China Mobile: 31.7 million users now on 5G plans

China Mobile ended Q1 2020 with 946 million mobile users, down from 949 million at the beginning of the quarter, but up by 4 million customers in March. Significantly, China Mobile ended the quarter with 31.7 million users with 5G plans. The company's revenue from the sales of products and others went down by 34.9% year-on-year to RMB12.4 billion for the first quarter of the year. The decline was mainly caused by contracted sales of handsets...

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FCC approves Ligado for low-power L-band terrestrial network

The FCC voted unanimously to approve with conditions Ligado’s application to deploy a low-power terrestrial nationwide network in the L-Band that will primarily support 5G and Internet of Things services.  “I thank my colleagues for coming together on a bipartisan basis to support Ligado’s application,” said Chairman Pai.  “The vote at the Commission reflects the broad, bipartisan support that this order has received, from Secretary of...

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Crehan: Server-class Ethernet networking doubles in past 2 years

Between the beginning of 2018 and the end of 2019, data center operators doubled their Ethernet server-class networking capacity, according to a recent report from Crehan Research. This recent strong increase helped drive the market to a longer-term average annual growth of 30 percent – see accompanying figure. Crehan’s report further shows that the strong increase was a result of robust server-class Network Interface Card (NIC) port shipment growth,...

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U.S. Cellular temporarily boosts spectrum capacity with Nokia

U.S. Cellular is working with Nokia to boost capacity in several markets, including the Northwest Region of the U.S., to help address surging traffic during the COVID-19 emergency. The FCC has granted a 60-day temporary spectrum license to U.S. Cellular and other service providers across the country. The temporary spectrum, which is licensed to Advantage Spectrum in the AWS-3 Band, was integrated remotely on Nokia Airscale Radio Access Network...

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LeapMind unveils ultra low-power AI inference accelerator

Tokyo-based LeapMind introduced its "Efficiera" ultra-low power AI inference accelerator IP for companies that design ASIC and FPGA circuits, and other related products. "Efficiera" is an ultra-low power AI Inference Accelerator IP specialized for Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)(1) inference calculation processing; it functions as a circuit in an FPGA or ASIC device. Its "extreme low bit quantization" technology, which minimizes the number of...

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GCI activates first 5G cell sites in Anchorage

GCI activated the first 5G cell sites in Anchorage, Alaska. Ericsson is the network supplier. “In June of 2019, we committed to launching 5G service in the spring of 2020. I am proud to announce today that we have delivered on that commitment,” said GCI CEO and Co-Founder Ron Duncan. “We have upgraded our wireless core, and we intend to upgrade the vast majority of cell sites in Anchorage, Eagle River and Girdwood to our 5-band 5G NR solution by...

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