This week’s MWC Barcelona 2021 had several themes; the most important was that several outsiders to the telecom industry were ever-present. The new entrants – the party-crashers – included Starlink, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Compute, and NVidia. These new players are forcing change either through economics, new technology,… Read More »The Party-Crashers of MWC21
On April 21, 2021, DISH, the fourth wireless operator in the US market, and hyperscaler Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced plans to work together, whereby DISH will leverage AWS infrastructure and services to build a cloud-based 5G Open Radio Access Network. The DISH/AWS announcement is important because this is the… Read More »Implications of the DISH / AWS Announcement
Cisco’s customer event, Cisco Live (virtual), is underway, and the company made many announcements. We are emphasizing what we think are the most relevant, which include Observability capabilities, Network as a Service (NaaS), and SASE. Here is a rundown of what we learned about today. Core portfolio (includes Campus Ethernet… Read More »Cisco Live Event Features Observability, Network-as-a-Service, SASE
In a briefing with Rakuten Mobile today, we learned two neat things: It is experimenting with 3GPP on satellite, and it hopes to announced a full-stack Rakuten Communications Platform (RCP) customer as early as next quarter. The company also shared some plans that it has for improving coverage to 96%… Read More »Rakuten Mobile Reveals Future plans
In conjunction with its recent Rakuten earnings call this week, Rakuten Mobile disclosed some more of its plans. This mobile operator is becoming a telecom vendor. Specifically, it said that “by expanding the Rakuten Communications Platform (RCP) globally, Rakuten aims to evolve from a Japan-headquartered tech company to a global… Read More »Rakuten Communications Platform update
Before the consolidation in the Mobile Radio Access Network (MRAN) market that occurred in the past decade during Huawei’s ascendancy, there were a dozen major RAN vendors. They included Motorola, Lucent, Alcatel, Siemens, Nokia, Ericsson, NEC, Fujitsu, Samsung, Nortel, Huawei and ZTE, and they hailed from the US, France, Germany,… Read More »And then there were 10 (RAN VEndors)
