It’s been 3 years since the last Mobile World Congress that neXt Curve has attended in person. Needless to say, the global pandemic has all but made in-person events a toil at the least. GSMA, the host of the MWC, found fortune this year as the US and Spain finds themselves on the back end of the Omicron wave. The show that might not have been went on with approximately 60K attendees, and over 1,900 exhibitors in attendance. According to John Hoffman, CEO of GSMA, the event was by all measures as success.
Continue readingIndustry Insight: Private Networks
Private networks are widely considered to be a highly-promising segment for 5G services. However, this market is not as straightforward as it appears. It is highly competitive and deep insights into industry verticals are required. Enterprise requirements are varied and project customisations are unavoidable. For now, large multinationals have taken the early lead in adoption.
Continue readingSnapdragon – One Roadmap to Rule Them All
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Tech Summit took place on the Big Island of Hawaii from the 30th of November to the 2nd of December. The central theme of the event was the reimagining of Qualcomm under its new CEO, Cristiano Amon. The cornerstone of this reinvention is Snapdragon which represents Cristiano’s vision for Qualcomm’s future and its strategy for expanding its business by pursuing and catalyzing new market opportunities where the emerging edge cloud and mobile computing meet.
Continue readingIndustry Insight: The State of Open RAN
What is the state of Open RAN? Despite all the excitement, little progress has been made on the commercial front. Brownfield mindshare and presence are yet to be realized amid early-stage greenfield deployments of open RAN networks, most notably Dish and 1&1.
Continue readingTech Insight: Ericsson Counters the Open RAN Threat and More…
neXt Curve Research Brief: Over the past three years, the Open RAN movement has transformed into an operator’s mission to realize a more open architecture in its networks into what sounds more and more like a vendor war on the “legacy vendors”, Ericsson, Nokia, and Huawei. Much of this dynamic has been due to the divisive geopolitics between China and the US. The resultant elimination of low-cost, high-quality RAN system provided by Chinese ICT vendors drew interest in Open RAN as a possible economical option versus the two remaining incumbents who Dave Mayo of Dish Network dubbed “the Scandinavian mafia”.
Continue readingAWS Private 5G – Is Easy Enough?
On November 30, 2021, AWS CEO, Adam Selipsky, announced that AWS would be offering a private 5G network as a managed service. As expected the announcement drew a tremendous amount of industry and media attention with many claiming that the age of private 5G networks had arrived. Trigger words “5G” and “private networks” aside, what are we looking at there with AWS’s latest venture to the edge of the network? According to the AWS press release, this new offering,
Continue readingTech Insight: Making Enterprise 5G a Thing
5G is supposedly about enabling new industrial applications that will benefit from the industrial grade connectivity that 5G promises to bring. Yet, enterprise uptake of 5G is in the very early stages with recent support for private networks using licensed and unlicensed spectrum. Where are we with 5G for the enterprise? Is it ready for prime time?
Continue readingIndustry Insight: Ericsson to Acquire Vonage
neXt Curve: Contributing Analyst – Foong King Yew: Ericsson has just announced its acquisition of Vonage, valuing the latter at an enterprise value of around $6.2b. This is clearly a push into the enterprise and communications applications programming interface (API) markets, partly driven by activist shareholders who are hankering for growth.
Continue readingNokia Global Analyst Forum 2021
There were many highlights in the recently concluded Nokia Global Analyst Forum. Nokia shared its vision and strategy (Reset—Accelerate—Scale), and showcased its product leadership, R&D commitments, and focus on customer experience. Nokia also showed how its strategic plans map to market trends, and how the company contributes to environmental sustainability through technology leadership and innovation. The ability to meet communications service providers (CSPs)’ needs for simplification (reducing complexity) and monetization of assets is key. Value will increasingly be created from partner ecosystems.
Continue readingMobile World Congress LA 2021
Mobile World Congress Los Angeles 2021 was the first in-person industry event for neXt Curve in 20 months. It felt good to be out of the house. Expectations for the massive turnouts of yesteryear were duly subdued given that the global COVID-19 pandemic is still in effect. Nevertheless, the smaller scale was a welcome introduction back to what we can hope is a return to normal. For the operators in the Americas, it looks like the pandemic has meant back to a pre-pandemic mindset. Back to connectivity.
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