Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Samsung has been pushing at the door of major mobile operators for some years and Huawei’s exclusions in North America and parts of Europe have added impetus. Now, a significant deal with Vodafone for Open RAN 5G equipment in the UK at 2,500 rural sites suggests those efforts are starting to bear fruit in Europe (see Wireless Watch June 14 2021). This follows some earlier signals by major European telcos that Samsung is welcome as an alternative supplier of RAN equipment, to avoid choice boiling down to little more than the Nordic duopoly of Ericsson and Nokia, and possibly Japan’s NEC. Deutsche Telekom (DT) selected Samsung kit to trial 5G Standalone (SA) in the Czech Republic city of Pilsen early…
However open networks may be, one aspect tends to remain a closely guarded secret -the price. The complexity and customization of RANs, in particular, has made it hard to achieve any meaningful ‘rate card’ pricing, which has made it challenging for smaller operators, especially, to understand what they should be paying. For large operators, by contrast, there have been some benefits to the time-honored system of secretive bilateral price negotiations with vendors, since they can leverage their scale and influence to get a good deal. But with a diminishing number of macro network vendors, it has become harder to play one supplier off against another for a more attractive price. Rakuten Mobile, so often the operator that sounds the starting…
If one theme has dominated Wireless Watch over recent years, it is the radical change in the dynamics of the RAN market. This has been driven by several significant factors, including the expanded performance requirements of 5G use cases; the emergence of new service providers, especially for enterprise users; geopolitics and the impact on Huawei. The most important factor of all has been the start of the migration of the RAN to be a cloud-based network in which all the network functions from Layer 2 upwards, and some of the Layer 1 processes, are run in software on cloud infrastructure. This shift is only just beginning, since the RAN is far more challenging to cloudify than IT functions or even…
Two leading Chinese EV proponents put out huge numbers for 2030 EV shipments, with BYD’s founder, Wang Chuanfu, telling CNBC that “new energy” vehicles will account for 70% of all new cars sold in China and Nio’s founder, William Li, telling local papers that it could reach 90% by that time. The Rethink Energy forecast contained in Look Back in Anger, shows 92% of new cars shipped in 2030 will be EVs. GE has partnered with LafargeHolcim to explore new ways of recycling wind turbine blades, and has also signed an MoU with Neowa to dismantle decommissioned wind turbines in Germany. This comes as part of a new push for circularity in the wind industry – following similar announcements by fellow…
Five years ago this week… Tencent snapped up SoftBank’s 84.3% stake in Finnish games firm Supercell for $8.6 billion, poising the former to be a world leader in online. This was an impressive flip from SoftBank, which had acquired 51% of Supercell, most famed for creating mobile hit Clash of Clans, for just $1.5 billion three years prior. Tencent had a history in PC gaming, but this was put on the back burner as WeChat rose to prominence. Nonetheless, over half of Tencent’s $15 billion revenue in 2015 was derived from gaming, and it was expected that it would generate $13 billion with Supercell on the books – 13% of the entire market. While Supercell’s annual income was just $780…
WiFi has been put on the backfoot by 5G in the rapidly expanding industrial IoT sector but the recent release of an enterprise WiFi 6E set of access points (APs) by HPE subsidiary Aruba was designed to be more competitive on that front. However, the main thrust will be to shore up the existing user base among other enterprise sites such as offices and general campuses, rather than emerging applications that call for ultra-low latency or the highest security. WiFi 6E is the extension of WiFi 6 into the 6 GHz band, which in the US was opened up in April 2020 for unlicensed use, a move that has now been emulated by around 40 other countries. This more…
British oil major BP this week announced that it would team up with Statkraft and Aker offshore wind to bid in the upcoming tenders for offshore wind projects in Norway, adding to the ever-growing list of companies looking to make an early mark in Nordic waters. While this a positive sign for Norway, as the country tries to establish itself as a major market for offshore wind and hydrogen exports, the likely oversubscription in this auction points to a concerning shortage of available leases for developers. The consortium formed this week will be split exactly into thirds, with the initial goal of securing the rights to capacity in the Soerlige Nordsjoe II licensing area in the southern part of the…
With much of Faultline’s recent advertising coverage focusing on the antiquated nature of connected TV ad tech, it is perhaps no surprise that this year’s Connected TV World Summit was lukewarm on pushing the value proposition of AVoD. One consistent thread throughout the ad-themed talks we attended was that AVoD’s rapidly expanding footprint is catching eyes everywhere, but advertisers are still hesitant to take the plunge. At the start of the day, we heard from Comscore’s Chief Revenue Officer, Carol Hinnant, who took us on a quick tour of the fragmented video landscape and the difficulties that this poses for attribution. The standout stat was that of the 5.4 billion hours of videos streamed in February, 59% were ad-supported. While…
We might have hit something of a jackpot, but Faultline found an online event that was properly interactive. The subject for this particular hour-or-so track at Connected TV World Summit was ‘Making D2C Work,’ and while we might have been buckling up for another slog, we were pleasantly surprised by the lineup. ViacomCBS’ Dan Fahy, SVP of Emerging Business, walked the audience through the firm’s plans to grow its presence in the UK – likely as a launchpad into the rest of Europe, we suspect. With 36 million paying subscribers, and some 50 million monthly active users (MAUs) for its PlutoTV AVoD service, video streaming now accounts for around 15% of ViacomCBS’ total revenues, said Fahy. With regard to the…
Video games have encroached further into our traditional media and entertainment bubble this week, on three fronts. Netflix and Ubisoft announced a duo of game adaptations, Amazon has launched its Luna game streaming service in the US, and Microsoft is working with TV makers to get its Xbox streaming service onto smart TVs – and working on an Xbox dongle. There has been a significant demographic shift in the past two decades. A recent Deloitte survey of entertainment habits illustrated this sharply. Millennial respondents (those born between 1981 and 1996) reported that viewing TV and movies at home as their collective favorite activity, scoring 18%, followed by video games in second place on 16%. However, for Gen-Z (those born between…
The results of Ateme’s work with Intel are definitely worth exploring further once Faultline returns from a brief summer break. What we know for now is that the French video compression firm has achieved a performance boost increase of two-fold in high video transcoding density per node using the third generation of Intel Xeon Scalable processors. Following tests conducted in January of this year, Ateme’s Titan Live video headend showed up to 2x encoder performance increase on UHD video delivered OTT. The result of Intel’s third-gen technology is a reduction of cost per channel without impacting video quality – meaning OTT providers can increase the number of services per server. This is a significant breakthrough at a time when video…
Telecom Italia launches Open RAN test and integration center Telecom Italia (TIM) has launched an Open Test and Integration Center (OTIC) lab dedicated to Open RAN products, following the lead of other major European telcos. The TIM European OTIC Lab, approved by the O-RAN Alliance, will be based at the group’s innovation laboratories in Turin. The new facility will work with major providers spanning the whole Open RAN ecosystem, as well as start-ups and system integrators, to test new components and accelerate deployment of the technology across Europe. Meanwhile, TIM pointed out that it has recently implemented Open RAN technology for a live network in the city of Faenza, in cooperation with US-based JMA Wireless. This follows various moves by other European…
French cable/mobile group Altice continues to buy and sell assets round the world. It has acquired a 12.1% stake in UK incumbent BT for a reported $3.1bn, becoming the telco’s largest shareholder by a whisker (it has 0.1% larger stake than Deutsche Telekom, whose holding in BT came about when the latter acquired EE, formerly a UK joint venture between DT and Orange). Altice chairman Patrick Drahi assured the BT board that this was not the prelude to a hostile takeover bid, and meanwhile, he seems to want to offload some other assets to help meet the bill for BT. In particular, Altice Europe is said to be looking for buyers for its Portuguese business, though the reported price tag…
At Anga Com Digital 2021, the virtual edition of the German broadband event, a debate erupted among a panel of WiFi companies – Airties, AVM and Icotera – about the future of WiFi access points and extenders. Airties’ CTO Metin Taskin naturally argues that APs are here to stay and will not become obsolete as a result of more technologically advanced WiFi router generations. Meanwhile, Icotera’s Volker Bendzuweit, a general manager at the Danish gateway manufacturer, took great pleasure in pointing to results of a recent business case worked up with Telenor in Sweden, based on the concept of reducing the proportion of customer installations using APs from 50% to 20%, which he all-but confirmed had been successfully achieved. Taskin…
It is always the case that, as long as exciting new technologies remain pre-commercial, their pioneers enjoy a day in the sun. It is when operators or vendors come close to commercial realities that investors and market watchers become more nervous and skeptical. So it has been this year for Rakuten Mobile in Japan and Dish Network in the USA – the two largest greenfield poster children for Open RAN, and both pioneering in their choices of architectures, suppliers and cost models. However, both increasingly have to justify their networks to naysayers, less on technical grounds but in terms of the impact of open networks on real world costs and commercial KPIs. Dish has not gone live with its planned…
5G x-Haul was a key topic at the annual OFC show last week, along with new generations of optical technology such as 800G. One development was the publication of a joint technical paper by Nokia, Ericsson, II-VI, Lumentum and Sumitomo Electric, arguing the case for reducing the wide choice of Mobile Optical Pluggables (MOPA) that are used to connect mobile cell sites to fiber networks. The group wants to establish a small set of pre-defined blueprints that use common optical pluggables. Recommendations include optical characteristics such as data rates, reach, power, wavelengths as well as mechanical characteristics such as form factor, heat dissipation and operational temperature. Meanwhile, the Open XR Forum made its debut, with founders including Verizon, Lumen Technologies,…
Vodafone was not the only Open RAN newsmaker of the past week. As usual, there has been plenty of activity in the space, which we sum up in this round-up. T-Mobile USA has been notably more cautious than its fellow US operators about Open RAN which is in line with the company’s broader attitude, and that of its CTO Neville Ray. In general, the company has been less prepared than AT&T, Verizon and (pre-merger) Sprint to adopt new architectures at an early stage, and has instead seized market share with clever marketing and pricing strategies under its ‘Uncarrier’ banner’. Given the question marks over the commercial success of Open RAN trailblazers Rakuten and Dish (see separate item), it can be…
Two months after the launch of the Open Grid Alliance (OGA), the industry group has set out its first deliverable, the Multi-Cloud Services Grid. The OGA was formed in April with the ambitious objective of “re-architecting the Internet”, taking the electricity power grid as its inspiration. The aim was to drive a common shared platform for distributed compute, data and analytics at the edge. The first deliverable to conform to its objectives will support on-demand and real time assembly of the network resources needed for different services and functions, on a dynamic basis. The project is being led by VMware, which is being spun out of Dell, the main mover behind the OGA’s formation; and Vapor IO, a US start-up…
Dell Technologies sees a huge opportunity in the migration of 5G networks to the distributed cloud, and has announced its latest proposition for telcos just as Vodafone anointed it as a strategic partner for its first Open RAN deployments (see separate item). Dennis Hoffman, general manager of Dell Technologies’ Telecom Systems Business, said the company is assembling a full stack of open and scalable servers and software to support cloud-native telecoms networks in fixed and 4G/5G markets. Its hardware, software and automated management systems are the foundation stones of its offering and are starting to secure it significant business in “an industry that is now beginning to wrestle with what an open ecosystem looks like” as Hoffman said. The edge…
Vodafone kicked off the week with the announcement of its first Open RAN suppliers, though the goal of fostering a European ecosystem is clearly still just a goal. Just as Telecom Italia, in May, selected a US and a Taiwanese vendor for its first Open RAN roll-out, so Vodafone has announced a line-up led by US and Asian partners. It has selected NEC and Samsung for the RAN, Dell for edge infrastructure, Wind River for cloud software and Keysight for interoperability testing, with some European representation from Capgemini Engineering, which will ensure integration and interworking between different vendors’ technologies in the lab. Samsung will be the reference RAN software provider and will also supply Massive MIMO antennas and radio units.…