We participated in the Huawei Analyst Summit 2022 (#HAS22) for three days this week.  The conference started with a keynote featuring Rotating Chairman, Ken Hu and then there were many executives and managers in charge of various operating groups at Huawei.   To summarize, Hu said there will be challenges ahead and emphasized software, services and partnerships instead of asserting leadership in hardware as it did last year.  Additionally, other speakers discussed the progress Huawei is making in F5G, introduced its latest Massive MIMO 64T64R radio system, discussed its progress with both indoor cellular and Fixed Wireless Access markets.

At the keynote, Ken Hu, and his other colleagues on stage made no mention of hardware systems, semiconductor, nor optical component plans, in sharp contrast to the year-ago HAS keynote made by last year's Rotating Chairman, Eric Xu.  Instead Ken and his colleagues focused on the importance of software development (re-engineering software compliers to boost performance, for instance), the opportunity to work with the Huawei cloud service, entry to new markets (automobiles, the metaverse), and of course, the company's green initiatives.  Mr. Hu also addressed supply chain challenges, saying that "it is true that we face a chip shortage," and that "we have no plans to build chip factories ourselves."  Hu also said that the shortage will be "fixed in a few years."  Hu also said that the company is organizing itself to allow for the shutdown of divisions or product areas more easily than could have been done in the past, which we think could mean it is planning for what might happen if Huawei cannot obtain chips, for instance, for its smartphone business.  The last of Hu's prepared remarks was to remark that "Huawei has quite a few challenges ahead."

In the Telecom Core meetings that were held, there were several interesting points raised by the presenters.  The team says that container based systems are not as mature as that of systems based on Open Stack and that Containers are not standards based.  Regarding Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) market, Huawei said that its experience is that "almost all" of its customers are using MEC for network connectivity and though it had offered a marketplace for third party applications, they haven't been adopted much as of yet.  Huawei sees Slicing as an emerging opportunity that will allow its operator customers to monetize their networks and to offer differentiated experiences.  

Huawei spent a lot of time conveying that participation in the F5G (Fixed 5G) market is shared with other participants.  Among those who shared the stage with Huawei were standards body ETSI, China Telecom, China Mobile, China Unicom, Globe Telecom (Phillipines), MTN Group (South Africa).  Besides its product managers discussing F5G, Ken Hu also highlighted its importance during his aforementioned keynote.

Huawei's Radio Access Network (RAN) team highlighted a new 64T64R Massive MIMO system that has 384 antennae elements.  Through multiple presentations, various managers highlighted how the new M-MIMO system enhances throughput and range, reduces power and other advantages of using its new product.  The company also highlighted its Digital Indoor System (DIS) as a means of enabling enterprises across various vertical markets including manufacturing, coal mines, the steel industry, the petrochemical industry, shipping ports, healthcare, power-grid companies and others.  Huawei said that in 2H22, it will bring to market a low-power chip-based system, as well.  The company also highlighted a customer, Schneider Electric, who expects to enter its deployment phase of Huawei DIS systems later in 2022.   

We found that Huawei's participating in the Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) market is interesting.  Similar to Ericsson, Huawei isn't participating meaningfully in the Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) part of the FWA market and instead is selling just the RAN equipment.  It has a certification program where it endorses other manufacturers, including greenpacket, who made a presentation at the Huawei conference.  greenpacket explained that it is seeing a lot of demand lately for "hybrid" FWA CPE systems, which we took to mean that these were battery-based devices that users can travel around with.  It is the experience of the presenters (both Huawei and greenpacket) that their customers in places like Kuwait and South Africa consume about 2-3 times more data using FWA than do average mobile (eMBB) customers.  The presenters contrasted this with the T-Mobile experience in the US market where 10% of its FWA customers consume 1 TB per month.  We found this contrast very interesting and feel that the screen sizes of customers in the US market (probably lots of high-end TVs) dramatically exceed that of the South African market (predominantly smart phones).  In our own FWA report, we have seen significant ramp-ups in volume in the 3GPP FWA market.

Hyperscalers, Open RAN, Private 5G and chip announcements were top news at the MWC show in Barcelona last week.  Based on disclosures at the show, Open RAN looks to go commercial in 2023 and 2024, hyperscalers are obtaining contracts to carry an increasing amount of telecom-related workloads, Rakuten Symphony is amassing a growing list of partners, Qualcomm/Marvell and other chip companies are taking front-stage at MWC,  and there were a variety of new private 5G-related announcements including those from Cisco, Huawei, Mavenir and Federated Wireless.  We took some time to compile some of the most noteworthy announcements, sorted by company.  

DISH chairman says 5G deployment is 6 months behind schedule.  DISH says it fell behind on a technical level and that it realized it has to become the systems integrator.  Expects to light up 25 metro regions in June, representing 20% population coverage.  

Huawei is pivoting towards fiber in certain markets like the home market.  It announced, for instance, Fiber to the Room (FTTR) and contrasted it to Wi-Fi which it claims has a variable experience.  Huawei's wireless Chief, Ryan Ding, keynote speech noted several points.  By the end of 2021, Huawei signed more than 3,000 commercial 5GtoB contracts with Chinese operators and partners for industry applications (implies operators involved in all), including coal mining using remotely controlled shearers communicating over 5G.

Mavenir showcased End-to-End 5G Core, IMS and automation hosted on AWS.  The company calls this a "pilot" and asserted that using a core on AWS system would reduce TCO and speed up rollouts.  Mavenir also announced 5G Radio Units from 8T8R to 64T64R (Massive MIMO) that use Qualcomm chips and that it plans to develop vDU RAN software based on the Qualcomm X100 5G RAN Accelerator Card, both systems of which are expected to be available for global deployment in 2023.  

Telefonica advocated for OpenRAN and explained its selection of technology suppliers such as radio/RRU/AAU (NEC, Comba, Airspan), Baseband (Altiostar/Rakuten Symphony), Small Cell (Node-H, Askey, Qualcomm), RIC (Nokia), as well as Intel, Mavenir, Parallel Wireless, IBM/Red Hat and VMWare.   It says it selected NEC as the systems integrator.  The pan-European operator said that Open RAN reduced vendor lock-in and is most cost-efficient over the medium/long term, however suffers from integration with OSS and the time to carry out interoperability tests until Open RAN is mature.  It expects Pilots to continue during 2022, then initial deployments in 2022/2023, followed by "massive deployments" beyond 2023 (we think this means 2024).

Rakuten Symphony announced it had acquired San Jose, CA based Robin.io, an automation and orchestration software company.  Rakuten Symphony also announced an Open RAN trial at MTN that includes Accenture and Tech Mahindra.  Symphony also said AT&T will use Rakuten's Site Manager, a software system that designs workflows for network deployments; additionally, AT&T's proprietary capacity planning tool. Cisco and Rakuten announced a partnership described as a joint go-to-market model.  Nokia is Rakuten's first "Symworld" partner, whereby Nokia's core software will be made available to Symphony customers.  

Qualcomm.  Made announcements about private 5G automation, a partnership with Microsoft about Private 5G, Mavenir portfolio expansion (also discussed elsewhere in this article), Fujitsu mmWave, and 5G FWA.

​Orange announced plans to use Ericsson 5G SA core for Belgium, Spain, Luxembourg and Poland, Nokia 5G SA core for France and Slovakia and Oracle for 5G core signaling in all countries.  It plans to launch SA commercially in 2023.  

Microsoft Azure announced Operator Distributed Services, which is a combination of its 2021 acquisition of AT&T Network Cloud Services and Azure for Operators tools.  The company explains that it will enable operators to run all their workloads, including RAN, core, mobile and voice core, OSS and BSS, on a single carrier-grade hybrid platform.  Microsoft also announced that AT&T is integrating its 5G network with Microsoft Azure Private Multi-access Edge (MEC) computing to develop AT&T Private 5G Edge.  Telstra collaborates with Ericsson and Microsoft to begin 5G-enabled edge compute trials.  

Cisco announced ORAN partnerships with private 5G vendors like Airspan and JMA Wireless and said it is in customer trials with both vendors.  As it had said a month earlier with its private 5G launch, this is being offered as a subscription service operated by Cisco, and Cisco will allow customers to use their own brand to market the service.  Cisco announced it is on a variety of Private 5G projects including at Chaplin, Clair Global, Colt Technology Services, ITOCHU Techno-Solutions Corporation, Maderia Island, Network Rail, Nutrien, Schaeffler, Group, Texas A&M, Toshiba, Virgin Media O2, and Zebra Technologies. 

ZTE announced lighter Massive MIMO radios, its UniSite NEO and a new "Gen 2" FWA CPE based on Qualcomm Snapdragon X65 and X62 5G Modem-RF platforms.

Marvell announced 5G-related product line enhancements, including a reference design with DELL technologies that creates a server based baseband processing system.   

Mavenir held its annual analyst event this week and highlighted some important information highlighting its progress in transitioning to a maturing ecosystem player in the telecom equipment industry.  The company highlighted its recent Koch Brothers $500M investment; existing investors include Intel/Nvidia and Siris Capital, who remain majority equity holders.  The company highlighted that it grew revenues and bookings in the mid 20’s percent year-over-year in its Fiscal 2020, an impressive figure.  Two main themes came from the show.  First, the company’s RAN portfolio is picking up steam.  Second, the company’s portfolio now spans very wide, from telecom core to RAN.
 
The RAN portfolio has made significant progress.  The company claims over 20 deployments in 14 countries.  And, Mavenir has demonstrated the capability to deploy on AWS, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud, Google Cloud, and VMWare.  The company spent a great deal of time reviewing definitions of various Open RAN terminology, to address confusion, spanning from vRAN, O-RAN, C-RAN, Cloud-RAN, and Open vRAN.  We’ve seen many public statements from Mavenir, its competitors, operators and pundits, alike, espousing the various benefits of some or all of these systems.  We think the point Mavenir was making at its conference is that Open vRAN is the most open, interoperable system.  When operators enable open systems, of course, it allows Mavenir and other vendors to bid on deals for networks that have existing equipment from traditional vendors like Ericsson, Nokia, Huawei, and ZTE.  We see Mavenir’s efforts to work with various infrastructure companies and systems like AWS and VMWare as a means of gaining a foothold with operators who are trialing or in the early stages of deploying these various infrastructure systems.  Speaking of partners, the company claims it has relationships with nearly 15 Remote Radio Unit (RRU) players.  The company says it can deliver Massive MIMO capabilities to customers, which means that its RAN systems can satisfy what would be considered mainstream 5G use-cases; this represents very significant progress over last year’s RAN capabilities. 
 
Mavenir’s portfolio is extensive.  The company made separate presentations about the following topics: RAN, OSS, Radio, Packet Core, Mobile Core, BSS/Digital Enablement, Security, Private Networks, and Enterprise over three days.  With over 5,000 employees spanning the globe, exposure to the most relevant parts of the mobile infrastructure industry, Mavenir is a serious contender for deals.  The company also highlighted that its telecom core technology uses modern programming techniques that enable it to operate on cloud infrastructure; among these are fully containerized micro-services design.  The company shared that most microservices file sizes are under 25 Mbytes, evidence that the systems are designed as microservices (and can load fast). 
 
The fact that in April 2021, well-known Koch Bros made a $500M “strategic minority” equity investment in the company is an important validation of Mavenir’s place in the telecommunications industry.  We see the investment as a reinforcement of the company’s balance sheet and an opening to new customers. 

In the keynote session of Huawei Analyst Summit 2021, there was a big focus on chip availability, both in prepared remarks and from questions fielded from the audience.  Huawei Deputy Chairman, Eric Xu, as he has done in past years, answered questions from the audience.  Huawei reiterated that it has enough B2B-focused chips, consistent with comments made one year ago today, which suggests that it stockpiled significant amounts of chips ahead of sanctions.  Huawei expects to remain on US Entity List for a long time. 

• The company said that a primary reason for the worldwide semiconductor shortages is that other Chinese companies have stockpiled up to 6 months of inventory and US sanctions are the main cause. 
• When asked a question about ARM v9, it has previously stated that it is allowed to use v9.  Additionally, Huawei plans to work with other Chinese companies to make the chips for the Chinese market, but the question is how advanced the semiconductor process can be.

The company shared many goals.  Those that were communications focused included:

• Huawei is promoting 5.5G as a means of improving uplink capabilities significantly: From 0.5 Gbps to 100 Gbps uplink by 2030. 
• The company expects optical transmission speeds of 1 Tb/sec by 2030 (per fiber). 
• Huawei is advocating for the creation of new IP protocols that are deterministic. 

Other standout topics were:

• Cloud business unit is big priority for Huawei and it expects to grow software and services as a percentage of total revenues in the future. 
• Autonomous driving software a big focus.  The company will not make Huawei branded cars, but will take a “Huawei Inside” approach.  It has 3 significant partnerships already and by 4Q21, the Beijing Automobile group will launch a car based on this technology partnership.

Nokia reiterated its commitment to 25G PON in its two-day briefing with industry researchers this week.  It also shared some interesting commentary about is progress with Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) and its consumer Wi-Fi devices.  But, what makes Nokia’s 25G announcement so interesting is that there is significant controversy associated with the 25G standardization process; 50G PON is also in the race for standardization, too.  It seems that the world will split into two purchasing groups: Chinese and Western.  We think the fact that two purchasing groups will emerge is a material negative for the telecommunications industry and is a sign of things to come.  Nokia has decided to chart its own path, find partners, and make the best of this controversy.  Our view is that Nokia’s 25G PON offerings will see more demand than 50G PON in the upcoming years, and when 50G finally becomes necessary, Nokia can move to support it.

For background, in May 2020, Huawei announced to analysts that it is backing a 50G standards process, in cooperation with the ETSI.  Huawei calls its 50G development “F5G,” which stands for Fixed 5G.  It demonstrated over a video presentation an FPGA-based prototype, and it and explained that it expects this technology to be adopted first by the mobile infrastructure market for connecting RAN radio systems to baseband systems and for backhaul.  Then Huawei expects the market will develop for residential PON, and later for enterprise campus connectivity (to replace Ethernet switches).  Huawei explained that in February 2020, it has the support of Chinese operators, ETSI members in Switzerland, a European operator, Altice Portugal, and Chinese operators.

On the other hand, Nokia had developed a chipset that specifically supports both GPON and next generation PON technologies; it is called Quillion and has been available for nine months.  Nokia had consistently explained on several occasions in the past several months that during a February 2020 ITU meeting relating to 25G PON, 18 members of the ITU were in favor of initiating the 25G standardization project (including ATT, BT, Korea Telecom, nbn Co, Telecom Italy, SK Telecom, Telus etc).   However, there was a minority coalition led by operators and vendors from China that objected to the proposal on the grounds that 25G PON would pre-empt their futuristic vision of 50G PON.  This in turn resulted in no consensus being met.

In response, Nokia has worked with operators and suppliers interested in pursuing 25G PON in the near-term, which we interpret as the next 1-2 years.  This MSA (multi-source agreement) strategy is used by various groups in the technology industry when there is sufficient buying power to move ahead of (or in this case, without) standards ratification; we see if used frequently by hyperscalers when building their bleeding-edge data center infrastructures.  We understand that there are a handful of operators, including Chorus (New Zealand), Chungwa Telecom (Taiwan), and NBN (Australia) and several technology suppliers including AOI, MACOM, MaxLinear, Ciena, Tibit and others.  The MSA has a website with more information.

Nokia explains that 25G PON shares the same optical technologies as those used in Ethernet Switches that are common and used by data centers and campus switching environments.  Sharing common optical technologies with high volume data center deployments will reduce costs . Our view is that in a few years, data center switching demand for 25G optics will continue to rise, and this is perfect timing for Nokia and others who are going to use 25G for PON because the supply will be there and this technology will be mature and lower cost.

There’s one other thing to consider that pits Nokia against others.  It decided to develop its own semiconductors to power its infrastructure PON systems (OLTs).  Nokia’s chip system is called Quillion, and its introduction means it won’t be dependent upon OLT chip vendors.

​What’s even more interesting about this whole debate is just how future-looking it is.  PON has moved through two main generations, GPON (2.5 Gbps), 10 GPON (XGS and XGPON), and now we are talking about two different generations, 25G and 50G.  Huawei’s 50G “F5G” approach is a “if you can’t join ‘em, beat em” strategy, where Huawei will leverage its home market telecom operators’ volume and a few others to work outside its home territory.  Huawei will leverage this technology to three markets over time: 5G backhaul, residential PON and enterprise networking.  On the other hand, Nokia is taking matters into its own hands in that it has developed its own chips.  What’s happening now is not uncharted waters, but it is rare for the telecommunications industry to splinter into multiple buying groups – usually standards are developed and followed for the benefit of the industry.  This time, in the absence of standards, Nokia has forged on ahead on its own and its headstrong ways are likely to benefit it because many Western operators and now actively seeking to diversify away from Huawei in their procurement of fixed network equipment.  ​

Before the consolidation in the Mobile Radio Access Network (MRAN) market that occurred in the past decade during Huawei’s ascendancy, there were a dozen major RAN vendors.  They included Motorola, Lucent, Alcatel, Siemens, Nokia, Ericsson, NEC, Fujitsu, Samsung, Nortel, Huawei and ZTE, and they hailed from the US, France, Germany, Finland, Sweden, Japan, Korea, Canada and China. 


As Huawei entered the market, using a price aggressor strategy, it catalyzed mergers, resulting in the elimination of Motorola, Lucent, Alcatel, Siemens, Nortel, plus a reinforcement that led to the Japanese and Korean players to sell primarily to their home markets.  The result is that in many markets during recent years, there were only two vendors left, and that left operators with little choice but to look elsewhere. 

The punchline is that going forward, due in part to Open RAN, and in part to the response of operators looking outside their traditional supplier base, we now have 10 RAN players who can bid on projects.  And there is a multiplier on top of the 10 players, because going forward,  operators can buy radio heads from different vendors than their primary RAN baseband vendor, essentially doubling the number of choices an operator has when making mobile RAN vendor decisions.

Here is how we arrive at the conclusion that there were only two players per major geography.  Just a couple years ago, the state of affairs was quite different; we had only Nokia, Ericsson, Huawei and ZTE as players, and last year, it became clear that in the US, only two major players were left.  In China, the same could be said, with Huawei and ZTE as main suppliers (Ericsson has won business there and Nokia ceded the market in 2019).  And in 2020, we’ve seen much of Europe and English-speaking Asia whittle down to two suppliers, as well.

And here is how the procurement teams at operators have much choice in the future.  The “Open RAN” vendors are now deemed viable given the success at Rakuten and the push by operators to demand Open RAN compliance, and these include Altiostar, Mavenir and Parallel Wireless.  Nokia and Ericsson are invited to most, if not all bids worldwide. 

Huawei and ZTE are invited to many, but a declining number of bids in markets that are siding with the US viewpoint.  We saw a turning point in late 2018 when AT&T announced it will buy from Samsung, who has now gotten a strong foothold in both India and the US.  And, more recently, we have seen two Japanese players, NEC and Fujitsu, in some way filling in the void left by Huawei and ZTE’s woes in the US/China spat, as they get wins (Fujitsu recently won DISH) and get invited to bid (NEC and Fujitsu are being asked to bid on UK projects).  Add these up and we have Altiostar, Mavenir, Parallel Wireless, Nokia, Ericsson, Huawei, ZTE, Samsung, NEC, Fujitsu. 

There are other factors at work that are adding to more RAN choices, as well.  Two such trends are Facebook’s efforts, ONF’s efforts and the variety of radio head vendors who are now viable with Open RAN/FB/ONF efforts.  Facebook has promoted projects such as Telecom Infra Project (TIP) that have many goals, including one that supports the goal of $1,000 radio heads (these cost much more from the major vendors). 

The Open Network Foundation (ONF) supports projects such as SD-RAN and Aether. 
Radios can be purchased from non-traditional sources, as well because with all three projects we have mentioned above (TIP, ONF SD-RAN and Open RAN), these allow radio purchases to be made separately from baseband purchases, literally doubling the choices that operators have when building out a roster of vendors.

The trends in mobile RAN have changed significantly.  Vendors with little to lose (startups and players entering new markets) are getting aggressive to grow their businesses.  Incumbent vendors are at risk, as their business practice of selling baseband and radio simultaneously to captive operators is coming to an end.  We may look back at this early 5G era and say there was a lot more to it than just the upgrade to 5G, and it begs the question, who will acquire whom to consolidate the market once again and get pricing under control.

The big ideas unveiled at the conference were twofold.  First, Huawei is promoting worldwide open standards as a counter to the likelihood that if it gets cut off from US-influenced technology, it may have to create its own, non-standard technology.  Second, the company is promoting “F5G,” which is “fixed 5G,” or a global standard for Passive Optical Network (PON) technology that operates at as high as 50 Gbps and can be used for fixed broadband, optical LAN (Campus Networks), cellular backhaul/fronthaul, and even optical Access uses.  The company also discussed evolutions or themes discussed at previous events like HAS2019, such as mmWave, FDD+TDD integration, Control User Plane Separation (CUPS), and more generally, 5G.  Much to our surprise, the opening keynotes differed significantly from the previous year’s themes in that there was no discussion of the advancements the company was making in developing in-house semiconductors and optical subsystems.

First of all, the company’s keynote, presented by Rotating Chairman, Guo Ping, was focused on Huawei’s views towards the US efforts to thwart Huawei.  The Chairman complained about the year-ago Entity List actions, and then more about this week’s escalation of prohibitions against Huawei.  Huawei expects these US actions will negatively impact Huawei in the future.  It said it is ramping up R&D and is focusing on open standards.  It says US’s efforts will hurt US interests.  In the past year, Huawei says it has redesigned over 1,000 circuit boards and that it grew R&D 30% last year.  Huawei’s supply chain is not “closed off, but open than ever,” and it “will continue to diversify” its base of suppliers.  As a result of US restrictions, the company fell $12B short of its plan in 2019.  Huawei’s view is that it simply hopes to “survive” in 2020.  One key message from the keynote was that Huawei does not want to see a world with two standards and two supply chains for the communications industry.

The company’s big news, in our view, was that it is advocating for F5G, which is a variant on PON technology that could be used in nearly all parts of networks, from indoor enterprise, to residential and business last mile, to cellular backhaul/fronthaul, and so on.  The vision, which was shared by co-sponsor, ETSI, a standards body in the telecom marketplace.  We think Huawei’s goal of creating a single technology platform that can be used in various markets where today multiple standards exist could be a good one.  For instance, in campus LAN environments, one could certainly argue that copper-based Ethernet has run its course (our forecasts are for declining revenue), and in the “last mile,” 1G-class PON and its currently shipping successor, 10G PON will need to be replaced by something.  F5G, which would operate at 10 Gbps and 50 Gbps speeds, differs from another consortium’s approach to a 10G PON successor, which operates at 25G.  So, on the one hand, Huawei is entering the market with a big idea – to put the same kind of fiber system “everywhere” (to the home, in the business, to the cellular towers, for instance) – at a time when many of these markets are currently, or soon will be, undergoing a transition, is a good idea.  On the other hand, there are already other standards bodies working to create accepted approaches for “to the home” fiber at 25 Gbps, for “in the business” at 2.5/5 Gbps, 10 Gbps, 25 Gbps and 100 Gbps (some copper, some fiber), and “to the towers” at 25 Gbps, 50 Gbps and 100 Gbps.  If Huawei gets it way, and F5G succeeds to become a standards, while at the same time the other standards continue to progress as they are today, then we’ll end up with two standards, the Huawei/ETSI approach, and the other approaches used by BBF, IEEE, etc.  This is what Huawei said it is trying to avoid in the keynote.

We enjoyed Huawei’s perspectives about its experience in the Chinese mobile and fixed market, where we see increasingly Chinese vendors are serving an increasing portion of capital equipment needs, while at the same time, it was interesting to hear about how the company is taking its experiences to other markets like Europe, Middle East, Asia and Latin America.  Several topics it discussed that were important, in our view, were the importance of mmWave, FDD+TDD integration, and CUPS.  To review each, we thought it was interesting that Huawei continues to view that the mmWave frequency as being limited to a US-only 5G market implementation; it views the C-band (which is mid-band) as the main spectrum where 5G will be deployed around the world, and it thinks this is sufficient to achieve 5G’s goals.  Next, the company spent ample time discussing its RAN technology that allows both TDD and FDD to operate simultaneously, explaining that FDD is best suited for lower frequencies and allows for superior uplink capabilities, while TDD is best for mid-band and is well-suited for MU-MIMO, high capacity throughput radios.  The company also shared that its CUPS technology has been adopted by 60 customers, which represents significant progress.
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We are eager to see the standards “battle” resolved, whether that means Huawei works closely with existing standards bodies, or whether other players worldwide, get on board with F5G, so that the communications industry will benefit from volume shipments and consumers may benefit with lower prices and new technology getting deployed sooner.

Commscope expects 6 GHz 802.11ax products to be shown at the CES show in January 2020 and that FEM and filters are not available today but will be by year-end or early 2020.

Newracomm is an 802.11ah (900 MHz WiFi) chip company that had won an award at the show. It claims to be an early leader in the market and based on comments made during presentations, we expect by 2H20, we will see systems and IoT services based on these types of chips.

Celeno, a stand-alone WiFi chip company, demonstrated radar on WiFi chip capability - the company won multiple award at the show. The company expects that a year from now, its Doppler on WiFi will emerge in products from SPs such as BT, Orange, and Comcast. The Doppler service only consumes about 3-5% of throughput capability when using Doppler and enables some very interesting capabilities such as fall detection, proximity detection, people counting and arm gestures.

ORAN and CBRS were the main themes at Mobile World Congress Americas, held in Los Angeles. I have to say, though, that unlicensed was the third most important theme, though it will emerge to the main stage in future years.

ORAN encompasses several topics woven together. ORAN is a set of common interfaces that describe how various devices in mobile RAN work together. ORAN may also represent a new way of building radio networks. Recently, new vendors are being invited to bid on major mobile network projects, including Mavenir, Altiostar, Parallel and others. And, the major market share players in mobile RAN, which include Ericsson, Nokia, Huawei, Samsung, and ZTE are being asked by operators to support ORAN. The incumbent vendors are responding in various ways: Samsung, a challenger in the market, has whole-heartedly embraced ORAN, while Huawei has only recently acknowledged the existence of ORAN. Ericsson and Nokia have embraced ORAN with the view to embrace and extend - in the sense that Microsoft used this term in the 1990s. Based on presentations made by Ericsson, Nokia, and Samsung, we expect that the incumbents, Ericsson and Nokia,will embrace ORAN but will establish a path to continue serving customers with the same vertically integrated business models of today. We are eager to see the results of mobile network operator bidding to observe how many startups win projects for wide scale deployment.
 
CBRS. Today, CBRS is available in the US market and has been so for about a month. We had an interesting opportunity to moderate three panels on the stage at MWCa and found some very interesting indoor/campus uses for CBRS, including WiFi backhaul, secure/critical communications, surveillance, IoT/sensor monitoring. Since CBRS indoor spectrum generally allows for more output power than for WiFi, the range is better. We see this as a key advantage for CBRS users, though enterprises who take advantage of the so-called OnGo service must pay various monthly fees such as those for the SAS and potentially other ongoing services. We expect that CBRS will be successful in certain verticals.
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Unlicensed.  We believe the existence of CBRS could uncork the value of unlicensed spectrum at 900 MHz, 5 GHz, 2.4 GHz, and 6 GHz. We are conducting significant research into each of these and other spectrums.