650 Group
  • Home
  • Programs
    • WLAN Infrastructure
    • Telecom Core Networks
    • Ethernet Switch Programs >
      • Ethernet Switch - Total
      • Ethernet Switch - Data Center
      • Ethernet Switch - Campus
      • Ethernet Switch - Carrier Ethernet
      • Campus Networks
      • Ethernet Switch - SMB
    • Application Delivery Controller (ADC)
    • Merchant Silicon in the Data Center
    • Market Intelligence Reports
    • Consumer IoT
    • Disaggregated Routing Report
    • Industrial Switching Report
    • Multi-Cloud Workloads Forecast and Research Report
    • Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) Forecast and Research Report
    • Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Hyperscaler SWOT Report
  • News
    • Press Releases
  • Blog
  • About
  • Employment
  • Contact
  • Clients

650 Group Blog

View my profile on LinkedIn

Mavenir Expanding Rapidly TO Support its Radio Efforts

11/13/2019

0 Comments

 
We attended the Mavenir analyst meeting last week.  The company has made progress in developing its radio products, while at the same time it has grown revenues approximately 15% this year and bookings are estimated to reach $510M this year.  The company expects to achieve a 28% EBITDA margin this year, greater than last year’s profitability rate.  The company has 3,100 full time employees, up significantly from last year.  We met executives hired recently with impressive pedigrees.  The company is positioning itself as a US based end-to-end mobile network operator supplier.

In 2019, most of the company’s revenues are from the telecom core products.  Generally, the company is taking a software-only approach to the mobile network market, which in many ways is what operators want from its suppliers.  By taking a software-only approach, the company leaves some of its destiny in the hands of others, especially when it comes to hardware acceleration and radio units.

The company has achieved success in VoLTE and RCS.  It is using the growing brand it has developed in these telecom core services areas to get access to RAN projects.  The company describes its RAN activities and its partner’s radio capabilities as being able to handle radio connection densities on the order of 200 users per radio. 

Mavenir plans to bring User Plane Forwarding capabilities for packet core to market next year with hardware acceleration; chip suppliers that were mentioned include Intel and Mellanox (now Nvidia).  The company is investigating various acceleration techniques such as GPU, ARM and FPGA, which presumably will allow the company to provide a denser baseband system than is currently possible.

The company is targeting mobile operators that are making initial deployments of O-RAN based radio systems. Mavenir explained that European RFIs are allocating a certain number of RAN sites to O-RAN.  The company claims to have recently been awarded some O-RAN contracts that have limited deployment scenarios.  Vodafone CEO made public statements in support of working with Mavenir recently. 
0 Comments

Mobile World Congress Americas Themes: ORAN, CBRS and Unlicsned

11/4/2019

0 Comments

 
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.
​
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.
0 Comments

5G Americas conference: unlicensed spectrum highlight

9/30/2019

0 Comments

 
​We attended the operator and vendor consortium of 5G Americas.  The themes of the show were: 5G, spectrum, cell siting, Asia-Pacific operator progress.  For the second time in the past couple weeks, we saw FCC Commissioner Michael O'Reilly present, and his key messages were similar both times, focusing on CBRS, C-Band and 6 GHz.  In attendance from the North American service provider side were AT&T, T-Mobile US, Shaw, and Sprint (we focused on NA operators mainly in this write-up).  Notable vendors included Cisco, Commscope, Ericsson, Intel, Kathrein, Mavenir, Nokia, Qualcomm, and Samsung.  We would say the most important theme from the show is the surge in interest in unlicensed spectrum, both for the use of mobile operators, as well as competing carriers, as well as by enterprises both for indoor and outdoor applications.  For this write-up, we are focusing primarily on comments made by some of the leading operators who attended the conference.

AT&T discussed mmWave, future 3GPP releases, 5G phones, Mobile Edge Computing and indoor cellular, mid-band spectrum strategies, 5 GHz spectrum usage, Mobile Edge Computing (MEC), StandAlone (SA), among other topics.  AT&T views mmWave as just a tool in the toolkit, so to speak, and not the only spectrum that is useful in 5G.  It considers mmWave to be most helpful in urban and potentially indoor settings.  Representatives said that future 5G-oriented Releases 16 & 17 are expected to be software upgrades to existing hardware and won't require new equipment to incorporate these new capabilities which will include network slicing.  AT&T is making a big deal about its Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) initiative.  At the conference, it emphasized MEC as having two main parts: a) expansion to about 100 edge sites (mostly Central Offices) from about 20 central locations in the LTE era and initially supporting packet core, and b) Microsoft Azure services managed end-to-end by AT&t.  The company also emphasized that it plans to pursue some indoor cellular opportunities, some that currently leverage 5 GHz using LAA technology, some that will leverage CBRS and some that will leverage mmWave.  We get the impression from AT&T that it is open in how it pursues future mid-band spectrum strategies.  Its strategy could change based on: a) the timing of the CBRS PAL licenses (currently slated for June 25, 2020), b) the potential for C-Band  private auctions (potentially in the mid 2020 timeframe), c) the potential for some or all of the 6 GHz spectrum availability (where Wi-Fi 6 would co-occupy), as well as other factors.  We learned that, at least in certain regions, the company is making very ample use of 5 GHz spectrum using LAA techniques.  AT&T seeing its picocells (small cells) get around 100 Mbps from LAA out of a total 130 Mbps inclusive of around three other licensed spectrums.  We were surprised the company makes such ample use of unlicensed spectrum where Wi-Fi currently exists.  The 5 GHz experience of AT&T leads us to think that 6 GHz, which promises to offer far more spectrum that the 5 GHz swath presently available, could be very beneficial to mobile operators and their consumers, as well as the Wi-Fi industry, and its consumers.  AT&T expects that by this time next year, it will be "pushing" 5G to all its customers, part as a result of handsets adopting 5G capabilities, part the result of its network seeing nationwide coverage.  Of the services that AT&T operates, it is installing mainly Packet Core in its MEC systems.  AT&T is also planning to run Microsoft Azure services in its MEC locations.   It expects that both Packet Core and Azure will see a 10-20 ms latency reduction by being located in MEC locations.  AT&T says that StandAlone (SA) is "just new software," and downplayed the significance of the upgrade from EPC/NonStandAlone (NSA) to SA.

Sprint "is all-in on 2.5 GHz mid-band deployments for 5G services."  Given the company's potential merger with T-Mobile USA, we view its network-build-out choices as being somewhat limited.  It has limited options because it increases its near-term value to its acquirer, T-Mobile, if it deploys 5G in 2.5 GHz.  Likewise, it is doesn't implement in mmWave, this reduces overlap with T-Mobile, who is deploying there.  The company reiterated that it had launched 5G in 9 markets.  It is seeing its peak speeds on 5G (aided by the fact that it has simultaneously upgraded hardware to Massive MIMO) be about 3-5 times that of its 8T8R LTE systems.  It currently covers 11M POPs and 2,100 square miles with 5G.  Sprint also shared that it sees RFPs from customers to replace Wi-Fi with 5G, though it didn't share more about this topic.  The company's experience is that in upgrading its macro base stations to Massive MIMO 64T64R capabilities, it is getting 3-4x faster throughput than its 8T8R systems, though in the field these measurements vary widely.  Additionally, Sprint said that its Massive MIMO systems relative to earlier systems show "generally the same coverage," with 1-2 dB better sometimes.  Sprint is exploring ORAN and vRAN but "not adopting near term."

Shaw (Canada) presented its mobile LTE and 5G efforts and plans.  Shaws plans are interesting because the company has significant cable services deployed in Canada.  The company said nearly all the mobile technology it has installed in the past three years are "5G-ready."  It will use 5G first in 600 MHz, then in mid-band (probably in 3.5 GHz) and the last in mmWave. Shaw expects that low-band 5G handsets will be available in 2020, and, similar to what AT&T said, it expects that is when 5G mobile will start in earnest in Canada.  Shaw admitted that it is behind where the US operators are in deploying 5G, but offered no apologies, as it felt it is where it needs to be from a competitive standpoint in Canada.  Almost laughing, Shaw explained that it would never consider deploying mmWave along highways, and that only high-density locations would get mmWave coverage.  Shaw's view that mmWave is for high-density locations was shared universally by other operators in attendance, including AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile US.

T-Mobile US spokespersons explained that mmWave has seen some challenges, relative to initial expectations and that while it does get mmWave to operate beyond near-line-of-sight, the view of T-Mobile is that mmWave is "just part of 5G."  T-Mobile expects 3GPP Release 16 to be completed in 2020, but that it will be 2021 before it deploys Release 16, which won't require "a massive hardware refresh" and which will incorporate industrial and connected vehicles features.  T-Mobile views 5G as being appropriate for indoor installations because while mmWave has challenges penetrating glass and concrete, but when 5G operates in low and mid-band spectrums, the "issue goes away."  By 2020, T-Mobile expects StandAlone packet core to be ready, but since its current EPC/NonStandAlone (NSA) systems are already virtualized, the upgrade to SA is "not a forklift" upgrade.  T-Mobile says virtual RAN (vRAN) "will take time," and that it will "need accelerators," which we take to mean FPGA-based Network Interface Cards (NICs) or the like to allow servers to operate faster than just x86 processors will allow.
0 Comments

    CHRIS DePUY
    &
    Alan weckel

    Technology Analysts

    Archives

    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017

    Categories

    All
    100 Gbps
    10 Gbps Ethernet
    112 Gbps SERDES
    12.8 Tbps
    14.4 Tbps
    200 Gbps
    2.4 GHz
    25G PON
    25GS-PON
    28 Ghz
    3.5 GHz
    3GPP
    400 Gbps
    50 Gbps
    50 Gbps SERDES
    50G PON
    56 Gbps SERDES
    5.925
    5G
    5G Americas
    5G Core
    5G Fixed Wireless Access
    5 Ghz
    5G Taxi
    600 Mhz
    60 GHz
    6G
    6 GHz
    7.125
    800 G
    800 Gbps
    802.11ac
    802.11ad
    802.11ah
    802.11ax
    802.11ay
    900 MHz
    A3
    Accelleran
    Actility
    ACX6360
    ADC
    Aerohive
    AFA
    AFC
    AFF A800
    Affirmed Networks
    AI
    AIops
    Airframe
    Air Pass
    Airspan
    Alan Weckel
    Alcatel
    Alcatel Lucent Enterprise
    Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise
    Alibaba
    All Flash Array
    Altiostar
    Amazon
    AMD
    AMIT Wireless
    Amplifi
    Analytics
    AOI
    AP530
    AP550
    Apple
    Apstra
    Aptilo
    Aquto
    Arista
    ARM
    Arris
    Artificial Intelligence
    Ascend 310
    ASR 9000
    Asset Tracking
    ASUS
    Atlas 200
    ATM19
    ATMDigital
    Atmosphere
    AT&T
    Automation
    Avaya
    AWS
    Azure
    Backhaul
    Baicells
    Bai Cells
    Baidu
    Balong
    BEC Technologies
    BELL
    BGP
    Big Switch
    BIS
    BLE
    BLE5
    BLE Beacon
    BLINQ
    Bluetooth
    Boingo
    Borje Ekholm
    Broadband
    Broadcom
    BT
    Bureau Of Industry And Security
    Cable Modem
    Cambium
    Campus Switch
    Campus Switching
    Capex
    Carrier
    Cat 6500
    Catalyst 9000
    C-Band
    CBRS
    CDN
    Celeno
    Centurytel
    CEOS
    Charter Communications
    Chatbot
    Check Point Software
    China Mobile
    China Telecom
    China Unicom
    Chungwa Telecom
    Ciena
    Cisco
    Cisco ICE
    Clearpass
    Cloud
    Cloud Managed
    Cloud-managed
    Cloud RAN
    Cloud Volumes
    Cognitive Wi-Fi
    Coherent Pluggable
    Comba
    Comcast
    Common Networks
    Commscope
    Consolidation
    Consumer Mesh
    Contact Tracing
    Contrail
    Co-packaged Optics
    Corning
    Coronavirus
    Corvid-19
    CoSP
    COVID-19
    CPaaS
    CPE
    CPRI
    Cradlepoint
    Crosswork
    CSCF
    CSP
    Cumulus
    CUPS
    CX 6200
    CyberX
    Dark Reading
    Dartmouth
    DAS
    Data Center
    DCI
    DD QSFP
    DD-QSFP
    DDR4
    DELL
    Delta
    Deutsche Bank
    Deutsche Telekom
    D-Link
    DOCOMO
    DOCSIS
    DPDK
    DRAM
    Dropbox
    ECI Telecom
    Edgecore
    Eero
    EMC
    ENAC
    Encore
    Entity List
    EPC
    EPON
    Ericsson
    Ericsson Router 6000
    ESP
    Etheric
    Ethernet
    Ethernet Switch
    ETSI
    Europe
    Extreme
    Extreme Networks
    F5
    F5G
    Facebook
    FBOSS
    FCC
    Federated Wireless
    Fibre Channel
    Firewall
    Fixed Wireless Access
    Flash
    FMS
    Forescout
    Fortinet
    FP-4
    FPGA
    Fronthaul
    Fujitsu
    FWA
    GAA
    Gainspeed
    GENBAND
    Geofencing
    German Edge Cloud
    Google
    GPON
    GPU
    Greenlake
    H3C
    HAS2018
    HAS2019
    HAS2020
    HDD
    Hong Kong Broadband
    Hotspot Tracking
    HPE
    HPE Aruba
    Huawei
    HWMBBF
    Hyperconverged
    Hyperscaler
    IaaS
    IBM
    ICD
    IMS
    Infinera
    Innoeye
    Intel
    IoT
    IoT Control Center
    Ip Access
    Italtel
    ITU-T SG 15
    Ixia
    John Roy
    Juniper
    Junos
    Kandy
    KDDI
    Keerti Melkote
    Keysight
    KT
    KUIPER
    Kungpeng
    LAA
    Las Vegas
    Layer123
    LG Electronics
    LG UPlus
    Linux
    Location Based Service
    LoRa
    LTE
    LTE-U
    Lucent
    Machine Learning
    MACSec
    Managed Services
    MANO
    Marco Rubio
    Marvell
    Massive MIMO
    Mavenir
    MaxLinear
    MEC
    Mediatek
    Megafon
    Meraki
    Mesh WiFi
    Metro Optical
    Michael P. O'Reilly
    Microsoft
    Midband
    Mid-market
    Millimeter Wave
    Millimeter-wave
    Mist
    Mist Systems
    Mixing Bauds
    MmWave
    Mobile
    Mobile Edge Computing
    Mobile RAN
    Modem-E
    Mojo Networks
    Motorola
    Motorola Solutions
    MPLS
    MSO
    Multefire
    MultiGig
    Multi Gig
    MultiTech
    MU MIMO
    MU-MIMO
    MWC
    MWC18
    MWC19
    MWC20
    MWCa
    MX
    NBASE T
    NBASE-T
    Nbn
    NCS 5700
    NEC
    NEC 540
    NetApp
    Netcracker
    Netgear
    NetInsight
    Netskope
    Network Services Orchestrator
    Network Slicing
    Neville Ray
    Newracomm
    New Radio
    NFV
    Nokia
    Nortel
    NPU
    NTT
    NUWAVE
    NVMe
    NVMeoFC
    OCP
    Ocp2019
    Ocpsummit
    OFC
    #OFC18
    Ofcom
    OFDMA
    OIF
    OLT
    OmniXtend
    ONAP
    ONFConnect
    OnGo
    On Semiconductor
    ONT
    Ooka
    Open19
    OpenRAN
    Open RAN
    OPPO
    Optical
    Optical LAN
    OptiXtreme H6
    Optus
    Oracle
    ORAN
    Orange
    Oreedoo
    OSFP
    OSS/BSS
    OTAC
    P2P
    P4
    Packet Optical
    PAL
    Parallel Wireless
    Passpoint
    PON
    Posture Assessment
    Private LTE
    Project Denali
    PSE 3
    PSE-3
    PTX
    Pure Storage
    Quad Level Cell
    Qualcomm
    Quanta
    Quantenna
    Quillion
    Radio Resource Management
    Rakuten
    RAN
    RBBN
    RCP
    RCS
    Realtek
    Reefshark
    Ribbon
    RISC
    Riverbed
    Rivet Networks
    ROADM
    Robin.io
    Rostelecom
    Router
    Ruckus
    Samsung
    Sandisk
    SAS
    SASE
    Satellite
    SBC
    SD Branch
    SD-Branch
    SDN
    SD-RAN
    SDWAN
    SD WAN
    SD-WAN
    Security
    Semtech
    Sequans
    Sercomm
    Server
    Shaw Communications
    Siemens
    Sierra Wireless
    Silver Peak
    Single-pane
    SingleRAN
    SingleRAN Pro
    SIP Trunking
    SK Telecom
    Skype
    Small Cell
    Smartphone
    Snapdragon 865
    Softbank
    Sonus
    Spark
    Spectrum
    Sprint
    Sp Router
    SRX
    SSD
    StandAlone
    Starlink
    STC
    Stellar
    Swisscom
    Tago.io
    Tareq Amin
    Technicolor
    Telco Cloud
    Telecom Infra Project
    Telefonica
    Telia
    Telit
    Telus
    Tencent
    Terragraph
    Tiangang
    T-Mobile
    TMUS
    Tomahawk 3
    TP-Link
    T&W
    Twilio
    Twitter
    TWT
    Ubiquiti
    UCaaS
    UCPE
    UI
    UltraSAW
    UniFi
    Unified Domain Center
    Unlicensed
    UTM
    UXI-6
    VaporIO
    VBLE
    VDSL
    VEPC
    Verilog
    Verizon
    Versa Networks
    VICTOR
    Virtualization
    VNF
    Vodafone
    VoLTE
    VRAN
    VSBC
    Walt Disney
    Wan Optimization
    Water Tower Research
    Way Finder
    WDC
    Westell
    Western Digital
    Western Digital Corporation
    WFH
    White Box
    White Paper
    Wi-F 6E
    WiFi
    Wi-Fi
    Wi-Fi 6
    WiFi 6
    WiFi-6
    Wi-Fi 6E
    WiFi Alliance
    WiFiNOW
    WiGig
    Wind River
    WISP
    WLAN
    Xiaomi
    Xilinx
    Xirrus
    XRAN
    Zebra
    Zero-Rating
    Zero Trust
    Zigbee
    Zipline
    ZR
    ZR+
    ZScaler
    ZTE
    Zyxel

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly
  • Home
  • Programs
    • WLAN Infrastructure
    • Telecom Core Networks
    • Ethernet Switch Programs >
      • Ethernet Switch - Total
      • Ethernet Switch - Data Center
      • Ethernet Switch - Campus
      • Ethernet Switch - Carrier Ethernet
      • Campus Networks
      • Ethernet Switch - SMB
    • Application Delivery Controller (ADC)
    • Merchant Silicon in the Data Center
    • Market Intelligence Reports
    • Consumer IoT
    • Disaggregated Routing Report
    • Industrial Switching Report
    • Multi-Cloud Workloads Forecast and Research Report
    • Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) Forecast and Research Report
    • Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Hyperscaler SWOT Report
  • News
    • Press Releases
  • Blog
  • About
  • Employment
  • Contact
  • Clients