5G News

5G news was, predictably, much of the talk in the run-up to the start of Mobile World Congress 2019. Reports with insights on 5G rolled out. Viavi Solutions revealed new industry data demonstrating the pace at which 5G networks are rolling out worldwide, with 55 commercial 5G networks expected to be live before the start of 2020 — the year that 5G was originally expected to debut. The pace of commercial deployment is, according to Viavi, a clear indicator of the fierce competition to offer 5G services. New research released this month from Transaction Network Services (TNS) also reveals consumers’ desire for 5G services: even though satisfaction rates are high for current mobile networks, 72 percent of US adults are aware of 5G and eager to upgrade to experience everything it may offer. In another newly released piece of research, Nokia and Analysys Mason have created the industry’s first 5G Maturity Index Report, intended to guide operators on how to align technology investments with business objectives so that they can succeed in the evolution to 5G.

Trials were conducted in many corners of the globe. Nokia and Zain Saudi are partnering on a MIMO pilot in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia on the TD-LTE network using 2.6GHz spectrum to boost capacity and customer experience, further paving the way for 5G. Vodafone UK, Ericsson and Qualcomm are teaming up to conduct ‘over the air’ tests of a smartphone ‘form factor’ device and 5G technology as part of preparing for 4K video and 3d holographic calling-on-the-go. Vapor IO and partners Federated Wireless, Linode, MobiledgeX, Packet, and StackPath have teamed up to launch the Kinetic Edge Alliance, which will advance edge computing at scale for the top 30 markets in the US.

RAD, the industry leader in Service Assured Access, announced its ETX-2i-10G cell site gateway has been selected for two 5G rollouts by Tier 1 service providers in Europe. The operators will be able to support highly distributed content and applications with multiple classes of service for various end-to-end 5G slices.

In a multiyear collaboration to align ongoing 5G development efforts, Ericsson and Intel will jointly develop the next-generation software-defined infrastructure for the 5G era. Their intent is to deliver a new level of cloudlike agility, transparency and efficiency required for Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), distributed cloud, and 5G.

Cloud News

This month brought news of data center openings and expansions around the globe. In Chile, Flexenclosure completed a data center for global communications and IT provider CenturyLink. With it, CenturyLink will expand its data and cloud services portfolio for existing and new business customers, governments and carriers. Flexenclosure also announced the opening of a new data center in East Perth, West Australia in partnership with NEXTDC. HGC and Megaport are collaborating to deliver Multi-cloud Connect Service to corporate customers to connect them to leading global cloud service providers in over 380 enabled data centers. Stateside, 123Net, Michigan’s premier data center services provider and host of the Detroit Internet Exchange (DET-IX), has tapped Telia Carrier’s 100G-enabled global IP backbone to provide scalable capacity and connectivity to the Michigan market. The state currently has the most permissive self-driving car laws in the country and, with the entry of driverless cars into the market, data volumes and use will surge.

The debut of new solutions also made headlines. To help service providers with fully automated edge data center deployments, Kaloom has introduced Cloud Edge Fabric, the first fully automated data center network fabric with native support for network slicing along with embedded 5G user plane function (UPF). MYCOM OSI announced the release of Assurance Cloud, a carrier-grade service assurance SaaS. Assurance Cloud employs the latest cloud technologies to reduce cost, effort, and time to deploy service assurance systems for CSPs. Cloudify has debuted Cloudify Spire, the next generation of orchestration designed to connect and control distributed networks, devices, and applications all the way to the edge—end-to-end at scale. 

In standards news, the ETSI Industry Specification Group (ISG) on Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) released the first version of its specification for the foundations of an open ecosystem where Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs) can be onboarded and managed by independently developed management and orchestration systems—a key objective for the standards body when it was launched in 2012.

IoT News

Vodafone released its latest IoT Barometer report this month. Among the research’s findings: 34 percent of businesses worldwide now use IoT, with 95 percent seeing the benefits of IoT investment as the technology moves into the mainstream. In other IoT thought leadership news, Ericsson outlined next steps for the evolution of cellular IoT and launched new solutions that will enable service providers to address a larger part of the IoT market with diverse use cases across verticals including automotive, manufacturing, and utilities.