It is essentially a consensus-building exercise that provides the US and its allies with some handy reference material to use when the time inevitably comes to block telcos from using Huawei and ZTE kit in their 6G networks.

In addition to the US and UK, the backers are Australia, Canada, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Japan, South Korea, and Sweden. This lot were never likely to give Chinese vendors the green light, but it may persuade any regional neighbours that might be on the fence to side with them.

BARCELONA – #MWC24 – Vodafone’s Open RAN network-in-a-box, which was unveiled just ahead of last year’s MWC event, is in the final stages of commercial preparation and will become available in June, according to Yago Tenorio (pictured above), Vodafone fellow and network architecture director at the operator. 

A major investment of £62 million will help to position the UK to shape the next generation of telecoms networks.

The funding through UK Research and Innovation’s (UKRI) £70million Technology Missions Fund (TMF) Future Telecoms Mission will support the development of technologies that will be crucial to future telecoms networks such as 6G.

The funding was announced by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology today.

Rakuten will collaborate with OpenAI to create solutions to address the unique needs and challenges of telecommunications operators when planning, building and managing mobile networks. The Rakuten AI platform will be expanded to include solutions for customer service, network optimization and predictive maintenance of telecom networks. Rakuten AI will enhance operators' ability to detect and resolve network issues in near real-time, enabling more responsive and adaptive network operations while improving service reliability and performance for customers.

BARCELONA – #MWC24 – The founding members of the Global Telco AI Alliance, along with Japanese telco SoftBank, have unveiled plans during an SK Telecom-hosted press event here in Barcelona to establish a joint venture (JV) for the development of telco-specific large language models (LLMs).

BARCELONA – #MWC24 – This year’s MWC kicked off with the announcement of a new telecom industry group, the AI-RAN Alliance, which boasts some of the industry’s biggest names as its founder members and sends a strong message to the mobile sector about the direction in which radio access network (RAN) architectures are heading.

UKTIN member Quantum Dice is leveraging its patented source-device independent self-certification (DISC™) protocol to develop the world’s first compact, high-speed, and continuously self-certifying quantum random number generator (QRNG).

This technology, which harnesses quantum processes to produce verifiably secure random numbers, is suitable for use across applications ranging from protecting terrestrial networks to providing quantum-secure entropy for satellite and IoT systems.

BRUSSELS, Feb 14 (Reuters) - EU regulators may ease their rules against mobile telecoms mergers and broaden telecoms rules to get Big Tech and others to help fund the rollout of 5G, according to a European Commission document seen by Reuters.

Artificial intelligence, it seems, is the answer to most questions these days and it was no different when the audience of the recent Green Network Summit were asked to vote in a poll focused on network power reduction strategies. 

The question put to them was: How can telcos most efficiently reduce their energy-consumption levels?

Seven possible answers were provided and respondents could select as many as they deemed applicable.

While end-of-year results are still coming in, 2023 revenue for OpenRAN products appears to have declined, following an impressive increase between 2019 and 2022, according to a recently published report by Dell’Oro Group.

The report highlighted that market conditions will remain challenging over the near-term but the long-term forecast for O-RAN remains positive.

The research company expects O-RAN revenue to account for 20-30% of worldwide RAN revenue by 2028, up from 7-10% in 2024.