After a brief pause the pod is back with a bang, thanks to the presence of special guest, analyst John Strand, who brought an obscene amount of beer with him. John is known for not pulling his punches on telecoms industry hot topics, and is especially strident on the threat posed by Chinese vendors, so they spend much of the time discussing that position, before concluding with a similar treatment of Open RAN.
New stats from research firm Dell’Oro suggest that the 2023 Open RAN market won’t see a repeat of last year’s stellar performance.
Marc-Andre Bordeleau, Senior Director Product Management from Juniper Networks highlights the progress made on RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) and the learnings from the RIC field trials in this keynote presentation. He also elaborates on solving the complexity of orchestration, automation, and service assurance with SMO.
Learn more about Juniper Network’s Open RAN solutions: https://www.juniper.net/us/en/solutions/5g-networking/open-ran.html
Network software specialist Mavenir has raised another chunk of change to help maintain Open RAN momentum.
The pod is delighted to welcome back former Chief Network Architect at BT Neil McRae, who starts by telling us about his new job. They move on to talk about 6G, with Scott and Iain having recently attended a conference on the matter, then get a report from Neil on a UK telecoms investment initiative he is part of, and conclude by trying to unravel the intricacies of the latest innovations in the Radio Access Network and why, if at all, we should care.
Swedish kit maker Ericsson will develop Open RAN solutions that run on AMD processors as well as Intel ones.
After a short break the pod returns with special guest Tom Bennett from Freshwave. His company is all about neutral host infrastructure, so they start with a look at that market. Inevitably, Open RAN works its way into the conversation which, in turn provides an opportunity to discuss interesting startup EdgeQ. The situation between the US and China is never far from telecoms chat these days either, and they conclude with a look at how that conflict is ramping further.
UK operator group Virgin Media O2 has added network software specialist Mavenir to its roster of Open RAN suppliers.
The Biden administration is ramping up its efforts to grow the US’ open RAN ecosystem.
The pod is delighted to welcome back media technology Analyst Ed Barton this week. Following a refreshingly short preamble, they get straight into Ed’s area of expertise, which includes tangents onto video streaming, social media and AI Armageddon. They then reflect on a day out Iain and Scott had with Rakuten Symphony before concluding by reviewing Huawei’s recent annual report.
OpenRAN offers many benefits and it’s clear that continued collaboration across key industry stakeholders, as well as government backing, is needed to take advantage of all it has to offer and enable us to utilise the technology to its full potential.
Japanese tech and media giant Rakuten is hoping its new customer experience centre will persuade European operators to move to Open RAN technology.
Technology incubation initiative Digital Catapult has teamed up with UK comms regulator Ofcom on a new ‘commercially-neutral, collaborative environment’ for testing Open RAN solutions.
Figures for 2022 show that while the telecoms equipment sales rose in 2022 by 3%, it’s a declining rate of growth. For an influx of firms to turn up on the scene and make everything more diverse, someone’s surely got to loose market share.
The UK Department for Science, Innovation and Technology has announced a competition to award up to £80 million of funding for projects around Open RAN.
Open RAN represents an exciting playing field for many telcos, transitioning from a static and vertical infrastructure into a dynamic horizontal one.
Deutsche Telekom plans to start commercial rollouts of Open RAN in Germany and further afield later this year, having decided that the technology is now sufficiently grown-up.
Electronics giant Samsung has reached another milestone on its journey to becoming a force to be reckoned with in telco vendor market.
European telco giants Orange and Vodafone have agreed to throw their considerable weight behind shared Open RAN networks.
Some of Europe’s biggest telcos have outlined their goals for the progression of Open RAN technology this year and beyond, including a suggestion of commercial launches in the near future.
