Hyperscalers, Open RAN, Private 5G and chip announcements were top news at the MWC show in Barcelona last week. Based on disclosures at the show, Open RAN looks to go commercial in 2023 and 2024, hyperscalers are obtaining contracts to carry an increasing amount of telecom-related workloads, Rakuten Symphony is amassing a growing list of partners, Qualcomm/Marvell and other chip companies are taking front-stage at MWC, and there were a variety of new private 5G-related announcements including those from Cisco, Huawei, Mavenir and Federated Wireless. We took some time to compile some of the most noteworthy announcements, sorted by company.
DISH chairman says 5G deployment is 6 months behind schedule. DISH says it fell behind on a technical level and that it realized it has to become the systems integrator. Expects to light up 25 metro regions in June, representing 20% population coverage.
Huawei is pivoting towards fiber in certain markets like the home market. It announced, for instance, Fiber to the Room (FTTR) and contrasted it to Wi-Fi which it claims has a variable experience. Huawei’s wireless Chief, Ryan Ding, keynote speech noted several points. By the end of 2021, Huawei signed more than 3,000 commercial 5GtoB contracts with Chinese operators and partners for industry applications (implies operators involved in all), including coal mining using remotely controlled shearers communicating over 5G.
Mavenir showcased End-to-End 5G Core, IMS and automation hosted on AWS. The company calls this a “pilot” and asserted that using a core on AWS system would reduce TCO and speed up rollouts. Mavenir also announced 5G Radio Units from 8T8R to 64T64R (Massive MIMO) that use Qualcomm chips and that it plans to develop vDU RAN software based on the Qualcomm X100 5G RAN Accelerator Card, both systems of which are expected to be available for global deployment in 2023.
Telefonica advocated for OpenRAN and explained its selection of technology suppliers such as radio/RRU/AAU (NEC, Comba, Airspan), Baseband (Altiostar/Rakuten Symphony), Small Cell (Node-H, Askey, Qualcomm), RIC (Nokia), as well as Intel, Mavenir, Parallel Wireless, IBM/Red Hat and VMWare. It says it selected NEC as the systems integrator. The pan-European operator said that Open RAN reduced vendor lock-in and is most cost-efficient over the medium/long term, however suffers from integration with OSS and the time to carry out interoperability tests until Open RAN is mature. It expects Pilots to continue during 2022, then initial deployments in 2022/2023, followed by “massive deployments” beyond 2023 (we think this means 2024).
Rakuten Symphony announced it had acquired San Jose, CA based Robin.io, an automation and orchestration software company. Rakuten Symphony also announced an Open RAN trial at MTN that includes Accenture and Tech Mahindra. Symphony also said AT&T will use Rakuten’s Site Manager, a software system that designs workflows for network deployments; additionally, AT&T’s proprietary capacity planning tool. Cisco and Rakuten announced a partnership described as a joint go-to-market model. Nokia is Rakuten’s first “Symworld” partner, whereby Nokia’s core software will be made available to Symphony customers.
Qualcomm. Made announcements about private 5G automation, a partnership with Microsoft about Private 5G, Mavenir portfolio expansion (also discussed elsewhere in this article), Fujitsu mmWave, and 5G FWA.
Orange announced plans to use Ericsson 5G SA core for Belgium, Spain, Luxembourg and Poland, Nokia 5G SA core for France and Slovakia and Oracle for 5G core signaling in all countries. It plans to launch SA commercially in 2023.
Microsoft Azure announced Operator Distributed Services, which is a combination of its 2021 acquisition of AT&T Network Cloud Services and Azure for Operators tools. The company explains that it will enable operators to run all their workloads, including RAN, core, mobile and voice core, OSS and BSS, on a single carrier-grade hybrid platform. Microsoft also announced that AT&T is integrating its 5G network with Microsoft Azure Private Multi-access Edge (MEC) computing to develop AT&T Private 5G Edge. Telstra collaborates with Ericsson and Microsoft to begin 5G-enabled edge compute trials.
Cisco announced ORAN partnerships with private 5G vendors like Airspan and JMA Wireless and said it is in customer trials with both vendors. As it had said a month earlier with its private 5G launch, this is being offered as a subscription service operated by Cisco, and Cisco will allow customers to use their own brand to market the service. Cisco announced it is on a variety of Private 5G projects including at Chaplin, Clair Global, Colt Technology Services, ITOCHU Techno-Solutions Corporation, Maderia Island, Network Rail, Nutrien, Schaeffler, Group, Texas A&M, Toshiba, Virgin Media O2, and Zebra Technologies.
ZTE announced lighter Massive MIMO radios, its UniSite NEO and a new “Gen 2” FWA CPE based on Qualcomm Snapdragon X65 and X62 5G Modem-RF platforms.
Marvell announced 5G-related product line enhancements, including a reference design with DELL technologies that creates a server based baseband processing system.