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History Some estimates put the telecom industry, especially the RAN segment, between seven and ten years behind a normal innovation curve due to the lack of competition in the market. This is a similar situation to the state of the …

5G hype bounds with the number of networks being deployed and the network operators vying for customer eyes. While consumer growth is important, the network can provide more benefits than high-speed mobile broadband. One of the key use cases that …

In previous blogs in this “Who Disaggregated My RAN? series, we have looked at the benefits of a disaggregated Open RAN, including the growth of an ecosystem to support the deployment of an Open RAN. We have also looked at …

History Functional splits are nothing new. They were initially outlined in 3GPP Release 14 and defined in 3GPP release 15 and where new terminology, interfaces and functional modules were introduced. But why is this RU, DU, CU functional split concept …

In this series focused on the benefits of a disaggregated Open RAN, we have had a chance to see how an open RAN has helped expand the ecosystem and led operators to consider new vendor solutions that meet their needs. …

Counterfeit chips, including gray market and rogue chips, have created an ongoing, multi-front battle for the semiconductor market to the tune of $75 billion annually, according to ResearchAndMarkets.com. The threat is more significant and broader than the chip maker’s bottom …

History The entire telecom industry is going through a dramatic change that can be only compared to the change that data centers went through in the 2000s, all driven by Moore’s Law. This is driving the need to move from …

Wi-Fi is arguably the most ground-breaking wireless technology of our time. From the first public Wi-Fi hotspots in the early 2000s which enabled radically increased productivity on the move, through to the role Wi-Fi is has in today’s pandemic environment, …

Now more than ever, we’re seeing more collaboration in the telecoms industry. Instead of working against each other, the industry is coming together to boost the pace of innovation. This is seeing tangible successes, with many associations and ecosystems forming …

The arrival of RAN disaggregation and the corresponding standards for open interfaces, hardware, software decoupling, network intelligence and automation has led to the expansion of a diverse ecosystem of RAN component players, specifically Radio Unit (RU) vendors. While this ecosystem …

In 5G standalone (SA), the control plane has been significantly enhanced as service-based architecture. Components for policy, authentication, session management and user management have been disaggregated. They provide a flexible, open deployment framework for a range of new use cases.  …

  The journey to full-scale 5G coverage is a gradual process, especially as many devices currently do not support 5G and the majority of business applications today don’t require 5G-level performance. This leaves MPLS, DSL, 3G, 4G, LTE and 5G …

Every global crisis brings this same conundrum: While times of upheaval cause severe economic pain, they also tend to be fertile breeding grounds for innovation. The Great Recession produced a wave of startups that are among today’s top digital brands, …

In my last article in this “Who Disaggregated My RAN?” blog series, we covered the advances made by the O-RAN Alliance to deliver an open Fronthaul specification that supports multiple ways in which the base station will connect to the …

In just a matter of months, the world has shifted itself indoors. In so doing, we have grown reliant on digital means for work and leisure. For mobile operators, it has been a busy time ramping up and responding to …

There is not much to recommend this current coronavirus pandemic. But there were two silver linings.  One was that the virus took telehealth mainstream. Two years ago, only 10% of healthcare consumers had tried telehealth. In a March 2020 consumer …

Nobody ever said the Ethernet Roadmap was a direct route. When the 25G Ethernet Consortium (Arista, Broadcom, Google, Mellanox Technologies and Microsoft) proposed single-lane 25-Gbps Ethernet and dual-lane 50-Gbps Ethernet in July 2014, it created a big fork in the …

As we saw in the last article in this blog series, the disaggregation of the RAN has opened up a number of new and exciting opportunities for a larger ecosystem to grow and thrive. But nowhere has the momentum been …

  As the coronavirus pandemic has evolved and new data emerges, we know COVID-19 poses a risk to everyone regardless of age and gender. That said, the health risk to older adults is high: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report eight out of 10 coronavirus deaths in the US have occurred in adults …

In my first blog in this new Who Disaggregated My RAN? series, “How it All Falls in Place,” I provided the background that led to the industry’s push for the adoption of an open and disaggregated RAN.  Based on my …

Network operators  worldwide are turning to open radio access network (O-RAN) architectures in an effort to simplify 5G RAN deployment and management, allowing more efficient scalability to meet rising data demands. With the recent formation of the Open RAN Policy …

Most of you reading this blog will be doing so under lockdown. Whether or not you are reading this while working is another matter, but regardless, you will be using data. In this current time, when so many people are …

Disaggregated RAN: How it all falls in place The promise of 5G is unlocking significant change and sparking the 4th Industrial Revolution, driving use cases such as industrial IoT and improved healthcare, to augmented reality, autonomous vehicles and smart cities. …

When you see the many announcements around innovation in OpenRAN for 5G, what you may not realize is that the 4G and 5G-only OpenRAN approach is only suited for greenfield deployments. So, what does that mean for brownfield or existing …

Much of the discussion around a new generation of mobile technology traditionally focusses on its increased throughput, and this seems no different for 5G. Everyone from Zoom video conference users to Unknown Battlegrounds players regularly experience that other key characteristic …