Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
There are two ways of thinking about EV and energy storage batteries – either the inevitable momentum of lithium ion designs has already won the day, stop doubting it – or something will come along which is better and cheaper and will overnight eliminate the weaknesses of lithium ion. Investors have backed over 150 lithium ion battery factories, some with slightly different chemistries from one another – for instance using less expensive and more readily available materials for the cathode. And the owners of these factories will battle it out over the next 10 to 15 years to see who owns the market – and it will be price and reputation that win the day. This week there was another…
The US could receive nearly half of its electricity from solar power by 2050, according to a new study from the country’s Department of Energy, as part of a drive to nearly fully decarbonize its power grid in just fourteen years. The Solar Futures Study, released on Wednesday, comes as a key precursor to President Biden’s ambition to reach net zero emissions across the US electricity sector by 2035. At this point, according to the report, the US could have 40% of its power coming from solar resources, rising to 44% by the middle of the century. “The study illuminates the fact that solar, our cheapest and fastest-growing source of clean energy, could produce enough electricity to power all of…
There have been many fatalistic claims that global warming will break the grid, as more and more people buy air conditioning – but few studies have seriously tried to put a value in TWh on the size of the problem In this report from Rethink Energy, entitled “Warming and Cooling – double whammy for the grid” we have tried to put genuine figures which show that as more cooling is installed and home heat gets decarbonized, global utilities will need to lay on more than 1,500 TWh in fresh power resources – collectively about the same amount of electricity that India supplies to its 1 billion citizens. These are twin problems that must be solved in the same time frame…
Samsung has unveiled a huge investment plan that will see KRW140 trillion ($205bn) going into next generation products, including 5G, 6G, chip design and production, and AI, over just three years. It said it aims to “lead the post-Covid industrial restructuring” in South Korea, where 75% of the spending will be focused, and where it will create tens of thousands of jobs. It said it aimed to boost its R&D capabilities in AI, robotics, supercomputers, displays, devices and communications networking to bolster its role in the global hi-tech ecosystem, especially in chips and 5G/6G – it sees these technologies as the most critical to its future. “As the 4th industrial revolution is accelerating due to network technology innovation such as…
Adtran and Adva, two broadband equipment suppliers hailing from opposite sides of the North Atlantic Ocean, are merging to create a fiber-focused network powerhouse. In a deal directly influenced by pandemic Internet usage trends, it will bring German firm Adva within touching distance of unicorn status at an equity valuation of $934m, in a union with US-based Adtran that creates annual cost synergies of $52m. It promises an “unprecedented investment cycle in fiber connectivity” across the US and European markets, where the two companies can more effectively – as one giant unit – better apply pressure on regulators and policymakers. Driven by demand for last-mile fiber access and middle-mile transport, the respective product portfolios are thought to be highly complementary.…
MNOs may have failed to land some of the major private industrial 5G contracts so far, especially in Germany, but that is just the tip of the enterprise wireless iceberg. There is still time to make a major impact, but MNOs need to determine their best strategy, taking account of their strengths and target market, which will vary between regions and sectors. It is true the private cellular field is now several years old, with roots in 4G, but most of the early adopters were confined to sectors such as mining, emergency services and military, where the benefits were particularly compelling in environments where wired connections were not an option and WiFi was not usually capable of providing the required…
Indian conglomerate Reliance Industries (RIL) is said to be close to making a bid, worth about $5.7bn, for T-Mobile Netherlands. If successful, buying the unit would give RIL’s disruptive mobile and digital services arm, Reliance Jio, its first foothold in Europe. This could send shivers down some MNO spines in the region. Of course, The Netherlands is a small market and a very different one from India, so it would be unlikely that Jio could replicate the approach or the success it has had in its home country. However, this could be just a first step towards building a larger European base and seeking to harness open architectures, digital services and elastic pricing to challenge the established players. Operating companies…
Some of the doubts about Open RAN as a technology that will be deployable in the short term for large-scale networks relate to advanced use cases. Brian Daly, head of core network and regulatory standards at AT&T, told the recent Big 5G Event that Open RAN would be introduced only gradually because “more work needs to be done to ensure O-RAN can meet our complex feature set”. “You don’t just go ‘full open’,” he said, though AT&T intends to introduce the technology in some rural roll-outs later this year or in early 2022. However, even in those relatively undemanding rural networks, operators meet a different challenge with Open RAN – not its support for very advanced implementations, but for legacy…
Intel dominates early Open RAN and vRAN roll-outs thanks to its FlexRAN reference architecture, which has been part of a huge majority of operator trials and vendor developments so far. Open RAN stakeholders are open about their concerns that Intel could become a default monopoly in the processor layer, repeating its success in the ‘open’ PC platform, but so far they have had few other choices in the macro base station. Qualcomm is working on specialized chips for radio units and distributed units and the latter could challenge Intel (or coexist with x86) depending on the scenario. Marvell has coprocessors to handle intensive tasks offloaded from the CPU in a distributed unit. Start-ups like Picocom are focused mainly on small…
Not all greenfield enterprise mobile networks are 5G-based, as UK cellular system integrator Vilicom has shown in deploying a private LTE network for an offshore wind farm in Scotland. The network features Open RAN over a platform supplied by Texas-based Mavenir, billed as the first such combination in the UK. The network, incorporating commoditized radio hardware that can come from any vendor, provides LTE connectivity for sea vessels and workers within the boundaries of the Moray East offshore wind farm project, just off Scotland’s east coast. This is a major sustainable energy project for the UK projected to deliver around 40% of Scotland’s electricity, or enough for 950,000 homes, when fully operational as scheduled for some time in 2022. As…
Vendors like Cisco and Juniper have important positions in the operators’ transport and data center networks but have been firmly excluded from the RAN, with the exception of WiFi, and a few short-lived base station acquisitions by Cisco (Navini, Ubiquisys …). But the RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC), the most novel element of the Open RAN architecture, gives them – and others, including operators like Rakuten – an entry point to the lucrative RAN market. The RIC provides an open platform for non-real time management and orchestration tasks, but also abstracts near-real time control functions that were typically embedded in the equipment itself, or in a tightly integrated SON (self-optimizing network) product. With the RIC, the idea is that xApps from…
Nokia sent shockwaves through the Open RAN community last week when it said it had suspended its work with the O-RAN Alliance, to which it is a major contributor, because three Chinese Alliance members have been placed on the USA’s entity list. As Huawei well knows, this list is made up of companies that the US Department of Commerce (DoC) has been advised pose security threats. In the current geopolitical context, the list has grown long and heavily China-centric. US companies can only trade with entity list members if they secure a special licence, which have reportedly been very difficult to obtain in the past year. The O-RAN members that have been added to the list – Kindroid, Pythium, and…
It’s been an eventful summer for the fledgling Open RAN industry. As is to be expected with any new platform and associated ecosystem, there are uncertainties, sudden changes in the market, over-expectation combined with exciting breakthroughs. All this is made worse, in this case, by the fact that Open RAN has been hijacked as part of the geopolitical ‘5G race’ between the USA and China, and the attempt by several countries to build a homegrown 5G industry while sidelining Chinese technology. The political angle is rarely entirely missing from development of critical infrastructure – there were plenty of international politics at work behind the original definitions of GSM, for instance, and the later emergence of US-influenced CDMA. But Open RAN…
A man in a bar is telling a joke, and he stops and asks “What do you think is the secret to telling a joke?” He pauses waiting for the audience to respond. Just as someone finally begins to offer an answer, he talks over them and says “Timing.” They say “Pardon,” because he spoke over them, he pauses and just as they start to speak again he says once again “Timing.” The joke of course is that he has none – timing that is, and this reminds us of Rivian’s IPO – “What is the secret of a good clean energy IPO?” Naturally, it’s timing. It would have been great for Rivian to go public in January or February…
The world’s largest tire maker, Bridgestone, has tapped Swedish start-up Einride as part of a new collaboration that aims to accelerate the age of autonomous electric trucking. Together the company aims to convert the bulk of Bridgestone’s own fleet of trucks to electric, although the potential for fully Autonomous Electric Transport (AET) and an intelligent freight mobility has much broader implications. The deal itself, signed on August 12th, will see Einride adopt Bridgestone’s smart-sensing tires for its electrified and autonomous Class 8 vehicles. This aims to enhance both the safety and efficiency of these trucks through the development of new onboard systems, while providing a platform for Bridgestone to electrify its own fleet by 2025. Bridgestone aims to deploy the…
Population: 109 million (+0.87% vs 2019) GDP per Capita: $3,330 (-4.45% vs 2019) Debt to GDP: 53.5% (+13.9% vs 2019) There are two ways of looking at the Philippines’ Nationally Determined Contribution to IPCC targets – firstly that it has a plan to rid itself of 75% of its emissions, in line with IPCC targets, which is great, or secondly that all but 2% of that progress is contingent upon international debt arriving to help, which means a low level of genuine commitment. Like most developing nations it plans peak emissions by 2030, which is code for “If you don’t help us with this, we will keep growing emissions until 2030.” In truth there is very little else that a…
Adtran and Adva, two broadband equipment suppliers hailing from opposite sides of the North Atlantic Ocean, are merging to create a fiber-focused network powerhouse. For us, the deal all-but answers a question we penned in a headline last year – ‘Will G.fast be a casualty of Covid-19?’ In a deal directly influenced by pandemic internet usage trends, it will bring German firm Adva within touching distance of unicorn status at an equity valuation of $934 million, in a union with US-based Adtran that creates annual cost synergies of $52 million. It promises an “unprecedented investment cycle in fiber connectivity” across the US and European markets, where the two companies can more effectively – as one giant unit – better apply…
As promised, the CDN Alliance has officially opened its doors to members this week, as a new non-profit industry organization hoping to be the guiding beacon for all things CDN. The phrase ‘all mouth, no trousers’ often springs to mind when we talk about technology alliances – so what’s different this time around, and besides, does the world really need another internet-based mouthpiece? It is inherently difficult to criticize a group that is founded with nothing but good intentions, yet that is exactly what happened when news first emerged of the CDN Alliance’s impending arrival towards the end of July. These kneejerk reactions were most evident among professionals from technology vendors connected with content delivery networks, interpreting the CDN Alliance’s…
Provinces across China still have plans to develop over 100 GW of coal-fired power generation capacity, according to a new report from Greenpeace. Despite an 80% decline in new approvals in the first half of the year, local planning agencies approved 24 new coal-fired power plants with a total capacity of 5.2 GW. China has previously stated that it does not plan to start cutting coal consumption until 2026. The total 104.8 GW figure includes plants that have been approved and gone into construction as well as those still at the planning stage. It remains uncertain how many will be completed. The German Government has signed a deal with Namibia that aims to import swathes of low-cost green hydrogen from…
Siemens Energy will receive $117 million from Germany’s Science Ministry towards its flagship H2Mare project, which aims to develop an offshore wind turbine with an integrated electrolyzer for the production of green hydrogen. The company aims to produce a full-scale demonstrator of the system in 2025 or 2026, based on its 14 MW turbine unit. The installation of the world’s largest floating offshore wind farm to date has been completed. The 48 MW Kincardine offshore wind project will now operate approximately 15 kilometers off the southeast coast of Aberdeenshire, at water depths of up to 80meters, and is expected to generate up to 218 GWh of clean electricity a year. The project is being developed by Kincardine Offshore Wind, a…