MWC19 Barcelona attendance hits record 109,000

Attendance at MWC19 Barcelona was 109,000, up slightly from recent years:

2019 - 109,000
2018 - 107,000
2017 - 108,000
2016 - 101,000

Visitors came from 198 countries and territories, and more than 55 percent of this year’s MWC attendees held senior-level positions, including 7,900 CEOs.

More than 2,400 companies participated at MWC19 across more than 120,000 net square meters of exhibition and hospitality space at Fira Gran Via.

Today we celebrate another highly successful MWC Barcelona, which brought together attendees, governments and regulators across the global ecosystem, spanning multiple sectors and reflecting the expanding role of mobile connectivity,” said John Hoffman, CEO, GSMA Ltd. “With the theme of ‘Intelligent Connectivity’, 5G was prominent at MWC19 and it was exciting to see a glimpse of that new world, with 5G-enabled handsets launched, new products and services, and even the first demonstration of live tele-monitored surgery over 5G technology. The mobile industry continues to make strong progress with 5G and MWC Barcelona continues to showcase the best and most creative elements of our connected world.”

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VMware builds its telco portfolio, partners with Ericsson

VMware announced expanded relationships with AT&T and Vodafone, along with an expanded alliance with Ericsson and a new partnership with T-Systems.

“5G is at a massive inflection point, and planning decisions made today will have far reaching financial and operational ramifications for CSPs going forward,” said Shekar Ayyar, executive vice president, strategy and corporate development and general manager, Telco NFV Group, VMware. “By moving away from the inflexible, hardware-defined architectures of the past, and rolling out 5G as a fully-virtualized architecture right out of the gate, telcos will be able to beat competitors to market with new value-added services and improve the performance and operational efficiencies of their networks. VMware today provides the best foundation for the 5G-ready telco cloud.”

Highlights of the announcements:

• AT&T is working with VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud to implement 5G capabilities into its SD-WAN. The collaboration targets 5G.
• Ericsson and VMware have signed a global alliance agreement that will simplify deploying and running a combination of Ericsson applications and VMware’s vCloud NFV platform for CSPs. The alliance agreement solidifies the close cooperation between the two companies, ongoing since 2012, and enables CSPs to accelerate time to revenue for new telco-grade services.
• T-Systems is providing customers with a managed services offering for VMware Cloud on AWS. Together with its long-standing partner, VMware, the Deutsche Telekom IT service provider is connecting clients’ private clouds with VMware Cloud on AWS.
• Vodafone has expanded its footprint of VMware’s cloud infrastructure to power its network and to capture operational agility and cost efficiency at scale. VMware is Vodafone’s primary strategic partner for telco cloud infrastructure services. VMware’s services are used across Vodafone’s operating markets around the world; they are live in 15 countries, in more than 50 sites, carrying increasing amounts of subscriber traffic on more than 300 core network functions.

VMware also announced new and enhanced solutions across its telco portfolio.

VMware Smart Assurance: provides full integration with VMware vCloud NFV, VMware’s NFV Infrastructure (NFVI) platform, along with new carrier-oriented advancements in VMware NSX-T Data Center. These advancements will give CSPs a strong foundational NFV platform with advanced networking features, accelerated data plane performance, intent-based assurance and support for a broad set of certified VNF applications to deliver multiple services and applications today and bridge the gap to tomorrow’s 5G networks.

Evolution of Networking in vCloud NFV: VMware NSX-T Data Center is a core component of vCloud NFV that provides a software network overlay across the complete NFV infrastructure and supports multiple telco use cases. The new VMware NSX-T 2.4 release delivers even higher levels of cloud-scale, operational simplicity, resiliency, and performance. This includes IPv6 support, near line-rate speed, high availability, and scalability to tens-of-thousands of unique networks per NSX-T Data Center instance. With Network Service Header (NSH)-based service chaining, service providers can deliver new services faster while significantly reducing CapEx and OpEx.

Expanding VMware Ready for NFV Certification Program: provides CSPs with the commitment that VMware partner VNF solutions will seamlessly and effectively deploy, run and interoperate with VMware vCloud NFV. VMware now has certified more than 105 Virtual Network Functions from 85 vendors worldwide. VMware’s broad ecosystem of certified partners creates a true marketplace that helps CSPs remove barriers to successful NFV implementations.

VMware HCX Enables Seamless Migration and Multi-Cloud Mobility for the 5G-Ready Telco Cloud:   delivers migration capabilities that can be integrated into Day 1 and Day 2 operations, helping CSPs seamlessly mobilize the applications to 5G with minimum downtime. VMware integrated OpenStack (VIO), with VMware’s support for Kubernetes orchestration capabilities complement VMware HCX in delivering easy migration and multi-cloud connectivity.

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Etisalat UAE selects Ericsson for 5G

Etisalat selected Ericsson to deploy a 5G radio network in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Etisalat is preparing to offer 5G enhanced mobile broadband and fixed wireless access - among the first 5G use cases - and will provide subscribers with higher throughput and better experiences.

Saeed Al Zarouni, Senior Vice President, Mobile Network, Etisalat, says: “Our ability to provide 5G services is due to our commitment to invest in line with our strategy to ‘Drive the Digital future to empower the society’ with solutions and services that are at the forefront of the digital journey. This is an opportunity for Etisalat to provide customers futuristic digital services and a truly transformative, nationwide 5G network they deserve."

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Marvell intros silicon for 5G infrastructure

Marvell, whose 3G and 4G solutions are widely deployed in 3G and 4G networks worldwide, announced an end-to-end silicon platform for 5G infrastructure.

Whereas initial deployments of 5G NR have been dominated by FPGA-based solutions, Marvell said its 5G solution encompasses baseband DSPs, Arm multi-core SoCs, purpose-built hardware accelerators, Ethernet connectivity engines and system-level security solutions.

Marvell's 5G NR Platform includes:

• Radio Access SoCs: The OCTEON Fusion-M product line is optimized for cost/power and programmable with a 3GPP protocol stack split and massive MIMO capabilities. Marvell's SoCs set the performance benchmark for both LTE-A and 5G NR, with multiple deployments through key industry partners.
• Transport/EPC Core Processors: Multi-core OCTEON processors that are optimized to address the most demanding use cases of 5G NR. Marvell's scalable data-plane acceleration makes its embedded processors ideal for 5G Core/EPC applications at the heart of the network as well. Marvell uniquely offers a single unified architecture for both transport and EPC core.
• Ethernet Networking: switches and PHYs for carrier infrastructure. Marvell Prestera switches contain hierarchical traffic management for mobile infrastructure. In addition, Marvell's differentiated switching solutions allow advanced flow identification and access control to enable user-level security.
• Wi-Fi Connectivity: Marvell is ramping high volume production of 8x8 and 4x4 Wi-Fi 6 solutions. The 802.11ax engines include full MU-MIMO and OFDMA uplink and downlink, multi-gigabit peak speeds, precision location, cloud management, best-in-class beamforming and integrated Bluetooth 5 technology. 
• ThunderX2 Arm-based Server: Marvell has introduced workload optimized ThunderX2 server processors to augment and enhance its 5G portfolio. 

"Marvell is uniquely empowering our network infrastructure customer base to accelerate their 5G systems via our highly integrated solutions," said Raghib Hussain, chief strategy officer and executive vice president of the Network and Processors Group at Marvell Semiconductor, Inc. "Specifically, our 5G Ready portfolio is an order of magnitude better in terms of performance, power efficiency and overall implementation cost versus unoptimized field programmable pre-5G architectures. In short, the depth and breadth of Marvell's technology offers OEMs the flexibility to tailor their infrastructure solutions to specific carriers and global end markets."

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U.S. Cellular picks Ericsson for 5G

U.S. Cellular awarded a multi-year contract to Ericsson for 5G network deployment. Under the contract, Ericsson will provide U.S. Cellular with 3GPP standards-based 5G New Radio (NR) hardware and software.

Niklas Heuveldop, President and Head of Ericsson North America, says: “We look forward to enhancing our strong relationship with U.S. Cellular and supporting the 5G network rollout to their customers. We work constantly to ensure our customers have access to the latest 5G solutions, and U.S. Cellular customers will certainly reap the benefits of innovative applications that 5G networks will enable.”

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