Summary Bullets:
- An opportunity to moderate two educational sessions at CTIA’s Super Mobility Week provided insights into the state of network virtualization and cloud RAN (C-RAN).
- While it’s understood that C-RAN might not be an appropriate technology for every operator deployment scenario, the opportunity to leverage Ethernet fronthaul – enabled by split-baseband architectures – is seen as making it more broadly applicable.
- Virtualization, meanwhile, has progressed to the point where it’s a network agenda item for every operator – even if many are still in an investigation phase.
- From increased vendor participation in standards bodies to operator cataloging of their transport assets, there’s plenty of ideas for how to help move both technologies faster.
Conspiracy theorists would have us believe that Apple scheduled its ‘Ask Siri’ event to upstage CTIA’s Super Mobility Week. While it’s unclear what Apple would have to gain from this move, it’s fair to say that the events taking place in San Francisco (where Apple made its announcements) dominated many conversations in Las Vegas (where Super Mobility Week was taking place). It’s also fair to say that most conversations at CTIA’s annual trade show had nothing to do with Apple, or devices at all. If nothing else, we already noted yesterday that 5G was set to be a major show topic, including key 5G component technologies like C-RAN, SDN and NFV. Continue reading “CTIA Super Mobility Week: Day One – SDN/NFV and C-RAN Insights”