Safe Connections Act

DALLAS -- Carriers and others in the wireless industry should embrace software's role in automating functions across networks and specifically software-defined networking, said an executive of SDN backer Verizon.

The coming 5G cellular networks may rely on telecom cloud computing to meet their full breadth of uses and super-fast data transfers with virtually no latency, said vendor executives in Dallas Tuesday at a Telecommunications Industry Association conference. The link between 5G and the cloud will require carriers and other industries to work closely together, often using open-source software, they said. "We will have to bring a lot more computing power, processing power, to where the demand is" to get to the level of latency and throughput for which 5G is designed, said Pierre Mathys, a director at Red Hat. "It will require time, it will require an industry effort, because let's remember we are talking about the telco cloud, because the benefits are only realized where we are operating in an open context." Nokia Networks' Claudio Frascoli, head of sales-telco analytics, said 5G won't just be for the connected car, but many "use cases" that can't now be predicted. "The only thing we know is that we don't know." He mentioned the potential for surgery, among other real-time 5G applications.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler expects the incentive auction to be well underway a year from now with active broadcaster participation, he said Wednesday. He also defended the net neutrality order as creating a flexible, not dictatorial, broadband Internet framework. The planned takeover of Suddenlink by a European company showed that the regulation wasn’t chilling investment in the U.S., he said in a Q&A session with Accenture Managing Director Shahid Ahmed at the management consulting firm’s Network Summit.

CTIA President Meredith Baker wants a new national plan on spectrum for wireless broadband, given that the U.S. is already half way through the administration’s 2010 plan calling for 500 MHz of new spectrum in 10 years, she said at an Accenture broadband conference. “I encourage you to look back at the numbers,” Baker said in her prepared remarks. “They seemed like aggressive estimates. Turns out those estimates simply captured the skyrocketing growth in mobile usage.” Five years ago, the FCC forecast 41 petabytes of monthly data use in the U.S., but the actual amount was 10 percent higher, she said. “By 2012 and 2013, traffic was 25 percent higher than the FCC’s projected growth rates,” Baker said. Wireless industry growth depends on licensed spectrum, Baker said. “When and how we introduce 5G in the United States depends, in part, upon whether we keep our spectrum policy as forward-looking as our industry,” she said. “The question we face is will the U.S. continue to embrace licensed spectrum, the approach that has made us the global leader in 4G.” Baker also said too much emphasis now is on spectrum sharing. Shared spectrum is a “complement” not a “replacement” for licensed spectrum, she said. “Clearing spectrum will never look easy, particularly years before an auction,” she said. “To be fair, it will never be easy. But it can be done and needs to be done if we are to remain the global leader in mobility.”

The Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions and 4G Americas signed a memorandum of understanding aimed at “alignment of the organizations' common technological and policy efforts in the field of mobile broadband communication,” they said Tuesday in a news release. The MOU lays out the terms for “knowledge-sharing and exploring opportunities” so they can work together on topics important to the wireless industry, the groups said. Areas of common interest include the move to 5G, emergency alerting, text to 911, preventing mobile device theft and “network functions virtualization/software-defined networking,” the two said. "Our alignment with 4G Americas will increase the momentum to advance the network toward its 5G future, help identify smartphones reported stolen, accelerate the delivery of critical emergency communications and more,” said ATIS President Susan Miller. "As the mobile broadband industry progresses at a rapid pace toward 5G … it is becoming increasingly important to cooperate with other major associations regarding critical common areas of interest to ensure there is no technical fragmentation,” said Chris Pearson, president of 4G Americas.

Many big U.S. companies are likely to get involved in the brewing fight over the European Union’s 16-step Digital Single Market (DSM) Strategy designed to promote e-commerce across Europe (see 1505060038), industry observers said Thursday. At a summit in Europe, speakers made clear they see the DSM as a tool for helping Europe fight back against U.S. gains in the high-tech world.

Broadcom is seeing a lot of activity in the IoT market, CEO Scott McGregor said on a Tuesday call about Q1 results. That quarter, it shipped a large number of development kits for “prototyping” IoT products, he said. Broadcom continues to “garner new design wins in a broad set of verticals” for IoT, “ranging across automotive, medical devices, healthcare, life goods and home automation,” McGregor said. Q1 revenue in Broadcom’s connectivity business rose 13 percent on strong consumer adoption of new high-end smartphones and growing penetration of new technologies such as 802.11ac, McGregor said. Broadcom is seeing “significant customer interest” in its latest 5G Wi-Fi BCM4359 chip that offers “industry-first” real simultaneous dual band (RSDB) support, he said. “This technology is expected to ship later this year and allows a smartphone or tablet to transfer data across two bands at the same time, enabling new applications and increasing the performance of existing applications.” Broadcom unveiled the BCM4359 in an early-March announcement, saying that by enabling RSDB support, the BCM4359 is able to connect to the 5 GHz and 2.4 GHz bands simultaneously, “improving the throughput and latency when using multiple applications at the same time, particularly video streaming and gaming.”

Mitsubishi Electric is demonstrating with Nokia Networks a prototype Active Phased Array Antenna (APAA) to verify new multibeamforming technology for envisioned 5G mobile networks, at the Brooklyn 5G Summit in New York this week. Features of the APAA prototype include four-beam spatial multiplexing achieved in a multi-element antenna, beamforming control of the direction of radio signal transmission and reception for two-dimensional vertical and horizontal scanning and use of 3.5 GHz, the highest frequency available in current cellular mobile communication, Mitsubishi said. Mobile systems based on 5G will use multibeamforming to cope with fast-increasing radio traffic volume, it said. Mitsubishi plans to adapt its APAA technology, currently used commercially in satellites, for use in 5G base stations, it said.

SiBeam is partnering with the NYU Wireless research center at the New York University Polytechnic School of Engineering as an industrial-affiliate sponsor of fundamental research that is creating 5G, a news release from SiBeam said Monday. The FCC is exploring the potential of mobile radio services in the millimeter-wave radio spectrum, which researchers believe could increase today’s mobile data capacity by a thousandfold or more, the release said. SiBeam and NYU Wireless recently filed comments in response to the FCC notice of inquiry aimed at exploring the potential of mobile radio services in bands above 24 GHz, SiBeam said in the release. NYU Wireless filed recommendations on global competitiveness and regulation, safety and feasibility and timing as it seeks to shape and accelerate the 5G future, it said.

Recent reports show handset device thefts are down and progress is being made, said Brian Daly of AT&T, co-chairman of an FCC Technological Advisory Council (TAC) working group on the subject, at a quarterly meeting of the TAC Wednesday at FCC headquarters. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler spoke at TAC’s December meeting on the importance of curbing mobile device theft (see 1412040049), which he asked the council to make one of its top priorities.