Mobile & Wireless Roundup #29

Welcome to the 29th edition of this newsletter. These last few weeks I have been busy making some Ikea furniture. I did this activity before once, nearly ten years ago. In those days there was a limited number of choices on how the furniture could be purchased, delivered and assembled. You had to go into the shop to purchase it, take it to the delivery counter, if you needed to get it delivered and either made it yourself or got a handyman to do so. Many handymen charged too much to do this fairly straightforward work.

Over the years Ikea have not just made it easy by allowing online purchases, they have also partnered with delivery and assembly services. You now have a price shown upfront if you are planning to use their partner’s assembly services.

There are now carpenters and other handyman who can take Ikea furniture and cut it to the shape of your roof/room and make it look like a bespoke solution. There are also now other sellers that sell Ikea compatible furniture, inserts, etc. Instead of spending huge amount of money in bespoke solutions, you can do a mix-n-match to get something looking really good.

This made me think how the mobile networks infrastructure has been evolving in a similar fashion. From limited number of one stop shops, the shift has been ongoing in both the software and the hardware for multi-vendor solutions. With the RAN Intelligent Controllers (RICs) becoming more prevalent in the open networks of the future, one would be able to purchase algorithms and even value added tools/services with the click of a button, from the same vendor, other competing vendors, their preferred suppliers and even third parties. I can’t wait to see some of these turning into reality, not too far in future.

For those of you who don’t know me, I am a technologist with over 24 years’ experience in mobile wireless technology, currently working as an independent analyst, consultant and a trainer. This newsletter is a summary of my posts and others news that caught my attention since the last newsletter.

⦿ 6G

• Free 6G Training - 6G-TakeOff: Holistic 3D Communication Networks for 6G (link)

• Free 6G Training: ETRI Journal's Special issue on 6G and satellite communications (link)

⦿ 5G

• The 3G4G Blog - ATIS Webinar on "3GPP Release 18 Overview: A World of 5G-Advanced" (link)

• A good summary of DCCA (DC + CA) and Positioning Enhancements in 5G New Radio (link)
• A brief summary of Distributed and Centralized Units (DU & CU) from UK5G/UKTIN (link)
• Light Reading - POWDER Testbed: Open for 5G and whatever's next in USA (link)

⦿ 2G/3G

• Ofcom’s expectations of mobile providers for 2G and 3G switch-off in UK (link)

⦿ Open & Disaggregated Networks (including Open RAN, vRAN, etc.)

• AT&T Blog: How AT&T Sped up its 5G, Fiber Broadband Rollout and Services with Open, Disaggregated Platforms (link) – good summary on Light Reading with some additional info (link)
• RCR Wireless: Standardization vs. innovation vs. economization: The Open RAN balancing act (link)
• Vodafone and DOCOMO serve up white paper on Open RAN systems integration (link)

⦿ Spectrum

• ITU News - WRS-22: Global harmonization paves road to WRC-23 (link)
• Fierce Wireless: Japan plans to auction spectrum, rather than give it for free (link)
• Light Reading: Korean govt falls for 5G fallacy over 28GHz (link)

⦿ Private Networks

• Light Reading: The shine begins to wear off 5G private wireless (link)
• Orange: 5G Steel - the first enhanced mobile broadband use cases to decarbonize the steel industry and work in mobility on an industrial site in France (link)

⦿ Small Cells & other Telecoms Infrastructure

• TMN: Verana Networks will be carrying out field trials of Verana’s mmWave small cells, deployed to support Integrated Access and Backhaul with Verizon (link)
• ABI Research: Distributed mMIMO, Radio Stripes, HBF Antennas, and pCells Among the Revolutionary Technologies for Indoor Networks (link)

⦿ IoT / M2M / Smart Homes

• New whitepaper from u-blox looking at The Importance of NR RedCap for 5G IoT (link)

• What is 5G RedCap, and will it save cellular IoT? The skinny on the (skinny) new 5G tech (link)

⦿ Smartphones, Devices, Wearables & Gadgets

• Developing Telecoms: India announces home-grown mobile OS, BharOS (link)

⦿ Satellites & Space

• BT Group and SPL look to the stratosphere to deliver 4G and 5G coverage to hard-to-reach areas of the UK (link)
• European Space Agency: Expansion of ESA’s 5G/6G Hub moves ahead (link)

⦿ Wi-Fi

• News12 Brooklyn – USA: MTA shuts down free Wi-Fi on buses after 7 years of service (link)

⦿ Metaverse

• Bijan Nowroozi on Metaverse and 6G on LinkedIn (link)
• Matthew Ball: Why VR/AR Gets Farther Away as It Comes Into Focus (link)

⦿ Public Safety Networks

• 5G multicast-broadcast for group communication: Why it matters and how it works (link)

⦿ Sustainability

• GSMA M4D - Tackling the fastest growing waste stream: E-waste (link)

⦿ Other News and Technology Stuff

• Fortune: ‘Everybody was wrong’: The $160B memory-chip sector is suffering one of its worst routs ever despite vows to escape the boom-and-bust cycle (link)
• YouTube: Created in the late 1940s, this film from Bell explains the operation of the Mobile Telephone Service (MTS) by showing how it can be used to make business more efficient. (link)
• Operator Watch Blog: Optus' Living Network (link)
• The Conversation: Device transmits radio waves with almost no power – without violating the laws of physics (link)
• William Webb on LinkedIn: The end of an era of mobile data growth is in sight (link)
• Analyst Paolo Pescatore’s findings of streaming the FIFA World Cup as a fan (link) – comments are interesting too.
• ETSI to transform the standards development landscape with Software Development Groups (link)

⦿ Picture of the week: Wireless communications infrastructure on Torre de Collserola in Barcelona (pic source)

Happy to hear your thoughts. Feel free let me know what worked, what didn’t, how I can make this better, etc. Get in touch over LinkedIn!

PDF version of this and previous newsletters are available here.