Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
In the last issue of Wireless Watch, we took our latest look at the role of the hyperscalers in emerging 5G architectures and business models. With most telcos backing away from offering cloud-based enterprise services themselves, or even building their own clouds to run internal IT and network functions, the balance of power has unsurprisingly shifted towards the cloud giants. In the current international climate, which has politicized operators’ technology choices, this also means a shift towards the US-centric ecosystem – something that seems as close to the hearts of lawmakers under the Biden administration as it was under Trump (see article below about the latest sanctions against Chinese suppliers). A 5G platform centered on Open RAN and core functions…
EDPR has acquired a 628 MW wind and solar portfolio in Chile, through two separate agreements with Atacama Energy and Lader Energy, with a total spend of $38 million. Under the first agreement, two wind farms worth 297 MW of capacity and one 254 MW solar park have been acquired, all of which are currently under development. The second detail entails a 77 MW wind farm, which is expected to come online in 2023. Pennant Walters has unveiled early-stage preparations for an application for a new 48 MW wind farm at Mynydd Llanhilleth in Wales, UK. Lithuania’s Ignitis Group has started generating electricity at the 94 MW Pomerania wind farm in Poland. Orsted and HOFOR have agreed to collaborate on…
The drought in central and southern parts of Brazil is not new, and yet most people in Brazil have no understanding that it is largely man-made, the effect of climate change – directly attributable to deforestation. What IS new is the fact that this is now the worst Brazilian drought in the past 100 years – the drought has reached new levels of incursion into the daily lives of Brazilians. When you then see the electricity generation graph below, showing that hydro power offers Brazil roughly 62% of all of its electricity and you have the perfect man-made disaster – no water, leads to no food, and you can add to this no electricity, or worse still, an increase in…
Google Analytics is the low hanging fruit on the video data tree that OTT outfits should avoid like the plague, while the popularity of video encoders developed in-house has surprised just about everyone. These are two standout conclusions from Bitmovin’s latest Video Developer Report – one of the most thorough vendor-led surveys in only its fourth year. On the video analytics front, the gulf is shown in black and white, with Google Analytics used by 51% of respondents. Conviva trails in second place with just 16%, followed by Bitmovin Analytics 13%, NPAW 11%, Mux 6%, and MediaMelon 3%. A further 24% chose Other, displaying the wealth of video analytics options on the market, while 17% of those surveyed currently use…
Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC) has been approved by the Internet Engineering Taskforce (IETF), graduating from an eight-year development process to a certified standard – RFC 9000. Promising more efficient networking, the new protocols sound like a boon for the video industry, which is grappling with how to reduce latency in streaming video applications. Currently, new transport protocols SRT and RIST look like the best remedy to that problem. Essentially, they use the ‘fire and forget’ UDP protocol as the basis, and then add some improvements on top, rather than deal with the latency that gets added when using TCP – where individual connections have to be established and reconfirmed continuously. Google began experimenting with QUIC in 2013, after developing…
Two vendors central to last week’s issue of Faultline happened to strike a deal moments after we went to press. Danish middleware developer Nordija was acquired by 24i Media, which was only itself bought by Amino in late 2019, in a deal designed to enhance and scale end-to-end software for the pay TV market. This is continued pay TV software consolidation disguised as scalability. With Amino recently being outbid by TiVo for the assets of MobiTV, Faultline predicted that it wouldn’t be long before Amino would be making alternative acquisition arrangements, particularly if the company has any hope of reaching its target of $250 million in annual revenues in four years’ time, from last year’s revenue of $82.7 million. Nordija…
Faultline has been keeping a close eye on the co-watching hype bubble – into which one company has been singlehandedly pumping more hot air into than any other. That vendor is UK-based Sceenic, which has just helped justify its recent marketing antics with a major deal at PCCW Media – delivering a co-viewing feature for the Hong Kong-based firm’s Now TV streaming service. Some confusion ensued from Sceenic’s press release, however, which linked to the website for the Now streaming service from Comcast-owned European operator Sky, rather than for PCCW’s Now TV site. We think this was an honest mistake from Sceenic, so we won’t overthink it, although there is an overwhelming temptation to conclude that Sceenic has inadvertently revealed…
Mobile operators are harnessing video in different ways within their 5G offerings, in some cases as a distinct revenue stream, in others as a carrot to entice subscribers to one or other of the service packages such as fixed wireless internet access in the home. T-Mobile USA has settled on the latter after dallying briefly with becoming a disruptive force in subscription video services and taking on the country’s major pay TV operators. That is really the story behind its six-month long foray into subscription video launched in October 2020, which failed to gain much traction on the back of a fairly lackluster entry level package. Like some other OTT offerings, it rather fell between two stools. On the one…
A nascent but potentially highly significant trend is for operators and telecom infrastructure suppliers to invest directly in edge cloud assets. While most telcos have pulled back from building their own centralized telco clouds, and will rely on partnerships with cloud providers, some are interested in investing in more distributed edge clouds. Towercos, too, are eyeing edge data centers as potential additions to their neutral host infrastructure models, and the three leading US tower providers are all actively developing this business. And even where telcos do not want to build an edge cloud, they do not have to buy edge capacity on the open marketplace. Their central offices, switching centers and cell sites make up a dense real estate…
A year after it was proposed, the £31.4 billion ($44 billion) merger between Telefónica’s O2 UK subsidiary, and Liberty Global’s Virgin Media – the UK’s largest cableco – has been approved by regulators. It is one of the UK’s largest ever telecoms deals, far higher than the £12.5 billion ($17.7 billion) price BT paid to acquire MNO EE in 2015. That is partly down to the strong job O2 UK has done in the past year to strengthen a business that often struggled in the 2010s, but has now leapt from third to first place in terms of subscribers. The two parent firms have promised to invest £10 billion ($14.1 billion) in the UK over the next five years and create…
Five years ago this week… The Multimedia Over Coax Alliance proposed a new lease of life for the MoCA protocol and its loyal chip makers, declaring that MoCA 2.0 would be created to deliver last mile broadband. The first targets looked likely to be multi-dwelling units (MDUs) and hotels with coax, while Europe and China looked like hospitable markets for the technology once it had trialled in the US. MoCA entering the race for full broadband access to the home was a question of basic operator economics, as the chips could be brought down to the price of DOCSIS chips, and used where coaxial cable was already widely installed, as well as wherever DOCSIS was already installed in low numbers.…
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 146 million people, there are around 52 million voice assistant users in Russia, according to estimates from Just AI. Based on its figures, Yandex’s Alice (Alisa) has 45 million users, with Google Assistant on 11 million, and Apple’s Siri on 6 million. This is perhaps testament to the advantage that native Russian developers have over…
While not quite the One Ring, the arrival of Matter opens the door for a significant attempt at solving the interoperability problems faced in the smart home. This should catch the eye of the operator crowd, which has viewed that particular endeavour as a major headache that would best be avoided. Matter is the name of the smart home interoperability specification that Project Connected Home over IP (CHIP) has been working on for the past three years. CHIP was housed inside the Zigbee Alliance, even though CHIP sat at a higher level in the stack than Zigbee’s low power wireless mesh protocol. To this end, the Zigbee Alliance has rebranded as the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA), and CHIP is now…
Test and measurement companies are under constant pressure to adapt their tools and services to the latest technologies, and by their nature, need to be ahead of the curve in supporting the very latest innovations that operators or vendors may need to validate. Currently, there is a race by the testing majors to offer cloud-native 5G core and Open RAN capabilities alongside broader cloud network and 5G platforms. Spirent’s Landslide Core Network Testing solution was used to validate control and user plane functionality for the cloud-native core in a recent trial by Vivo Brazil (see separate item), And testing provider Viavi has announced the availability of its TeraVM O-CU Tester on AWS Outposts. The product addressed the Open Centralized Unit…
Mobile operators are harnessing video in different ways within their 5G offerings, in some cases as a distinct revenue stream, in others as a carrot to entice subscribers to one or other of the service packages such as fixed wireless internet access in the home. T-Mobile USA has settled on the latter after dallying briefly with becoming a disruptive force in subscription video services and taking on the country’s major pay-TV operators. That is really the story behind its six-month long foray into subscription video launched in October 2020, which failed to gain much traction on the back of a fairly lackluster entry level package. Like some other over-the-top offerings, it rather fell between two stools. On the one hand,…
Qualcomm has hit the headlines recently for its re-entry into the macro RAN infrastructure market, courtesy of Open RAN, but whenever it ventures out of its smartphone kingdom, it faces a new set of competitive challenges, so it is wise to keep its options open. That policy of expanding its architectures both up and down in terms of product size and performance sees it unveiling a module that it hopes will accelerate sluggish progress in large-scale Industrial IoT deployments; as well as a reference design targeting that difficult market for cellular, the non-smartphone consumer device. The 315 5G IoT Modem was designed for IIoT applications that require high performance, resilience, ruggedized devices and low energy consumption, such as utilities, manufacturing,…
Nobody except the wildest optimists believe Open RAN will be easy. Operators are being asked to deploy the challenging functions of the macro RAN on a cloud platform while simultaneously introducing the 5G core, new use cases and potentially new suppliers. However, confidence that the barriers will be lowered by the mid-2020s has been bolstered by the collective efforts being made across the ecosystem, and most operators are particularly reassured when large suppliers with significant radio expertise lend their weight to the shared endeavor. Nokia has been the most significant member of the old guard to take a leading role in Open RAN, but comments at a recent regulatory meeting showed that even those committed to the cause still have…
Determining how to close the urban/rural digital divide has confounded the communications industry ever since its inception, with the way lined with corpses of failures, of which Google’s Project Loon is one of the most recent. But new efforts keep emerging and many, in recent years, have centered on High Altitude Platforms (HAPs), which can be regarded as hybrids between balloons and aircraft, launched into the stratosphere at heights between 20 and 50 kilometers (12-30 miles), drawing small amounts of power from solar cells to maintain a fixed position. A significant development is that HAPs are starting to deliver cellular services, either 4G or 5G, as in a Swiss HAP recently tested for covering rural and tribal areas at speeds…
Ban Chang in Thailand, a city lying between Bangkok and Pattaya, will be one of the first ‘smart cities’ to major on Open RAN 5G infrastructure for coordinated deployments between the public and private sectors. This has put the spotlight on the role of converged networks in metropolitan planning. The announcement came from US-based RAN and core software developer Mavenir, which is involved in the project alongside local 5G city technology specialist 5GCT, and Cisco, the latter providing switching hardware and application services. The decision to run Open RAN in millimeter wave spectrum and include Cisco as a partner rather than one of the big three RAN firms is a significant move for the country and for the profile of…
As mentioned above, many telcos are torn between the advantages of deploying key functions in the public cloud, to access the hyperscalers’ ecosystems and innovations and to reduce inhouse cost; and the risk of ending up locked into a certain cloud, and taking the role of very junior partner to AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud. One compromise position is to rely on external clouds, but to select a large number of partners. Ensuring consistency across any cloud is something that open platforms such as Open RAN and ONAP (Open Network Automation Protocol) can facilitate in a telco-optimized way, and as the network becomes more distributed, it will be even more important that operators can access the best edge locations…