Industry Insights Newsletter?#6

In this Industry Insights Newsletter from Alpha Wireless,?Luke Kehoe?shares the latest telecoms news, including stories about the Irish spectrum auction, the Virgin Media O2/Mavenir oRAN and vRAN partnership, and Ericsson's growth in India.

Ireland’s telecoms regulator activates new spectrum licences, touts potential economic benefit of €1 billion per annum?| ComReg

After years of consultation and a colourful auction process that saw a high-profile legal challenge create significant delays, ComReg has finally completed the assignment of the spectrum it sold in the Multi-Band award process. The country’s three mobile operators, as well as Imagine, the largest fixed wireless access provider in Ireland, can now use their spectrum licences for commercial 4G and 5G deployments and have wrapped up migration activities in the 2100MHz band.

Despite the auction delays, the country’s operators have been engaged in a period of high capital intensity over the last number of quarters, and have invested heavily in network transformation to introduce new technologies and refresh the RAN. Indeed, there is evidence that operators are well-equipped to take advantage of the new spectrum quickly, with eir’s network already boasting 2,130 sites active in the 700MHz band, for example.

ComReg is bullish that the 46% increase in spectrum assigned for mobile services in Ireland enabled by the auction will have “substantial” positive benefits for the Irish economy. The regulator commissioned a study which concluded that these benefits could be in the region of €1 billion per annum.

Win for Mavenir as Virgin Media O2 inks partnership for open RAN and vRAN | Fierce Wireless

The Texas-based open RAN star has been selected by the UK’s Virgin Media O2 to be its open RAN vendor and principal integrator to aid the transition to a cloud-native, virtualised RAN architecture. The partnership represents an important strategic win for Mavenir as it seeks to present itself as a one-stop shop for open RAN and exploit the growing appetite for telecoms vendor diversification in the UK at government and policy levels.

Mavenir’s vRAN software solutions operate on open interfaces supporting O-RAN Split 7.2x and Split 2, and the company employs a disaggregated architecture for the distributed unit (DU) and centralised unit (CU) functions. The solution that it is implementing for Virgin Media O2 will draw upon Xeon Scalable Processors from Intel and will include Mavenir’s OpenBeam Radios among other third-party radio units for open fronthaul.

Ericsson buoyed by strong sales growth in India, capital spending slows in other markets?| Telecoms.com

Sweden’s telecoms juggernaut continued to enjoy strong growth in India in the first quarter, where it boasts major deals with Jio and Bharti Airtel. The strong performance masked, however, a decline in sales across other markets like the US and Europe, which saw material decreases in capital spending on network equipment upgrades.

Overall, top-line sales were stagnant year-on-year, and profitability declined as Ericsson’s EBITA margin reduced to 7.7% from 9.1% in the same quarter last year.?

Luke Kehoe

Luke is a telecoms analyst, consultant and entrepreneur. He is a strategic advisor to a number of companies in the telecoms industry and shares his extensive expertise in fixed and mobile networks with national and local government through consultancy. He is a regular contributor to the Business Post’s telecoms coverage in Ireland and is a prominent voice in the telecoms industry through his writing. Luke has supported several national and international thought leadership studies in areas such as 5G, IoT, open RAN and edge computing.

If you enjoyed this newsletter, make sure to?subscribe?so you receive all future editions!