Mobile Network Operators (MNO) are under pressure on the consumer market, traditionally their largest, with flat growth, an intensive war on voice and data plans, and fierce competition from over-the-top (OTT) applications and services. The enterprise market offers a better growth outlook—15.2% CAGR[1] between 2016 and 2021 for Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS)—with relative protection…
You know the saying, “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is”? Google, seizing the opportunity to capture B2C messaging revenue, is offering operators free RCS P2P (Person to Person) messaging. RCS stands for Rich Communication Services — a far richer messaging experience than SMS/MMS (more on this below). On the surface, it sounds…
Not so long ago, nobody would have predicted that businesses could move away from WiFi and DAS technologies for their private wireless networks. That was before Enterprise LTE. With the ongoing densification of mobile networks, the lower-cost availability of small cells, and new ‘white-label’ offerings from mobile network operators (MNOs), private LTE networks have become a…
The first SMS message was sent over the Vodafone GSM network in the United Kingdom on 3 December 1992, from Neil Papworth of Sema Group (now Mavenir Systems) using a personal computer to Richard Jarvis of Vodafone using an Orbitel 901 handset. The text of the message was “Merry Christmas.” It was a modest start, but it ultimately changed technology and even social…
With all the new RAN technologies flying around, it’s easy to confuse one acronym with another. So, let’s just clear up one of them. Virtualized RAN (vRAN), formerly referred to as Cloud RAN, is definitely not the same thing as C-RAN. But what’s the difference? For starters, C-RAN stands for “Centralized Radio Access Network,” which is…
The promises of 5G go well beyond high data rate, spectral efficiency, ultra-low latency, or massive sensor networks. The fundamental appeal of 5G lies in the fact that the entire infrastructure acts as a cohesive platform for innovative applications and is tuned to flex with demand – providing services tailored to their unique characteristics. We…
Rapid advances in mobile computing power are pushing machine intelligence to the very edge of the network. Known as Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC), this development is a critical success factor in the rise of the new 5G mobile networks that will deliver unheard of data speeds to an exponentially larger user base, and all at…
Mavenir, partnering with Heavy Reading, has released a report that assesses the business and technical progress being made by Communications Service Providers (CSPs) as they race to implement network functions virtualization (NFV). It is a transition that Gartner says “will change the way traditional CSPs create, manage and deliver services to their customers.” In the…
A cloud-based RCS interconnect hub would serve as an efficient means of deploying secure, advanced RCS communications. The days of being restricted to a 160-character text message are long gone, SMS itself is now seen as “traditional” and, following the recent deluge of OTT messaging services such as iMessage, Snapchat and WhatsApp, the growth of Rich…
In technology, what’s viewed as important today, will dramatically change tomorrow. As the industry transitions towards LTE and 5G, there is a critical and growing requirement for a new, more distributed network architecture. The 5G (NR) (new-radio core network) has advanced network slicing architectures and is a key part of a multi-access edge computing and IoT strategy. Supporting low-latency…
