MWC Las Vegas 2022: 7 Telecom, 5G Offerings On Display

Mobile edge, open RAN, 5G and private 5G networking solutions were showcased this year at Mobile World Congress Las Vegas 2022 as the world enters what the GSMA calls “the era of 5G.”

Entering the Era of 5G

This week’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) North America, held this year in Las Vegas for the first time, encouraged a “digitally advanced” audience ready to hear from visionary thought leaders and inspiring speakers about the hottest telecommunications technology.

The vendors at Mobile World Congress have their sights set on taking telecom to the next level and these service providers didn’t disappoint. Some of the largest carriers in the country, like AT&T and Verizon, have returned to their telecom roots in recent years and are looking to re-establish themselves in the market as innovators. Then there’s T-Mobile, which has shaken up the telecom space and has been giving the incumbents a run for their money. At the same time, the telecom market has been changed by a number of trends in recent years, including hybrid work, the shift to the cloud, and the supply chain crisis. These trends are all driving digital transformation.

Today, there are over 5.3 billion unique mobile connections globally. By the end of this year, there are expected to be more than 1 billion 5G connections globally. Vendors came to MWC armed with offerings geared toward networking and connectivity evolution that are taking advantage of newer technologies, such as millimeter wave and 5G.

“I don’t think there’s ever been a more exciting time to be involved in the mobile ecosystem … we are undoubtedly entering the 5G era,” Lara Dewar, Chief Marketing Officer for the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSMA), said during her MWC Las Vegas keynote on Wednesday.

MWC Las Vegas 2022 showcased a bevy of new telecommunications solutions geared toward the enterprise, cloud and service providers, and even the home. Here’s a sampling of five new products and services that were on display at the most influential connectivity event in North America.

Dell, Wind River’s Telecom Cloud Infrastructure Solution

Dell Technologies teamed up with edge software provider Wind River to debut a new telecom cloud infrastructure solution, Dell Telecom Infrastructure Blocks for Wind River. The cloud-native infrastructure blocks simplify telecom cloud network deployment and management, while allowing new technologies to be introduced and lowering operational expenses.

The solution is aimed at helping service providers reduce complexity and speed up their cloud-native network deployments. With Telecom Infrastructure Blocks for Wind River, service providers can reduce time spent on the planning, design, validation, procurement, and upgrade process, automate the deployment and management of Wind River Studio, which the companies said will “significantly” reduce the complexity and operational burden of managing a distributed cloud. The solution will also decrease cost and time spent integrating and deploying infrastructure to a workload-ready state with factory integration and reduce “Day 2” operational costs with continuous design and integration testing, according to Dell and Wind River.

Napatech Shows Off 5G UPF Offload Solution

Napatech, a developer and manufacturer of high-speed network accelerators designed for real-time network monitoring and analysis applications, showcased its Smart Network Interface Cards (NIC)-based offload solution for 5G User Plane Function in collaboration with AMD and Advantech at the show this year.

4G networks are based on purpose-built appliances, while the 5G packet core is implemented as virtualized or cloud-native software running on servers located within edge and core data centers. Service providers and enterprises scaling up their 5G deployments face financial pressure to maximize the number of users that can be supported on each server. Napatech’s offload solution is a good fit for deployments in telco edge data centers and on-premises enterprise locations, both of which face the challenges of supporting large numbers of subscribers or devices within small-footprint servers, the Denmark-based company said.

NTT Sustainability as a Service

The world’s largest service providers more and more are prioritizing sustainability and shrinking their impact on the environment. With that in mind, infrastructure and services giant NTT unveiled its Sustainability as a Service offering to help organizations achieve their net-zero goals.

According to NTT, 58 percent of Fortune 500 companies are aiming to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and achieve net-zero goals by 2050 or sooner. The company’s latest climate-focused solution will help customers achieve better economic performance through enhanced climate action including measuring, monitoring, and reporting impact; proactively working to limit climate incidents; and improving response times when detecting issues, the company said.

NTT’s full-stack Sustainability as a Service architecture combines the company’s existing capabilities around IoT, private 5G, edge compute and its NTT Smart Solutions Platform, Digital Twins and Machine Learning products. The full-stack offering, which is initially targeting manufacturing, transportation and logistics and healthcare, comes with a consulting service and is designed to be customized depending on net-zero goals, the organization and the supply chain’s carbon-producing footprint.

Red Hat OpenStack Platform 17

Red Hat took to MWC Las Vegas to announce the general availability of the Red Hat OpenStack Platform 17, which is designed to help service providers as they build out their large networks.

The latest version of the platform is integrated with Red Hat OpenShift for increased resilience from the core to the edge and the ability to run both virtual network functions and cloud-native network functions with bare-metal performance side-by-side in their networks, the company said. New features of the latest platform include improved day 1-2 operations, dynamic resource allocation and director lite deployment, and improved security features.

The platform will empower service providers to further realize use cases such as 5G core, edge deployments including hyperconverged infrastructure, networking, storage and compute, and open virtualized radio access networks. The Red Hat OpenStack Platform 17 is generally available through the Red Hat Customer Portal via a Red Hat subscription, according to the Raleigh, N.C.-based company.

Qualcomm X100 5G RAN Accelerator Card and Qualcomm QRU100 5G RAN Platform

Chipmaker Qualcomm took to the show to highlight two offerings: the Qualcomm X100 5G RAN Accelerator Card and Qualcomm QRU100 5G RAN Platform that global customers and partners can use for integration and verification of 5G mobile infrastructure solutions.

The Qualcomm QRU100 5G RAN Platform offers high-power and high-capacity radio operation and supports Massive MIMO capabilities and features a comprehensive 5G Modem-RF System. It can facilitate scalable 5G RAN networks across mmWave and Sub-6 GHz.

The Qualcomm X100 5G RAN Accelerator Card is a cloud-optimized solution that offers high-performance and power efficiency. It has been designed to deliver a high-performance, low-latency and power-efficient solution to enable cloud-native, virtualized 5G network deployments by offloading server CPUs from compute-intensive 5G baseband processing. The card features a O-RAN Compliant Design.

The company said that these product releases mark a significant next step in the evolution and upcoming commercialization of full-scale open and virtualized 5G networks.

T-Mobile Advanced Industry Solutions

Wireless innovator T-Mobile launched Advanced Industry Solutions, a portfolio of ready-to-deploy solutions for municipalities and retail, manufacturing, and logistics businesses that come packed with the connectivity, compute, devices and applications needed to simplify smart solutions, according to the Bellevue, Wash.-based provider.

Specifically, T-Mobile’s 5G Advanced Network Solutions offer several connectivity options for lower-latency and higher bandwidth, including T-Mobile Public Network, a Hybrid Mobile Network and a Private Mobile Network — with the option to add compute to any of these. T-Mobile Business Internet is another option offering 5G fixed wireless that gives businesses flexibility, security, and cloud-delivered managed services for configuration, monitoring and analytics. Lastly, T IoT is an enterprise solution for global IoT connectivity that offers platform management and support, according to T-Mobile.

T-Mobile’s new solutions will lower the barrier to entry to 5G with end-to-end smart solutions optimized for specific industries. Advanced Industry Solutions includes connectivity, compute, devices and applications needed to make certain use cases, including smart cities and autonomous factories, possible, the carrier said.

Verizon 5G Home

Carrier giant Verizon came into MWC with its arms full of announcements. For home wireless needs, Verizon, in collaboration with Qualcomm Technologies, introduced the Verizon Router based on Tri-Band Wi-Fi 6E Qualcomm Networking Pro Series Platforms, the latest hardware available on the market, according to the two companies.

The new Verizon router uses the latest Qualcomm 5G Fixed Wireless Access Platform Gen 2. The product includes Verizon’s next-generation network technologies, including mmWave, C-Band and 4G LTE. The router is more than 60 percent smaller and lighter than the previous generation and is waterproof, so it can be installed indoors or outside the home.