Editor’s Note: RCR Wireless News goes all in for “Throwback Thursdays,” tapping into our archives to resuscitate the top headlines from the past. Fire up the time machine, put on those sepia-tinted shades, set the date for #TBT and enjoy the memories!
Snapdragon Spaces at MWC ’23
BARCELONA–Every year at the MWC (Mobile World Congress) event in Barcelona, the world’s biggest telecom operators gather among the smartphone OEMs and chip vendors to show off their latest achievements. This year, many of the telcos coalesced around Qualcomm’s XR platform, Snapdragon Spaces. Seven of these leading wireless providers have announced plans to leverage Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Spaces platform to accelerate the growth of XR on Android. For those unfamiliar with Snapdragon Spaces, it is Qualcomm’s XR development platform, which was born out of the reality that Google has dropped the ball on Android for XR functions such as hand-tracking, simultaneous location and mapping (SLAM), and so on. Qualcomm built Snapdragon Spaces as a combination of the work it was already doing in the XR space and its acquisitions of Wikitude and Clay Air. This is important because Qualcomm is helping to create a common framework among all the different XR devices so that developers can do their work once—for Snapdragon Spaces—and still serve compatible headsets from many different makers. One way that Qualcomm is achieving this is by implementing and mandating the use of standards like OpenXR. … Read more
Monetizing MEC
One promise of 5G is unlocking latency-sensitive use cases, things ranging form immersive gaming experiences without jitter that takes a player out of the moment to computer vision systems deployed for access control, quality assurance, and other applications relevant to numerous verticals industries. But delivering on low-double-digit latencies is a job for more than just the 5G New Radio air interface; it also requires a distribution of computational resources out of centralized data centers to closer to where data is created. In the push to monetize mobile edge computing (MEC)—something that hasn’t really happened to a meaningful degree if you listen to quarterly reporting from most major global operators—how do you keep your eye on the ball? Where MEC fits into the sweep of making new money off of 5G investments was discussed during the recent 5G Monetization Forum, available on-demand here. Volt Active Data Head of Product Marketing David Rolfe painted a picture of a future state wherein devices of all types are becoming intelligent and cloud-connected. In this environment, “There has to be some kind of orchestration effort or coordination effort going on somewhere,” he said. “And from the CSP’s perspective, this is another business. This is theirs to lose. Because if they don’t [capitalize], somebody else will. And they have the ability and the know-how, the capability to make an effort in this space. And they should.” … Read more
Nokia Bell Labs’ moon shot
Amid rising interest in what non-terrestrial networks might mean for communications on Earth, Nokia Bell Labs is taking space-based networks a step further, and collaborating on a NASA project to put LTE on the moon in support of a lunar rover. The idea is to explore the moon’s southern pole with a rover that can connect to an LTE base station built into a lunar lander about four meters tall. The rover, featured in Nokia’s booth at Mobile World Congress Barcelona, will be able to capture high-definition pictures and videos via an LTE link in 1.8 GHz spectrum, explained Luis Maestro, the principal investigator for the project within Nokia Bell Labs. That information will go through processing on-site and then be sent back to earth. Nokia has said that part of its goal is to establish the viability of cellular tech for future space exploration by adapting commercial tech to do the job. Nokia received NASA funding through its Tipping Point project aimed at sustainable development of tech for space missions, including manned missions. “For the future of space exploration, communications is a critical capability,” said Maestro at MWC23. “Instead of building proprietary solutions or reinventing the wheel, why not leverage technologies that we know from Earth … are good, that they are robust, they are reliable? We know how to build them and operate them.” … Read more
MVP of the Super Bowl? mmWave, says Verizon exec
Ahead of Super Bowl LVII, Verizon invested more than $100 million in network upgrades and enhancements in and around State Farm Stadium and the greater Phoenix area. Inside the stadium, Verizon installed 490 5G nodes — 66 of which are the carrier’s newest 5G mmWave nodes — and 1,400 4G and 5G antennas. This investment, the carrier’s Vice President of Device Technology Brian Mecum told RCR Wireless News at Mobile World Congress 2023, paid off. Of the 67,827 in-person Super Bowl fans, 60% were Verizon customers, and together, they used 47.8 TB of data, which is a 57% increase from last year’s game and is equivalent to a single user binge-watching HD video for more than three years. “Eight minutes into the second quarter, [our customers] used more traffic now than [they] did at SoFi for all of last year’s game,” Mecum said, adding that upward trend in data use will continue as long as more network capacity continues to be made available. Mecum also shared that while Verizon did deploy C-Band spectrum at the State Farm Stadium, mmWave was still the “star” of the show in terms of what made this staggering amount of traffic possible, aided in part by how many handsets are mmWave compatible. … Read more
Gigi Sohn withdraws from consideration for FCC seat
President Joe Biden’s nominee to fill the fifth seat on the Federal Communications Commission, Gigi Sohn, has withdrawn from consideration for the seat as a result of the bitter battle over her stalled nomination. Sohn is a longtime consumer advocate and was an advisor to former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler when net neutrality rules were first imposed by the agency (they were later repealed under the Trump administration and then-Chairman Ajit Pai). The FCC remains split at 2-2 between Democrats and Republicans, in the third year of the Biden administration. The commission traditionally seats two members of each party, with the chairperson, and therefore the voting majority, coming from the party which controls the White House. While Biden’s choice for the chair, Jessica Rosenworcel, was confirmed, Republicans and industry players fought Sohn’s nomination. Sohn was nominated in October 2021 and her nomination stalled in the Senate over the course of three hearings, the most recent one just weeks ago. Fox Business reported in July of last year that the administration was both considering moving forward with Sohn’s nomination during a lame-duck session after the mid-term elections—which did not happen—as well as vetting additional candidates for the FCC seat. But Biden re-nominated Sohn in January, when the Democrats’ slim majority in the Senate increased to 51. Sohn’s withdrawal from the nomination process came after Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) announced that he would vote against her nomination, saying that her years as a consumer advocate included “partisan activism, inflammatory statements online, and work with far-left groups” and that “the FCC “must remain above … toxic partisanship.” … Read more
Dish tests 800 MHz spectrum
The Federal Communications Commission has granted Dish Wireless permission to test 5G in low-band spectrum at 800 MHz in Yuma, Arizona—spectrum which it has an option to buy from T-Mobile US. Dish is using 817-824 MHz/862-869 MHz, which may signal the company’s increasing interest in exercising its option to purchase a nationwide footprint in those airwaves for $3.59 billion. That section of the 800 MHz band is formerly Sprint (and formerly Nextel) spectrum which was the focus of a divestiture effort as part of the Department of Justice deal that allowed the T-Mo/Sprint merger to go through. Dish has the option to, within three years of the merger’s close, purchase that 800 MHz ESMR spectrum from T-Mobile US. Under a spectrum purchase agreement made as part of the deals related to Dish acquiring Sprint’s prepaid business and infrastructure access, Dish was expected to buy all of those 800 MHz spectrum licenses, totaling approximately 13.5 MHz of nationwide wireless spectrum. The three-year anniversary of the close of the merger is coming up on April 1; the FCC STA filing notes that T-Mobile US is the current licensee in the band. The six-months STA began March 6 and runs through the end of the September. If Dish walks away from the spectrum purchase, it has to pay a $72 million fee to T-Mobile US and $360 million to the U.S. government—but there was also a stipulation that Dish didn’t have to pay anything to the United States if it had deployed a core network and was offering 5G service to at least 20% of the U.S. population within three years of closing on its purchase of Sprint’s prepaid wireless business. … Read more
Check out the RCR Wireless News Archives for more stories from the past.
