Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
VideoAmp’s assault on Nielsen’s patch persisted this week as the TV data vendor continues to shed light on the various industry stakeholders that are supportive of its cause. Last week it was rallying the media agencies, and this week we have news that ViacomCBS will be signing up to VideoAmp’s alternative currency. Starting from this month, VideoAmp’s dataset will be used as a currency to plan, transact and measure ViacomCBS’s national media strategy. ViacomCBS will be able to use this currency to guarantee media campaigns against customized advanced audience segments that are requested on its Vantage advertising platform. The past month or so has seen a series of rapid-fire events that have signaled that Nielsen is set to be toppled…
It looks like the box office might have finally turned a corner, and recovered to pre-pandemic levels of attendance and revenue, based on the early data from the latest releases. This is good news for Hollywood, which has missed the boost that theatrical releases gave to their bottom lines. No Time to Die will prove whether the postponement strategy was correct. It was originally due for release in April 2020. Six quarters of punting it down the road was always a decision that was going to cause sleepless nights, in terms of lost marketing efforts and buzz. There were three separate delays, each made hoping that we were going to see a return to moviegoing normalcy, in the wake of…
Often when we look across the pond at the advertising situation in North America, Faultline’s tone is one of despair. The technology landscape is shockingly antiquated for an industry that still has tens of billions of dollars pumped into it each year, with hostility between the networks, operators and vendors only making things worse. However, much of our perspective of the region is understandably warped by the various dramas taking place in the US. This week’s virtual event from Mediatel, The Future of TV Advertising in Canada, suggested that things are much calmer further north, with the collaborative spirit between three of Canada’s leading operators and networks being the central theme to the conversation. Boasting representatives from Rogers, Bell and…
US digital rights management darling Intertrust has quietly separated into two distinct units. On one half, we have the ExpressPlay DRM business, which is well known in the media and entertainment world with a special home in Asia Pacific, while the Intertrust Platform will form the other half, housing the group’s newer exploits around data services and data management, in verticals such as IoT and energy. It’s the same group, with the same people, still reporting to long-term CEO Talal Shamoon. However, it is virtually impossible not to interpret this structural shake-up as result of the sale of Intertrust’s whiteCryption subsidiary in July this year, to mobile security vendor Zimperium, and perhaps even a precursor to a similar series of…
Telcos combine to push Make in India Indian telcos Bharti Airtel,Tata and Reliance Jio have joined forces to conduct 5G trials with their own equipment. This can be seen as a boost for the country’s Make in India campaign designed to promote indigenous technologies and vendors wherever possible. Bharti Airtel Chairman Sunil Mittal said its 5G trials with Tata, which is building the 5G stack, should start in April or May 2022, well ahead of commercial network deployment. IBM and Airspan plan 5G Open RAN testbed in Europe IBM Global Business Services has announced joint plans with RAN vendor Airspan to launch a 5G-enabled Open RAN testbed encompassing two of its centers in France and Germany. Airspan is providing its AirVelocity…
Just weeks after IBM announced that Dish Network would use its AI-powered automation software (see separate item in Special Report), Telefónica has joined the party, and will use the same IBM software and services to implement its cloud-native 5G core network, UNICA Next. IBM said UNICA Next will give Telefónica the “agility, reliability, and efficiency required to manage its services and prepare for a future where 5G will transform core network functions”; while Javier Gutierrez, director of strategy, network and IT development for Telefónica, added: “Building out the UNICA Next platform with its next generation network architecture shows how important it is to build the infrastructure now to support the deployment of 5G.” The IBM Global Telco Solutions Lab in…
Xilinx has been making a major play for an increased place in the RAN platform and has been particularly successful in forging ties with Japanese companies in the Open RAN sector. It has alliances with Fujitsu (for the Ultrascale RF side of its portfolio) and NTT Docomo, and it has now expanded its relationship with NEC, whose next generation of Open RAN 5G radio units (RUs) will include Xilinx Versal cores. The FPGA (field programmable gate array) pioneer has three key elements to its 5G strategy: a telco accelerator card, launched in summer 2020 and specifically designed to offload demanding functions from the processor in a distributed unit a Smart NIC (network interface card), announced in April 2021 the Versal…
The US 5G market is increasingly an edge-centric one, with operators and vendors seeing that a combination of distributed cloud and advanced wireless connectivity could deliver more than the sum of its parts. This was emphasized in the past week in comments from Equinix, Verizon and American Tower. Colocation and interconnection provider Equinix has opened a 5G and Edge Technology Development Center in Dallas, Texas, equipped with a 5G Non-standalone network from Nokia, which will be used to test new services. It will provide, said the firm, a “product-ready interconnection sandbox environment from the radio network to the cloud”, and builds on a proof of concept center that was opened on the site a year ago. The upgraded center will…
Dish Network’s appointment of IBM as manager of its network functions, running either in the AWS cloud or its own edge servers, was widely reported last week and discussed in Wireless Watch. The interesting aspect, as we noted, is the focus on enterprise and private networks. We pointed out that this adoption of IBM’s slicing orchestration capabilities played into the operator’s bold approach of running much of its RAN in the public cloud, even though it will also have some functions operating on its own edge nodes. Perhaps boldest of all though is the attempt to tap growth in private networks, because this could be challenging for MNOs as big manufacturers, in particular, bypass them by building their own 5G…
When Börje Ekholm took over as CEO of Ericsson in early 2017, he quickly reversed a key strategy of his predecessor Hans Vestberg, and pulled back from targeting enterprise cellular opportunities directly. Understandably nervous of backlash from core MNO customers, he believed Ericsson should engage with enterprises only through operators. However, this caution saw Nokia leap ahead both in the number of enterprise and private networks it supplies (including some that exclude the MNO), and in perception as a B2B specialist. As the private networks landscape diversifies – enabled by shared spectrum, open architectures and network-as-a-service – there will be more and more deals, especially among large enterprises, that will not go through a traditional operator. Ekholm has been modifying…
Special Report: Open enterprise 5G In this week’s edition we look at several examples of large vendors that are driving 5G into new markets and opportunities, with a particular focus on enabling industrial and enterprise connectivity. Nokia, NEC and IBM are the suppliers in the spotlight – none of them exactly agile start-ups, but all eyeing an enlarged place in the 5G RAN and core market, by leveraging emerging open technologies such as Open RAN and by targeting new cellular business models. In Nokia’s case, of course, this is about regaining ground lost because of early 5G silicon missteps and other issues. The Finnish firm has, despite its recent difficulties, taken two important strategic decisions aimed at outwitting Ericsson and…
Five years ago this week… AT&T floated the idea that US powerlines could be used to deliver multiple Gbps, using a plastic antenna fed by NFV (network function virtualization) components in the cloud. Dubbed Project AirGig, the idea caught a lot of attention by promising a solution for cheap 5G backhaul. But Faultline was unconvinced that the unpredictability of US power – both as a utility and a highly fragmented industry – would be a safe base for AT&T to build this project. The last anyone heard of AirGig was in 2018, when AT&T teased of a 2021 launch. We won’t be holding our breath. — Canal+ is taking a 70% landgrab in media company SPI International, which serves up…
News last week of a new smart TV operating system from LG Ads confused us somewhat. LG already runs a successful smart TV OS in WebOS in an increasingly crowded market, so why is the company throwing a new competitor out into the field? We were soon to discover that things were not as they seemed. Contrary to what the name may have you believe, LG Ads is not a subsidiary of LG, but rather an independent company of which LG is a majority shareholder. Speaking to Faultline this week, LG Ads’ CMO, Allen Bush, explained how the new company came about. It started out with the name Alphonso, which LG Ads was previously known as, founded in 2013 as…
ARM brings out reference architecture for connected automotive systems UK-based chip design company ARM, whose owner Softbank is looking to sell the asset to Nvidia, has unveiled an architecture and hardware platform for emerging software-defined automotive systems. This exploits software running in edge-based systems commonly using 5G C-V2X connectivity. An initial version is available now following collaboration between ARM and US hyperscaler AWS, German auto parts maker Continental, and Volkswagen-owned software group Cariad. ARM has also partnered with US-based edge compute and cloud analytics specialists ADLink and Ampere to develop two reference hardware platforms for automotive workload exploration and testing on high end silicon, before broader commercialization. Microsoft Joins LoRa Alliance board Microsoft has joined the board of the LoRa Alliance,…
The debates about use of the 6 GHz spectrum band rage on in various parts of the world, most importantly the USA and China. The USA has allocated much of the band to unlicensed use and the WiFi Alliance has been quick to support an extension of the most recent standards, WiFi 6, to operate in this sizeable new chunk of spectrum. Meanwhile, in China, the spectrum is largely being allocated to licensed 5G use. Some regulators are taking a middle way, keeping the upper portion of the band for cellular while opening up the lower portion – adjacent to the unlicensed 5 GHz spectrum – for unlicensed technologies, most importantly the new WiFi specs, WiFi 6E. The task, for…
Technicolor’s Android TV win, at Italian operator TIM, was one of the more significant technology announcements to occur this month, because of the surprise inclusion of Broadpeak’s nanoCDN to support advanced mobile and TV experiences. Deployed as part of Technicolor’s Jade platform with WiFi 6 and Android 10 support, nanoCDN brings what is considered the industry’s most advanced multicast ABR (adaptive bit-rate) technology from Broadpeak to TIM for live and time-shift modes across TV and mobile devices. The biggest driver behind multicast ABR right now is from customers on fiber networks, and TIM is certainly not slacking in that department, most recently committing to bringing fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) coverage to 75% of the country’s grey and black patches by 2025, via…
Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon has acknowledged the major impact that the global semiconductor shortages are having on the business, and the company is drawing up a list of partnerships to spread its risks more widely in future, and help to make its supply chain more robust. Intel and GlobalFoundries are both on that list, though if rumors that they could merge come true, Qualcomm could see its supplier diversification strategy being weakened by ongoing industry consolidation. Amon told Bloomberg that he expects chip shortages to start to ease from early 2022, and that he was implementing measures in all Qualcomm’s divisions to help address the constraints – though these would only bear full fruit in late 2022. One ambition that will be…
Nokia has returned to active participation in the O-RAN Alliance, after suspending its efforts because of concerns about some Chinese contributors. The Alliance has offered several changes to its process to reassure members like Nokia, though it is unlikely that the issues of Chinese intellectual property in open platforms will be so easily settled. But for now at least, the return of Nokia is seen by Open RAN players as a welcome end to a potentially damaging interlude and a chance to focus on the real concerns of operators rather than the geopolitics. Nokia’s action was triggered by the news that three Open RAN members had been placed on the USA’s Entity List. US companies cannot trade with listed firms…
Dish Network has announced the latest addition to its long list of suppliers for its greenfield 5G network, which will be disaggregated and based on Open RAN specifications. The new partner is IBM, which will provide slicing orchestration capabilities. IBM’s automation software and services will manage all the operator’s network functions, whether they are running in the AWS cloud or elsewhere. Dish recently took the bold step of intending to run much of its RAN in the public cloud, though it will also have some functions operating on its own edge nodes. IBM Global Business Services (GBS) is to provide its Cloud Pak for Network Automation to support orchestration and automation, and enable slicing. The scope of the agreement includes…
Government-backed 5G projects are often criticized, round the world, for lack of commercial impact, but in the manufacturing and automotive sectors, the pent-up demand of large companies for new processes is driving adoption of the results of some 5G-focused R&D initiatives. One example is the UK’s 5G-Encode, which we noted, last week, has just entered its second phase. Now it emerges that the 5G-Encode consortium, which is led by Zeetta Networks, has partnered with a manufacturing research group called National Composites Centre (NCC), to install a sliceable private 5G network. This will be used by NCC customers such as Boeing and Airbus on a commercial basis. Zeetta works with an international group of partners including Siemens, Toshiba, private networks integrator…