Samsung is inking a deal with Verizon with a new $6.64 billion order for 5G equipment.
“A small player until recently in the telecom equipment business, Samsung has gained ground in recent years and is challenging the dominance of Nokia and Ericsson in telecom gear,” writes Supantha Mukherjee at Reuters.
Mukherjee also points out that the Korean vendor is well-positioned with these sorts of customers due to the U.S. ban on Chinese firm Huawei, which the U.S. White House undertook due to concerns about national security and Chinese espionage.
In the meantime, as nations gear up for global 5G adoption, systems will need new kinds of hardware to accommodate broadband with the new frequency spectrums in the design.
Because the new types of waves have difficulty moving through physical barriers like walls, indoor equipment is going to be a major part of 5G rollouts.
An example of the types of innovations going on with 5G show how disruptors in the industry are looking to get around those bottlenecks.
A system called Open Radio Access Network or O-RAN is designed to make indoor hardware units compatible, to enable discreetly supplied pieces of a local area network to work together to provide 5G functionality.
“An Open RAN, or Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) is a concept based on interoperability and standardization of RAN elements including a unified interconnection standard for white-box hardware and open source software elements from different vendors,” explains a research page at Viavi Solutions. “O-RAN architecture integrates a modular base station software stack on off-the-shelf hardware which allows baseband and radio unit components from discrete suppliers to operate seamlessly together. O-RAN underscores streamlined 5G RAN performance objectives through the common attributes of efficiency, intelligence and versatility.”
Will this kind of compatibility design suffice to help drive local network evolution for getting 5g around inside buildings? And who will be the major vendors who merge their hardware through these universal protocols?
Keep an eye on 5G if you have any skin in the game in telecom.
