Editor’s Note: RCR Wireless News goes all in for “Throwback Thursdays,” tapping into our archives to resuscitate the top headlines from the past. Fire up the time machine, put on those sepia-tinted shades, set the date for #TBT and enjoy the memories!
Pandemic delays expected to hit 5G deployment
Ericsson is largely holding steady in the face of the ongoing COVID-19 epidemic, with limited financial and operational impacts thus far — although company executives expressed concern about the possibility that 5G deployments could be delayed in Europe, and warned that the longer national lock-downs last, the more likely that their operations could be impacted. Ericsson expects to see a softer than usual second quarter of 2020, but the company remains confident in the long-term outlook for telecom equipment. “The current global uncertainty requires a humble attitude towards predicting the near-term future,” said Börje Ekholm, president and CEO of Ericsson. “We remain positive on the longer-term outlook, but the second quarter is likely to be a tad softer than normal due to timing of strategic contracts and uncertainty induced by COVID-19. Predicting when the restrictions to curb the pandemic will be lifted and how the recovery will look is impossible.” “We are going through unprecedented times with COVID-19 which has impacted everyone around the world either directly or indirectly,” added Ekholm. He went on to say that Ericsson “delivered a solid result during the first quarter, with limited impact from the COVID-19 pandemic.” For the first quarter, networks sales were up 2% year-over-year by the numbers, but Ericsson said that when adjusted for comparable units and currency, sales were actually down about 2%. Profits were down about 5% compared to the same period last year. … Read more
China Unicom expects 5G deployment delays
China Unicom said the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in China has slowed the deployment of 5G networks and impacted business development. In a statement, the company said the pandemic has also increased demand for digitalization, which could translate into new business opportunities. The carrier’s net profit in the first quarter of the year declined by 13.9%y ear-on-year to CNY3.17 billion ($448 million), while revenue grew by 0.9% to CNY73.8 billion In a statement, Wang Xiaochu, China Unicom chairman and CEO, claimed that while facing challenges such as market saturation and strong competition as well as the coronavirus outbreak, the telco managed to control customer acquisition costs during the quarter. The executive also said he expects 5G user growth to accelerate in the second half of 2020, as 5G network deployments accelerate and prices of 5G devices decline and more innovative applications emerge. The company did not provide specific information about the number of 5G subscribers. China Unicom ended Q1 with a total of 311 million subscribers, down by 12.1 million from Q1 2019. Its 4G user base expanded 10.5% year-on-year to 254.5 million. After losing 1.37 million LTE subs in the first two months of 2020, it added 756,000 in March. … Read more
Parsing pandemic traffic shifts
Some major urban business hubs of the U.S. are seeing less traffic, and what traffic there is, is moving faster. Hot spots of mobile activity have shifted from the heart of city centers into more diffuse areas, and Wi-Fi usage has spread out across metro areas as well. Those conclusions come from data analysis by network benchmarking and analytics company umlaut (formerly P3), which has been tracking the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on where and how mobile users are using their devices. After recently analyzing trends in major European cities, umlaut turned its focus to U.S. cities and looked at how patterns have changed in Los Angeles, California; New York City; the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area; and Chicago, Illinois. Umlaut found that the use of business applications, particularly Zoom, rose in all of those areas beginning in mid-March. Cisco WebEx saw heightened use in the New York City metropolitan area, and Microsoft Teams saw a spike in the Chicago area earlier this month. The shift to educational app use for remote learning was spread across a wider variety of platforms, from DuoLingo to Google Classroom and Hangout Meet and others, and varied by metro area. Interestingly, umlaut found a rise in the use of communications apps in L.A., New York and D.C., and a bump in mobile shopping apps (Amazon in particular) in D.C. and Los Angeles, but didn’t find a statistically significant change in the use of entertainment apps on mobile in any of those major metros. In terms of whether mobile users are staying at home, umlaut found a marked decrease in mobility as of mid-March, with NYC seeing the most profound impacts. … Read more
The trouble with industrial AR headsets
AR hardware has a reputation for being expensive and cumbersome. How is the experience, actually? Not brilliant, it turns out. “It varies by use case and device, but generally the user experience is acceptable-to-poor,” says Eric Abbruzzese, research director at ABI Research. Even Microsoft’s latest HoloLens 2, arguably the star turn in the AR field, will not stand up to heavy industrial usage, he suggests. “It is a market leader at the high end, and is still heavy, hot, and difficult to focus [with] for extended use.” Cheaper alternatives to the HoloLens, as well as high-end rival devices like Magic Leap, have their own issues, he implies. “Monocular devices can alleviate weight and discomfort, but small displays with ‘goldilocks zones’, [which require users to balance] the display and their vision are not ideal.” The industry itself is more polite, although the implication remains that there is massive work to be done to make the experience both affordable and naturalistic. “The experience is good and continuously improving, but there is still room for growth,” says Qualcomm. Brian Vogelsang, senior director of XR product management at Qualcomm, runs through the fixes, echoing the harsher sentiments from Abbruzzese. “Headsets need to be lighter, more comfortable and not produce any strain so they can be worn for a full shift,” he says. … Read more
Nvidia acquires Mellanox
Nvidia’s $7 billion acquisition of computing networking company Mellanox Technologies has been finalized following delayed regulatory approval, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang couldn’t be happier. “This is a home run deal,” Huang told CNBC. “Man, I’ve been dreaming about this.” The two companies reached an agreement of acquisition in March 2019, but because Mellanox has significant business in China and because China and the U.S. are experiencing heightened trade tensions, the deal did not receive regulatory approval until April 16th of this year. Among Mellanox’s major customers are China’s Baidu and Alibaba. Alibaba recently announced it will invest 200 billion yuan ($28.26 billion) in its cloud computing division over the next three years. By giving Nvidia end-to-end expertise in data center services, the acquisition will improve and grow the company’s infrastructure position in the market as it continues to compete with Intel’s artificial intelligence business. … Read more
Cybercriminals leverage Covid-19
There may be one thing growing and mutating faster than the novel coronavirus itself: human hackers’ attempts to use the pandemic as an opportunity to spread their own viruses and ransomware. Cloud security company Zscaler reported a 30,000% increase in COVID-19-themed attacks since January — and in the company’s words, no, that’s not a typo. Zscaler saw coronavirus-themed attacks grow from around 1,200 observed and blocked COVID-19-related attacks in January to 380,000 such incidents in March. “Bad actors love to take advantage of major news and events, popular brands, the hottest games—anything trending around the world—to give their malware a better chance of success. And, sadly, they are not above preying on peoples’ fears and uncertainty, which explains the explosion in attacks and scams related to COVID-19,” wrote Deepen Desai, VP of security research at Zscaler, in a blog post on the company’s data. Telework has risen abruptly due to stay-at-home orders, and cybercriminals are trying to take advantage of the disruption. Zscaler reported an 85% increase in phishing attacks targeted at remote enterprise users. Some examples included spear-phishing emails that target users by appearing to come from corporate IT departments or payroll departments, perhaps asking the user to follow a link and log in to a fake “corporate VPN” site. Registrations of suspicious domain names has surged, which commonly include COVID-related key words such as test, mask, Wuhan and kit, according to Zscaler. There was a spike of nearly 97,000 such domain registrations in late March. … Read more
High hopes for HAPS
A coalition of companies are aiming for the stratosphere as a “multi-billion dollar market opportunity” in telecommunications, planetary observation and weather prediction and modeling—including five traditionally terrestrial cellular network operators and two major telecom infrastructure vendors. In a post on Medium and a new white paper, the recently formed HAPS (High Altitude Platform Stations or High-Altitude Pseudo-Satellites) Alliance laid out what is described as a “rare, untapped commercial opportunity in the skies above Earth’s atmosphere.” That Alliance includes Alphabet’s Loon and Japan’s SoftBank, which have collaborated via HAPSMobile, a SoftBank subsidiary, on modifying a HAPS payload so that telecom equipment can be carried. But it also includes network equipment companies Nokia and Ericsson, as well as carriers China Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, Telefónica and Bharti Airtel. While space technology and the use of satellites has matured in recent years, the HAPS Alliance says, the stratosphere — where temperatures can be as low as -65 degrees Celsius and wind speeds can be greater than 40 kilometers an hour — has still been seen as unsuitable for large-scale commercial operations. Recent advances advances in solar, battery and artificial intelligence technologies have made it possible to design stratospheric vehicles, however, and multiple companies are now looking at the possibilities of the stratosphere. Loon’s balloons may be the best-known, but Airbus, Boeing and HAPSMobile have also developed fixed-wing HAPS aircraft that fly in the stratosphere. … Read more
Check out the RCR Wireless News Archives for more stories from the past.
