Mobile World Congress 2022

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.

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Tech 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”.

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Nokia 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.

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Mobile 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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Tech Insight: The Open RAN Movement

Excitement about the open RAN movement continues to rise as operators such as Rakuten proves out OpenRAN and O-RAN principles in their greenfield 5G network which went live last year. How are major network equipment manufacturers adjusting to the new technology landscape? What are the benefits and costs to operators and vendors in adopting open and interoperable technologies?

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Industry Insight: A Biden Tech Policy

On January 20th, a new US Administration took office in the midst of a global pandemic, economic crisis and deteriorated Sino-US trade & security relations. During the Trump Administration, the tech industry became the epicenter of the trade war as US and China quickly escalated their exchange of tit-for-tat tariffs and bans. What will change under a Biden Administration if anything?

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Tech Insight: Rakuten Communications Platform

In an exclusive one-on-one chat with Rakuten Mobile’s CTO, Tareq Amin, neXt Curve’s Leonard Lee received an update on the state of the much-touted Rakuten Cloud Platform (RCP). RCP was formally launched in October of 2020 with the goal of bringing the open RAN innovations, integrations and the inventions that make up Rakuten Mobile’s cloud-native infrastructure to the rest of the world.

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Industry Insight: Microsoft’s Flight to the Hyper-converged Edge Cloud

In the last three months, Microsoft has been on a tear building out its portfolio of 5G core and virtualized network service management technologies having acquired Affirmed Networks, and most recently, Metaswitch. The acquisition of these telecom tech companies by the leading enterprise IT technology company and cloud service provider may seem curious at first, but these transactions highlight the acceleration of a transformative trend that we at neXt Curve dubbed Under-the-Bottom (UTB) in our 2019 technology horizon study for Ofcom, the United Kingdom’s communications and media sector regulator.

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