Stateside, DASAN Zhone Solutions (DZS) is teaming up with American Fiber to bring 10-gigabit-ready hyper-scale broadband services to residential and commercial customers in central Illinois. It also announced a new three-year, $66 million contract to supply LG U+ with Fiber-to-the-Home solutions and switches, including co-development of ultra-low latency 100 Gbps mobile backhaul switches for 5G mobile services. As part of the ongoing Connect America Fund effort, the Federal Communications Commission authorized over $7.4 million in funding over ten years to expand rural broadband in Oklahoma and Oregon. Together these investments will connect 11,852 unserved rural homes and businesses. 

SOLiD announced commercial availability of the edgeROU, a fiber-to-the-edge remote unit to improve in-building mobile service. SOLiD designed edgeROU specifically to resolve the challenges experienced by mobile users within a building.

5G News

It was a busy month in 5G industry news for Nokia, which announced that it is working with Japanese mobile operator, KDDI, in a joint initiative aimed at delivering a fully cloudified RAN solution. Nokia also announced details of a new 5G deal with Taiwan Star Telecom (TST). The deal will see Nokia supply TST with its end-to-end AirScale Radio Access network portfolio helping the operator to launch 5G non-standalone (NSA) networks that will lay the foundations for 5G standalone (SA) in the future. Nokia also released new research highlighting 5G plans, expectations and the biggest 5G WAN and LAN drivers for businesses across key industries in the US and UK. The study, which was conducted in partnership with Parks Associates, revealed that 65 percent of participants are familiar with 5G and over one-third report they are already using 5G and are highly satisfied. Finally, Nokia’s existing 4G relationship with China Unicom is expanding as the service provider has selected Nokia’s core networking products for its 5G SA Core Network in China.

In the United Kingdom, Ericsson has been selected by O2 UK to deploy its 5G radio access network (RAN) more extensively, upgrading the existing 2G/3G/4G sites as part of a substantial network modernization program.

Swedish communications service provider Telia Company has launched commercial 5G in Stockholm powered by Ericsson Radio Access Network products and solutions. Initial services on the 700Mhz band will cover most of central Stockholm by mid-June.

Market insights related to 5G news percolated as well. OMDIA released the first version of its 5G Market Progress Assessment (end-2019) report, showing that South Korea is the leading country for 5G deployment in the twenty-two leading 5G countries analyzed for their deployment of 5G technology. BearingPoint//Beyond, in collaboration with OMDIA released a report outlining how CSPs must change strategies in order to drive revenues from their 5G investments. The study demonstrates alignment between CSPs and enterprises on the importance of 5G but reveals a worrying trend for CSP 5G revenues based on their roles in early 5G enterprise projects.

A new report from Market Study Report, LLC depicts the growth drivers and ongoing technological trends that are expected to potentially drive the overall 5G infrastructure market over 2019-2026 with a compound annual growth rate of nearly 30 percent.

AI News

Rockset, the real-time indexing database in the cloud, announced that it is redefining the real-time data stack for AI-powered computer vision, an industry that is advancing what is possible in healthcare, gaming, logistics and retail.