Nokia takes a significant leap in telecom landscape with a unique Cloud RAN trial, persistently striving to achieve parity between Cloud RAN and purpose-built RAN. This strategic move, involving Elisa, explores In-Line acceleration potential, positioning Nokia in a subtle competition with Ericsson’s ‘Look-Aside’ approach. The latter’s reticence adds intrigue to this telecommunication rivalry. However, will Nokia’s In-Line strategy prove to be the more efficient route?
Vodafone is expanding its devotion to Open RAN technology, joining forces with Nokia in a progressive venture in Italy. The initiative aligns with Vodafone’s Open RAN directive, largely centered in the UK, and extends influence to the Italian telecom landscape. With this first commercial 5G Open RAN pilot in Italy, they aim to prove Nokia’s Open RAN solution matches the functionality and quality of traditional RAN. With an eye on promoting automated, adaptable networks for the ever-growing demand of responsive 5G services, such innovation bolsters the EU’s digital sovereignty and global competitiveness.
Despite the seemingly lagging global investment in standalone 5G networks, promising trends in the telecom sector indicate an upcoming surge. With minimal progress indicated by Global Mobile Suppliers Association’s statistics, the industry pins hopes on major moves from operators like New Zealand’s Spark and Vodafone. Meanwhile, the increasing adoption of 5G SA in private networks for various sectors shows an encouraging forecast. The journey towards profitable 5G investments seems complex, yet strides are being made in the right direction.
Virgin Media O2 Plans Job Cuts Virgin Media O2 is reportedly planning job cuts, with anywhere between 800 and 2,000 jobs at risk of elimination. The company has rescheduled an imminent pay rise for staff to avoid including it in redundancy packages. This news disappoints staff who were led to believe they would have the opportunity to transfer to different departments, but anonymous sources suggest suitable alternative roles may not be available. The job cuts are part of the ongoing integration process between O2 and Virgin Media, following their merger in 2021, and are expected due to real estate consolidation and eliminating overlapping roles, common methods in mergers. Read the full article T-Mobile and Bellevue Pilot Road Safety Tech T-Mobile US and the city of Bellevue, Washington, are partnering to pilot Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) technology, aimed at enhancing road and pedestrian safety through real-time information. T-Mobile will provide 5G connectivity,…
IBM and Telefónica Argentina (Movistar) have announced a live, fully operational Open RAN network that will act as a proof of concept (PoC) for the delivery of commercial mobile services to the city of Puerto Madryn, Argentina, covering 81,000 urban residents. The launch allows for the testing of live, commercial traffic and provides an early proof point for the technology as it continues to develop. IBM has led the system integration process, assembling components and systems from a number of software and hardware vendors, including Altiostar, Red Hat, Quanta, Gigatera and Kontron, from pre-integration all the way through to full deployment. Open RAN is a state-of-the-art radio access network technology that enables interoperability for transforming a radio network into an open cloud environment in which multiple vendors can participate to create a better and more efficient service network. When using Open RAN, operators can combine hardware and software…
Telecommunications giant Telefónica has expanded its long-standing technology partnership with IBM and announced the release of Cloud Garden 2.0, the next step in Telefonica’s cloud services platform to accelerate application modernization. Cloud Garden 2.0 is supported on IBM Cloud Pak and Red Hat OpenShift. The first iteration of Cloud Garden, launched in 2019, was originally based on IBM Cloud Private technology. However, Cloud Garden 2.0 switched to the hybrid Red Hat OpenShift cloud Kubernetes platform and the IBM Cloud Pak for Application. Telefónica customers can now run their applications on containers on premises or in the cloud environment of their choice, along with the simplification and speeding up when launching new solutions. Cloud Garden 2.0 is hosted through Telefonica’s Virtual Data Center in Spain, helping its customers experience low latency and better uptime for managing their applications. Andrés López Hedoire, de Enterprise Product Marketing Director, Telefónica España, commented:…
Verizon buys Zoom rival BlueJeans for less than $500 million Verizon Business has announced a deal to purchase enterprise-grade video conferencing platform BlueJeans, thereby expanding Verizon’s unified communications portfolio and improving its service for business customers. This acquisition shows that the company is also trying to capitalize on the current trend of remote employees making extensive use of online services such as Zoom, Slack and Microsoft during the pandemic. BlueJeans has more than 15,000 customers, including Facebook, IBM-owned Red Hat, ADP, Zillow and LinkedIn. The deal is worth USD 500 million and is expected to close in the second quarter of 2020. Read more at https://tinyurl.com/yd9qtfhg Apple’s new iPhone SE is surprisingly powerful for $399 Apple is launching iPhone SE 2020, the second generation of its cheapest smartphone in the iPhone lineup, priced at just USD 399. The iPhone SE runs on Apple’s latest A13 Bionic chip that enables great battery…
Comcast says voice and video calls have skyrocketed 212 percent during widespread self-isolation Comcast Corporation, a global media and technology company, has announced that voice and video calls have more than tripled on its network since people across the US started working from home due to the COVID-19 outbreak. According to the company, traffic in this category has increased by 212 percent in total, while overall peak traffic on its network has grown by 32 percent. Tony Werner, Comcast’s tech leader, said that the additional traffic is “well within the capabilities of the network,” and despite the increases in usage, the company’s network is working just fine. Read more at https://tinyurl.com/skncjow Zoom freezes feature development to fix security and privacy issues Over the past few weeks, the Zoom video conferencing app has been widely used for personal and business online meetings during the coronavirus lockdowns around the world. According to the…
Samsung’s next flagship phone chip, the Exynos 990, is 20% faster Samsung has released its new Exynos 990 flagship chipset together with the 5G-capable Exynos Modem 5123 that are expected to help the next generation of mobile devices make intensive use of video and artificial intelligence (AI) applications as well as 5G communications. The Korean electronics giant said that the Exynos 990 is 20 percent faster at executing ordinary processing tasks, 20 percent faster in graphics processing and twice as fast in software tuned for the chip’s AI acceleration scheme. Read more at: https://tinyurl.com/y2qmemq5 Nvidia and Ericsson announce the first GPU-powered 5G mobile network At this year’s Mobile World Congress in Los Angeles, California, Nvidia announced the partnership with Ericsson and Red Hat to help mobile network operators accelerate 5G deployment. The company has compared the power of its GPU-accelerated EGX hardware to traditional CPU-based servers and claims that a…
The American chipset manufacturer Nvidia is rolling out its EGX platform to bring real-time artificial intelligence (AI) to the edge of the network. Nvidia EGX is an accelerated computing platform, which boasts low-latency AI that enables companies to perceive, understand and act in real time on continuous streaming data between 5G base stations, warehouses, retail stores, factories and beyond. AI computing will occur at the edge of the network, where sensors collect data before it is sent to cloud-connected data centers. This platform is expected to satisfy the increasing demand for AI applications to assist numerous devices streaming continuous raw sensor data and is designed for high-throughput AI at the edge where data is primarily sourced to achieve instantaneous and guaranteed response times while reducing bandwidth to the cloud. According to the company, by 2025, there could be up to 150 billion machine sensors and the Internet of Things (IoT) devices streaming…
