Mobile & Wireless Roundup #10

Welcome to the 10th edition of this newsletter. This week I went to CW’s Founders Dinner. It was good to catch-up with friends, colleagues and make the acquaintance of some interesting new people. Early next month I am giving a presentation on ‘The role of 5G and Other New Connectivity Options in Healthcare’, it was beneficial to discuss ideas with others. Despite having been a home worker for a very long time, meeting people in-person in a relaxed environment certainly drives my motivation and creativity. Do you feel the same? This coming week I will be at Connected Britain conference.

For those of you who don’t know me, I am a technologist with over 23 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: Metamaterials Could be the Key to Unlock THz Spectrum for 6G (link)
• Twitter thread by Dean Bubley on 6G Global Summit (first Tweet, last Tweet)

? 5G

• Light Reading: The slow march to standalone 5G (link)
• Good summary of different types of Edge (MEC) and the round trip time (link)
• Verizon deploys more than 8,000 VRAN cell sites, rapidly marches towards goal of 20,000 (link)
• Germany: Deutsche Telekom and RTL Deutschland use 5G network slicing to broadcast live TV for the first time (link)
• What’s the difference between BLER (Block Error Ratio) for Radio Link Management and BLER in Data throughput? (link)
• Gabriel Brown, Light Reading: Make IMS simple (link)
• Quick tutorial on IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) Support for 5G Service Based Architecture (SBA) (link)
• Light Reading: With 145,000 shipments, AT&T quietly updates femtocell biz (link) – you can read more about the Nokia femtos on our old blog post here.
• Light Reading: A concerning ARPU trend shows up in South Korea's 5G (link)
• 'Network Innovation and Evolution' session from GSMA Mobile 360 Asia Pacific 2022 (link)

? 4G/LTE

• 3GPP SON Series: SON Management in HetNets and Enhanced ICIC (eICIC) (link)
• Operator Watch Blog: Tanzanians are Embracing LTE and Internet Services

? 2G/3G

• Telenet/BASE in Belgium to switch off the 3G signal as of September 2024. Spectrum will be re-farmed for 4G/5G. 2G will still be supported for a while, until at least 2027 (link)

? Open RAN

• ETSI releases first O-RAN specification ETSI TS 103 859, namely ‘O-RAN Fronthaul Control, User and Synchronization Plane Specification v7.02’ (link)
• Microwave Journal: Open RAN Radio Unit Architecture for mMIMO (link)
• Light Reading: Open RAN is falling a long way short of its promise (link)
• MWL: Docomo open RAN head reveals challenges, progress (link)

? Private Networks

• TeckNexus: Chunghwa Telecom, Taiwan, to deploy open RAN based private 5G network (link)

? IoT / M2M

• Presentations from CW Seminar: A review of LoRaWAN (link)
• Orange and its IoT continuum partners will support tiko, a subsidiary of the group Engie, to design, produce and deploy a fleet of 800,000 connected devices in France over a period of 5 years. These devices will control electric radiators remotely, via the Orange LTE-M network, to optimize consumers’ home heating consumption. (link)
• GSA has identified 37 commercially available chipsets designed specifically to address machine-to-machine and IoT applications and which support any of LTE Cat-1, Cat-M1 and Cat-NB1 or -NB2 user equipment (link)

? Telco Cloud

• Open Sourcerers: What does Telco Cloud mean? (link)
• Telecom TV: “The telco cloud is a nightmare,” says Orange tech exec (link)

? Security & Privacy

• ESF Members, NSA and CISA publish Open Radio Access Network (Open RAN) Security Considerations (link)

? Connected And Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs)

• Transforma Insights: Fully Autonomous Vehicles: Are they close to reality? (link)

? Satellite Connectivity

• SES: Taiwan Taps Satellite Backhauled Private 5G for Disaster Recovery (link)

• Kusat dot Com YouTube channel has details on OneWeb Speed tests in Canada (link)
• The Seattle Times: Elon Musk enters in-flight Wi-Fi market with small satellites (link)

? Wi-Fi

• Wi-Fi: Driving innovation & opportunity in residential IoT (Video)
• South Africa: TikTok, ThinkWiFi unite to pilot 50 free WiFi hotspots (link)
• Today’s Wireless Offering by Dave Wright (Tweet)

? Other News and Technology Stuff

• Telecoms Infrastructure Blog: Construction of a Self-Supporting Tower (SST) (link)
• The Guardian: how the Apple AirTag became a gift to stalkers (link)
• Forbes: 5G Modem Development – Not As Easy As It Looks. Just Ask Apple (link)
• In Compliance Magazine: The Rise of Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) in Automobiles, Industrial Automation, and Aviation (link)
• Forbes: IBM Research’s Path To Serverless Quantum Computing (link)

? Picture of the week: Ever wondered how QR code works? (Twitter thread with lots of interesting details)

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!