Press Release

Samsung Electronics and Vodafone have announced their plans to accelerate 5G Open RAN expansion across Europe, beginning new open network initiatives in Germany and Spain, while enhancing Vodafone’s 5G network in the U.K.

This builds upon the two companies’ initial network collaboration, including Vodafone UK’s successful launch of the first 5G Open RAN site in Bath, U.K. in January 2022, using Samsung’s virtualized RAN (vRAN) solution. Vodafone and Samsung are proving stable performance and capacity in Vodafone UK’s commercial network, exceeding targeted performance level and power savings in its strategic Open RAN sites (also known as its ‘Golden Cluster’), located in Exmouth and Torquay, England.

“As we grow and scale our network, we are excited to jointly drive collaborative Open RAN innovation and continue our groundbreaking work together with Samsung,” said Santiago Tenorio, Director of Network Architecture for Vodafone. “We look forward to continue bringing fundamental improvements to our wide-scale next-generation network, to further accelerate our open network approach for 5G expansion across Europe.”

New Europe 5G Initiatives

Building on their collaborative advancements, the two companies continue to grow their Open RAN footprint in Europe. New developments and projects include:

In the U.K.: The companies implemented Samsung’s O-RAN compliant Massive MIMO radios in Vodafone UK’s commercial network, efficiently expanding 5G coverage in the U.K. With this, Samsung’s 64T64R Massive MIMO radios are now successfully integrated with 5G vRAN, carrying commercial data traffic. Recently, the companies also completed a data call using Samsung’s vRAN and NEC’s Massive MIMO radio, demonstrating multi-vendor interoperability for Vodafone’s commercial network. This illustrates how Open RAN technology can enable multi-vendor integration of vRAN, not only with single-band radios but also with more complex Massive MIMO radios.
In Germany: Vodafone will carry out comprehensive pilot projects for Open RAN using Samsung’s 2G/4G vRAN and O-RAN compliant radio solutions. In these commercial pilots announced in October 2022, Vodafone will use Samsung’s mature solutions — proven in large-scale commercial networks — to demonstrate outstanding performance, stability and reliability.
In Spain: Samsung joined Vodafone’s testbed in Ciudad Real, which was created to benchmark mature RAN providers and compare performance across both traditional and Open RAN. Samsung will deploy its Massive MIMO radios and 4G/5G vRAN in CREATE (Ciudad Real España Advanced Testing Environment) to evaluate and verify their performance in Spain’s urban environment.

“Samsung’s virtualized Open RAN solutions are successfully running in Vodafone’s commercial network in the U.K., delivering performance on par with traditional mobile radio networks and providing Vodafone with an agile network on which to deploy new services and features,” said Thomas Riedel, Head of Samsung Networks Europe. “Vodafone has been a pioneer in the Open RAN space and they continue to break new grounds. We are excited to deepen our collaboration with Vodafone by extending our capabilities across Europe, and taking vRAN innovation to the next level.”

Continuing to claim deployment milestones, the two companies remain as strong partners in leading 5G Open vRAN innovation. Vodafone and Samsung are collaborating with other Open RAN leaders, to drive acceleration of Open RAN with wider diversity and multi-vendor, open architecture.

Keep up to date with all the latest telecoms news with Total Telecom’s daily newsletter

Also in the news:
AT&T signs up to use Frontier’s fibre to connect mobile towers
UScellular urges customers to put down their phones in latest initiative
VMO2 and Vodafone give rural Scotland a 4G boost

The boss of German telecoms giant Deutsche Telekom (DT), Tim Höttges, has said that taking out a £5.6bn stake in UK broadband and telecoms giant BT Group in 2015 has turned out to be the “biggest mistake” he ever made, after its value fell by almost £4bn. But DT hasn’t given up on the possibility […]

Arizona is a state of big numbers. It is perhaps best know for the Grand Canyon, 277 miles long, up to 18 miles wide and reaching a depth of over a mile…

But now Arizona and Cox Business have some more big figures to celebrate with a weekend that encompassed both Super Bowl 57 at the State Farm Stadium in Glendale, and the Waste Management Phoenix Open golf.

With the Kansas City Chiefs winning the Super Bowl and Dallas resident Scottie Scheffler topping the scoresheet for the PGA golf it might be easy to overlook other wins, so we were pleased to see this infographic from Cox showcasing some eyewatering statistics, including 1,380,901 minutes spent online during the Super Bowl and the 87% year-on-year increase in connections made during the WM Phoenix Open.

Cox Communications David Lee will be speaking in the Connected Industries track at Connected America [March 28-29, 2023 – Dallas] – it’s not clear whether sporting success will be part of his presentation! Make sure you join him by getting your ticket here.

Broadband ISP and telecoms giant BT and consultancy firm Hatch have today published their annual economic impact report for 2021/22, which among other things found that the operator provided an estimated boost of £24bn (Gross Value Added) to the UK economy last year and supported a total of 284,00 jobs. The Economic Impact Report 2023 […]

Bath-based alternative network ISP Truespeed appears to have added the rural Somerset (England) village and civil parish of Bleadon, which is home to around 1,100 people, to their rollout plan for a new 10Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network. The community of Bleadon wasn’t mentioned last year, when Truespeed updated their rollout plan for the […]

The Building Digital UK team has today published their latest quarterly Winter 2023 update on the Government’s £5bn rural Project Gigabit broadband rollout scheme, which has so far awarded six contracts – worth £164.8m – and launched 14 further procurements with a combined estimated value of £906.7m. The project itself aims to extend networks capable […]

VIEWPOINT

The much-awaited MWC 2023 has kicked off, and Huawei’s 5G ToB booth attracted an influx of visitors. The 5G Remote Control Solution, in particular, garnered attendees’ interest. Although terms such as “mining trucks, shovels, drilling rigs, slopes” displayed at the booth may be unfamiliar to some carriers, the exhibition of remote unmanned automation of large devices demonstrated the vast possibilities and potential changes that 5G technology could bring to the mining industry.

The audience is visiting the booth of ToB at MWC2023

Meanwhile, in the 100-meter Zhulan Iron Mine of Pangang Group Mining Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as “Pangang”) in Panzhihua City, Sichuan Province, in southwest China, the scene depicted at the MWC booth is currently unfolding under the miner’s lamp.

Large mining equipment, such as mine cards, electric shovels, and drilling rigs, operate in a highly organized way, without human intervention, which starkly contrasts traditional mining methods. The remote-control center, located 3 kilometers away from the mine, is where the intelligent and digital capabilities enabled by 5G technology make this transformation in mining operations possible.

On entering the remote-control center of the mine, Yao Shijian, the operator of Pangang’s shovel, takes his place in a remote seat reminiscent of a game controller. With skill and precision, Yao operates the shovel, expertly excavating ore from the pile and transferring it to the mine truck. “Initially, I felt like it was a bit surreal, but after a few times, it felt just like being on-site,” Yao said. As the 5G mining system became a norm production, Yao Shijian and his colleagues transitioned from working under the sun and wind to sitting in a climate-controlled room, moving from “grey collar” to “white collar.”

Li Yibing, the project’s lead, said, “This project represents a new production mode that revolutionizes the mining industry and sets it apart from previous technological improvements. Unmanned mines have increased mining efficiency by over 10 percent. Particularly through unmanned mines, we’ve been able to capitalize on the difference in electricity price between day and night to increase our production capacity during the night. This has saved almost one million RMB in monthly electricity bills, and all made possible through the low latency, high bandwidth, and high reliability of 5G networks.”

Yao Shijian’s operating the machine remotely for mining

For Zhulan Iron Mine of Pangang, a pioneer in metallurgical mining in China, implementing remote control technology was a formidable challenge. The biggest challenge for 5G remote control was signal freezing and delay, which could impact the work experience and lead to accidents. However, with the reliable and low-latency capabilities of 5G networks, workers like Yao Shijian can control the forklift’s robot arm movement with precision and without delay. The project team worked for three months to design the optimal network configuration, including the 5G base station location and network optimization parameters, to meet the communication requirements of vehicles, shovels, and drills. This enabled the optimal air interface delay and prevented data from traveling over public networks by deploying 5G core network devices in the edge data center of the mining area.

To accelerate the rollout of the remote-control system, Huawei collaborated with partners to pre-install network, computing, and security devices and remote-control applications in a “container” data center. Onsite installation took only two weeks. Additionally, Huawei used “video stitching” technology to combine multiple cameras into seamless large-angle images, improving the forklifts’ maneuverability and control efficiency.

Huawei’s innovative solution integrates workers’ professional experiences and scientific and technological support into the production process, fundamentally changing the operation mode of traditional open-pit mines. In the future, 5G technologies will be introduced into underground mines and factory workshops, further improving production safety and working environments for employees and contributing significant value to the digital transformation of the industry.

News

The Finnish vendor says its mobile device days are well and truly behind it, with its new rebrand emphasising enterprise technology as the key vector for company growth

Nokia has started this week with a bang, launching a rebrand that seeks to position the company as more than just a traditional telecoms vendor and instead as a broader enterprise technology provider.

Alongside unveiling a sharp new logo, the company said that it would focus on six key pillars to ensure its future success: continuing to build market share with CSPs, expanding its enterprise customer base, continuing to ‘manage its portfolio actively’ to maximise its value, continuing to invest heavily in R&D, and to turn its Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) goals into a competitive advantage.

While many of these measures seem fairly amorphous, the overall message is clear: as network technology moves increasingly towards the cloud, opportunities for innovative new technologies in the B2B sector will grow rapidly, thereby warranting increasing strategic focus. For now, enteprise technology is a relatively small slice of Nokia’s total revenue, but in future it could play a much more significant role.

“We see a future where networks go beyond connecting people and things. They’re adaptable, autonomous and consumable. They are networks that sense, think and act, and they maximise the opportunity of digitalisation,” explained Nokia’s president and CEO Pekka Lundmark.

“Today we share our updated company and technology strategy with a focus on unleashing the exponential potential of networks – pioneering a future where networks meet cloud. To signal this ambition we are refreshing our brand to reflect who we are today – a B2B technology innovation leader. This is Nokia, but not as the world has seen us before.”

In short, it appears that the company is keen to severe brand ties with its consumer-focussed phone business of the past and instead demonstrate its commitment to the enterprise segment over the coming decade.

Naturally, this announcement coincided with the launch of a wide range of new Nokia products, the most exciting of which is perhaps their new anyRAN technology – software that can run on any partner’s cloud and server infrastructure, as well as on Nokia AirScale base stations and Nokia AirFrame servers.

The operator says this new approach will help reduce complexity for operators and enable “deep multi-level disaggregation at the cloud infrastructure and data centre layers”.

“The strength of our industry partnerships and the launch of anyRAN unlocks more choice and higher performance in Cloud RAN for our mobile network operator and enterprise customers,” explained Tommi Uitto, President of Mobile Networks at Nokia.

“Server-based Cloud RAN will have to co-exist with purpose-built RAN in the short-to-medium term which calls for performance consistency and service continuity between the two. Together with our leading industry partners, we have made huge progress towards this goal by driving consistent performance across any partner’s Cloud Infrastructure or server hardware. Our collaborative approach to Cloud RAN means we can drive efficiency, innovation, openness, and scale by jointly delivering competitive advantage to organizations embracing Cloud RAN.”

The new technology is backed by Nokia’s new Cloud RAN SmartNIC, a Layer 1 (fronthaul) In-Line acceleration card.

However, it should be noted that this new focus on hybrid RAN solutions does not mean the company will be any less focussed on its own end-to-end RAN solutions, with Nokia also announcing a range of new Massive MIMO products that are set to come to market later this year.

Keep up to date with all the latest telecoms news with Total Telecom’s daily newsletter

Also in the news:
AT&T signs up to use Frontier’s fibre to connect mobile towers
UScellular urges customers to put down their phones in latest initiative
VMO2 and Vodafone give rural Scotland a 4G boost

Startup Stories

Tell us about your start up
Innovate5G Inc. is a software product and services company developing AI/ML Platforms and APIs for 4G/5G/6G Cellular Network Performance Observation for Application Developers and Network Developers.

Innovate5G inc. customers are mainly Application companies that develop IoT, UAV, Metaverse(AR/VR) Applications and Solutions Integrators that integrate Applications to Networks. Current customers are headquartered in US in Texas and in Illinois.

Applications can now observe Performance over Cellular Networks to optimize Applications and Networks in real time with APIs.

With our platforms and products, our customers can Observe the performance of Applications over Cellular Networks, Adapt the Application real time to Network conditions with APIs and Evolve their Business Models based on Quality of Experience (QoE).

What is your USP?
Innovate5G Inc. USP is to enlighten the End User Experience on Wireless Networks. The days for Wireless Networks, that are simply built as a pipeline to deliver one-size-fits-all service are limited. While everyone is looking for a faster horse, we are enabling a shift in the industry that will bring in the Experiential Marketplace. We are here to uplift End User Experience, bring in new Business Models and build the first ever Experience and Concierge Experience platform which can deliver a wow-factor for Applications and its users by understanding the Quality of the Network available to Applications.

What is your relationship with the telecom sector?
We are disruptors and for that reason navigating the Telecom market has been daunting. We find Application Developers are more attuned to new-age ideas and trying different things. We would love to collaborate with Telcos who want to offer more to their customers than just data plans. For that reason, I think our perfect partnership could be in the arena of MVNOs who want to add another layer of service to their offerings and stand out in the MVNO crowd.

How have you got to your current stage of development?
We have been very fortunate to be selected by Google for Startups. They have opened pathways for us for Cloud Trainings, access to latest & greatest Cloud Infrastructure, Tools, Software, APIs and access to their Global Partners.

Why did you establish the business?
I’m always looking for a gap in the market and looking to solve a problem that genuinely exists.

When I exit my previous startup, which was based on a lack of Computer Science education in the K12 curriculum in USA, I looked around and asked, what should I solve next?

I came from a Communication Network background with protocol design in the Optical field and then moved to the Education and Franchisee industry for my first startup. I wanted to return to Networks but this time to Wireless. I had this sense that Networks are very important, far more important than content but the whole hype pre-covid was towards content. Covid era and post-covid have now proven that that statement stands True.

This was a chance for me to challenge myself yet again and be in touch with the love of my life – Radios. I’m an Electronics & Communication Engineer and I loved tinkering with Radios, Antennas and Electromagnetic fields from a very young age. To me, being hands on and experimenting with circuits & radio waves comes easily.

5G was just taking off in 2019 but the issue with 5G was lack of true 5G Applications. That lead me down the path to ask the question – What is a 5G Application? The whole expectation was that 5G applications need to leverage the 5G spec of low latency, high bandwidth, massive number of connections. This is how networks explained it. In short, a wow-factor is how applications understood it. It meant delivering something more than what is being experienced today with 4G. Of course, getting the right network specs on 5G is crucial to actually deliver the true 5G Application Experience. However, not many application developers understand what 5G can help them with. So, how are they going to push the limits, when they actually don’t understand what those limits mean?

We started out initially measuring and qualifying 5G applications in our test lab. We came to a quick epiphany that if we really wanted to enhance the Experience, we were missing the psyche/thinking behind Experience. Today’s industry is not oriented around it and neither are Business Models. What would be needed to evolve into an Experience Economy from an App Economy, just like we went from Equestrian Economy to a Fuel based Economy not too long ago with the introduction of a horseless carriage – The Car. That is the journey we set out on. To become the enabler for a shift from the App Economy to the Experience Economy.

So far, it has been a very spiritual journey for us, meaning, there has been some intense and tough soul searching for us. Whenever, you are trying to make a market shift, it is always an uphill journey. But it is also a very rewarding journey, which we hope will be all worth the effort in the end.

Who or what inspired you?
Creativity inspires me. Being Original, Down-to-Earth and Shining a Light of Truth on Everything is what motivates me.

So all those people that show up with Creative ideas and then put their strength and truth to the grind to produce their best creative work. All those People, all the Designers, Creators, Coders, Engineers, Researchers, Entrepreneurs, the inherent Spirit of always trying to find the cure or the solution to the next problem, I draw inspiration from all of those. I see them Everywhere. Anyone with a child-like enthusiasm who think they can achieve anything, I think that they are all very special. Their ideas are just simply out there, with no sense of fear or failure. It truly energizes my Spirit when I see Divine creativity at play in others.

What does the future hold for your business?
We hope to make our humble contribution in making this World a better place.

We hope we can become an enabler to uplift other people’s Creativity, be it in enhancing Metaverse Applications, making it easier to connect IoT & AI Applications to the Network, enabling new-age applications and business models to market that we haven’t seen or experienced yet and to build a more Experiential World.

We know that people truly value how they feel, more so now than ever. To leave a lasting impression, like you have just watched a show of Shen Yun or Cirque de Soleil or something that stimulates your creative senses is truly awe-inspiring for everyone. That experience lasts much longer than shopping therapy.

We want to help others achieve grand results in ways that have not been explored before in the App Economy.

COMPANY CV
HEADQUARTERS – Richardson, Texas, USA
NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES – 5
LAST FUNDING TYPE – USD $200K non-equity funding from Google
URL – www.innovate5g.com
FOUNDERS
Rashmi Varma (Founder & President)
Mike Thompson (Board of Advisor)

Innovate5G is one of the exciting startups that you can meet at Connected America. Make sure you join us on March 28-29, 2023 at Irving Convention Center, Dallas

 

Network builder Freedom Fibre, which aims to cover over 2 million UK premises with their Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network and is being supported by ISP TalkTalk, has awarded thousands of pounds worth of grants to 13 local community schemes in some of the areas where their new infrastructure is being built. In case anybody has forgotten, […]