Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
M&A, IP, Patents The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the International Finance Corporation (IFC) will make $435 million in loans to Ukraine’s newly merged Datagroup-Voila-lifecell. The telco is a merger between the Ukrainian mobile operator lifecell with pay TV and broadband provider Datagroup-Volia. The two were acquired and merged by a group of investors led by Xavier Niel’s investment firm NJJ Holdings, private equity firm Horizon Capital is also investing. UScellular has been making the case for its acquisition by T-Mobile to the FCC. The operator said that it has been losing wireless customers for years now and cannot afford the high cost of 5G midband spectrum. Ultimately, the firm says it is less able to invest…
While global RAN sales have been bottoming out in successive quarters, Swedish vendor Ericsson promised investors that there would be some slightly more positive news to share in the second half of 2024. In the firm’s recent earnings, it did beat analysts’ estimates with a drop in sales of 1%, which, though still negative, is a smaller fall than expected. Net sales declined by 4% to SEK 61.8 billion ($5.92 billion), and 1% on an underlying basis, compared with a 7% decline in the second quarter. Adjusted core earnings, or net income, were SEK 7.33 billion ($703 million) compared with SEK 3.9 billion a year earlier, this figure beat analysts’ expectations of SEK 5.75 billion. Ericsson shares rose 9% on…
CB Insights, a major purveyor of investment and startup data, has released its latest update on the state of venture capital. For Q3 2024, both the volume of deals and total funding fell from Q2 2024, and both are down substantially from Q3 2024. Unsurprisingly, the MNO market does not crack any of the various top-ten views, but AI hype is still propelling billions of dollars of investments. The findings are useful context for this industry. The quarterly results show a continuation of the post-covid trend, where fewer rounds prop up a fairly stable total pool of investments. The heights of 2021 look like they shall not be soon repeated, and given the inflationary macroeconomic context, this would be a…
Data centers are heaving under the unprecedented computational and storage demands of AI training, which are growing even faster under the barrage from GenAI, amid intense competition between major players. These include Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and OpenAI, the latter two being partially joined at the hip, especially over data centers. There is also the Chinese contingent led by Alibaba and Baidu engaged in similar deployments. This is driving innovation across the whole spectrum of data center technology, as much to contain costs and meet sustainability requirements, as to keep up with escalating demand. Such innovation begins at the chip level where Nvidia and AMD are particularly influential, through to hardware architecture to extract the best performance from multiple clusters…
A recent report reviewing 123 global operators showed that in the first half of the year, a lower proportion of operators were able to turn rising data usage into ARPU increases. The research indicates a reduced ability to leverage pricing power. The headline information is gloomy, but a review of the details shows a more varying landscape between operators in mature and maturing markets. The figures from research firm Tefficient are not drastic. In 2023, 93% of operators experienced growth in data usage per subscription and 71% of them converted this into higher ARPU. While in the first half of this year, 95% of operators saw data consumption rise and a slightly lower proportion, some 69%, grew ARPU. It is…
The transformative effect of FWA on broadband in the US and some developing countries has driven investment and competition over the CPE itself, not just to drive down costs but also enhance the user experience. This in turn is shaping how operators position FWA services and their own competitiveness against alternative broadband offerings over fixed networks and LEO satellite, although some offer all of these themselves to address different sectors and scenarios. For CPE makers, what began as almost commodity products taking in cellular signals and converting to WiFi for onward transmission in the home of business premises, have become increasingly sophisticated and now boast about AI capabilities. These are focused both on network or bandwidth optimization to maximize QoS,…
The world of standards is a murky one. It does not draw much attention from the mainstream technology press, nor the industry outlets, despite so many standards being inextricable from modern life. From our wireless perspective, convergence between cellular and WiFi, plus the use of Open RAN, is a perfect example of how important these standards are – but one that illustrates how many necessary integration components are not covered in the standards themselves. The webinar began by asking the panelists about the behind-the-scenes realities of working with standards. Balazs Bertenyi, Senior Principal Lead at Nokia’s Standards efforts, who also works with the GSA (Global [mobile] Suppliers Association), noted that “all my opinions are heavily biased by all the bruises…
Mobile World Congress (MWC) satellite shows have struggled to escape from the shadow of the mothership event in Barcelona at the start of every northern hemisphere spring, which seems to suck the oxygen away from other events for the year. Wireless of course looms large at many major vertical trade shows dedicated to manufacturing, broadcasting, retail or transportation for example. Yet there seems only the energy for one truly large scale global annual gathering dedicated to the mobile field. One to watch though is Network X, which has emerged as a fusion of three previous fora: the Broadband World Forum, formerly a permanent fixture at RAI, Amsterdam, 5GWorld and the Telco Cloud. The latter has only been recently formed and…
With convergence still looming large, and the Venn diagram between fixed and mobile operators increasingly blurry, WiFi is of great interest to service provider stakeholders. This week, the prpl Foundation held its global summit, Nokia announced new prpl support for its WiFi management needs, and the RDK Management group announced that MediaTek is the first chipset maker to have WiFi 7 support for the alternative platform. RDK is an open-source project, which came to the fore developing an operating system and technology stack for cable set tops. Over time, the RDK scope expanded to include home gateways too, and so a distinction between RDK-V (Video) and RDK-B was necessary. By being the first to adopt WiFi 7 within the RDK…
Unbeknown to many, Netflix has delivered over 200 global interactive streaming events using a third-party platform called Flux. Amazon Prime Video is another prominent user of Flux, delivering digital fanfares to over 600,000 viewers in 2024 alone. Both streaming heavyweights have integrated the Flux platform into their core websites, reducing development time by between 70% and 90%, so why has no one heard of Flux? That is partly because the Flux SDK—facilitator of watch parties, multi-room chats, polls, quizzes, photobooths, and other interactive tools—has only recently been productized for presentation to the broader media and entertainment market. The Flux platform is a product of Little Cinema Digital (LCDigital), which is itself a product of a Covid-forced pivot. Little Cinema, an…
TVkey, the USB dongle co-developed by Samsung Electronics and Nagra for accessing full pay TV services on dumb screens, was a device developed ahead of its time in late 2016. After a debut deployment at German satellite operator HD+, TVkey took on a new lease of life with its release into the cloud at IBC 2018. Yet it is only now, in Q4 2024, that TVkey Cloud has cracked the all-important Indian market. TVkey Cloud is seeing modest success in securing and delivering branded TV UIs for satellite operators on smart TVs, helping to offset declining high-margin cable and satellite TV revenues, and now DishTV is the first DTH operator in India to offer secure content on TVs from Samsung,…
Why is Freely, an innocuous UK-based streaming service backed by a bluster of local broadcasters, making waves on the international scene? Even before this week’s watershed deal to port the Freely app on Amazon Fire TV smart TVs, the fledgling streaming platform—operated by Everyone TV and launched in April 2024—has been gaining global notoriety. The deal with Amazon is particularly disruptive for the fragmented smart TV OS space – spelling bad news for entrants like TiVo OS looking to make a mark in Europe. Freely’s hype is partly because other streaming resistances inked between local broadcasters, with the mission to immortalize free-to-view broadcast content in the OTT era, have failed cataclysmically. It is also because broadcast puppeteers see Freely as…
New York-based JW Player (JWP) is merging with Connatix, a company new to the Faultline archive, pitched as a specialist in video delivery and monetization. Given JWP’s recent efforts to bolster its subscription and management features, notably the acquisition of InPlayer in January 2023, we are a little surprised that the vendor has merged with a company of this ilk. Having said that, JWP CEO Dave Otten highlights the complementary nature of the two businesses, combining Connatix’s integrated ad tech stack—comprising ad server and player—with JWP’s workflow capabilities, recommendation software, analytics, APIs, CMS, and ad tech. A few years back, JWP was openly criticizing competitors like Brightcove, Kaltura and Vimeo for lacking scale and was more than happy to tell…
Over 70% of Kazakh voters have supported the construction of a nuclear power plant in the country. The government aims for nuclear energy to supply 5% of the national energy mix by 2035, which would mean around 1 GW of nuclear capacity – a standard reactor size representing billions of dollars of investment. Not the biggest move in itself, this is likely to be followed by further developments over time, especially given Kazakhstan’s role as a major source of uranium ore. With 62% coal and 25% natural gas in its electricity mix, Kazakhstan barely surpasses 10% renewables, with 8% coming from hydro alone. The Central Asian states have very cheap electricity today, but their populations and economies are growing rapidly…
Borealis is an $8 billion revenue Austrian plastics company looking to serve the future perovskite market with its thermoplastic polyolefin (TPO) encapsulant. The special angle here is that the thermoplastic only needs low process temperatures, similar to those in perovskite manufacturing. We spoke to Geir Kristian Johnsen, Program Manager for Renewable Energy in the New Business Development department of Borealis. Degradation is one of the most important technical hurdles for perovskites to become a viable product. Degradation may even be the single most important challenge of all alongside large form-factor, scaled-up manufacturing processes, and power output per square meter. Within degradation, encapsulation and edge seals are going to be crucial. Perovskite is a lot more fragile than silicon, so the…
The same company that was making a loss on every fuel cell it shipped has now entered into a binding framework agreement to supply up to 3 GW of electrolyzers to Allied Green Ammonia (AGA) for a green ammonia project in Australia’s Northern Territory. This a big shift in the company’s fortunes. We’re talking about Plug Power, of course, which will provide proton exchange membrane (PEM) electrolysis systems from its New York gigafactory, with installations expected between late 2026 and early 2027. Plenty of criticism fell on Plug after reports revealed that the company was making a loss on each fuel cell it sold because it had to provide the hydrogen to run it due to the scarcity of the…
M&A, IP, Patents Telecom Italia (TIM) has received a €700 million bid for its subsea unit, Sparkle. The offer comes from Italy’s Ministry of Economy and Finance in partnership with Retelit, a subsidiary of Spanish infrastructure fund Asterion. Iliad owner Xavier Niel and his investment vehicles have increased their investment in Irish operator Eir. The portion of ownership is not known, but he is coming close to full ownership of the operator. Niel has owned 64.5% of Eir since April 2018, and is now buying shares from US hedge fund Anchorage Capital which owned the remaining 35.5%. Financials Not only will Nokia provide RAN equipment to India’s Vodafone Idea, as announced last week, but the vendor will also apply its…
Satellite pay TV provider DirecTV has struck a deal with EchoStar to acquire the pay TV assets of its Dish wing, leaving EchoStar free to sort out and monetize the Dish Mobile business. Ostensibly this clears away quite a lot of mess for EchoStar. It has shifted $9.75 billion of debt (albeit for the purchase price of just $1) and can focus on growing the wireless business, formerly Dish Mobile, now Boost Mobile. This is particularly important, since EchoStar aims to build a national 5G Open RAN-based network which is already behind schedule. Action was certainly needed, but the firm may have already lost too many subscribers to build itself a sustainable wireless business – especially now that the TV…
With convergence still looming large, and the Venn diagram between fixed and mobile operators increasingly blurry, WiFi is of great interest to the likes of Wireless Watch. This week, the prpl Foundation held its global summit, Nokia announced new prpl support for its WiFi management needs, and the RDK Management group announced that MediaTek was the first OEM to have WiFi 7 support for the alternative platform. There is a lot of nuance to unpack, but the elephant in the room is the priority list at Nokia. The recent round of rumors regarding a potential sale of mobile assets to Samsung were batted away, but there is generally no such smoke without fire. To this end, WiFi could soon be…
IoT modules continue to increase in diversity and function by incorporating multiple capabilities in sensing, AI analytics, and integration of multiple wireless protocols. This reduces the component count and footprint for size-constrained IoT devices, especially for more complex use cases, or IoT deployments with diverse requirements at the higher end of the performance spectrum, in the realm of edge AI. There has been a trend towards incorporation of key wireless technologies for a given target IoT field. Qualcomm has just teamed up with Europe’s STMicroelectronics to develop a module featuring edge AI and integrating several wireless protocols. This will be accomplished by incorporating compatible Qualcomm SoCs supporting the wireless connectivity technologies into a module comprising STMicro’s STM32 microcontrollers, which differ…