By: Scott St. John - Pipeline

As the clock ran out on 2019, telecom industry news updates continued to roll in at a rapid pace. They offered a mix of 2020 predictions and 2019 year-in-review news, as well as tantalizing glimpses of powerhouse partnerships intended to advance innovation in the new year. Ericsson and Microsoft, for example, will bring their connected vehicle expertise together for the next generation of connected cars. Orange announced its selection by candy titan Mars, Incorporated to build an Intelligent Automated Network to advance the manufacturer’s global connectivity. And the heads of the US and Canadian communications commissions participated in the first cross-border call intended to combat robocalls and spoofing. 

The top telecom industry news stories from the month are summarized below. To view all the news as it breaks, check out Pipeline’s News Center or subscribe to receive our telecom industry news summary.

Leaderboard and Innovation News

Nokia awarded this year’s Nokia Bell Labs Prize to a student and professor team from the University of California at Berkeley. PhD student Tianshi Wang and Professor Jaijeet Roychowdhury received $100,000 for winning the competition, and the opportunity to pursue an expanded collaboration with Nokia Bell Labs. The pair won the prize for their work on “A Classic Spin on Quantum Computing." Their innovation is in a new type of processor element that will be significantly more efficient in computing the answers to discrete optimization problems. Their innovation will complement conventional digital processors (CPUs and GPUs) by efficiently tackling a wide range of computationally hard problems of importance in many diverse areas, including 5G communication systems; complex tasks in planning, scheduling and control; and even the discovery of new drugs.

It was a busy month for Ericsson in new or newly expanded partnerships. Ericsson and Microsoft are bringing their connected vehicle expertise together for the next generation of connected cars. The two companies will integrate their platforms into a single solution to allow automakers to deploy and scale global vehicle services such as fleet management, over-the-air software updates and connected safety services. Together, Ericsson and Telstra successfully deployed the industry’s first live cloud-native container-based Evolved Packet Core for 4G and 5G services. The achievement is a significant milestone in network orchestration and automation.