Here we are past July, a busy summer month for vacationers in the US, and unfortunately, it looks like COVID-19 will be with us a little longer. We’re still planning on attending the upcoming Big 5G event in September in Denver. In October, find us at KubeCon+CloudNativeCon and Open Networking and Edge Summit in Los Angeles, followed by MWC Los Angeles. Hope to see you there!
AvidThink and Events
July’s been slower on the event front for us, giving us a short and welcome respite. But you’re welcome to check out the New Age of NetOps panel with experts Jason Gooley (Cisco), AJ Murray (Red River), and Dan Baxter (Opengear). It’s available on-demand and part of the Road to Resilience series sponsored by Opengear.
If you missed our ONUG Executive Roundtable on ** AI in Networking** with Parantap Lahiri of eBay, Ihab Tarazi of Dell, and Mirko Voltolini of Colt, it’s now available on-demand too.
Coming up in September, we have a webinar with Ekinops on achieving ROI at the branch while laying edge foundations. Sign up if you’re interested in the branch, uCPE, SD-WAN, and edge.
We’ll also be attending and speaking at Layer 123 World Congress 2021 in October virtually, and hopefully in person at Upperside’s SD-WAN and SASE 2021 conference in Paris in December. COVID willing…
Resource Sites
Two sites for you to check out and two new reports, if you haven’t yet had a chance to do so:
- Private Mobile Networks — Featuring exclusive content from Boingo, Orange Business Services, Qualcomm, Linux Foundation, Accedian, Celona, Aarna Networks, Aruba/HPE, Fortinet, EdgeQ.
- Service Assurance — Featuring unique content from AT&T, Comcast Business, Ribbon, Emblasoft, Juniper Networks, Cisco/ThousandEyes, Amartus, and Prosimo.
Up next, Open RAN and Network Automation sites; please contact us at [email protected] if you are interested in participating or sponsoring those. On to news highlights for July!
5G News Updates
- AT&T reaches 250M US with help from 5G low-band. AT&T now covers more than 250 million people across the US, leveraging low-band and use of dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS), which allowed it to speed its 5G deployment by putting it on top of its LTE network. The most recent report from Opensignal shows AT&T in second place for 5G reach, with T-Mobile in the lead and Verizon trailing in third place.
- Ericsson, MediaTek show 495 Mbps upload speed through mmWave and carrier aggregation. Typically used for boosting 5G download speeds, Ericsson and MediaTek have instead established a new uplink speed record using carrier aggregation and millimeter wave spectrum.
- T-Mobile dominates 5G coverage and speed in the latest Opensignal report. T-Mobile scored higher marks than AT&T and Verizon across categories of reach, availability, and upload and download speeds in the latest round of Opensignal results. According to Opensignal, T-Mobile’s nationwide 5G availability increased 3.3%, with T-Mobile users connected to 5G 36.3% of the time.
- Verizon, Samsung fire up 5G vRAN trial with Massive MIMO. Verizon and Samsung ran tests using Samsung’s vRAN platform (with vDUs) alongside C-band 64T64R Massive MIMO radios, with Verizon’s virtualized core. Verizon claims performance is the same as traditional hardware-based equipment and that the agility of vRAN is the key innovation.
- AT&T CEO defends Dish MVNO deal. AT&T CEO John Stankey defended the agreement, citing that Dish has established an annual minimum commitment for wholesale revenue but that there’s an upside. Stankey also indicated that Dish would succeed whether AT&T played a role or not and that this was a win-win relationship.
- Verizon CEO sees 2021 as the tipping point for 5G. CEO Hans Vestberg highlights three areas that point to 5G becoming a reality for the masses in 2021/2022: (1) consumers are purchasing many more 5G phones, (2) traction in their MEC offerings with AWS and Microsoft Azure – network and on-premise edges and (3) fixed wireless uptake displacing fiber/DSL for last-mile.
5G and Open RAN
- Dish’s Stephen Bye provides an update on their progress. At the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) open RAN event, Dish’s chief commercial officer, Stephen Bye, shared that working with a large number of vendors for their open RAN deployment is both a strength and a challenge. Bye indicated that Dish is on track to hit its 20% US population coverage milestones with 5G by June 2022 and 70% by 2023. Dish expects 5G in Las Vegas to turn on soon, with Orlando, Florida and Washington DC to follow.
5G Infrastructure
- Rakuten verifies 5G SA data transfer with Tokyo Tech. Rakuten Mobile has successfully verified data transfer on a 5G standalone (SA) mobile network with the help of the Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) at Tokyo Tech’s Ookayama Campus. Rakuten Mobile said it plans to leverage the verification results to improve the quality of its 5G SA network and prepare for the launch of commercial services.
- Orange to launch cloud-native standalone 5G pilot network in France. Mobile operator Orange announced plans to launch a pilot standalone 5G network in France that is cloud-native end-to-end. Vendors will include U.S.-based Mavenir, which is supplying 5G open RAN software.
Latest on Private 5G/LTE
- Dell’Oro forecasts $1B CBRS 5G RAN market by 2025. Dell’Oro Group expects that cumulative 2020-2025 CBRS 5G Radio Access Network (RAN) investments will approach $500 million to $1 billion. This is despite near-term downward adjustments to reflect slower than expected year-to-date LTE CBRS base station adoption.
- Nokia adds MulteFire router to private wireless. Nokia is adding a MulteFire router series to its Digital Automation Cloud private wireless solution. MulteFire uses an unlicensed 5 GHz spectrum band for LTE and 4.9G and supports listen-before-talk to minimize interference with Wi-Fi in the same band. Nokia views this as an option for customers who don’t have access to shared spectrum (like CBRS) or enterprise licenses for spectrum and who can’t or don’t want to license from MNOs. MulteFire performs better than Wi-Fi (with up to 3x improved range indoors) but worse than CBRS because MulteFire has tight power budget constraints.
- Gogo turns to Airspan for 5G MIMO. Gogo is partnering with Airspan Networks to roll out 5G air-to-ground solutions for aviation. Airspan provides a unique technology that can support connectivity to planes traveling over 500MPH and at elevations up to 35K or 40K feet.
- Boingo to equip 12 airports with AT&T’s mmWave 5G. Boingo Wireless will be augmenting existing distributed antenna system (DAS) and Wi-Fi installations in airports across the US with 5G mmWave from AT&T, starting with 12 airports. Boingo CEO Mike Finley anticipates working with and competing with AT&T and other carriers in the airport and overall private mobile networks market.
Edge Computing News
- AT&T and Google Cloud partnership yield concrete outcomes. The collaboration between AT&T and Google has now yielded a MEC offering with Google cloud that combines the operator’s existing 5G and MEC capabilities with the hyperscaler’s artificial intelligence, machine learning, data analytics and ecosystem of software vendors. In addition, they’ve announced AT&T Network Edge with Google Cloud, which will allow enterprise customers to tap into Google edge points of presence which will be linked to the operator’s fiber and 5G networks.
- Lumen expands edge with Azure. Lumen Technologies has teamed up with Microsoft in a long-term collaboration to tap the power of its Azure cloud platform for Lumen’s clients. The move builds on the previous edge compute deals Lumen inked with VMware and IBM.
SD-WAN and SASE Updates
- India’s Airtel to use Cisco for managed SD-WAN and SASE. India’s Bharti Airtel announced an expansion of a deal signed in 2019 with Cisco to include managed SD-WAN and secure access service edge (SASE).
- Colt expands its SD-WAN offering with Versa to better support hybrid workers. Colt Technology Services is adding a remote access feature to its SD-WAN service to allow employees to remotely access the data and applications that they need via Versa’s SASE platform.
- Masergy improves broadband packet loss for its SD-WAN. Masergy announced a patent-pending innovation, Masergy Performance Edge, that minimizes packet loss over public broadband connections. Their approach leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning to auto-tune traffic based on the applications running at any given time to reduce packet loss and improve user experience.
Other News
- T-Mobile and Lumen court joint enterprise, government customers. T-Mobile and Lumen Technologies announced an expansion of their previous partnership announcement (in April) to create joint offerings combining T-Mobile’s 5G network with Lumen’s business-grade fiber and edge computing capabilities. They’ve indicated that they are now jointly targeting enterprise and government organizations with their joint 5G and edge computing services.
- US replaces $10B JEDI Microsoft contract with a multi-cloud, multi-vendor approach. After years of legal wrangling instigated by AWS, the US government terminated its 10-year, $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract with Microsoft. Instead, the government will replace JEDI with Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability (JWCC), a multi-cloud, multi-vendor Indefinite Delivery-Indefinite Quantity contract.
And that’s it for now. Please stay safe and healthy, especially with Delta and Lambda variants in the air, until our next update. And don’t forget to check out our Private Mobile Networks and Service Assurance sites and watch out for our Open RAN and Network Automation sites coming soon!
