Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
WiFi has been put on the back foot 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 USA was opened up in April 2020 for unlicensed use, a move that has now been emulated by around 40 other countries. This more…
In those seemingly faraway years just before the global pandemic hit, there was a great flurry of activity to release 5G-targeted spectrum around the world, mainly in at least part of the 3.4 GHz to 4.2 GHz range. The focus of the auctions, and therefore most of the initial 5G deployments, was on these midband, capacity-centric frequencies, and the aim was to boost capacity to support usage levels and data rates in relatively constrained areas such as downtowns or business parks. Here 4G – which in most areas is nowhere close to ‘capacity crunch’ – might start to burst at the seams. There was some disruption and delay to auctions and build-outs in the early months of the pandemic, though…
North Carolina has become the latest state to add to the US’ targets for offshore wind, setting out a goal of 2,800 MW of capacity by 2030 and 8,000 MW by 2040. The Executive Order estimates that this will spur $140 billion of investment over the next 15 years to develop projects from North Carolina up the Atlantic Coast, while helping the state towards achieving its Clean Energy Plan of a 70% reduction in power sector greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2050. Vestas has signed an agreement with CS Wind for the acquisition of Vestas’ tower manufacturing facility in Pueblo, Colorado, for an undisclosed fee. The deal aims to allow the latter to become a…
SGH2 Energy – a Washington DC-based waste-to-hydrogen start-up – has become the supplier in the world’s largest ‘green hydrogen’ offtake agreement, with a deal to sell 3,850 tons of carbon negative hydrogen to refueling stations across southern California. Under a ten-year contract, SGH2 will supply the hydrogen annually to two of California’s largest owners and operators of hydrogen refueling stations, for use at 90 stations, which are being rolled out across the state. The hydrogen will be produced from biogenic waste and biomass at the company’s planned production facility in the City of Lancaster north of Los Angeles, which will primarily use recycled wastepaper and recycled water. Set to break ground in December this year, this plasma-enhanced waste gasification plant…
A revolutionary approach to turbine design could make floating wind power cost competitive as early as 2022, according to Wind Catching Systems, a Norwegian start-up, which has teamed up with Aibel and the Institute for Energy Technology to bring its multi-rotor design to market. The company, which is owned by Ferd and North Energy, is also supported by Innovation Norway and aims to integrate as many as one-hundred-and-seventeen 1 MW turbines into one structure to help improve the capacity per square kilometer by up to five times. In announcing the partnerships this week, Wind Catching Systems CEO Ole Heggheim claimed that the company “will make floating offshore wind competitive as soon as 2022 or 2023, which is at least 10…
Five years ago this week… The Supreme Court upheld the FCC’s Open Internet Ruling against an appeal, maintaining that an ISP should be considered a Title II ‘common carrier service’, rather than Title I ‘information service’. Although there was a lot of dissatisfaction, Faultline felt that this decision was best for both sides of the political landscape. Big business lovers could take comfort in the knowledge that Title II steadied the landscape for further operator consolidation for both fixed line and cellular broadband, but champions of small business could sleep easy knowing that conglomerates could not starve start-ups of internet access. The NCTA and ACA had come out swinging against the ruling, while a previously nervous Netflix applauded the outcome.…
CableLabs, the venerable industry association that develops a heap of technologies in support of cable operators, has unveiled a DDoS prevention system that looks to detect and block traffic at the network level – for both internal and external attacks. Called Transparent Security, it could help solve a looming problem, and prevent users from getting egg on their face down the line. Transparent Security (we already hate this name) uses In-band Network Technology (INT) to monitor network traffic. It looks for suspicious behavior, and can then block traffic emanating from a rogue device on a home network. For instance, if a smart speaker was compromised, and started reaching out to a known command-and-control server, an operator using Transparent Security could…
With major live sporting events gearing up for summer 2021 and beyond, the floodgates have swung open for technology deployment opportunities. We have the European Championship soccer tournament kicking off this week, coinciding with the Copa America equivalent in Latin America, while the strongly anticipated Tokyo Olympics is taking place from July 23 to August 8. With Tokyo’s technologically advanced reputation, this year’s Olympics is expected to set a new bar for TV production and delivery, a year after the summer sporting extravaganza was due to take place. To support this effort, NBC Olympics – part of NBC Sports Group – has gone big this week by allowing numerous vendors to pull their press release triggers simultaneously. These include Telestream,…
WiFi 6 was described as “the genius WiFi service” at Anga Com Digital 2021 – in which the word service is probably more poignant than genius. Had there been an opportunity for a live Q&A during this pre-recorded session featuring WiFi specialist speakers from Airties, AVM and Icotera, Faultline would have fueled a fire that was just beginning to spark about the future of WiFi APs 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 GM at the Danish gateway manufacturer, took great pleasure in pointing to results of a recent business case with Telenor…
Connected TV advertising is struggling to keep up with its glowing reputation, which promises all the glitz and glamor of traditional TV advertising, but now with the added granularity and guarantees of digital advertising. But Faultline has pointed out time and time again that this is the long-term goal, not the present reality. It was therefore refreshing to speak to an ad tech vendor this week that concurred with our diagnosis. SVP of Addressability and Ecosystem at data platform LiveRamp, Travis Clinger, agreed that CTV advertising capabilities are still not up to the standards of the rest of the digital advertising ecosystem but was optimistic that “it is starting to catch up as marketer demand focuses more on the format.”…
Cloud migration was one of the standout themes of 2020, with many operators and content providers rushing to get remote capabilities online. Now that the dust has settled, more nuanced approaches to cloud migration are becoming the norm, and a panel at this year’s digitized Anga Com aimed to explore this more measured approach. First up, we heard from Synamedia’s CTO of Video Network, Nick Fielibert, who argued that cloud migration makes sense for most cable operators, just that the extent to which this is true is highly case-dependent. As most of our readers will know by now, some things make sense purely in the cloud, some on-premise, and many use cases benefit from switching regularly back and forth between…
While Faultline remains a strong sceptic about BT fulfilling its full-fiber broadband rollout roadmap, given the empty promises of so many overambitious operators, the British MSO has attracted the attention of France’s Altice – acquiring a 12.1% stake for a reported $3.1 billion. Outdoing Deutsche Telekom by just 0.1%, Altice becomes BT’s largest shareholder, although billionaire owner Patrick Drahi has assured the BT board that this approach is not a precursor to an aggressive takeover of the business. We don’t trust Drahi as far as we could throw him. It comes as the BT Sport wing was supposed to be finding a new buyer, but here we are with a French outfit taking a sizable bite of the main course…
Sequans licenses CEVA 5G modem IP for broadband IoT CEVA, a provider of intellectual property for wireless connectivity and smart sensing, has licensed its PentaG 5G New Radio (NR) IP to Sequans, a vendor of 4G/5G chips and modules for IoT. Sequans will use PentaG to ensure its 5G platform meets performance, latency and power budget requirements for IoT applications. “CEVA’s PentaG modem IP provides us with a powerful DSP [digital signal processor] along with a comprehensive set of hardware and software technologies that shorten the design cycle for our upcoming 5G platform and ensure we deliver the industry-leading performance and efficiencies that our customers demand,” said Bertrand Debray, general manager for broadband IoT at Sequans. The move suggests Sequans is…
Most operators, and even the large vendors, see virtualized RAN (whether Open RAN or not) as a medium term architecture, and one that cannot yet match the performance of traditional integrated platforms. But Samsung claims its vRAN can already match that performance. “While there have been industry discussions that suggest that vRAN performance could be lower than purpose-built, vendor-specific solutions, Samsung’s vRAN offers proof that performance equal to traditional hardware-based equipment is achievable,” Farook Hussan, senior director of technology at Samsung’s Network Division, told SDxCentral. He added: “Virtualized RAN offers more deployment flexibility and supports swift transition with integrated hardware and software infrastructure. vRAN also eliminates many hardware dependencies, making vRAN an attractive technology option for the operators from both…
Spurred by the news that Russian banking firm SberBank was beta testing its Visper platform for a customer-facing virtual presenter in Russia, details about the current state of voice assistants in the market has trickled out. Unsurprisingly, Yandex (the Russian Google) takes first place, but with even banks investing, it begs the question of the operators’ attitudes to the technology. With a population of some 146m people, there are around 52m voice assistant users in Russia, according to estimates from Just AI. Based on its figures, Yandex’s Alice (Alisa) has 45m users, with Google Assistant on 11m, and Apple’s Siri on 6m. This is perhaps testament to the advantage that native Russian developers have over those that don’t speak the…
The saga of Huawei’s involvement in 5G deployments across Europe continues amid strong indications from sources published by global news agency Reuters that Vodafone Italy has been given conditional clearance to deploy equipment from Huawei in its 5G RAN. The sources indicated that Italian prime minister Mario Draghi authorized the deal between Vodafone and Huawei on May 20, which would appear to represent a U-turn. In October 2020, the government blocked Swisscom subsidiary Fastweb from deploying 5G RAN equipment from Huawei, the operator having earlier adopted the Chinese vendor as its preferred broadband supplier. Then in April 2021, Telecom Italia (TIM) was rumored to have caved into political pressure and cancelled a 5G contract with Huawei. At the same time,…
Amidst all the excitement surrounding Open RAN, one element is attracting more vendor attention than anything else – the RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC). This is the most novel element of the O-RAN Alliance’s particular set of specifications for an open, multivendor RAN, and it aims to become, in effect, the operating system for the 5G mobile network. However, there is a great deal of testing, development and confidence-building that needs to go on before it achieves that goal. The RIC is an ambitious initiative, which abstracts a wide range of network control functions and runs them as xApps on a common platform. It has non-real time functions, which relate to management and orchestration, and the more challenging near-real time apps,…
The latest operator to partner with Amazon AWS at the network edge is Bell Canada, which will add AWS Wavelength Zones to its 5G network. Bell’s top priority in building out its edge network is to improve customer experience, especially for premium 5G applications and users, in order to boost market share and ARPU, and reduce churn. The improved quality of experience will not just come from bringing 5G and associated processing and storage closer to the user, but also from using a wide range of AWS tools at the edge. For instance, Bell will adopt AWS analytics and machine learning techologies to “create and scale new consumer and business applications faster”. Like other operators such as Verizon and Vodafone,…
Operators are being pursued as both customers and partners by the major cloud providers for edge-based services under the AI/ML banner, targeting a variety of applications involving automated network optimization, configuration, monitoring and troubleshooting. Larger tier 1 operators are more likely to feature as partners while lower tier operators will tend to be customers gaining from the scale economics of the cloud providers in terms of analytical expertise as well as infrastructure. The big six in this area consist of the three US hyperscalers – Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud – plus the enterprise-centric Oracle Cloud and IBM Cloud, with some international presence for China’s Alibaba Cloud. They have all been hyperactive in this area, with Alibaba being…
The wide range of new use cases being deployed already around the 5G network edge is driving demand for more sophisticated service validation and equipment testing capable of demonstrating adherence to stricter performance measures relating to latency, capacity and speed. At the same time, the dearth of choice for RAN equipment occasioned by Huawei’s exclusion in many countries, is generating groundswell behind Open RAN to encourage new entrants to the field and this too calls for new testing products. This is giving cloud providers an opportunity to take up residence at the edge to provide testing services, even for operators not otherwise using their infrastructure. Amazon AWS, with its analytics pedigree from various developments and acquisitions, is not surprisingly at…