11542 search results for Open RAN

As often happens in India, the process of getting 5G spectrum into the hands of the operators is proving a tortuous one. Initial auctions have been delayed in the face of operator hostility to high reserve prices, and requests to set a later date and allow their coffers to recover from recent investments and fines (see introductory article). Now the regulator, TRAI, has released a consultation paper that it hopes will ease the path to spectrum auctions in 2022, and kickstart 5G deployment, which is central to government economic and digital agendas. Operators may not be so quick to embrace 5G. They still have plenty of 4G investment to pay off, and though ARPUs have risen, recently, for the first…

Huawei’s exclusion from many countries’ 5G plans – under pressure from the USA amid its trade and political wars with China – has caused many operators to pursue alternatives based on Open RAN to avoid being locked into a de facto Nordic duopoly of Ericsson and Nokia. Samsung and NEC are gearing up to fill the breach but will take time to amass a comprehensive end-to-end portfolio across the whole RAN and core. The hope is that Open RAN – which is supported in certain products by both Asian challengers – will usher in a wider range of alternative suppliers, bringing greater choice, innovation and price competitiveness, and the ability to mix and match suppliers within one network. Concern over…

Special Report: Indian 5G   India is the second largest mobile market in the world in terms of subscribers, and a technology hothouse, especially in software development. Its population has one of the most rapidly growing levels of usage of mobile data and content. All these ingredients should make India a powerhouse in shaping mobile services and platforms, but to date, its impact on the industry has been limited compared to that of other major markets such as China and the USA. This has been down to a range of factors. Despite growing middle classes and disposable income in some regions, India still has a high percentage of citizens with no access to Internet connectivity, and either 2G-only or no…

Mobilitie expands connectivity at health park with CBRS spectrum Mobilitie, a privately held US telco infrastructure provider, is using CBRS technology and spectrum to expand connectivity at Dignity Health Sports Park (DHSP) in Carson, California, home to the MLS (Major League Soccer) club LA Galaxy. Mobilitie and DHSP are together expanding the capabilities of an existing distributed antenna system (DAS) by launching a private LTE network using the 3.5 GHz CBRS spectrum. “The expanded private network at Dignity Health Sports Park will ultimately enhance the operational technology and help ensure all of our new touchless enhancements, security measures and digital media have the secure connection to work seamlessly as we welcome fans back to our stadium,” said Katie Pandolfo, general…

News from around the world of WiFi last week suggested that vendors were seeing the demand for WiFi 6 and 6E-enabled CPE as a steady trickle rather than a rush, with the surrounding infrastructure and consumer demand not quite there yet. However, deals are Both Technicolor and integrated device manufacturer Akoustis have signed new deployment agreements, even as industry consortiums wrestle to fully unlock 6 GHz. Rethink TV, Faultline’s forecasting arm, has been busy the past few months tracking and predicting the roll-out rates of the various WiFi standards, old and new, both across CPE and consumer client devices. One of the biggest considerations has been whether WiFi 6 (802.11ax) will roll-out across the world at the same speed as…

CableLabs, the R&D arm of the north American cable industry, has an increasingly broad remit. On the one hand, as cablecos such as the UK’s Virgin Media O2 plot their path away from DOCSIS technologies towards full fiber, CableLabs could see its overall influence diminished. On the other, as more cablecos – again like VMO2 – become part of fixed/mobile operators, it has been active in developing platforms that will enable future converged services. This has seen CableLabs contributing to developments by mobile standards bodies such as 3GPP, as well as devising its own architectures to support multiple access networks including cellular and WiFi. Its latest effort is to launch a series of architectures to support MVNOs in hybrid network…

Orange’s Belgian division is in discussions to acquire a majority stake in the local cable operator, initially at approximately 75% in a deal that would value VOO at €1.8bn ($2bn). A successful bid would mark Orange Belgium’s debut in the fixed line market – bolstering its 3m mobile subscribers with VOO’s roughly 500,000 broadband subscribers and 50,000 pay-TV customers. Three years ago, Orange’s rival Telenet – owned by Liberty Global – had just poached VOO from being an MVNO on Orange’s mobile network, to an MVNO using Telenet’s Base mobile network. Rumors swirled at the time that Orange was circling VOO, but rumors they remained, until last week. The only thing stopping Orange from making a move for VOO back…

While TIP’s progress update (see separate item) reflects the bright side of Open RAN, with stakeholder engagement, growth in trials and extensive cooperations, there are clouds on the O-RAN horizon too. Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) has published a report that warns that multivendor Open RANs carry significant security risks and concluding that insufficient work has been done to address these issues. The government report was commissioned from German consultancy Secunet, which also develops cybersecurity products. The 86-page document concludes that “medium to high security risks emanate from a multiplicity of the interfaces and components specified in O-RAN” and “the current development process of the O-RAN specifications is not guided by the paradigm of ‘security/privacy by design/default’.” It…

In its latest progress update, Telecom Infra Project (TIP) says it has now helped to facilitate 35 Open RAN trials and deployments, by 29 operators in 20 countries. In addition, since its formation in 2016, the group has added 42 Open RAN products to the work of its broad-ranging Open RAN Project Group (which brings together six working groups). These products have been submitted by 16 vendors to be available for testing or purchasing via TIP’s marketplace. They include most of the elements of a disaggregated Open RAN including centralized units (CU), distributed units (DU) and radio units (RU), plus integrated small cells and outdoor macro equipment. The vendors involved are Altiostar, Baicells, Comba, Dell, Fujitsu, Mavenir, MTI Mobile, NEC,…

Dish announces its first deal with Rakuten Symphony, for OSS Dish Network promises to be the next flagship greenfield deployer of Open RAN, after Rakuten. Although it has often referenced Rakuten’s ground-breaking (though heavily customized) deployment in Japan, it has not directly said it would use the Rakuten Communications Platform (RCP), which pre-integrates many of the elements used in Japan, and which Rakuten will commercialize through its new vendor and integrator arm, Symphony. Indeed, the US operator has generally chosen different suppliers, as a result of a long series of RFPs, from those of Rakuten (Fujitsu, rather than NEC, was its first radio partner, for instance, and it is famously going to run some of its RAN functions in AWS’s…

Private network technology developer Athonet has coined the slogan ‘Bring Your Own RAN’ (BYORAN) to promote both its own offerings for enterprises and Open RAN in general, to allow freedom of choice or cherry-picking in cellular radio equipment. Inspired by the hallowed Bring Your Own Device mantra, Athonet has been seduced by the desire to conflate its acronym with Open RAN and should have called it instead ‘Buy Your Own RAN’, for that is what it the company really urging its enterprise customers to do. That indeed is provided for within Athonet’s product architecture comprising three key components for private 5G or LTE networks, only two of which the firm supplies itself. These are the Edge Node and the Control…

Ericsson’s acquisition of enterprise cloud-based communication platform vendor Vonage for $6.2bn came rather out of the blue, partly because it does not fit snugly with its 5G strategy for corporates and private networks. The move, Ericsson’s biggest buy ever by some distance, consumes a lot of its cash, leaving little over for further manoeuvers that might more directly nourish its broader 5G strategy. Historians of IP-based messaging and universal communications will recall that Vonage was founded in 2001 to serve the then heavily hyped consumer voice over IP field alongside the likes of Skype, which ended up in Microsoft’s hands. Vonage went on ploughing its own furrow, evolving to become a communications platform-as-a-service (CPaaS) provider, incorporating apps such as reminders…