Wherever Vodafone dominates markets it is active in seeking out fixed lines and its recent bidding for Neotel, South Africa’s second-largest ISP behind incumbent Telkom, has triggered a bid for Telkom itself, from MNO rival MTN. This looks to bring operator consolidation and aggressive quad play economics to the South African, region. Telkom has filed details of the discussion with that Johannesberg Stock Exchange and MTN says it has only held exploratory discussions and a bid is not imminent.
Rumors at the beginning of the week were firmed by Qualcomm this week that it will pay a fine of just under $1 billion to China in a deal worked out with China’s National Development and Reform Commission, but in return it will get an agreed 5% royalty from Chinese manufacturers on 3G and 3.5% on 4G phones, based on 65% of the purchase price by MNOs. IN essence in China Qualcomm cannot make phone builders take all of its patent portfolio, only the ones they use. After reflection the US markets can see the upside in this more than the downside, and the price fell, but has mostly recovered.
Modern Times Group which owns the Nordic DTH Viasat TV business, has agreed to sell its Hungarian free to air TV operations, including channels VIASAT3 and VIASAT6 as well as the local version of catch-up service Viasat Play, to Sony Pictures Television for an undisclosed cash consideration. MTG’s pay TV channels are not part of the agreement. MTG said it was focusing its European Free to air TV on markets such as the Baltics, Bulgaria and the Czech Republic.
The HbbTV Association this week announced the new HbbTV 2.0 specification which paves the way for TV services based on HTML5, UHD and HEVC. The Association expects manufacturers will introduce new interactive broadcast and broadband services during 2016, based on the specification and will include features such as voting, play to screen with better support for more subtitle languages, as well as app synchronization between TV, tablets and smartphones and secure playback for adaptive bit rate devices and support for CI Plus 1.4.
Apple is planning to build a data center in Arizona which will come complete with its own $850 million California based solar farm, in conjunction with First Solar, which should provide all of its electrical power.
Finnish cable TV specialist Teleste, said this week that it has embedded a Samsung Lynk DRM system into its Luminato headend in partnership with Samsung for the hospitality market. Service providers and integrators will be able to secure premium HDTV content to Samsung Hospitality TVs. We rarely previously heard of Samsung’s proprietary DRM Lynk.
Alcatel-Lucent said this week it will introduce enhancements to its TWDM-PON (Time and Wavelength Division Multiplexed – Passive Optical Networks) technology which offers 40 Gbps speeds which it says will lower the current cost of TWDM-PON. It is using a new ‘Universal TWDM’, allowing different types of optics to be used, so operators can initially deploy 10 Gbps and add more as demand grows. It means operators can start with one non-tunable 10 Gbps wavelength then add more wavelengths as required by plugging in more optics. Alcatel said that it introduced the world’s first TWDM-PON solutions last October.
According to a survey conducted for Irish WISP MyPlace Connect a staggering 90% of customers expect free WiFi service in restaurants, Hotels and pubs – and will take their business elsewhere if they do not find it. Some 67% surveyed said they have chosen destinations based on whether or not they offer a free WiFi service. The survey was carried out in Dublin and also revealed that the vast majority (70%+) rely on the free WiFi either often (28.73%) or very often (41.97%) and the majority of respondents (61.62%) said they were willing to provide information about themselves such as age, gender, e-mail address in order to get free WiFi.
US encoder specialist Harmonic and video software player This Technology, have announced a partnership to enable MVPDs to deliver regionalized content such as sports, to any device. The integration brings together This Technology’s SwitchStream content delivery system with Harmonic’s ProStream 9100 and it was implemented at an unnamed tier 1 operator during 2014.
US broadband equipment supplier Adtran and telco equipment vendor Digicel, will partner to deliver high-performance wireless networks throughout complex environments in the Caribbean using the Adtran ProCloud service. Its first deployment is at the Blue Horizons Garden Resort in Grenada, where IT maintenance activities are being offloaded to Digicel for seamless wireless service throughout the property.
One profitable quarter does not a turnaround make, but this week Sony said it expects to make about a $170 million operating profit for the year ending March 31, after previously saying it expected a loss. The difference has been extra sales of its PlayStation 4 videogame consoles and some cost-cutting. Bear in mind that in order to achieve this, Sony had to sell its PC business and spin out its TV business into a separate company. Sony says that the TV business, after a decade of losses, will report an operating profit for the year. Sony CEO Kazuo Hirai said “The management decision to spin off the PC business last year was a big event for us in terms of changing employees’ mindsets.” The company expects to cut another 1,100 jobs in its mobile phone business and its headcount has fallen from 180,000 or so to about 140,000.
Ruckus Wireless has just introduced new Smart WiFi technology to help the drive towards better voice calling over Wi-Fi. This will be offered as standard on all Ruckus Smart WiFi products and on show at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next month. They have been successfully tested with two of the biggest MNOs in the US it said. Now who could they be? The improvements include prioritizing WiFi Calling traffic by looking at the Type of Service (ToS) bits set by the smartphone in the IP header. Additionally it prevents too many devices try to log onto a WiFi AP if this will damage voice quality, using a capacity-based client access control algorithm. In WiFi, where Ruckus leads, everyone else tends to follow.
The FTTH Council Europe said this week there are now 12.3 million subscribers across the European Union’s 28 countries using fiber to the home and said Lithuania was the leading country with 34% of homes subscribing to FTTH/B (basement), ahead of Sweden and Latvia. FTTH is available to 63% of subscribers, with Norway leading the way, while FTTB is on offer to 37%.