Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
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 a potential addition to their neutral host infrastructure model, 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…
Vodafone has spent recent years heavily focused on constraining cost – despite fiber and 5G expansion – and preserving cashflow. Its priorities have been to streamline and centralize its processes and procurement, to leverage its international scale better; to unlock value buried in infrastructure assets, notably with the creation and IPO of Vantage Towers; and to try to align 5G capex with the potential of each market, rather than taking the old build-and-they-will-come approach of Vodafone’s heyday in the 3G era. Following the announcement of its full year results, Vodafone surprised investors by talking about an increase in capex, though almost entirely focused on its largest market, Germany, and on further developing centralized group functions and platforms. In fiscal 20/21,…
The increasing harmonization of telecoms regulation and policy making across the European Union has had a deep, if only gradually evident, impact on the region’s competitive landscape, especially as more countries have joined (though the UK has left). EU-level decisions concerning mergers and acquisitions, roaming fees, security issues, spectrum bands and rules, and even Open RAN ecosystems, have helped investment flow into telecoms networks, and achieved a more consistent (though hardly perfect) regulatory framework that encourages roaming and economies of scale. On the downside, however, operators complain of reduced freedom of commercial action, over-regulation compared to hyperscalers, and slow decision making. And despite the improved unity that has slowly developed over the past two decades, the large multinational European operators…
Energy Estate is creating a consortium to create Australia’s first hydrogen valley in New South Wales, under a $2 billion proposal that has already received support from local and global energy companies. The Hunter Valley project would aim to completely replace the region’s coal industry, providing feedstock to mining, transport and industrial users. If successful, a second stage would pipe hydrogen to Newcastle, another industrial zone with eyes on exporting green ammonia. Other companies that have reported interest include AGL Energy, APA Group, Idemitsu, Trafigura, RES Australia, and Walcha Energy. Possible production volumes have not been announced, although the project would involve green hydrogen being produced on the site of a repurposed coalmine at Muswellbrook by 2024 and piped to…
Five years ago this week… Quantum dot technology vendor Nanoysys debuted its Hyperion Quantum Dots technology, a film overlay for LED backlights in TVs which marked a significant breakthrough in reaching the BT.2020 spec for the wider color gamut in UHD TVs. Most Quantum Dot TVs at the time imitated backlighting by shining light from the side – a much inferior, but cheaper, method of production which was offered by Nanosys’ rival QD Vision. The two companies were stuck in a war of words and patent litigation, with the former dubbing QD Vision “a poor imitator using stolen technology to produce cheap knockoffs.” Straight off the bat, Samsung and Sony had opted for the more expensive film approach, while Hisense…
Orange has announced that its new mobile cloud gaming offering, a big part of its new 5G promotions, will be powered using Streamava technology from Wiztivi. The French UI developer has been behind Orange’s TV-based cloud gaming services since 2012, and now that the MNO is ready to push 5G networks in a big way, the pair say that expanding that partnership into mobile is the natural next step. Faultline wondered there had been a fundamental change that enabled Orange’s new launch and SFR’s similar launch back in March? Wiztivi’s Thibault Demartial, VP of Sales and Marketing, explained to Faultline that the main issue for streaming video games from the cloud is still latency, and that the new 5G offerings…
What a striking coincidence that Faultline interviewed Zattoo in the same week bidding took place for the assets of MobiTV, for which the Swiss IP video provider is now showing belated interest. Despite TiVo emerging victorious with an $18.5 million bid for MobiTV, beating six other companies to the prize including Amino, Zattoo is hovering on the periphery waiting for juicy offcuts that could provide it with a route into the lucrative US market in which it currently only has a single customer in the form of Hotwire Communications, a service provider on the East coast. Zattoo’s CEO Niklas Brambring has revealed that MobiTV is one of several options for the company to gain a foothold in the US. However,…
Despite the grinding, slow start, it does seem that 2021 is the year in which the roll-out of addressable advertising is making some notable progress. CBS has announced plans to make addressable advertising available across its broadcast network in the latter half of this year, with smart TV inventory getting a look in, too. This follows ViacomCBS delivering the first ever addressable ad within a live national broadcast in January to select Dish Media set tops. Now the network wants advertisers to know that the flood gates are open, although we imagine the slow trickling momentum will persist for some time. The new addressable inventory will be carved out from the space where CBS traditionally runs its promotional material for…
The days of inferring that WiFi mesh standards such as EasyMesh are bad for business at mesh software vendors like Airties are a distant memory. By defining low-level protocols, EasyMesh removes much of the cumbersome communications leg work between access points and gateways, meaning the likes of Airties can concentrate on developing high-level intelligent functions on top of standardized technologies. Despite Airties being early to embrace EasyMesh with open arms back in 2018, the idea that EasyMesh is still in some way a competitor to the Airties mesh is something that certain camps just cannot shake off. Perhaps the latest move from Airties will change a few minds, as the Turkish vendor has announced a new level of EasyMesh support…
Population: 44,569,381 GDP per Capita (nominal): $3,980 Government Debt as % of GDP: 50.41% Algeria – like many countries in the MENA region – has become a massive exporter of energy to satisfy a mushrooming demand in the developed world. The country itself, which some estimate has nearly 30% of its population living below the poverty line, has an economy which is hugely reliant on oil and gas prices. With virtually no presence in the renewables sector – neither domestically nor globally – the necessity for the country now faces an uphill struggle to counteract the waning value of its fossil fuel assets. A country hooked on oil after years of supply to the west At present, with a huge…
Many telcos have pulled back from building their own telco clouds for IT purposes, and turned to partnerships with public cloud providers, that trend may be reversed when it comes to the highly distributed, high performance cloud and edge infrastructure needed to support 5G vRANs. Many operators are still wary of putting their RANs in a public cloud, either because they fear performance trade-offs, or they resist being locked into AWS or Google in the same way they are currently locked into their major vendors. Austria’s A1 is one telco that is pursuing development of its own cloud infrastructure and aims to use this to enable new services for enterprise customers, as well as for internal purposes like vRAN. Its…
In some emerging economies, mobile money has proved a goldmine for operators, and services continue to expand. Once, these were mainly focused on simple SMS-based payments systems for customers with featurephones and no bank accounts. While services for the ‘unbanked’ remain important, major offerings such as Vodafone’s m-Pesa have grown to offer a full portfolio of offerings including savings and credit. In Ethiopia, where Ethio Telecom will soon face competition for the first time as the government awards new licences, the incumbent is launching its first mobile money services, presumably to help strengthen itself against the future new entrants. Its service, TeleBirr, will allow customers to send and receive money, including from abroad, to deposit or withdraw cash from appointed…
Millicom, the international operator that specializes in emerging markets, has made its first efforts to deploy Open RAN, focusing on Latin America. The company, which recently sold its last businesses in Africa, now sees the LATAM region as its chief source of growth and is eager to drive a low cost, flexible architecture that will improve the economics of getting 4G and 5G to underserved communities, while competing effectively with incumbent telcos in the big cities. Its first deployment of Open RAN will be for rural 4G services in Colombia, and as the platform matures, it aims to extend its roll-out to cities and to other countries in the region. It is working with Parallel Wireless, which already has Open…
The Linux Foundation and the operator-driven Next Generation Mobile Network (NGMN) alliance are joining forces to collaborate on 5G, including the “end-to-end 5G architecture and beyond 5G”. The two bodies managed to tick just about every 5G buzzword in their joint statement, saying that “specific areas of alignment may include sustainability, network automation and network autonomy based on AI, security, edge cloud, virtualization, disaggregation, cloud-native and service-based architecture, to name a few”. They even pointed to future cooperation around 6G. NGMN’s main function is to collect and distil operators’ requirements and priorities and translate these into something readily understandable by vendors, in order to guide their development priorities. In this case, it is likely to be tapping into the Linux…
Just as the impact of 5G on early adopters’ business performance is very unpredictable (see Wireless Watch May 10), the same is true of operators that are making a significant shift to add digital services to their connectivity business models. For some, the returns are starting to be clear, while for others, the development of new services is proving a burden rather than a driver of new revenues in the earliest stages. Of course, many operators have flirted with digital services over the past decade or more, and some continue to do so, or are having a renewed push on the back of 5G. For instance, Orange is investing heavily in growing its own non-connectivity business, especially via the Orange…
India’s homegrown and controversial 5G standard, 5Gi, has divided the country’s operators as well as the wider cellular industry since its emergence as a candidate alternative during 2020. The debate has intensified and appears to be coming to a crisis point as the two biggest Indian telcos, Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel, line up on opposite sides. This has led the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) to direct the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), to come up with a clear indication of implications implementing 5Gi, outlining pros and cons. This includes assessing how acceptable the Indian standard will be for both telcos and their infrastructure providers. This it hopes will help it come to a decision over whether India should…
Facebook’s founding role in the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) may be emphasized less these days than it used to, as the body aims to represent a wide range of operators (some of whom are threatened, in the consumer market, by the social media giant). But the company continues to innovate behind the scenes, facilitating or even developing enabling technologies that could accelerate the roll-out of high quality mobile broadband (supporting Facebook services of course) to the next billion. Facebook has contributed small cell, antenna and backhaul designs to the open networks community and helps to bankroll TIP and the Open Compute Project (OCP), which is also increasingly relevant to telcos as they start to consider migration of their networks to…
Dish Network has added yet another supplier to its list of vendors for its forthcoming 5G Open RAN build-out. The latest recruit is Oracle, which will supply the technology to enable a service-based architecture (SBA) for Dish’s 5G core. The SBA is part of the 3GPP’s 5G core standards, and is essential to network slicing. It hands automated coordination of network functions so that new services can be quickly assembled from different microservices and provisioned automatically to customers. This will be the basis of many network-as-a-service offerings for enterprises, and of network slicing. Dish’s chief network officer, Marc Rouanne, said the Oracle technology would enable SBA and so allow customers “to consume software on demand” while also supporting the “advanced…
While the five major operators put their feet on the Open RAN accelerator in Europe, parties in other regions also want to speed up the progress of bringing a fully mature, interoperable Open RAN platform to market. In the USA, major vendors are calling on the government to put money behind its support for a US-centric 5G industry by supporting the creation of more Open RAN testing and certification facilities. In particular, companies like Microsoft and Intel want a certification programme, somewhat like the one established for the CBRS spectrum, that will be funded and endorsed by the USA. This would help stimulate a US-centric ecosystem and if it were adopted globally, could greatly enhance the USA’s position of influence…
The Telecom Infra Project (TIP) has launched its much-heralded OpenWiFi initiative with ambitions to assemble a global connected ecosystem allowing automated transparent roaming without log-in. There is also a secondary objective to revive heterogenous networking combining WiFi and cellular, which – as we have noted before – has proceeded in fits and starts over the past decade. TIP had done well to generate momentum behind OpenWiFi ahead of the launch through a drip-feed of leaks from members or participants such as AT&T, Boingo, Broadcom, Cisco, CommScope, Deutsche Telekom, Facebook, Google, Intel and Samsung. All of these have firmly advocated the Wireless Broadband Alliance’s (WBA) OpenRoaming standard, which provides the foundation for OpenWiFi. That underpins the federated network structure comprising multiple…