Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Everyone likes a good deal, and Amazon is no exception. After playing a year-long waiting game over the purchase of Indian ad-supported OTT platform MX Player, the tech giant is reportedly on the verge of buying some of its key assets—notably the content library—for less than $100 million. With this move, Amazon takes advantage of a tumultuous Indian streaming industry to gain a bigger foothold in the country by growing its roots outside of India’s largest urban hubs. In addition to is Prime Video subscription service, Amazon has since 2021 operated a free, ad-supported platform called miniTV exclusively in India, available in the country’s Amazon shopping app and browsers. Although details are sparse, and the deal is not completed, the…
You wouldn’t know it from the predictable headlines covering Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC)—brainwashed by the uninspiring privacy-focused Apple Intelligence updates—but it was actually Apple’s TV business line which kicked off proceedings in Cupertino at the start of this week. “Let’s talk about Apple TV+,” came CEO Tim Cook’s opening gambit. Cast aside from Cook’s WWDC presentation were gory details including a small but significant update that Apple’s HLS now supports the Common Media Client Data (CMCD) standard. As defined by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA)’s Wave project, CMCD enables video players to send information to CDNs with each object request – allowing CDNs to support quality of service (QoS) monitoring and delivery optimization. CMCD was popularized after its unveiling…
LONGi and Trina Solar have reduced their solar manufacturing efforts in South East Asia – with LONGi’s module factory in Malaysia suspending operations earlier this month, while Trina halted module production at its Thailand facility in late May, with cell production halting in mid-June. This is happening in the context of the end of the US AD/CVD tariff moratorium, the opening of a second, likely more harsh Department of Commerce investigation, and the immense overcapacity in the mainland China solar industry. The production capacity built in South-East Asia has mostly been built in the past few years to dodge US tariffs, and now that basis for its existence is called into question. Both companies have stated that they will ‘adjust…
M&A, IP, Patents US optical telecoms and cloud software provider DZS will acquire NetComm Wirelesswhich provides services to 50 communications service providers and enterprise customers in the United States, Canada, Latin America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. Financials Deutsche Telekomhas increased its stake in T-Mobile through buying shares a discounted price which were held by SoftBank. The deal was agreed in 2020 and represents around 0.6% of the T-Mobile shares, lifting Deutsche Telekom’s stake in the operator to about 56.7%. 5G RAN Holland’s KPN is moving its infrastructure assets into a joint venture with pension fund ABP. The operator will own 51% of the entity which also includes assets from other entities. In total the towerco will own 3,800 towers…
Telecom Italia’s (TIM) radical restructuring strategy is jumping through all the right hoops. Success in this project would turn an unwieldy and unprofitable operator into a streamlined business, ready to compete in the tough Italian market and abroad. Investors are yet to be convinced of TIM’s plans, but they have been proven wrong before. The European Commission (EC) has unconditionally approved KKR’s acquisition of TIM’s fixed-line assets, called NetCo, for up to €22 billion. If successful, the sale will pay off €7.5 billion of TIM’s $26.6 billion debt pile by the end of the year. TIM desperately needs the cash, and the opportunity to focus its efforts on growing its other units – especially the profitable Brazilian segment. But while…
The various threads are coming together to establish High Altitude Platform Station (HAPS) as a prominent layer of future wireless services. This is due in part to a Japanese consortium led by Docomo and Space Compass Corporation that is investing $100 million in AALTO HAPS, a subsidiary of Europe’s Airbus. Japan has picked up the baton for HAPS after a checkered history that has involved several high-profile failures, such as Google’s Project Loon. The move is significant in backing HAPS for more than just relatively niche monitoring applications, or as a fill-in to provide mobile connectivity temporarily, for major remote engineering projects for example. The Japanese project is intent on deploying HAPS for broadband services and Direct to Device (D2D)…
The latest publication from the Wireless Broadband Alliance offers a heap of advice to public WiFi providers on how to best provide connectivity for end-users. The WiFi Alliance’s Passpoint specification makes a prominent appearance, of course, but for operators, the moments that public cellular networks interact with these public WiFi ones require a lot of thought. To use a clunky metaphor, the current dynamic of public cellular, private cellular, public WiFi, and private WiFi, are soap bubbles being forced up against each other in a tub. At some point soon, without any audible pop, those bubbles are going to merge into one. In a very short span of time, from a user perspective, this convergence trend will see users able…
Interest is rising in transmission at THz frequencies, an order of magnitude or more above mmWave, for a variety of potential use cases – with R&D focused on overcoming power dissipation and reliability issues. The better these challenges can be addressed, the greater the range of possible use cases. These higher frequencies are attractive for the same reasons as mmWave, but even more so. The main draw is the huge amount bandwidth available following in principle from the bigger numbers and therefore wider spectral bands involved, and also more accurate location detection. The latter follows from the shorter wavelengths, which equates roughly to the position sensing accuracy possible. In fact, frequencies defined as lying in the THz range are between…
Verizon has quietly emerged from the shadow of rival AT&T’s monumental $14 billion Open RAN deal with Ericsson. The magnitude of the deal took Verizon aback, as it did many observers, and also unusual in that it did not include Samsung, Verizon’s own preferred partner for Open RAN and vRAN. Not wishing to be seen as spiteful about the deal, Verizon has been calmly articulating its long-standing argument that operators are best off deploying vRAN across their 5G network first. Since this provides a sound foundation for Open RAN for when that technology is mature enough to deliver on its promise of multivendor choice and innovation. vRAN can be regarded as one of a triumvirate of technologies that can transform…
Connected TV (CTV) advertising is such a tangled mess that vendors must make slightly perverted claims about their utility if they are going to promise any relief. Even if an advertiser has the most cutting-edge marketplaces, ID graphs, attribution vendors, and the most seamless APIs tying them all together, there will still be holes in a CTV campaign. We were, therefore, unsurprised to find that one supply-side platform’s (SSP) ‘futureproof’ update is just some minor window dressing. Hoping to stay on top of the increasingly chaotic cadence of video advertising, OpenX has minorly upgraded its ‘TV by OpenX’ CTV pool in the US, by curating some off-the-shelf packages of premium inventory for buyers. In short, this streamlines the process of…
In a surprising twist, CommScope has won the auction for the cable assets of Casa Systems for $45.1 million, beating Canadian rival Vecima’s top bid of $44.95 million and more than doubling the opening bid. We say surprising, because not so long ago, it was a given that Vecima would be the winner—per an agreement with Casa that saw Vecima place a stalking horse initial bid of $20 million, fully expecting to come out the victor at the end. Harmonic was the third bidder at the auction which took place last week. Bids rose in small increments throughout the day and CommScope eventually prevailed. With this win, CommScope enlarges its cable portfolio with assets that include fiber nodes, Axyom virtual…
With a waitlist 50,000 strong, Showrunner has staked a claim as the world’s first credible user-driven, AI-generated streaming platform. The prospect of democratizing not just content creation, but TV production at a professional level—effectively allowing users to live inside an infinite loop of their own dreams—has sent the world bananas. Sora who? Developed by Fable Studio, Showrunner will bring your TV ideas to life using the power of generative AI. With just a few text prompts, users can write the script and screen the characters for their very own animated TV series. Thanks to Showrunner, the vacuous hole that envelops TV lovers—as the credits roll down the screen for a final time—could finally have a salve. Picture creating your own…
Russia and Uzbekistan have signed an agreement to build a six-unit small modular reactor (SMR) nuclear power plant in the Jizzakh region. Construction, led by Rosatom, is set to start this summer. Vestas has received an 84 MW order from BE Energy GmbH, a subsidiary of Burgenland Energie AG, to repower a part of the Neusiedl-Weiden wind energy project in Austria. Vestas will deliver 14 V150-6.0 MW wind turbines, and the order includes supply, delivery, and commissioning of the turbines. Vestas has received a 124 MW order for a wind energy project in Telsiai in Lithuania. Vestas will deliver 20 V162-6.2 MW wind turbines, and the order includes supply, delivery, and commissioning of the turbines. The order was placed by…
For the past year or so we’ve ignored most proposals for renewable energy protectionism coming out of the EU, because we regarded them as not credible. To take solar power as an example all measures have been feeble one way or another, like leaving Uyghur sanctions enforcement up to member states, with too many words and too little money stumped up. Full reshoring of solar would need a few tens of billions of dollars of state backing. On May 27th the European Council adopted the Net-Zero Industry Act (NZIA), which requires us to comment on it – but from what we can see, nothing has changed. The Act features targets of manufacturing production capacity equal to 40% of demand by…
Mexico’s President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), who stamped out Mexican green energy development a few years ago, will be replaced by Claudia Sheinbaum, a former climate scientist who won 60% of the vote in the election held earlier this week. But there’s a catch – AMLO and Sheinbaum are from the same party, Morena, and AMLO is only leaving office because of term limits. The leaves us with the question – can the Mexican green energy transition get anywhere under Sheinbaum, within the two constraints of maintaining the old state-owned fossil fuel monopoly companies Pemex and Federal Electricity Commission (CFE), while distrusting and limiting Western finance? To explain both – the Morena party is ‘old left’ and wants to…
M&A, IP, Patents US investment firm KKR and Singaporean operator SingTel are in the lead to buy a 20% share, worth $1 billion, in one of Asia’s biggest data centre providers, ST Telemedia Global Data Centres, according to Reuters. CommScope won the bidding war to buy Casa Systems’ Cable Business assets for $45.1 million. The winning bid was more than double the $20 million offer made in early April by Canadian software company Vecima Networks. The European Commission has given TIM “unconditional approval” for the sale of its NetCo fixed access network division to private equity firm KKR for up to €22 billion. Financials Ericsson has come to the end of a four-year anti-corruption monitoring program. This was part of an anti-corruption agreement with the…
The announcement of China’s $47.5 billion third round of state funding for semiconductor research seemed well timed, coming just after South Korea’s President Yoon Suk Yeol had declared that the field had degenerated into all-out warfare. Similar sentiments have been expressed about 5G and to some extent cutting edge technology generally, in the wake of the relatively recent geopolitical schism into two broadly opposed camps, along with various major countries or groups seeking to bolster their own R&D in fields deemed critical. Semiconductor fabrication has emerged, over the last decade especially, as a major focal point for competition, as the field has narrowed at the top to just a few major foundries. These are (most notably) South Korea’s TSMC with…
Equipment decommissioning is a relatively new angle in the industry’s sustainability journey. The pitch is simple, but managing the process is a lot to ask of operators that claim to be up against it. As such, a helping hand is needed, and for TXO, a UK firm, it appears to be a great commercial opportunity – for both sides of the equation. At a roundtable event, ahead of the launch of TXO’s network decommissioning report, the firm outlined the opportunity for network operators – in cost savings, new revenue opportunities, and environmental benefits. For context, David Evans, TXO’s Head of Asset Recovery and Services, said 83% of operators (both fixed-line and wireless) are currently decommissioning some part of their network.…
We last checked in with the Broadband Forum in May, when it published ‘major’ enhancements that it said would improve convergence between fixed and 5G networks. These Phase 18.1 documents, developed by the Wireless-Wireline Convergence (WWC) work area, provide for network slicing opportunities. A few weeks later, the BBF celebrated the 20-year anniversary of its TR-069 device management standard – which has served as the basis for the newer TR-369 User Services Platform (USP) project. TR-069 standardized the ways that ISPs could manage CPE, intending to solve the problem of how to get this equipment up and running – to cut down on truck-roll costs. TR-369 aims to add more sophisticated network management capabilities, which include support for multiple controllers,…
Nvidia launched a media blitz at the Computex trade show in Taiwan, unveiling a slew of new AI-based services and tools. These run the gamut from customer-service bots all the way through to manufacturing robots, with the underlying hardware not getting much in the way of limelight. Here, Nvidia is laying out the industry’s roadmap, as the de facto leader – but there is an awful lot of hype at play. Quietly, Nvidia has also received FCC clearance to test a 5G Standalone private network, at its Santa Clara headquarters. The goal, for the 3.7 GHz to 3.8 GHz network, is to see how well Nvidia’s hardware-accelerated Open RAN offerings coexist with offerings from other vendors. The consumer graphics cards,…