CableLabs is now an industrial affiliate member of NYU Wireless, joining the ranks of AT&T, Sprint, Ericsson, Nokia, Qualcomm and others.
CableLabs has a long history of collaboration with NYU Wireless founder and director Professor Theodore (Ted) Rappaport, and the diversity of research topics at the NYU Wireless Labs align with various areas of interest for CableLabs, a spokesperson told FierceWirelessTech.
“We have an active engagement program for research across multiple academic institutions,” the spokesperson stated via email. “Through this program, we connect professors, students and technical leaders with the most interesting problems in the cable industry, providing resources, expertise, data, labs, and real-life environments for discovering and testing new ideas.”
Of course, the cable industry has been eager to increase its stakes in the wireless industry for quite some time, and has done so with varying degrees of success. The Wall Street Journal today reported that Altice USA is preparing to launch a mobile service this summer, joining rivals Comcast and Charter Communications in trying to persuade U.S. consumers to get their wireless service from cable providers. At the same time, wireless carriers increasingly are challenging cable operators in the fixed wireless space.
It’s worth noting the comings and goings of the affiliate members at NYU Wireless, where significant millimeter wave research has been conducted. Notably, Verizon and T-Mobile currently are not listed among the affiliate members.
Verizon has conducted a sizable amount of study on millimeter wave, reporting that things look better than originally expected when it comes to propagation and range. Meanwhile, T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray has said Verizon basically launched a “science experiment” using customers as test subjects because millimeter wave isn’t ready for prime time.
Earlier this year, Samsung Research America, a subsidiary of Samsung Electronics, joined NYU Wireless as its 14th industrial affiliate member.
Tom Marzetta, associate director of NYU Wireless and originator of the 5G wireless technology known as Massive MIMO, was named as the technical point of contact; he recently was named winner of the 2019 Fred W. Ellersick Prize. Elza Erkip also received the 2019 Best Tutorial Paper Award.