Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
There was one final workshop at last week’s Picture Coding Symposium 2021 that Faultline could not resist dipping into. After all, who can ignore what Netflix has to say about the future of video compression – at such a critical juncture in streaming history. Kyle Swanson, an encoding engineer at Netflix, posed a simple yet strange question to attendees of such a highly technical industry event – is improving video compression still relevant? He produced a satellite image of the sun rising over the earth, showing quite a bit of banding artifacts, something you wouldn’t see with the naked eye but are common encoding artifacts observed on a daily basis by the Netflix encoding team when looking at compressed videos.…
DVB, Europe’s broadcast industry body, has dreamt about 8K video every night since the Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard was finalized in July 2020. A year later, that dream isn’t quite a reality, but at least the DVB Project has made progress this week after approving three video codec candidates to spearhead its ambitious 8K and 4K roadmaps. AOMedia’s AV1 and China’s AVS3 join MPEG’s VVC as DVB’s three choices with which it will work to develop draft specifications and explore intellectual property rights policies. However, there is no mention of EVC (essential video coding) nor LCEVC (low-complexity video enhancement codec) which have both previously been mentioned as being on DVB’s radar. Has the open standards organization given up on…
Voice AI advertising start-up Instreamatic is in the process of taking an enormous leap of faith from audio into video, after the US company spent pretty much the entirety of the pandemic perfecting its foray from ears to eyeballs. In that time, none other than Google has taken an interest in Instreamatic, joining in the company’s April 2021 Series A funding round, in a move that is impossible to interpret as anything other than a precursor to something much bigger (acquisition or otherwise), given Instreamatic’s integration with Google Ads. Now, we will be the first to admit that there were reservations about Instreamatic making this transition from audio to video at all from the product side, let alone lining up…
South Korea to open up spectrum for non-telcos for first time For the first time, South Korea will make 5G spectrum available to enterprise providers and non-telcos. The three MNOs – SK Telecom, KT and LG Uplus – have spectrum in the 3.5 GHz and 28 GHz bands. Now, the regulator will make an additional 600 MHz in the 28 GHz band available, as well as 100 MHz of spectrum in the 4.7 GHz band. The aim is to encourage private networks or other alternative deployment models, which could accelerate the adoption of 5G by enterprises and intensify 5G socio-economic impact. If the MNOs get most of the spectrum, they will have greater capacity and speed with which to support…
Orange has unveiled its vision of “the network of the future”, applying to the French regulator, ARCEP, for permission to trial an experimental cloud-based network that would provide “ambient connectivity”. The operator wants to run the two-year trial, which it calls Project Pikeo, initially in Lannion, Brittany, where it has a major R&D center. It needs ARCEP approval because it will sign up real business and consumer customers to use the network. It says the system will be “Europe’s first 5G standalone (SA) end-to-end network operating in a cloud-native mode,” according to group CTIO Michaël Trabbia. “This is an experimental network, but it is a network with real users. The technology is maturing fast but it is still not carrier-grade.”…
To coincide with last week’s Mobile World Congress, Deutsche Telekom announced that its ‘O-RAN Town’ real world testbed, first promised late last year, had gone live near the city of Neubrandenburg. When O-RAN Town was first unveiled, Nokia was a supplier, but it did not appear in the list of vendors set out by the German telco last week. Instead, it said it is running RAN virtual network functions from Mavenir on Dell or Supermicro servers and Intel’s FlexRAN architecture, with radios from Fujitsu and NEC. That follows in the pattern set by other early-stage Open RAN deployers in Europe, such as Telecom Italia, which have tended to use US and Japanese technology despite the goal of fostering a European…
Malaysia’s plan for a wholesale-only 5G network has had several stops and starts in recent years, but is now full steam ahead. The government-backed entity that will manage the network, Digital Nasional, has awarded Ericsson a contract worth MYR11bn (US$2.6bn) to supply the infrastructure. That will represent a big blow for Huawei, which was widely expected to win at least some of the big equipment and build-out deal. It is particularly surprising that, according to Nikkei Asia, part of the reason for Ericsson’s win was attractive vendor financing – often a competitive edge for Huawei, with its hefty financial underwriting from Chinese banks. Digital Nasional was quoted by Nikkei as saying: “Ericsson has undertaken to arrange to finance for the…
Qualcomm’s CEO Cristiano Amon may not have been in Barcelona in person to deliver his keynote speech to Mobile World Congress (MWC), but he created a splash anyway, talking about the “decade of opportunity” that now awaits in 5G, to justify all the investment that vendors and operators have put in so far. The chip company provided more details on its Open RAN product plans, and on its growing millimeter wave portfolio, while the same week saw it partner with integrator Capgemini (CGS) on a project focused on private networks. Amon said during his keynote: “We now stand at a decade of opportunity for us all. We’ve watched industries and enterprises accelerate their digital transformation efforts, with an ever-increasing number…
It is becoming hard to separate competition from cooperation in the increasingly crowded field for platforms that combine 5G and AI functions. Nvidia initially launched its converged 5G/AI system to run with x86-based servers, but has now added chips based on the ARM architecture. This clears the way for Nvidia to develop its own integrated package, if competition regulators approve its proposed acquisition of ARM. If Nvidia succeeds in this quest, it will gain control of the intellectual property that dominates processors in smartphones, along with many other devices and embedded systems, where low power and heat consumption combined with significant processing capability are required. This comes at a time when Intel has been straining to compete with Nvidia in…
As two much-criticized big tech beasts, Facebook and Amazon have come together hoping for more positive publicity over their collaboration to hook up the digitally unconnected. The companies took last week’s Mobile World Congress 2021 as their forum to launch a collaboration to stimulate deployment by telcos, and other players, of remote 5G mobile and fixed wireless access (FWA) services. Under the deal, Facebook’s open source Magma software platform for building mobile networks is being integrated with Amazon Web Services’ edge computing infrastructure. This delivers AWS preinstalled with Magma, irrespective of network size, with no licensing fees for the packet core software. Magma on AWS Marketplace will make fixed wireless and private network deployments quick and easy to deploy and…
Google Cloud takes third place behind Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS in the cloud world, but it has put concerted efforts, over the past year or two, to overtake them in the telecoms market at least. It has come up with a string of telco-friendly platforms and services, with a particular focus on edge compute. Now it has added a major alliance with Ericsson to develop new cloud-native, 5G and edge applications for enterprises and consumers. These applications will help operators to reduce the time and cost to deploy 5G and monetize it with new services, Google says, while the relationship with Ericsson will bring valuable 5G-specific expertise and established telco relationships. The focus of the agreement is “on supporting…
AT&T has been one of the most decisive of the established operators about moving many of its operations to the public cloud. In 2019 it announced a ‘public cloud-first’ strategy for its data center and IT platforms, and signed cloud partnerships with Microsoft Azure, as well as with IBM. It seemed only a matter of time before the network, as well as the IT systems, moved to the public cloud, but the decision to do this has come at an earlier stage than most expected. This has followed earlier decisions to pull out of the cloud services market itself, and to sell many of its own telco cloud data centers and rely on third parties. That set the stage for…
Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2021 was a shadow of its usual self in terms of physical attendance, and of the number of announcements and headlines it generated. However, there were some significant keynotes and launches, and a sense that, even in its hybrid format, MWC21 represented a small step back to normality. There will be many questions over whether it will ever return to its pre-pandemic size and buzz, or whether the industry needs such a huge event any more, but at least the highlight of the mobile calendar looks set to survive in some form in future. Some of the event’s traditional bighitters, though choosing to stay away from Barcelona, still saw it as a showcase for major announcements,…
If you grew up in the European Community you have an opinion on its Common Agricultural Policy or CAP – with some people dramatically FOR the idea, and likely more people either against it or simply baffled by it. It is founded in French folklore, and was at French insistence. Essentially it is a policy for food security, but more often it is thought of as a policy in favor of financial the security for people who live in the country or who produce food. So when you hear that the EU has struck a deal on farm subsidies after three years of negotiations, there is a tendency to assume that the same mistakes have been made yet again. We…
Indonesia’s Minister for Energy and Mineral Resources Arifin Tasrif has stated that “Multiple opportunities lie ahead in Indonesia’s development of its electrical power infrastructure and mineral processing industry” and that “Indonesia welcomes Chinese investors into these fields.”. The minister was speaking to Xinhua, China’s largest media outlet, and seems to be looking to China and not just the West for investment – a stark contrast to nearby Vietnam whose recent renewable explosion was funded by Western countries including Japan. International Institute of Green Finance (IIGF) figures show that Chinese overseas investment into wind and solar in 2020 came to $10.7 billion. Tasrif stated that Indonesia is planning to make electricity prices profitable for renewable energy projects, and that it has an…
Population (2020): 83,992,949 (+1.30% vs 2019) GDP per Capita: $7,555 (+8.23% vs 2019) Debt to GDP: 42.77% (-4.9% vs 2019) Iran will miss out on the brimming opportunities for middle eastern renewables over the coming decades, if it cannot be disentangled from ongoing political feuds. Despite a huge potential for solar power – particularly in the country’s south – a deteriorating economic situation could thwart any attempts for a rapid transition away from its oil obsession. Having built its global status as a petrostate since the start of the 20th century, and built an economy that is hugely dependent on exports to the rest of the world, an ongoing surge of sanctions has continued to plague Iran with economic uncertainty…
The global steelmaking industry faces an immediate $70 billion risk of stranded assets, if it follows through with plans for new coal-powered production facilities, according to a new report from Global Energy Monitor. But – as highlighted in Rethink Energy’s latest forecast for the sector – the necessity to decarbonize will see a huge chunk of these projects, mainly in China, cancelled or retired early. According to Rethink Energy’s report, entitled Renewables Set to Unlock $2.2 Trillion Green Steel Monster, the global steelmaking industry – which accounts for up to 11% of global CO2 emissions (7% directly) – will see an 82% reduction in emissions through to 2050. This is just shy of the 90% reduction in emissions that would…
Five years ago this week… Orange made a strategic investment in fledgling connectivity marketplace BandwidthX, raising questions as to whether the latter’s services would move to Europe. BandwidthX came to life on the prospect of WiFi offload, acting as a trusted neutral marketplace for US tier 1 operators to privately exchange bandwidth in real-time. Faultline noted at the time that France was the original WiFi offload marketplace, as Iliad’s Free began with WiFi offload from its own home gateways when launching its successful cellular service, leading Orange, SFR and Bouygues to quickly follow suit. It looked as though, if coaxed to Europe, BandwidthX could provide Orange with extra resources to operate more actively in the region, while signalling to other…
Multi-network owned ad platform OpenAP has shared its OpenID audience identifier with Invest TV, the self-serving linear buying platform within AT&T’s Xandr. OpenAP’s publishers will now be made available on Invest TV, enabling the latter’s buyers to make use of the former’s unified audiences when purchasing linear inventory across the largest networks in the US. This will be achieved by using OpenID – a person-level audience definer that enables centralized activation of audience segments for use in campaign targeting, matching them with viewership currencies for distribution to multiple television publishers. Xandr’s advertisers will benefit from using one consistent ID-based audience when transacting across the enlarged footprint of premium linear advertising inventory, enabling deduplicated reach estimates and reporting. Initially we thought this…
Harmonic’s incursion of the Telefónica Movistar+ account is another warning shot to AWS Elemental, after the US video heavyweight recently described the cloud computing behemoth as a “frenemy”. Sound familiar? That’s because we ran a similar headline and opening gambit almost exactly a year ago, when Ateme was selected by Telefónica Spain to deploy its Titan platform for distribution of live DTH and OTT video services for Movistar+, in a project which included transitioning to a virtual head-end. In the end, we concluded that Ateme’s arrival in Spain, after working Telefónica’s other territories for a number of years, was not a blot on the AWS Elemental footprint, because the importance of being the incumbent software transcoding supplier for a converged…