Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Early data on impact of C-band spectrum on 5G performance looks positive for the two US operators involved, AT&T and Verizon, but it is too early to tell whether findings of signal drop-off with distance from base stations in other midband frequencies, including CBRS, will have a significant impact. Such power drop-off has become more relevant to cell-edge performance in the wake of the agreement by AT&T and Verizon to reduce C-band power output by all base stations for the first six months of operation, with an even bigger reduction near airports. This followed the eleventh hour intervention by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to warn pilots of aeroplanes and helicopters that C-band deployment could interfere with legacy radio…
Deutsche Telekom (DT) has added a private 5G Standalone (SA) package to its campus network portfolio based on 5G, using 100 MHz of the 3.7 GHz spectrum band that is dedicated to enterprises in Germany. It is particularly targeting ultra-reliable low latency communications (URLLC) use cases that are highly location-specific. This is the latest in a series of moves to position DT as a major player in private 5G, especially on the URLCC front where initially MNOs appeared to be losing out on major projects from the biggest manufacturing companies in the country, such as Volkswagen and Bosch. In fact, MNOs have enjoyed some success even among those major tier 1 manufacturers. For instance, Telefónica Germany, in conjunction with Ericsson,…
The USA’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), passed last year, includes rules related to ‘Build America, Buy America’, which are being seized upon by the Open RAN community, among others. These require a proportion of the federal subsidies allocated by the IIJA for broadband construction to be spent on homegrown equipment. Like India (see separate item), China and, to a lesser extent, Russia, the USA is increasingly keen to support its own industries at a time of economic uncertainty and geopolitical tension, in order to improve its self-sufficiency in key technologies, stimulate local companies and, so the argument goes, enhance national security. While the USA dominates some areas of technology, such as processors and cloud, it has a minor role…
Most of the real world deployment of Open RAN so far has focused on a standardized interface for fronthaul connections between radio units and basebands (centralized or distributed units). The O-RAN Alliance has specified Open Fronthaul, which is based on the eCPRI standard. But a fully interoperable, multivendor RAN will rely on a wider set of interfaces, to ensure open connections between every element. One of the most important is X2, which is the interface allowing handover between base stations. Although this is a 3GPP-defined interface, and so does not need to be specified by another body, it has been implemented in different ways by each base station vendor (in the same way that the CPRI specs for fronthaul have…
Vodafone is using its considerable weight to try to accelerate development of a robust Open RAN ecosystem and platform, and its latest effort is to open a dedicated Open RAN chip design center within its new R&D labs in Málaga, Spain. About 20 chip developers will be involved in this project to design open foundations for the next generation of mobile networks, putting Vodafone at the heart of an ambitious attempt to define a new silicon architecture for RAN. The operator wants to stimulate developments that will speed up the process of making Open RAN sufficiently powerful and reliable to support heavily loaded 5G macro networks, a tough challenge when its aim is to deploy the technology at scale by 2025.…
The Indian government led by Narendra Modi is calling for the development of a homegrown operating system, to counter the rising dominance of Google and Apple and to encourage a local ecosystem. For many years, successive Indian governments have sought to increase the technological self-sufficiency of the huge country by encouraging development of local platforms, from chips to network equipment to software, for key infrastructure such as cellular. The most recent program is the Atmanirbhar Bharat (self-reliant India) policy, which includes requirements for operators and others to buy a rising percentage of their equipment locally. The government has also sought to promote its own alternative to key US platforms such as Twitter. Results have been mixed, despite the country’s wealth of…
Vecima is only now starting to talk openly about the footprint of its distributed access architecture (DAA) technology, acquired from Nokia 18 months ago. Despite a recent announcement that Liberty Latin America is deploying the Canadian vendor’s Remote MACPHY across its high fiber-coaxial (HFC) networks to scale performance and capacity, we understand this has been rumbling away for quite some time. Following a conversation with Vecima’s COO, Clay McCreery, Faultline found out that tangible change is still yet to come. Vecima’s Remote MACPHY offering looks to clean up the network chain, moving decisioning and intelligence capabilities to the node and the cloud. Freeing up this capacity allows for 10-fold bandwidth increases, passing operators of 1 Gbps services the keys to…
The pandemic has intensified the digital divide into throbbing chasms tearing through every nation and every industry on Earth – so what are we doing about it? In the US, that divide is more glaring than anywhere else, which is why the US government has set up the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF), allocating $20.4 billion for rural broadband network rollouts. The EU, on the other hand, has committed €134.5 billion ($152 billion) to digitalization, although policymakers flat out refuse to say how much of this will fund broadband buildouts over the next five years. We suspect it is well below $20 billion. However, while the US RDOF is plodding along nicely with auctions splitting funds among operators, the EU…
Seeing Harmonic’ VP of Video Strategy, Thierry Fautier, take up the role of referee during a multi-cloud boxing bout was a sight to behold during a heated panel session this week. Cloud experts from Google and Red Hat slugged it out at FierceTelecom’s Cloud Networking Blitz Week, trading blows firstly on the familiar debate of public versus private cloud, before this spilled over into whether Google Cloud is all it cracks up to be in the context of telco applications. For the record, we should not forget that media and entertainment services are becoming increasingly valuable telco applications. We will elaborate on Fautier’s video-centric intervention further down, which was only required as Fatih Nar, Chief Architect of Telco Partner Solutions…
On January 26, Elon Musk addressed his shareholders and talked through his plans – and the share price dropped through the floor on the following day – each observer attributed it to something different, most Musk lovers were unreasonably upbeat over his pronouncements, but he dropped a handful of bombshells, which a traditional manager would have been ashamed of. Musk is not that guy however, and every investor and would be EV car buyer has to decide whether or not they will follow his logic or not. Some investors, at least, clearly thought they were investing in a car company, and since Musk’s statements were almost all about being something more than a car company, almost to the point where…
Worth Noting: Round-up of highlights from the week’s news IoT gains help Intel cruise to strong financial finish for 2021 Intel has beaten its own guidance by $1.3bn to post fourth quarter GAAP revenue of $20.5bn, up 3% year-on-year. Full-year GAAP revenue was $79.0bn, up 1% year-on-year and the highest in the company’s history, buoyed by a strong performance from the company’s Internet of Things Group (IoTG), which reported $1.1bn in sales, up 36%. Non-GAAP revenues were very similar, but can differ markedly for some companies. All US companies are required to report using stringent GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) rules, but some asset managers believe that alternative non-GAAP figures represent a company’s financial performance more accurately, for various reasons.…
Two European operators, TIM and Orange, have announced new CEOs in the past week. Pietro Labriola, CEO of TIM Brasil, has been promoted to the Group CEO role, to replace outgoing Luigi Gubitosi. The catalyst for Gubitosi to leave was a $12bn takeover bid for TIM from private equity group KKR, which was announced in November. Gubitosi was already under shareholder pressure after a series of poor financial results. Shortly after the offer from KKR, Gubitosi offered to stand down in order to expedite the company’s response to the takeover bid and TIM’s board appointed Labriola to prepare a turnaround plan and fend off KKR. Labriola reportedly presented his preliminary plan to the board last week, recommending that TIM spins…
Massive MIMO is both one of the biggest revenue opportunities for Open RAN vendors, and one of the biggest challenges facing the platform as it aims to match traditional macrocell architectures in performance and cost. Strengthening its position as a key radio provider and integrator for Open RAN, Japan’s NEC has acquired a US Massive MIMO innovator called Blue Danube. Operators have been far more reliant on higher orders of MIMO to boost 5G capacity and coverage, than was expected prior to large-scale 5G deployments. The accelerated uptake of antenna arrays with at least 16 transmit and 16 receive (16T16R) elements has thrown a spotlight on innovators in this area (see separate item on SK Telecom trial), but has also…
India’s second largest operator, Bharti Airtel, has announced a five-year agreement with Google to accelerate the growth of India’s digital ecosystem. Google will invest up to $1bn in the partnership, as part of its Google for India Digitization Fund. The companies will work together on new products and customer experiences, to address challenges of affordability, access and digital inclusion. The $1bn sum will include a $700m equity investment to gain a 1.28% stake in Bharti, at a price of INR734 ($9.77) per share, as well as a maximum of $300m to be spent on fulfilling commercial agreements or scaling Airtel’s offerings. “Airtel and Google share the vision to grow India’s digital dividend through innovative products,” said Sunil Bharti Mittal, chairman…
By singling out physical retail as a key growth sector for IoT and 5G, Qualcomm is hardly stopping the front page, but is merely following many peers and competitors. Of greater interest is the plan Qualcomm has to stimulate and exploit latent demand from retailers for technological assistance for recovery from what for many has been a dire period over the Covid-19 pandemic. The period has taken a heavy toll on the physical retail sector, with a good number going to the wall as a result, while many that have survived are short of cash for investment in new technologies that could make up lost ground. However, there is an opportunity for survivors to capitalize on the consolidation if they…
The UK’s BT, unlike rival Vodafone, has been skeptical of many of the claims made for Open RAN, questioning its ability to support a full-performance 5G network, while insisting it wants “fewer suppliers to manage, not more”. However, chief architect Neil McRae – for all his wariness about the near term feasibility of Open RAN outside of small cell networks – has been vocally interested in the RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC), a key element of the O-RAN Alliance architecture. BT has been testing various RIC applications in its R&D labs in AdAstral Park, and has suggested it would develop its own xApps to run on an open RIC platform. Now it is bringing its activities out of the labs and…
Nokia and SK Telecom have conducted a proof-of-concept (PoC) demonstration in South Korea of a 5G virtualized RAN with 64T64R Massive MIMO. This gives them an early stake in the ground ahead of more such demonstrations over the rest of 2022, as well as early deployments. The PoC adopted the increasingly common architecture for vRAN trials, as popularized by the O-RAN Alliance, with the shared baseband infrastructure split into a virtual centralized unit (vCU) in the data center, and a virtual distributed unit (vDU) close to the cell site. This aims to maximize flexibility and resource efficiency and support 5G use cases that require advanced beamforming and/or ultra-low latency, among the capabilities that require a dedicated and optimized DU. The…
Energy efficiency is often touted as a benefit of Open RAN technologies, though many of the claims really relate to virtualized RAN (vRAN), which can be open or not. The energy efficiency claims for vRAN derive from the ability to share network functions between many cell sites, moving resources between the sites as traffic patterns change rather than having to equip every site for peak loads. However, the more operators talk about implementing demanding 5G network functions on COTS servers, the more the dark side of the vRAN power argument looms. Even Nvidia, which is working on processors that would be capable of supporting the demanding processing requirements of 5G Layer 1 tasks, has acknowledged that, while its designs can…
Special Report: 5G energy efficiency One of the most pressing challenges facing telecoms operators is how to increase the density and performance of their networks to meet the demands of new data-intensive applications, while also fulfilling commitments to energy efficiency and reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Most major telcos have made commitments to energy reduction as part of broader sustainability and corporate responsibility strategies. Mobile operators representing one-third of the wireless industry by revenue have committed to achieving net-zero emissions by 2050, and almost two-thirds of the mobile sector has accelerated targets to cut emissions during this decade, according to GSMA. Energy targets, of course, are partly born of pragmatism – the need to reduce the cost of energy, which…
Five years ago this week… Sky bit the bullet and begun the cannibalization of its core business of 30 years with the announcement that all 270 channels would be delivered directly over broadband via its Sky Q set top. This marked a bolder strategy than most at the time, and still holds true today, although the likes of Liberty Global are playing catch-up. Sky’s confidence in home broadband was bolstered by a partnership with Airties and the operator wasted no time making bold claims, aiming to do away with satellite dishes altogether by 2018. However, the painfully similar rhetoric that surrounded the arrival of Sky Glass in 2021 demonstrated that satellite will not go quietly. — Patent pool MPEG…