Mobile & Wireless Roundup No. 159

Welcome to the 159th edition of this newsletter. Surnames can be a curious thing. Some spark pride, some spark questions and some simply spark confusion at airport check-ins. I have often shared the story behind mine. In Hindi/Urdu, ‘Ghadial’ means clock. My great grandfather repaired clocks, so we became Ghadialy. When the British introduced formal record-keeping in the Indian subcontinent, many families adopted surnames based on their trade, location, religion or even what they owned.

I grew up surrounded by names with interesting backstories. Batliwala for someone who made or sold bottles. Gheewala for someone associated with ghee. Khanna linking to a city in Punjab, and Bombaywala for someone proudly from Bombay, now Mumbai. Patels were traditionally landowners or village heads. Khans were military chiefs, and in many cases became the chosen surname for Muslims who did not want to be confined to a trade. Singh, widely used among Sikhs and many Hindus, signalled strength and bravery.

It is similar elsewhere. Smith came from blacksmiths. Taylor from tailors. White and Brown from physical appearance, while Green and Wood or Woods pointed to those who lived near a village green or forest. A thousand years ago you might be John-the-Smith. Today you are John Smith trying to secure an email address that is not already taken.

Not all surname histories are pleasant. In colonial Algeria, people were forced to adopt names, and some were deliberately humiliating. Some Algerians still carry those names today, and changing them can reportedly take years. A surname can be both heritage and history, sometimes heavy to carry.

All of that got me thinking. If changing surnames were simple and we could pick new ones based on our passions today, what would we choose? Spectrum has a nice ring to it. AI feels timeless. I can picture a certain analyst happily becoming Disruptor/Disruptive. As for me, I am torn between Mobilewala and Telecomswala. Both would certainly save me a lot of introductions.

For anyone new here, I am a technologist with more than 25 years of experience in mobile and wireless technology, working as an independent advisor, analyst, consultant and trainer. This newsletter brings together my posts and news that caught my attention since the last edition.

⦿ 6G

• Free 6G Training: How VIAVI Sees Post Quantum Readiness Shaping 6G (link)

• Wireless Future Blog: Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces are Most Attractive in mmWave Bands (link) – you can follow the discussion on Prof. Emil Björnson’s LinkedIn post here.

• NVIDIA Developer Technical Blog: Powering AI-Native 6G Research with the NVIDIA Sionna Research Kit (link)

• Ericsson, Nokia and Fraunhofer HHI join forces to drive 6G-era video coding standardization (PR)

• 6G Capex Ramp to Start Around 2030, According to Dell'Oro Group (PR)

• NVIDIA and US Telecom Leaders Unveil the All-American AI-RAN Stack to Accelerate the Path to 6G (PR)

• Is 6G Our Last Chance to Make Antennas Great Again? (link)

⦿ 5G

• Broadband Forum's new Technical report, TR-507: Multi-Tenant 5G FWA (link)

⦿ 4G/LTE

• Chris Cockings on LinkedIn - Tech Tip #1: When Throughput Drops - Try a TCP/IP Stack Reset (link)

• Chris Cockings on LinkedIn - Field Testing: MT SMS Over NAS - Low-Power Delivery for IoT Devices (link)

⦿ Open & Disaggregated Networks (including Open RAN, vRAN, etc.)

• RCR Wireless - Open vRAN momentum builds in APAC: Omdia (link)

• MWL: Dell joins Vodafone open RAN party (link)

⦿ Spectrum

• Dean Bubley on LinkedIn: "Pretty full-on first day at #AmericasSpectrum. Keynotes from FCC, NTIA, CTIA & NCTA, all set against the background of the OBBBA mandate to find 800MHz of #spectrum for auction…" (link)

⦿ Telecoms Infrastructure, Small Cells, Antennas & others

• Roland Berger: The Future of B2B Telecommunications (link)

• Daniel Ollé on LinkedIn: "Now also available in English our review of the state of Internet Interconnection in Spain, it includes several interesting data points, e.g. "The traffic in Gbit/s needed to fill CDNs with content is 6-7 times less than the traffic delivered to users" …" (link)

• Paul Rhodes on LinkedIn - Tuesday Towers: Small Cell International Edition II (link)

• Gabriel Brown on LinkedIn: "My latest on Light Reading. UK mobile operators find their network mojo … finally. It's a little embarrassing when overseas industry people visit and comment on how their connection dropped n times since they arrived…" (link)

• Paul Rhodes on LinkedIn - Thursday School: Guilty Pleasure? (link)

⦿ IoT / M2M / Smart Homes

• Wiliot and Royal Mail bring Ambient IoT to postal logistics (link)

• Transforma Insights: Segmenting the satellite IoT market (link)

⦿ Security & Privacy

• Denis Laskov on LinkedIn: Cell phone roaming and how to hack it: SoR systems and bugs in the Diameter protocol (link)

• TelecomTV: Optical vendor Ribbon suffers ‘cybersecurity incident’ (link)

• The Register: Major telecom supplier compromised by unnamed nation-state attackers (link)

• Denis Laskov on LinkedIn: Security analysis of Software-Defined Vehicles (SDVs): cyberattack entry points you can try (link)

• Dmitry Kurbatov on LinkedIn: Best lab is the live network, but better not! (link)

• Denis Laskov on LinkedIn: Hacking modern ARM processors: Practical side-channel attacks on Cortex-A72 to recover AES (link)

• The Asia Business Daily: "Concerns Over a Second Telecom Hacking" KAIST Discovers Security Vulnerability in 'LTE Core Network' (link)

⦿ AI, ML & Automation

• Ericsson White paper – AI agents in the telecommunication network architecture (link)

• Joe Madden on LinkedIn: My thoughts on the Nvidia/Nokia deal in Fierce Wireless (link)

• TM Forum: Why Orange is treading carefully with agentic AI (link)

• IEEE ComSoc Technology Blog: Market research firms Omdia and Dell’Oro on impact of 6G and AI investments (link)

• TelecomTV: Nvidia lights a fire under AI-RAN partner Nokia with $1bn investment (link)

• FutureNet Asia Panel Discussion: How will AIOps & GenAI Shape the Next Era of Telco Operations? (link)

• TMN: Nokia commits to full AI-RAN GPU play on new Nvidia RAN compute platform (link)

⦿ Satellites, HAPS, Drones, UAVs & Space

• Rudolf van der Berg on LinkedIn: "Enable VoLTE for emergency calls over Starlink, if the regular service is interrupted. I hadn't expected to see those words yet. It appears to be only for messaging, so not for calls, but still an interesting development…" (link)

• Virgin Media O2 signs landmark partnership with Starlink to boost rural UK mobile coverage (PR)

• MyBroadband: Illegal Starlink is rocking in South Africa (link)

• DPL News: Chile allocates spectrum bands to the D2D service (link)

⦿ Sustainability

• Developing Telecoms: New report highlights vast US export of e-waste to developing countries (link)

⦿ Other News and Technology Stuff

• TechRadar: Meta will ban rival AI chatbots from WhatsApp (link)

• Ryan Jeffery on LinkedIn: "Berkshire Hathaway Discovered a Mutual Destruction Trap in Textiles. Almost too Late. Will Telcos Fall into it too?" (link)

• E.ON and Nokia join forces for a five-year strategic collaboration for telecommunications network modernization for distribution system operators (PR)

• Independent: Replaced by AI: Amazon cuts 14,000 jobs in its biggest-ever workforce slash for ‘bet’ on artificial intelligence (link)

• Analysys Mason: The increasing use of spin-offs highlights an alternative B2B growth strategy that operators should consider (link)

• RCR Tech - The memory wall: Why HBM matters more than ever (link)

• IEEE Spectrum: The 7 Phases of the Internet > A map to where the Web goes next (link)

⦿ Picture of the week: Denpa893 has shared some interesting pictures of KDDI's mmWave repeater from an expo in Japan on X (post #1, post #2, post #3, post #4). Although it has a slightly unusual shape, it appears that each side may be focusing on a different direction. A blog post from last year explains how KDDI and Kyocera developed this technology to increase coverage in Nishi-Shinjuku's millimetre wave area from 33 per cent to 99 per cent.

Happy to hear your thoughts. Feel free let me know what worked, what didn’t, how I can make this better, etc. Get in touch over LinkedIn!

PDF version of this and previous newsletters are available here.