AT&T has signed an agreement with Oracle to move thousands of its large scale internal databases to Oracle’s Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). Under the agreement, AT&T will migrate thousands of existing Oracle databases containing petabytes of data plus their associated applications workloads to Oracle Cloud.
The agreement gives AT&T global access to Oracle’s cloud portfolio offerings both in the public cloud and on AT&T’s Integrated Cloud. This includes Oracle’s IaaS, PaaS, Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), which will reportedly help increase productivity, reduce IT costs, and enable AT&T to gain new flexibility in how it implements SaaS applications across its global enterprise.
AT&T has also agreed to implement Oracle’s Field Service Cloud (OFSC) to further optimize its scheduling and dispatching for its more than 70,000 field technicians. With OFSC, for example, AT&T will combine its existing machine learning and big data capabilities with Oracle’s technology to increase the productivity, on-time arrivals, and job duration accuracy of AT&T’s field technicians.
Ligado Networks has formed a collaborative partnership with Harris Corporation to enable beyond visual line-of-sight operations for unmanned aircraft systems (BVLOS UAS).
The two companies said they share a vision with respect to the commercial market for BVLOS UAS applications and will demonstrate how their joint expertise and technological capabilities can enable the safe integration of such operations into the national airspace system.
Ligado and Harris indicated they will demonstrate new technologies and applications of BVLOS UAS through trials. These are slated to include a pilot of Harris’ planned BVLOS Network, HubNet, in North Dakota and Ligado’s upcoming network demonstration in Louisiana. The companies also noted they will test mission-critical use cases to generate data that can be used by the FAA for future certification processes, including the development of safety-related use cases.
Viavi Solutions announced its CellAdvisor Base Station Analyzer will now support the unique signal analysis required for narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) connectivity. The capability – which Viavi believes is the first of its kind in the industry – is available immediately.
With NB-IoT support, CellAdvisor measures the interference and performance impact the NB-IoT signal may have on the LTE wideband signal. It also confirms whether the signal has the reach and coverage required to serve the number of devices in the assigned geographic area, taking into account considerations such as building penetration. Analysis includes signal power levels, digital demodulation analysis, and interference analysis down to the single PRB (Physical Resource Block) for the signal under measurement. Viavi said these measurements provide customers with a comprehensive picture of how well the network is operating in terms of performance, coverage, and data traffic capacity, while identifying potential issues related to interference or intermodulation that need to be resolved.
Viavi indicated the introduction of this upgrade follows successful trials with Tier-1 global service providers and collaborations with major network equipment manufacturers.
The Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA), an association representing communications networks manufacturers and suppliers, will play a lead role in smart community standards development as the newly appointed Technical Advisory Group (TAG) administrator for the U.S. National Committee of International Electrotechnical Commission (USNC/IEC).
In a coordinated effort with the global IEC Systems initiative, the U.S. TAG will work to enable the rapid deployment of smart cities solutions by pursing comprehensive needs assessment, collaboration among groups involved in smart city development, and the development of specific standards, as needed.
