Saturday, July 31, 2021

Friday, July 30, 2021

Cisco Eyes App Security, SASE, Cloud Native M&A

Cisco’s security investments and acquisitions focused on secure access service edge (SASE), extended detection and response (XDR), and DevSecOps for the last three years. And as she looks ahead, Cisco Investments VP Janey Hoe expects to see continued development and innovation in application security, SASE, and cloud-native security.
           

AT&T, BT tackle cloud-native 5G

Cloud infrastructure is something both AT&T and BT are pursuing, but they’re taking different approaches as each looks to speed up the introduction and delivery of software in a cloud-native core environment to ultimately support new services.
           

Changes coming to wireless competition in the fall — Moore

It’s been a quiet summer.  In summer 2020, carriers were dealing with closed stores amid a pandemic while Sprint was absorbed into T-Mobile. This summer has been much quieter. Apart from some drama over whether Verizon and/or T-Mobile will join AT&T in making its best deals available even with upgrades, things have been slow. Carrier reps are telling our analysts that phone sales are soft.
           

Cable MVNOs add 550,000 wireless subs in Q2

The big three U.S. mobile operators collectively added nearly 1.5 million postpaid phone subscribers in Q2 2021. But cable MVNOs continued to nip at their heels, growing wireless subscribers and revenue at a healthy clip.
           

Shentel set to pay investors $937 million after wireless sale

Coming off the completion of a $1.94 billion wireless asset sale, Shenandoah Telecommunications (Shentel) next week will pay $937 million to its investors in the form of an $18.75-per-share dividend, Shentel chief Chris French said on the company’s second quarter earnings call Friday.
           

Terahertz gets ready to shine in 6G: Special Report

It took a long time for folks to get used to the idea of using millimeter wave (mmWave) frequencies for 5G wireless communications. Verizon, for one, spent a lot of money on mmWave, only to have some Wall Street analysts and others continue to second-guess its decisions.
           

Open Connect in the Era of 5G

Fierce Wireless publisher Kevin Gray recently sat down with STL CEO of Access Solutions to discuss 5G: telecom network changes, greenfield vs. brownfield deployments, the journey from legacy to open connect, new opportunities, the seamless ecosystem, and more!
           

Thursday, July 29, 2021

T-Mobile Steamrolls 5G Competition, Sows Durable Growth

T-Mobile US continues to steamroll the competition on 5G. The mobile network operator’s low-band 5G network now covers 305 million people, including 92% of interstate highways across the country, and its mid-band 5G network covers 165 million people. 
           

Virgin Media O2 goes all in on full FTTP

U.K. operator Virgin Media O2 outlined a plan to upgrade its entire fixed network to full fiber-to-the-premises over the coming years, announcing the move alongside its first-ever quarterly report.
           

Consolidated accelerates fiber build in 2Q

Regional telco Consolidated Communications continues to make big strides in its fiber deployment plans. During the company’s second quarter earnings call with investors, CEO Bob Udell, said the company added 76,000 new fiber locations in the quarter, a significant increase from the 45,800 locations it added in the first quarter. Udell said that with 122,000 fiber upgrades completed so far in 2021 Consolidated is on pace to reach its goal of 300,000 new fiber locations this year and hit 70% of the company’s footprint, or 1.6 million fiber locations by 2025. Consolidated said its penetration rate in its 1-Gig capable markets is 14%, up from 12% at the end of the first quarter.
           

FierceWireless presents its 2021 class of Rising Stars

For 2021, FierceWireless looked for executives aged 35 or younger who are making a name for themselves in the wireless industry.   The 11 young executives in our final slate were nominated by their companies, and they come from diverse business units, ranging from customer experience, to engineering, to retail operations, to human resources.
           

Wednesday, July 28, 2021

Red Hat Nuzzles Nutanix to Vex VMware Velocity

Red Hat and Nutanix are cozying up to make it easier for their respective customers to tap into their joint hybrid-cloud focused offerings. The move is predicated on vocal demand from customers and allows both to better target rivals like VMware.
           

Verizon bags $78.8M Air National Guard contract

Verizon’s Public Sector business inked its second deal with the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) in as many months, this time nabbing a $78.8 million contract to help the Air National Guard (ANG) modernize its network services.
           

T-Mobile targets Boost, Cricket in new prepaid offer

T-Mobile is taking the gloves off – if they were ever on – in its fight for prepaid customers. Today, the company announced that Metro by T-Mobile is offering a $25/month plan to entice Boost and Cricket customers over to its 5G network. The offer starts July 29.
           

Inside the zero-trust networking and SASE land grab — Raynovich

You may be overwhelmed with cybersecurity acronyms and buzzwords — I know that as an analyst it's hard to follow FWaaS, SWG, DLP, DDoS, APT, ATP, and ASVs. Now some new ones have arrived — Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) and Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA), so it's important to define what they are and what they mean.
           

Pica8 hires 2 familiar networking veterans

Pica8 hired two familiar software and networking industry veterans. Kelly LeBlanc has been appointed as chief marketing officer, and Mike Hoffman has been hired as chief revenue officer. These hires follow on the heels of its recent Series C funding of more than $20 million.
           

Tuesday, July 27, 2021

Linkerd Nabs CNCF Diploma, Counters Istio’s ‘Empty Calories’

Linkerd hit graduation status at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), marking a significant milestone as the first service mesh to earn a diploma. It also adds much-needed stability to the service mesh space that has been dogged by considerable consternation following Google’s controversial move last year for the popular Istio service mesh project.
           

Qualcomm and Capgemini team for private networks

Qualcomm has partnered with Capgemini to help the integrator offer clients “off-the-shelf” private wireless networks. The partners foresee Capgemini pairing Qualcomm’s radio solutions with edge compute resources and core network elements supplied by other vendors.
           

Vodafone wants U.K. government to propel 5G private networks

The U.K. government is pursuing an initiative to “level up” parts of Britain that are less prosperous than the London area. Vodafone UK commissioned a report that finds 5G private networks are a way to level up manufacturing operations in rural parts of the U.K. And Vodafone makes several recommendations to the U.K. government to tap private wireless networks for manufacturing.
           

CBRS 5G RAN forecast approaches $1B by 2025

The overall Citizens Broadband Radio Services (CBRS) market sentiment remains healthy, with cumulative 2020-2025 CBRS 5G Radio Access Network (RAN) investments expected to approach $500 million to $1 billion, according to the Dell’Oro Group.
           

Lumen ramps focus on Europe as fiber, edge demand grows

Lumen Technologies just inked a $2.7 billion deal to sell its Latin America assets to investment firm Stonepeak in a move designed to free up capital to pursue key growth areas. And moving forward, it looks like Europe will be near the top of its list of investment priorities. 
           

Verizon, Samsung fire up 5G vRAN trial on C-band

Verizon continues to put Samsung virtualized radio access network (vRAN) gear to the test in preparation for C-band deployments, successfully completing a fully virtualized 5G data session using a C-band Massive MIMO radio in live network trials.
           

Eurobites: KPN turns a corner in Q2

Also in today’s EMEA regional round-up: T-Systems heads deeper into the Google Cloud; customer satisfaction (or not) in France; Telefónica Tech takes up with CrowdStrike.
           

Monday, July 26, 2021

Nokia Exec Forges 5G Strategies in vRAN, Open RAN

Advancements required to deliver fully virtualized radio access networks (vRAN) will likely continue through this decade, a pace that matches efforts to virtualize network cores a decade prior, said Jane Rygaard Pederson, Nokia’s head of dedicated wireless networks and edge clouds, in an interview with SDxCentral.
           

IBM Report: Data-Breach Costs Hit 17-Year High of $4.24M

Data-breach costs jumped nearly 10% from an average of $3.86 million to $4.24 million per incident over the past year, according to IBM’s latest Cost of a Data Breach Report. It marks the highest average total cost in this report’s 17-year history and the largest single-year increase in the last seven years. 
           

Verizon 5G Sails Samsung’s vRAN Massive MIMO

Verizon and Samsung successfully completed a fully virtualized 5G data session on the operator’s recently acquired C-band spectrum in three locations. It marks another accomplishment that puts Verizon in position to be the first operator with fully virtualized 5G radio access network (RAN) equipment packing massive MIMO.
           

LTD Broadband dealt blow as FCC approves $311M in RDOF funds

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) dealt LTD Broadband a blow as it announced an initial batch of $311 million in support for winners of the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund Phase (RDOF) I auction, denying the operator’s request for more time to prove its funding eligibility in three states.
           

Unleashing the Power of Advanced Analytics

Scientia potentia est – knowledge is power - is the phrase attributed to 16th century English philosopher Sir Francis Bacon. The better informed you are, the more appropriate your behavior in any number of situations, both proactive and reactive. We know that we have a torrent of data generated by today’s hyper-connected world at our fingertips – how can we transform this into knowledge, and unlock its power? It’s important here to differentiate definitions. Data in itself is not knowledge – it only becomes powerful once organized and analyzed to create actionable insights. The sheer amount of data being generated today makes that task far beyond the capabilities of mere humans. IDC has predicted that by 2025, there will be 79 zettabytes of data created by billions of connected devices across the IoT. In addition to this, Kaleido Intelligence forecasts that data traffic created by international travelers will match pre-COVID-19 levels in 2022, seeing an average annual growth of 40% to exceed 1,600 petabytes in 2025. It’s difficult to grasp just how much data is being created, but with this inundation comes huge opportunity. The operators who can manipulate this data and transform it into knowledge will harness its power, and the only way to achieve that is through advanced analytics. There are two key challenges in addressing the data tsunami. The first is identifying what is the source of the data: is it person-to-person, application-to-person, or machine-to-machine? The second is identifying across which networks the data is traveling. Is it a private network, national, or international – is the data roaming? Roaming, after all, is not limited to people. The critical reliance on connectivity during the pandemic has highlighted just how important roaming capability is to IoT-connected sensors. International logistics and delivery companies, for example, are almost wholly reliant on roaming devices to track and monitor cargo and fleet movements. A further Kaleido report that forecasts a massive 300% rise in IoT roaming to 2025. To add to the complexity of data analysis, as subscriber interactions change, and new use cases appear and evolve, it is possible for human users to appear to be machines on the network, and vice versa. Operators must be able to distinguish between devices being used by people, and devices connected to and/or being controlled by machines. Analysis needs to bring out behavioral nuances, and usage patterns – how the devices interact with the network. The most sophisticated advanced analytics platforms provide operators with a full 360-degree view of roaming traffic, providing real time, actionable data across the full network stack – 2G, 3G, 4G and IoT. Trends can be identified and monitored, with historical data brought into the mix, and descriptive analytics implemented to identify anomalies. This translates into heightened safety and security, with alerts for unusual or suspicious activity. These insights give operators the power to improve the service they offer: to create personalized, tailored offerings to subscribers, and attractive data plans for their enterprise IoT customers. They can segment and optimize to deliver consistent quality of experience. And of course, the parallel goal to ensuring the best possible customer satisfaction is achieving the highest possible profitability – all roaming traffic can be tracked to see how the usage patterns impact the operators’ bottom line. Advanced analytics give operators the knowledge to develop and enhance the monetization strategies that will underpin and drive the growth of their business and create the right value propositions for their customers.  Bacon’s words are as valid today as they were more than 400 years ago. Knowledge is certainly power – and in today’s connected world, the depth and accuracy of insights driving that knowledge, are based on the quality of the advanced analytics.For more information on how advanced analytics can not only enhance the telco experience and monetization strategies, but create relevant, meaningful personal experiences too, please visit BICS’ dedicated business intelligence page. By Damion Rose, Senior Product Manager - Mobile Signaling & Roaming Solutions
           

Sunday, July 25, 2021

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