December 2023

Summary Bullets:

• Ericsson’s joint announcement with AT&T this week of plans for high-scale open RAN deployment represents an important milestone for the open RAN movement and could help stimulate the ecosystem.

• But it’s not clear exactly how widely and quickly AT&T plans to put in place true open RAN in the most meaningful sense – multi-vendor base stations that invigorate supplier competition and software innovation.

Source: Ericsson, AT&T

Ericsson’s joint announcement with AT&T this week of plans for high-scale open RAN deployment represents an important milestone for the open RAN movement, which AT&T helped launch to begin with, but which has not yet seen dramatic acceleration in operator networks. AT&T’s moves in that area could help alter the movement’s trajectory.

Continue reading “AT&T Gives the Open RAN Movement a Helpful Push, but Much of its Plan Remains Unknown” →

Summary Bullets:

• At the ZTE 5G Summit in Bangkok (Thailand) in November 2023, ZTE continued its focus on RIS with a next-generation prototype that consumes less power than its predecessor.

• ZTE also introduced ZTE RAN Composer, a solution that inserts general-purpose computing into the baseband unit to aid AI-based RAN optimization applications.

At the 2023 ZTE 5G Summit in Bangkok (Thailand), ZTE presented a range of views on 5G’s continuing and future evolution, including presentations from operators and analysts in addition to ZTE representatives. The company also highlighted two forward-looking technologies that stood out: reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) and what ZTE has branded as ‘RAN Composer.’

Continue reading “At its 5G Summit, ZTE Advances RIS and Introduces ‘RAN Composer’” →