Mobile World Congress 2026 crystallized the AI-RAN strategic split. Nokia and Samsung are betting on merchant silicon (CPUs and/or GPUs), while Ericsson, Huawei, and ZTE continue relying on purpose-built ASICs. The merchant camp believes general-purpose chips are now powerful and available enough to run real-time RAN functions plus AI workloads… Read More »MWC 2026: The RAN Chip Wars – Merchant vs ASIC Strategies
We attended the 5G Americas conference this week and came away with few themes we felt were impactful: NTN, more spectrum lobbying, 6G, environmental sensing, and Sliced Services. We think the most important of these themes is Satellite NTN/D2C as it has the greatest potential to disrupt the mobile market… Read More »Top 5G Americas Wireless Operator Event Themes included Satellite and 6G
One of the main themes we sought to investigate with our attendance at the Mobile World Congress 25 show in Barcelona this year was whether the mobile operator industry has made progress in finding new sources of revenue above and beyond bare-bones mobile data. Several themes were evident: first, Fixed… Read More »MWC25 – Mobile Operator 5G-Era Monetization Is Developing
It seems everywhere we went, we heard about the progress Intel has made in RAN and Core. Themeticlt, its progress is in Open RAN, but it goes beyond that. Samsung highlighted its Open RAN win with Canadian operator Telus, where baseband is running on unaccelerated Intel chips. We discussed Intel… Read More »MWC 24 was about Intel, Private Wireless and Satellite
Data Center – $2.5B annualized run rate Driven by DPUs, Inphi, and Innovium acquisitions, Marvell has grown robustly in data center, geared towards the Cloud. Marvell is well positioned to the higher growth portions in the data center. Our research indicates Cloud CAPEX will prioritize AI/ML and DCI in 2023.… Read More »Marvell is Growing Robustly in its Four Core Markets – Highlights Gains During Industry Analyst Day
In 2Q’22, revenues for the RAN (Radio Access Network) market were 3% less than the year-ago quarter, according to our recently published report. The market has been inconsistent in performance over the past four quarters, oscillating between Y/Y growth and Y/Y declines. Our report also includes an updated long-term forecast.… Read More »2Q’22 RAN Market and Long-Term Forecast Results
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
Qualcomm made many wireless-related announcements today from its San Diego, CA headquarters, in place of making a presentation at #MWC20 in Barcelona. Top announcements included its FSM100xx 5G small cell chips customer announcements, RF-chip availability, Wi-Fi 6E demonstrations, and 5G smartphone customer announcements. FSM100xx 5G RAN endorsements. Qualcomm announced… Read More »Qualcomm MWC20 announcements include Updates on 5G, Wi-Fi 6E and mmWave
ORAN and CBRS were the main themes at Mobile World Congress Americas, held in Los Angeles. I have to say, though, that unlicensed was the third most important theme, though it will emerge to the main stage in future years. ORAN encompasses several topics woven together. ORAN is a set… Read More »Mobile World Congress Americas Themes: ORAN, CBRS and Unlicsned
We attended the operator and vendor consortium of 5G Americas. The themes of the show were: 5G, spectrum, cell siting, Asia-Pacific operator progress. For the second time in the past couple weeks, we saw FCC Commissioner Michael O’Reilly present, and his key messages were similar both times, focusing on CBRS,… Read More »5G Americas conference: unlicensed spectrum highlight
