Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
One of the potential outcomes of the Open RAN movement is to create a commoditized base station that could support an open ecosystem similar to that in WiFi, and enable new network deployers to challenge the stranglehold of the large operators. A clear sign of things to come was the recent agreement struck between one of those Taiwanese contract manufacturers, Pegatron, and Microsoft, to cooperate on private network solutions. Combined with Microsoft’s acquisition of Affirmed Networks and Metaswitch to enable a cloud-based core network for enterprise 4G/5G services, this latest deal is a clear indicator of Microsoft’s interest in the new opportunities arising from open cellular networks, and its potential to bypass traditional operators altogether in the enterprise space where…
Patrick Drahi, the French tycoon behind the Altice cable venture, made an unsolicited offer for Eutelsat last week, and was firmly batted away by the also-French satellite operator. At a rumored $3.2bn, it was not to be sniffed at, but Drahi is going to have to up his game, as Eutelsat is betting big on OneWeb. The initial offer was only around a 20% premium on Eutelsat’s market cap – which stood at some $2.7bn last week. Currently, at a share price of €12.30, the market cap has grown to $3.34bn (€2.89bn), meaning that the follow-up offer is going to have to be raised significantly. But this may well be worth it, for Drahi. Eutelsat gives Drahi and Altice a…
Ericsson’s recent demonstration of electricity transmission to a 5G base station over laser has established the potential of optical power delivery for cellular deployment. This complements similar demonstrations of power delivery over microwave, with scope for exploiting the wireless infrastructure already established. While neither approach is likely to be widely adopted for general sites with ready access to power grids, both have potential for making valuable contributions around the edges, while microwave delivery is particularly promising in the IoT realm for electricity delivery to small devices. In such cases they avoid the need for batteries or local generation via small solar panels for example, reducing either capital or operating costs. Ericsson has teamed up with optical electricity transmission specialist PowerLight…
Samsung and Intel are locked in a battle to dominate the global semiconductor market, which is now being fought on many fronts since the Korean company overtook Intel as the world’s largest chip supplier by revenue in the second quarter of this year. Intel has entered the foundry business, in which Samsung has seen significant growth in recent years; both are racing to support new chip geometries at 3-nanometers or below, chasing Taiwan’s TSMC; and both have cloud-based 5G networks in their sights as a key growth target. In Q2, Samsung reported a record profit of $12.6bn, and of its $54bn in revenue for the quarter, $15bn came from semiconductors – above the $14.8bn that Intel reported for the same…
The advent of the 5G era makes cloud-based architectures more critical than they were in previous generations, but also makes it far more demanding to implement them. The highly centralized and relatively simple Cloud-RAN designs that were developed for 4G are not adequate for 5G networks, whose bandwidth and latency requirements dictate very distributed topologies. That has led to a disaggregation of the RAN, breaking it into centralized, distributed and radio units, as well as abstracting software from hardware and deploying that software in the cloud. The emergence of Open RAN potentially enables operators to combine these twin transformations with a shake-up of their supply chain, maximizing the commercial impact of vRAN by opening up a wider base of innovation.…
Even though 5G is the driving force behind wireless and mobile broadband investment, there is increasing industry focus on a broader base of connectivity options, particularly to support underserved or remote users and industries. From novel fixed wireless access (FWA) platforms to low-earth orbit (LEO) satellites, these technologies are attracting considerable investment from the movers and shakers of the telecoms and cloud sectors. On the satellite front, French satellite firm Eutelsat has increased its stake in OneWeb from 17.6% to 22.9%, for an investment of $165m, on top of its first injection of $550m. That will make it the second largest shareholder in OneWeb after India’s Bharti Airtel. OneWeb, which was rescued from bankruptcy last year, has a constellation of…
It is almost litotic to describe the world of IoT wireless protocols as confusing, as there are so many options, but there are some signs of consolidation for low power communications, largely indoors. In this environment, Thread and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) are cornering the field, pulling ahead of the successors to earlier contenders, such as Zigbee and Zwave. The whole IoT wireless communication field broadly comes down to three categories. First come the full speed options of cellular or WiFi, which are required for some of the more data-intensive IoT applications, such as video surveillance. Second is low power WAN, designed to serve outdoor applications in monitoring and smart metering involving transactions that are large in number but small…
This week BP has bought another company with the initials BP, Blueprint Power Technologies – this is a New York firm that offers cloud based software to manage energy on large real estate portfolios, such as a New York Skyscraper. The company has paid an unspecified amount for Blueprint, likely just a few $ million up front, but expects great things from it. The idea is to turn commercial buildings into a flexible power asset and it seems to have two key ingredients – solar generation from the windows and roofs of such buildings and Electric Vehicle recharging bays around the building. Naturally there will be some batteries involved, to sit between the two, and the software makes a number…
Yet another hydrogen start-up has burst onto our radar this week, claiming that its production cost will be next to nothing. The fact that H Quest, a US startup, is using natural gas to produce hydrogen would normally be enough to put us off the idea, but the company’s approach of making it as a ‘co-product’ with other carbon-based products may provide the fossil-fuel industry’s only real opportunity in the sector. This should only be the case, however, if upstream methane emissions can be eliminated and misleading carbon accounting can be avoided. The process that H Quest is in the early stages of developing is an emission-free version of microwave plasma pyrolysis. Here, renewable electricity will be used to generate…
The emergence of offshore wind and green hydrogen as the solution to an equitable African energy transition could come as part of the same wave, according to oil and gas player Chariot, which is planning to build the continent’s first 10 GW renewable complex off the coast of Mauritania. The London-listed company, which is primarily active in the Atlantic region, has been granted exclusive rights by the country’s government to form a consortium to develop a project of this size to produce green hydrogen off the continent’s western coast. Hosting a significant amount of solar power to capitalize on the exceptional natural resource in the region, the project could also become home to Africa’s first offshore wind farm once it…
The CEO and chairman of General Motors, Mary Barra, entered a fantasy world as she walked onto the stage at this week’s GM investor day, promising to double the company’s revenues by 2030, and bring in $25 billion from connected car services. Most people in the audience – live or virtual – instead looked for clues as to whether or not GM can survive the onslaught of Tesla, US Tesla-alikes and Chinese EV makers – and for the most part, we think it will. But as we look around the world, we see Chinese firms taking root in markets where GM has previously been strong, even if they are not invading its native US quite yet. This event was not…
Five years ago this week… There was serious talk that Disney was gearing up to acquire Netflix, but Faultline could not help but see this prospect as an unholy alliance. We noted that such an acquisition would immediately turn Netflix into a subservient Hulu-like entity, waiting from crumbs to fall from the high table and unable to plow its own furrow with originals. Equally, Disney’s numerous bungled chances of running video services such as Moviebeams and the first SVoD, Movielink, had proved that the content giant thrived when it partnered with platforms rather than try to run them. It looked as though Disney had asked, and Netflix was trying to work out how to politely say no. — …
After our scrutiny of Redbox last week from the angle of its front-end software developer choices, the US DVD firm turned streamer has kept up momentum by turning to Comcast’s ad tech arm FreeWheel. The deal will streamline the inventory buying process for Redbox’s advertiser – opening up Redbox’s inventory on a national and local basis while also enabling audience targeting. We imagine that this falls under FreeWheel’s service of providing marketplace access for publishers, which allows them to monetize complementary channels alongside any pre-existing direct-sold inventory. On FreeWheel’s platform, publishers can plug into third-party demand sources to drive complementary demand for inventory. Within this product segment, there is a small range of ad management tools to aid publishers in…
In the same week that RDK types have been making noises, Europe has another Android TV Operator Tier installation to shout about, with Orange Slovenkso of Slovakia delivering a set top experience bringing together technologies from two well-known names – CommScope and Viaccess-Orca – and one lesser-known one – nangu. Prague-based nangu is the star of the show here, with this being its first Operator Tier project – delivering the nangu.TV platform which includes a full IPTV/OTT hybrid backend. This is a gamble from Orange Slovakia, trusting a small vendor with a résumé void of Android TV Operator Tier experience, although nangu is a long-term supplier to the operator, so this latest upgrade was realistically always going to fall into…
With the RDK community not fond of frequent public appearances, it has proven difficult to provide readers with an alternative to the disappointment of a few weeks ago when Faultline was abruptly halted at the pearly gates of the members-only RDK Global Summit, despite receiving an invitation well in advance. Fortunately, we have been saved by video app developer 24i Media, part of UK-based Amino, as well as separate announcements from Deutsche Telekom and Metrological (see two other standalone stories in this issue). 24i Media has been talking about the latest and greatest things RDK, while the Dutch vendor has topped this off with a win at French streaming platform Cinessance, which admittedly is not RDK-related, but is still a…
Telestream’s NAB press conference, held via a live stream last week following the fateful cancellation of the Las Vegas trade show, talked about a budding relationship with Firstlight Media that takes Telestream’s wide-ranging product portfolio deeper into OTT video, while improving Firstlight Media’s OTT architecture. Firstlight Media, which is the resurrection of the Quickplay Media assets acquired by AT&T and then re-acquired by its original founders, is contributing its Gen5 low-latency live OTT architecture to Telestream’s fully automated monitoring technology – intertwining software targeted at sports and entertainment services. Testament to the fledgling partnership is the arrival of a customer already, with Sportsnet, part of Canada’s Rogers Sports & Media, signing up to repower its relaunched SN Now sports streaming…
Patrick Drahi, the French tycoon behind the Altice cable venture, made an unsolicited offer for Eutelsat last week, and was firmly batted away by the also-French satellite operator. At a rumored $3.2 billion, it was not to be sniffed at, but Drahi is going to have to up his game, as Eutelsat is betting big on OneWeb. The initial offer was only around a 20% premium on Eutelsat’s market cap – which stood at some $2.7 billion last week. Currently, at a share price of €12.30, the market cap has grown to $3.34 billion (€2.89 billion), meaning that the follow-up offer is going to have to be raised significantly. But this may well be worth it, for Drahi. Eutelsat gives…
The Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) has released its annual Industry Report concerning 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 APs to tens of thousands of homes, or just…
What might appear a brand new win for Metrological at Portuguese operator NOS is actually a simple extension of a relationship which began back in 2017, using the same Metrological Application Platform product. What hasn’t been addressed, however, is why it has taken NOS four years to bring Netflix and Amazon Prime Video to market? This is an inexcusable timeframe for an operator of this caliber. NOS has added Metrological’s unified TV App Store and back-office portfolio to integrate even more apps into the UI for users of UMA set tops in Portugal, devices which are manufactured by Arris (CommScope) and powered by Espial’s G4 set top client. Initially, the announcement inferred that more devices in the NOS footprint have…
Deutsche Telekom has taken a plunge that RDK-Video (RDK-V) could only dream of, by rolling out RDK-Broadband (RDK-B) across its entire EU footprint, following the completion of a comprehensive pilot of its latest gateway generation which began in early 2021. In the months since, the German giant has been busy fine-tuning the scalable reference technology for standardizing core functions in the home router, together with a handful of other operators involved in the open source project. Deutsche Telekom has not outed its partner operators by name, yet one might guess that it has collaborated with tier 1s like Comcast, Liberty Global, Altice USA, and possibly even rival Vodafone. As expected, Deutsche Telekom has decided to use RDK-B as the global…