Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
We were scratching heads after reading the latest quarterly report from addressable advertising pioneer Canoe Ventures. The overall sentiment is that, despite a spluttering start, it seems MVPDs are finally firing up all engines on linear addressable, leading Canoe to do the same with its internal operations. But the numbers seem to show an industry that is still kicking its heels. Canoe has never shied away from the fact that while AVoD inventory is ready and waiting for increased advertiser demand, live linear addressable has always proved more technologically challenging. However, this report sets the tone that addressable has finally reached the critical mass needed to usher in widespread rollouts of national campaigns. Canoe notes that it has invested in…
In what looks like a reaction to Synamedia’s disruptive entrance into the forensic watermarking space, French software vendors Ateme and Viaccess-Orca have pooled resources on a new contribution watermarking product – providing a glimpse into what the future of watermarking looks like from both a technology and business model standpoint. Watermarking is a pricey affair, but one that is in growing demand for UHD and premium streamed content. With complex pricing being a barrier to entry for many content providers, VO and Ateme are proposing a pay-per-use business model which the two companies say will enable faster adoption of watermarking technology. Pay-per-use eliminates licensing, maintenance, and service fees, according to the two vendors, which describe the collaboration as a smarter…
Synamedia’s new OTT ServiceGuard product didn’t get the plaudits it perhaps deserved when it launched a fortnight ago, with the claim of being the first content protection technology that extends to the CDN itself. Even if the technology doesn’t fulfill its potential in terms of customers, the very sentiment of its creation in the first place is a damning one for the digital security sector. Faultline has since learned that the significance of this breakthrough into the delivery chain came about following intensive research carried out by Synamedia’s highly active and top secret in-house intelligence division. Based on insights into how modern day content pirates operate and how their methodologies have shifted to circumvent even the most advanced OTT protection…
Around five or six years ago, Faultline turned up for a meeting with the executive team at multiscreen app developer 3SS eager to know what was so special about a bunch of JavaScript developers. After all, this was and still is the most common programming language and the vendor did little to convince us at the time that it was a cut above the rest. It took maybe two more years before 3SS had won us over (and more importantly won the major customers to prove it) – now here we are staring at a company reaching for the stars and growing at around 30% a year, fresh off the back of a sharpened strategy executed last year. Its recent…
Nokia chosen by Softbank and KDDI for Japan’s shared RAN Nokia has been selected by Japanese mobile operators Softbank and KDDI as one of the vendors to deploy Japan’s shared RAN. The deployment will deliver 5G services to both Softbank and KDDI subscribers, and will be based on a multi-operator RAN (MORAN) architecture, which will allow both companies to share the RAN while keeping core networks separate. The network will operate initially in three modes – LTE, 5G and dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS), which allows both radio technologies to work in the same bands. It will feature plug-in cards based on Nokia’s latest Reefshark system-on-chip. These will increase the capacity of the AirScale baseband products to scale flexibly and efficiently.…
The latest deal for Turkish smart WiFi vendor Airties is with NetNordic, a systems integrator that opens up a potentially lucrative new channel into the Nordic region. NetNordic has a reseller agreement to provide sales and technical support to local broadband service providers for the Airties Edge software for home gateways, the Airties Cloud management platform, the Airties Vision companion app, and of course Airties WiFi 6 Mesh Extenders. Edge is the in-home brains that sits on the residential gateway as software that can turn any client into an intelligent WiFi mesh access point (AP), normally without requiring extenders, depending on the size and type of home. While Airties has historically thrived on extenders, some major operators are actively trying…
One of the only major physical trade shows of the year in Europe was held this month in Amsterdam, with the hybrid reboot of the Broadband World Forum (BBWF). Like other once cable-heavy events, BBWF has evolved into an occasion welcoming mobile operators and wireless vendors of various sizes – reflecting the strong drive for fixed/wireless convergence happening in Europe. When we talk about this convergence, there are always two names pushing the agenda – Liberty Global and Vodafone – with both nominating executives to speak about the 10G future and the incessant drive for consolidation. Also on a converged theme, several vendors, including Zyxel, ADB, Radisys, Nokia and AVM, were making product announcements timed for BBWF 2021, ticking many…
Connectivity for shipping has been stuck in the late twentieth century at speeds in the hundreds of Kbps, fit for only voice and basic data in many cases, with few options beyond very small aperture terminal (VSAT) systems served by geostationary (GEO) satellites. A dramatic improvement is in the wings through a combination of alternative offshore communications platforms, especially low earth orbiting (LEO) satellites, and integration with terrestrial 5G under the auspices of 3GPP. More rapid progress is coming for near-shore communications, which has already tapped into cellular networks on land and is now being boosted by dedicated 5G deployments, serving offshore wind farms and oil rigs, among others. These strands are being united through standardization efforts that extend existing…
Virtualization supremo VMware has been increasingly expanding its efforts from the data center and enterprise network into the world of telecoms, and the 5G RAN was prominent in the discussions at the firm’s recent VMworld 2021 event – in a way that it would not have been only 2-3 years ago. CEO Raghu Raghuram reiterated the message that VMware’s experience in virtualizing enterprise networks and data centers would make it a critical partner for 5G operators and enterprises. “Our role in 5G is that we provide the 5G underlay on top of which the 5G RAN software runs,” he said. “One of the critical things that’s happening with 5G RAN is RAN is being turned into software, and so we…
One of the most important initiatives in the nascent RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) platform is the Open Networking Foundation’s (ONF’s) SD-RAN project. Though this will take the original RIC specifications from the O-RAN Alliance as its starting point, it will offer a fully open source implementation, and it claims it will further in making a fully disaggregated open RAN deployable. Critics of O-RAN claim the ONF effort is also more operator-driven, and more democratic, than the O-RAN project. A major milestone for SD-RAN came last week when Deutsche Telekom and partners described their first major trial, in German capital Berlin. Alex Choi, SVP of strategy and technology innovation at DT, said: “The Berlin SD-RAN Open RAN Trial is a momentous…
As 5G networks start to move to the cloud, phrases like ‘radio access network’ (RAN) and ‘RAN intelligent controller’ are being uttered by companies that would seldom have concerned themselves, until recently, with the mobile network. Vendors from the IT world, such as Oracle, VMware and IBM, have been taking gradual steps towards the telecoms network market for years, often on the back of virtualization. Having helped introduce virtualized platforms, ‘as-a-service’ models and cloud-native concepts to the data center and enterprise IT, these companies are transferring their expertise to a telecoms world that is well behind the data center in all these key trends, and where native skills are in short supply. It started, of course, with operators’ IT and…
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has laid down his gauntlet ahead of COP26, with a statement that his country will aim to reach carbon neutrality by 2060 at the latest. “Russia will practically seek after carbon neutrality of its economy. We set a specific orienting point here – not later than 2060,” he said, speaking at the Russian Energy Week forum. Activities are already underway in Russia to develop a hydrogen cluster, produce ‘green’ coal and ‘green’ liquefied natural gas, build wind farms and geothermal power plants. UK energy supplier Ovo Energy is preparing a bid for rival Bulb, as the latter struggles with losses through the UK’s record wholesale gas and power prices. The move would create the UK’s second…
The Rivian S1 document filed at the SEC at the beginning of September was a first chance to see how well it was doing financially, but Tesla fan-boy publication CleanTechnica this week highlighted the ambition Rivian has for subscriptions, so we took another look at it – and it raises even more question marks over its forthcoming IPO. This is especially true given the hammering we gave General Motors for saying that it would double revenues in the next decade, partially based on the sale of subscription services, in our lead last week. On the one hand we would prefer to believe a pure EV play that it will attract extra revenues for software updates and services both sold and…
Population: 67,886,001 (+0.52% vs 2019) GDP per Capita (Nominal): $39,103 (-10.3% vs 2019) Debt to GDP: 104.5% (+19.2% vs 2019) When it comes to determining who should be most responsible for fighting climate change, it’s hard to argue against those who pioneered the human-caused emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. As the first country to experience the rapid manufacturing development of the industrial revolution in the mid 1700s, the UK was the top emitter of CO2 for over 100 years. Despite now accounting for less than 1% of the global population, the UK has been responsible for nearly 6% of historic carbon emissions. The UK is also among those with the greatest means to accelerate its efforts to decarbonize.…
Five years ago this week… G.fast chip leader Sckipio was fighting it out with Broadcom in the run up to Broadband World Forum 2016 in London. In partnership with Calix, Sckipio had implemented Dynamic Time Assignment (DTA), allowing bi-directional allocation of bandwidth in twisted pairs, while its new 212 MHz variant of G.fast was double the previous speed. But Broadcom was quick to kick back just days later with a second generation BCM65400 chip offering equivalent speeds and the suspiciously similarly named feature of dynamic time allocation. While Sckipio looked to be the main force driving change in the telco broadband market, Broadcom was close to matching it stride for stride. Sckipio slowly slipped off Faultline’s radar until disaster struck…
While many in our industry mourned a week in which we should have been meeting in-person at NAB, and others attended virtual alternatives such as the SCTE Cable-Tec Expo, there was a real-life physical trade show (with a hybrid twist) happening in Europe – as the Broadband World Forum got back underway in Amsterdam. Like other once cable-heavy events Faultline has attended, BBWF has evolved into an occasion welcoming mobile operators and wireless vendors of various sizes – reflecting the strong drive for fixed-wireless convergence happening in Europe. When we talk about this convergence, there are always two names pushing the agenda – Liberty Global and Vodafone – with both nominating executives to speak about the 10G future and the…
For anyone unfamiliar with broadband in the Nordics, first impressions may misconstrue Airties’ new customer win as a Nordic-based internet service provider, when NetNordic is in fact a systems integrator that is now reselling the Turkish firm’s Smart WiFi portfolio to broadband operators across the region. The deal opens up a potentially lucrative new channel into the Nordic market for Airties, while implying that the vendor has struggled to gain a foothold in the Nordics to date without a helping hand. It also suggests that local competition in the WiFi software space isn’t up to the exceptionally high standard set by Airties. Naturally, pandemic trends are cited as the central driver behind this deal, as Airties and NetNordic acknowledge the…
North American operators in particular are under immense pressure to transform unsustainable legacy network infrastructure into the levels demanded from broadband subscribers today, more than ever. This field is being championed by vendors including Harmonic, CommScope, Casa Systems, Cisco, and more recently Vecima, and one of those wasted no time in using this week’s virtual SCTE Cable-Tec Expo as an opportunity to slander its competition. Harmonic has a habit of doing things in threes – firing another trio of broadband-focused press releases sequentially into our inboxes this week. It has announced expanded FTTH PON capabilities, added a Google Cloud Marketplace integration, and revealed what it believes is a “breakthrough” moment for the flexible MAC (Media Access Control) market with a…
Marvell has upped its game against Broadcom in the switch-chip market with the launch of its first 5-nanometer product along with new data processing units (DPUs). The company, which has just closed its $1.1bn acquisition of switch-chip player Innovium, claims its new units consume 50% less power than competitive products. The new product is the latest in the Prestera line, which will sit slightly below the switch-chips that Marvell is gaining from Innovium. The new Prestera DX 7321 Ethernet unit offers port speeds from 1Gbps to 400Gbps, with aggregated bandwidths up to 1.6Tbps, thanks to a technology called 56Gbps pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM4) serializer/deserializers (SerDes). The chips will target Broadcom’s Trident family of switches for carrier applications such as 5G fronthaul,…
The Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) has released its annual Industry Report with its predictions for 2022. Although a survey can only reveal so much about the future, the numbers offered here suggest that WiFi 6 is likely set for a more rapid roll-out than WiFi 5. The headline figure is that 83% of respondents to the WBA’s survey of 121 vendors, service providers and other stakeholders said that they will have deployed WiFi 6 or 6E by the end of 2022. One difficulty with these reports is interpreting the reality that they will eventually translate to. Unfortunately, ‘deploy’ is a rather elastic term. It could mean a roll-out of WiFi 6-enabled access points to tens of thousands of homes, or…