HPE unveils edge
and core products
HPE’S NEW PORTFOLIO OF EDGE AND CORE PRODUCTS LOOKS TO SPEED UP THE
ROLL-OUT OF 5G IN THE UK. ELLIOT MULLEY-GOODBARNE REPORTS
While 5G providers batted off questions about airwaves distributing Covid-19, earlier this
NEWS 5G ROLL-OUT
month HPE announced its edge and core products for networks to use in the second half
of this year.
The portfolio is aimed to speed up the roll out of 5G services outside the mobile model that
is well established in the UK on a pay-as-you-go consumption model.
Products are split between network and enterprise customers with the former being afforded
the capability to compute data in a cloud-native 5G core on HPE or non HPE infrastructure, as
well as virtual RAN capabilities and multi access edge computing (MEC) for processing requests
closer to the end user.
“As the operators move to a standalone 5G core, the ones that are going to be successful
are the ones that exploit that technology to its fullest extent,” said Martin Halstead, global chief
technologist, telco servers, HPE, “and network slicing gives operators the ability to differentiate
their services in a more granular way than they do today”
“If you have a factory environment that requires tens of thousands of data points gathering
information, but on an infrequent basis, you need to ensure that you can support that number
of devices and, when those devices finally wake up, send what they have to some central
repository.
“That’s different to a manufacturing plant in Germany making Mercedes Benz that has a
bunch of extremely low latency tolerance robots that are constantly on and need real time
transactions. Those are two enterprises cases, but absolute polar opposites of each other
but the operator would be able to prioritise
the service offering that they have in such a
granular way that they can differentiate them.”
For the enterprise, HPE is offering the
capability to manage the connectivity and
bandwidth available for Wi-Fi, SD-WAN,
SD-Branch, Video and IoT devices from a
centralised platform as well as deploy a
network that seamlessly passes between Wi-Fi
6 and 5G depending on connection strength without any user interactions or permissions.
Named ‘AirSlice’ and ‘AirPass’ respectively, Chris Dando, chief technologist for
communications and media at HPE said that the manipulation of the airwaves could lead to
more effective distribution of 5G capacity.
“If we took the city of the City of London for example, you are able to predict how much RAN
usage is needed during office hours. Outside office hours, the venue usage will be much lower
and if you’re thinking about that scenario, as an operator, at different times I might want to
offer different types of services and utilise some of the capacity for a different function in the
evenings.”
Dando went on to say that both enterprise offerings could lead to better connectivity on the
whole adding that mass gathering areas such as universities and stadia, due to their strain on
bandwidth, as well as office buildings and supermarkets, due to their almost-impenetrable walls,
could stand to win.
“Statistics show that the vast majority of mobile device usage is when you’re static inside
a building, but you’re not always in the same building. The AirPass product is good for those
people who are traveling, go into new places and want to have those sorts of capabilities.
“But cellular coverage is fundamental for all the use cases that we see, which is where
AirSlice comes in. Anything associated with smart cities, anything associated with vehicle-toeverything
has to work when the devices and sensors are not on a WiFi network because they
can be mission critical.”
UnitedSiC announces
global distribution
partnership with
Digi-Key
UnitedSiC, a manufacturer of silicon carbide
(SiC) power semiconductors, has announced
a global distribution agreement with Digi-
Key Electronics.
The partnership will provide Digi-
Key customers with worldwide, 24-hour
availability of UnitedSiC’s Silicon Carbide
product portfolio - including the only
standard gate drive SiC devices currently in
the market.
Yalcin Bulut, VP of Global Sales and
Marketing at UnitedSiC, said: “This
partnership focuses on expanding the
UnitedSiC product line to an even wider
group of power designers by leveraging Digi-
Key’s distribution expertise. We will now
be able to provide our SiC wide bandgap
technology to the markets and customers
served by Digi-Key.”
The UnitedSiC products available through
Digi-Key will be beneficial to engineers
focused on electric vehicles, battery
charging, IT infrastructure, renewable
energy and circuit protection.
David Stein, VP of Global Supplier
Management at Digi-Key said: “We are
excited to partner with UnitedSiC and
bring on their portfolio of silicon carbide
semiconductor devices. With ever increasing
pressure on power engineers to deliver
efficiency and cost-effectiveness, it’s critical
we work with companies
who have market leading
technology. We look
forward to introducing
UnitedSiC’s portfolio
to our global
engineering
community.”
www.newelectronics.co.uk 24 March 2020 9
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