Meta-standards group the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) last week rubber-stamped the first "frozen" 5G standards.

A plenary in the USA saw around 600 delegates approve 5G Release 15, which gives operators the first phase of standardisation for the mobile standard.

The 3GPP working groups involved in completing Release 15 were the TSG CT (core network and terminals), TSG RAN (radio access network, responsible for 5G New Radio), and TSG-SA (Service and System Aspects).

The delegates represented 29 vendors, 20 carriers, and two academic research institutions.

This release is aimed squarely at the OEM and network operator market, allowing them

Chinese brands have been eyeing Western markets for some time, but in the UK customer inertia means many punters stick with what they know.

RootMetrics' consumer survey of UK mobile shows just how much.

More than half of the UK's big four mobile network customers have been with their carrier for two years or more.

O2 customers are the slowest to upgrade their phones, despite being the first to decouple the hire purchase of the phone from the airtime. O2's annual Refresh scheme is attractive to people who need the annual fix of new hardware – and O2 stocks a

Google has formally launched its Partner Interconnect product, priced for customers too small to afford 10 Gbps interconnect links.

Google Cloud Partner Interconnect connects organisations who don't have access to a Google Cloud Platform peering location, or who have a service provider they want to use for connectivity.

Technical program manager Sankari Venkataraman explained sending the service to general availability means customers get service level agreement coverage for Google Cloud Platform connections sourced through partners.

Layer 2 and Layer 3 connectivity options are available. Connecting at Layer 3 means the partner will handle BGP configuration. Taking something like an Ethernet

Roundup Be nimble, be QUIC: Google's added secured load balancing support to its QUIC protocol.

The Chocolate Factory created QUIC as a way to speed up Web connections by reducing the number of round trips for connection setup and using UDP instead of TCP, but it's seen only limited adoption outside Google's own infrastructure. In January this year, a mere 161,000 domains were hosted on QUIC-capable infrastructure.

Giving QUIC the ability to accelerate HTTPS infrastructure is a way of enhancing its appeal, and software engineers Michael Behr and Ian Swett wrote that Google's made QUIC-enabling a load balancer a single

Analysis Across political divides in the United States there's a common appetite for reining in the country's plutocratic corporate overlords. The country that reveres Mom 'n' Pop businesses is wary when giant businesses combine. But the landmark decision in a US District Court permitting two legacy businesses to merge indicates how hard this is.

In one of the most-watched antitrust decisions in decades , a judge booted out the Department of Justice's objection to the merger of AT&T and Time Warner. It was unusual for a few reasons. It's the first time the government had intervened in a "vertical merger"