. In line with the neutral host concept, this project will integrate Duke University’s existing private network, based on…

Special Report: Multi-industry 5G The big difference between 5G and other options, such as 4G or WiFi, is supposed to be its versatility. One common set of radio standards would support not just faster mobile broadband speeds, but other capabilities such as ultra-low latency and massive device density. Migration of networks to the cloud, and application of AI analytics, network slicing and the 5G core, would build further flexibility on top of the radio. The result would be networks that could be optimized for a wide range of use cases, vertical sectors and deployers. Common cloud-based platforms would make it possible for new network operators, especially in private enterprise scenarios, to complement the MNOs, and some even hope that open…