Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
A few weeks ago, we pointed out that Vodafone UK, while being a major champion of Open RAN, was staying conservative in the core, selecting Ericsson as its 5G core network supplier. Now its UK rival, Virgin Media O2, also an Open RAN triallist, has also announced that its 5G core will be supplied by Ericsson. This highlights how, for all the UK government’s efforts to drive 5G supply chain diversification in the wake of the ban on Huawei, the ability to achieve this in the next wave of 5G roll-outs and upgrades will be limited. The point was further reinforced when Telefónica Spain announced that the radio equipment for its forthcoming 5G Standalone network would be supplied by Ericsson…
Like smart buildings, the smart city concept is constantly evolving and according to cynics never materializing. It is a moving target and subject to changing fashions and the whims of architects, such that some past efforts that aimed for an urban utopia ended up more like dystopia, thinking of some new city zones erected during the 1960s in many European countries for example. Yet there have been some widely accepted successes, such as Tapiola in Finland, which has attracted a healthy tourist trade. There is a distinction between essentially new towns or cities and existing ones retrofitted for smartness. The modern concept of the new town dates back a full century to Welwyn Garden City in the UK, constructed under…
We have analyzed many times how critical it will be for operators to diversify their revenues if they are to achieve positive return on investment from 5G. A few operators will succeed in delivering revenue growth and stable profits by extending the conventional consumer-centric mobile broadband business model, but those will mainly be working in unsaturated markets, or able to consolidate in order to increase market share and economies of scale. For the rest, new revenue streams will be essential, and most of these will come from enterprise and industrial services. They might be focused on a particular sector, such as connected vehicles; or they might support a wide variety of private or semi-private networks for different enterprises; or some…
Ireland’s Mainstream Renewable Power has announced plans to develop a 1 GW hybrid energy platform in Chile. The Nazca Renovables platform consists of three wind farms and three solar plants, all divided into three portfolios. The first of these, Humboldt, will supply 255 MW of green energy through the Tata Inti solar farm and Entre Ríos wind farm, with construction starting next year. PNE has sold the rights to three wind farms totaling up to 220 MW in Romania. The buyer, price, and specific project remain undisclosed. OSMI Australia has opened a public comment period for the planning application for the up to 200 MW Delburn wind farm in Victoria, Australia. The period for formal public comment is open until…
The world’s oil producing nations have finally agreed upon a plan that will continue a controlled reopening of the global supply through to the end of 2022. Adjustments have been made to resolve complaints from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) that it was be disproportionately punished through the supply cuts that were enforced at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. The tense negotiations surrounding the deal, however, are something that will only become more common as falling demand threatens to throw the OPEC cartel into crisis. The deal was agreed by OPEC ministers on Sunday, in a bid to cool off the global prices for oil. Prices have climbed to their highest since October 2018 as economies – and oil…
After a false start, it has finally happened – Kaltura has gone public. The US video software developer has listed on Nasdaq, instigating celebrations from an army of ‘Kalturians’ toasting the company’s meteoric rise from humble beginnings. We thought a fitting tribute to Kaltura’s newly acquired public status would be a little trip down memory lane – starting back in 2012 when Faultline heard the name Kaltura for the first time, which unfortunately wasn’t on good terms. Back then, in the early days of OVPs, companies would use Kaltura as a negative example of a company when talking up their own products, along the lines of “our product does many things, not just this one thing like Kaltura.” Kaltura’s co-founder…
European linear standards consortiums have a fatal habit of moving too slowly when it comes to targeted advertising. The opportunity for sizable returns is closing fast as ad revenue jumps ship to more trusted, digital formats, and yet each time new specifications are announced or fleshed out, it seems as though enacting addressable advertising over linear is still out of reach. This week, the HbbTV Association has published the second phase of its Targeted Advertising (TA) standard, enabling the substitution of broadcast adverts on HbbTV-enabled TV sets that are connected to a set top. This second phase of specifications allows broadcaster apps to use the HbbTV-TA API to schedule precise transitions from HDMI set top feeds to targeted ads and…
European and Chinese operators top 5G enterprise connectivity league Deutsche Telekom, China Unicom, Orange, China Mobile and Vodafone are the top five operators, in that order, for enabling enterprise 5G connectivity. These five are “clear leaders in this space”, according to ABI Research, and lead by some distance a second ‘mainstream’ group that includes US-based AT&T and Verizon, European Tier 1 players Telefónica, Telia and BT, along with Singapore-based Singtel. A third group of nine ‘follower’ telcos has also been identified for enterprise 5G, that is KT, KDDI, LGU+, NTT Docomo, STC, Etisalat, Bharti Airtel, Telstraa nd Softbank. Deutsche Telekom is cited as overall leader for “the most diversified product portfolio”, with more flexible deployment models and pricing. Verizon and…
Last week, our sister service Faultline, which provides weekly analysis of digital video issues, ran an article on the main candidates to be standard video codecs. The issue of these codecs is highly relevant to mobile operators these days, since so many people watch significant amounts of video over cellular networks. The article, which focused on VVC (Versatile Video Codec), triggered a discussion about the state of codecs in China, given the Chinese investment in VVC technology (including from Alibaba, Kuaishou and Hikvision). This snowballed into a broader investigation into the wealth of alternative video codec options used in the largest single market in the world – one which is seldom mentioned in western codec discussions. In western markets, the…
One of the key issues surrounding Open RAN is how far Chinese technology and intellectual property can be excluded from it, if that becomes necessary to satisfy US regulations, given that a significant provider of seed code was China Mobile, and one of the biggest O-RAN plugfests to date was held in Beijing last year. The issue took on a new profile when the Biden administration added 43 new companies to the USA’s ‘entity list’ (US firms can only trade with listed companies if they gain a special licence, and these are not easy to secure). Of the new additions, 23 were Chinese, and one is a member of the O-RAN Alliance. This company is Kindroid, apparently a subsidiary of…
We’ve had the European ‘Gang of Five’ – five large telcos that signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) earlier this year, to support Open RAN deployments and ecosystem (those telcos were Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica, TIM and Vodafone). Now five Middle Eastern operators have followed suit with their own Open RAN MoU. The signatories are Etisalat, stc, Zain, Mobily and du, which mainly operate in the Gulf states. They have committed to support and deploy Open RAN in their future roll-outs, though they were cautious in their words about supply chain diversification. For some Open RAN supporters, especially those from governments that see an opportunity to build a local industry, a diverse supply chain is the main attraction. But for…
The UK incumbent telco, BT, has not been the most vociferous of the UK giants about key trends such as Open RAN, or even 5G, but it has been in the forefront of many developments. While not part of the ‘Gang of Five’ European operators that is supporting Open RAN, it did work with the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) to set up that open networking group’s first TIP Ecosystem Acceleration Center (TEAC) to incubate promising start-ups in the field. Meanwhile, its mobile arm, EE, has achieved the highest 5G coverage in the UK so far, and while the telco’s roadmap to implement a fully cloud-native core for 5G Standalone is less publicly detailed and aggressive than Three UK’s, BT has…
As highlighted in our opening article this week, Ericsson will be weighing up two big numbers and working out how, on balance, they affect its ongoing recovery and its position in the 5G market. One of those figures is a hefty $8.3bn, Ericsson’s largest ever single contract, which was awarded this month by Verizon for the next five-year phase of the US operator’s national 5G roll-out. The other figure is less definite, but relates to the amount of revenue Ericsson stands to lose from a sharp decline (possibly to zero) in new networks contracts from China. How far large deals like Verizon’s can offset the loss of presence in the world’s biggest 5G market will be a critical question for…
Open RAN, and particularly the specifications set by the O-RAN Alliance, have taken an important role in the USA’s bid to become a 5G superpower, building its own industry while reducing the influence of China’s vendors. There was an initial burst of enthusiasm during the Trump administration, which was often highly unrealistic about how long it would take for a brand new architecture and ecosystem to become fully commercially ready. But now, more practical plans and objectives are being set – even if it is Dish, the new entrant, that is the Open RAN poster child, rather than the big telcos. AT&T has contributed significantly to O-RAN and other open platforms but so far, its shake-up of its supply chain…
Shared, wholesale and neutral host models can significant reduce the total cost of ownership of a mobile network, and simplify deployment. This is urgently needed to improve availability of high quality cellular connectivity for enterprises and industrial environments, which will have rising needs for 5G as they undergo process transformations and introduce new use cases that require very high reliability, deep indoor penetration, or links for huge numbers of sensors and devices. Some neutral host models are starting to emerge to enable the roll-out of enterprise, including private, networks, filling gaps where a single-operator business case would not add up, or where the established mobile operator was not eager to target the fragmented world of enterprise networks. Some of these…
If anything epitomises the rollercoaster that is 5G deployment right now, it is the week Ericsson just had. Within days, the company had announced its biggest ever contract, a whopping $8.3bn deal with Verizon; but warned about falling Chinese market share, with some analysts believing this could fall to virtually zero in the coming few years (see item below). So, on the one hand we see 5G deployments by major operators being expanded and accelerated, partly driven by the pandemic, which will spark government and enterprise recovery plans that are 5G-centric, and which has, of course, led to permanent shifts in work and leisure habits that rely on connectivity. On the other, we see disruptions to the supply chain, also…
The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia are close to an agreement that will ease the stalemate at the heart of the OPEC+ cartel. The UAE is reportedly going to receive a higher production baseline within the supply curbs, having claimed that those enforced by OPEC did not consider the country’s increase in production capacity after October 2018, the date from which the levels were set. In return, the UAE will now agree to supply curbs being extended through to the end of 2022, from a previous deadline of April 2022. Final details over the exact level of the baseline have not yet been finalized and will have to be signed off by all other members of OPEC+, including Russia.…
The concept of earning money on the toilet is an inevitable thought for nearly all employees as they spend time defecating at work. The idea of creating – or retaining value – while doing this, however, is normally far from this thought process. That is until a professor at South Korea’s Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) developed a toilet that is capable of processing on-site human waste to generate electricity, allowing its users to profit from doing so. The BeeVi toilet is equipped with a vacuum pump that sends human waste into an underground tank where microorganisms convert it into methane. This gas can then be used as a source of energy for gas stoves, hot water…
We just can’t help it but when we heard this week that GE was planning to be net zero including scope three emissions, from the use of its products, we were a little bit cynical. It has upgraded its 2030 plan to be zero carbon for scope 1 and 2 emissions, to one where by 2050 it will have to include the use of its products in its zero emissions strategy. So just what does GE think will happen to its electricity generating gas turbines and to its aircraft engines, that will make them zero emissions, bearing in mind the fact that it has an installed base of over 7,000 gas turbines, and 37,700 commercial aircraft engines, to worry about?…
Population 32.7 million (2020) (+2.3% vs 2019) GDP per Capita: $ 10,270 (-11.1% vs 2019) Debt to GDP: 62.2% (+8.8% vs 2019) As in many Islamic nations, Malaysia is dominated by a political party based around race and religion, and the United Malays National Organization (Umno) speaks mostly for the 61% of the country that are Muslim. After 60 years of Umno rule, a coalition government took control, in 2018 called the Pakatan Harapan (PH), on the back of Umno corruption scandals. However two years later the new government’s over-vigorous lockdowns led to the old Umno government being placed in charge once more – not so much through fresh elections, but mostly through party desertions and a change of heart…