The 3rd Generation Partnership Project accepted specifications developed by industry players for low-power wide area network development, expected to be a major piece of the “Internet of Things” in terms of devices that send small amounts of data, require a long battery life and may be in remote locations.
The GSMA formed a 27-member Mobile IoT Initiative to develop the LPWA specs and lauded 3GPP’s approval. According to the GSMA, participants in the work, which include AT&T, VerizonCommunications, Vodafone Group and major infrastructure vendors, “will implement multiple global pilots in early 2016 with full commercial solutions starting later in the year.
“The low-power wide area market is a high-growth area of the Internet of Things and represents a huge opportunity in its development,” said Alex Sinclair, acting director general and CTO for the GSMA. “A common and global vision will remove fragmentation, accelerate the availability of industry standard solutions and help the market to fulfill its potential.”
The GSMA will also host a working meeting in late January as part of a 3GPP meeting in Budapest, Hungary, to work with the Narrowband IoT Forum on including NB-IoT as part of the GSMA Mobile IoT initiative to create a more cohesive ecosystem for various IoT technologies.
In other standards news this week, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute formed a new group to work on standards for “UltraHD” television – with one of the primary concerns being content decoding that works on all devices, including televisions, tablets and smartphones. The intelligent Compound Content Management Industry Specification Group aims to develop a solution workable for both existing and next-generation devices. The ISG’s founding members are BT Group, Dolby Laboratories, STMicroelectronics and Telefonica S.A.
–Spirent Communications acquired European Wi-Fi monitoring specialist Epitiro for an undisclosed sum. The two companies had an existing partnership for Wi-Fi end-user experience visibility with customers that include a tier-one U.S. service provider. Epitiro provides probes designed to provide real-time insight into metrics such as network availability, Web browsing, file transfer speeds, and the accessibility and performance of applications such as Facebook.
“Our service provider and enterprise customers increasingly see Wi-Fi as an integral part of their strategy to provide services anywhere and anytime,” said Des Owens, GM of service assurance at Spirent, in a statement. “With this acquisition, we’re building on the success of our strategic partnership with Epitiro and see an exciting opportunity to improve the visibility of Wi-Fi experience for many more service providers and enterprises worldwide. We’ll also be better positioned to integrate Epitiro’s pioneering Wi-Fi technology across our suite and to provide our customers with seamless support and services.”
Spirent recently appointed Kim Fisker as CTO of its device intelligence unit, which is comprised of its Tweakker (cloud-based device guide for customer self-care) and Mobilethink (device intelligence and management) operations. Fisker has significant background and experience in voice over LTE, which was recently added to Mobilethink device management options.
–Keysight Technologies introduced new software for pulse amplitude modulation with four amplitude levels, or PAM-4 signals for its oscilloscopes. PAM-4 signaling is being driven by mobile computing applications that demand better speed and performance from server system communications, according to Keysight, but the company noted compliance testing for PAM-4 signals is still in early standards discussions.
–Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced it has a new monitoring software solution for virtual network environments. The company’s Network Node Manager I aims to provide visibility into virtual elements that may not be captured by existing network management systems, in order to maintain network control and loading decisions as well as support connectivity troubleshooting.
“Network managers today are unable to see a complete picture of their virtualized devices in real time, which limits their ability to ensure compliance and engineer the network for optimal performance,” said Balaji Venkatraman, who is director of product line management for HP Enterprise, in a statement.
-LTE Release 13 will be the demarcation point at which the technology is designated as LTE-Advanced Pro, according to 3GPP, and is expected to be finalized in March 2016. TeliaSonera‘s Norwegian subsidiary, NetCom, demonstrated an LTE-Advanced Pro network this week in partnership with Huawei, and was able to reach speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second using four component-carrier aggregation, NetCom said, at 800 MHz, 1800 MHz, 2100 MHz and 2600 MHz.
