Crown Castle is already reaping returns on its fiber investments for small cell deployments. Wells Fargo Senior Analyst Jennifer Fritzsche in a Wednesday note indicated the company’s $6 billion investment in fiber assets is yielding between 6 and 7 percent in returns – more than double what it was pulling in the early days of macro tower deployments. Crown Castle reportedly has 25,000 small cells in its current pipeline, and the company’s leadership has indicated they believe the total addressable market for small cells will be similar to that of macro sites.
Rival American Tower, however, is sticking to its focus on indoor DAS, with no plans to move into outdoor small cell solutions, Fritzsche said. The company is expecting domestic leasing activity to pick up in 2018 and 2019 with the rollout of FirstNet and deployments of 600 MHz spectrum won in the FCC’s recent incentive auction.
Qualcomm Technologies announced support for Amazon Web Services (AWS) Greengrass in select system-on-chips (SoCs) to help manufacturers accelerate development of Internet of Things products with edge processing capabilities using the new AWS Software Solution. Manufacturers expected to commercialize solutions running AWS Greengrass on Qualcomm Technologies’ chips include Advantech and Thundersoft, with commercial products expected to be available later this year.
The Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) Project has added a number of new members, including Accenture, CertusNet, Coriant, Juniper Networks, Mavenir, Mirantis, PCCW Global, Red Hat, VEON, and Windstream.
ONAP was formed back in February when AT&T merged its open source ECOMP project with China Mobile and Huawei’s Open-O initiative. The ONAP community is now working to deliver a neutral automation platform for network, infrastructure, and services across service providers, cloud providers, and enterprises in a virtualized environment.
In a blog post this week, AT&T SVP of Wireless Network Architecture and Design Marachel Knight said software-defined networking will be a key enabler of 5G capabilities and will help AT&T handled the 150 petabytes of data that flow over its network (the figure she listed for an average day in 2017). The carrier has already virtualized 34 percent of its network functions and is working to raise that figure to 55 percent by the end of this year.
Other ONAP members include a broad mix of major vendors, service providers, system integrators, and consultancies, including Amdocs, ARM, AT&T, Bell Canada, BOCO Inter-Telecom, Canonical, China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom, Ciena, Cisco, Cloudbase Solutions, Ericsson, GigaSpaces, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Metaswitch, Microsoft, H3C Technologies, Nokia, Open Networking Foundation, Orange, Raisecom, Reliance Jio, Tech Mahindra, VMware, Wind River, and ZTE.
Filed Under: Infrastructure