Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Sometimes, memorandums of understanding between multiple large companies are followed by years of silence as the parties struggle to coordinate any concrete deliverables. Not so with the MoU announced on January 20 by Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica and Vodafone, joined a couple of weeks later by Telecom Italia (TIM). Less than four months later, the five partners have already issued their first joint paper, which outlines their key technical requirements for Open RAN, and sets an ambitious target of commercial readiness by 2022. This sets out their demands on any vendor that wishes to be part of the European operators’ supply chains, and it provides far more detail than previous statements, or the Open RAN RFIs issued by Vodafone and Telefónica…
Some operators believe the momentum behind Open RAN gives them their best opportunity ever to shake up their supply chains, introduce new ideas to the 5G RAN, and reduce their dependence on a shrinking group of large equipment vendors. And several governments or regional powers are equally fascinated by Open RAN as a way to build or expand a homegrown industry for 5G, and therefore generate not just new revenues, but global influence in a key technology. (It remains to be seen how the Chinese intellectual property and innovation that is feeding into the Open RAN ecosystem will be handled, given the overtly or implicitly anti-Chinese nature of some of the initiatives.) All this is certainly generating a welcome burst…
As we look across the world, the view of hydrogen is becoming distinctly divisive – some view it as an extension of fossil fuel power, naturally falling to big oil and gas to provide ad infinitum. Other’s see it as the ultimate storage medium for renewable energy, and others still see it as a super-fuel that will bring aviation into the green ages. It is none of those things, it is simply an element, and as such it has opened a new front in the war on global warming – right now, today, people are doing what they always do in the energy business – assume things will stay as they are for the next 135 years, as they have…
Oil prices have been propped up for a third time this year, by yet another short-term incident. We’ve had Texas’ big freeze, we’ve had the Gulf of Suez blockage, and now a cyberattack on US pipelines to counteract the downward pressure from faltering demand. It all started last Friday, with the ransomware group DarkSide targeting the Colonial Pipeline with a malware attack. The pipeline – one of the largest in the country – carries nearly three million barrels of gasoline and jet fuel every day from production hubs in Texas 5,500 miles up the East Coast to New York, but was forced to shut down entirely and only reopened late on Wednesday. Colonial said it initiated a restart at roughly…
Norway’s technology leader in floating solar, Ocean Sun, has quietly beaten the world record for lowest levelized cost of energy (LCOE) in Colombia, in a pilot installation there. The project which has not been listed before by the company and which is currently being kept under wraps, has a 24 weeks installation time at a single floating circle each day. CFO Karl Lawenius, told the results conference that it would be 172 GWh of energy each year, and rely on 144 circular floaters delivering 100 MW peak. Ocean sun lays solar panels flat on roughly 0.5 MW of proprietary floating circular hydro-elastic membrane. The build price is quoted at $45 per watt for construction and the LCOE was designed to…
Population: 126,300,000 GDP Per Capita: $40,146.07 Government debt as % of GDP: 256.49% Japan has few natural resources – just like South Korea it has some coal and oil resources, but nothing close to its demand for them. Similarly it has few mining interests, some in Bismuth and it provides minerals such as sulfur (volcanic) and gypsum (lakes and seawater) and Iodine (from seawater). Weirdly Japan has over 100 active volcanoes, more than almost any other country in the world, hence the availability of sulfur. But for the most part Japan has become a trading nation, bringing raw materials from outside in order to manufacture everything, from steel, to cars and ships, and advanced electronics. It also processes chemicals and…
The Biden Administration has given its first big thumbs up to offshore wind in the US, approving the development of the country’s first commercial-scale offshore wind farm. For a market, which is woefully behind Europe and Asia in the space, a flurry of subsequent activity will propel the US to become the third largest market in the world by 2030 – behind China and the UK. The Vineyard Wind project, sitting 15 miles off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, will weigh in at a capacity of 800 MW – pretty mid-range by today’s offshore standards, but still sufficient to supply electricity to 400,000 homes. The $2.8 billion project, which is being developed by CIP and Avangrid, will now see…
Five years ago this week… Modem chip start-up Sckipio looked set to give AT&T the trigger for another broadband revolution. Sckipio’s Dynamic Bandwidth Allocation (DBA) in G.fast was poised to take control of coaxial cable from US cablecos and place it in the hands of telcos, with AT&T seeming to be at the front of the queue. AT&T’s average speeds topped out at 50 Mbps in 2016 – an embarrassment compared to the 300 Mbps to 500 Mbps offered by cablecos. But DBA offered a truly flexible bi-directional line, which could switch the direction of almost all its bandwidth depending on a customer’s needs. This laid the groundwork for AT&T to take over coax in MDUs, potentially expanding its static…
Vodafone Group has signed a six-year deal with Google Cloud, which will see the companies collaborate to develop a new analytics system, with up to 1,000 staff from both firms due to work on the project. This system will allow the operator to move and process “huge volumes of data globally from multiple systems into the cloud,” it said, targeting volumes of 5,000 data feeds per day, or about 50 terabytes per day “and growing”. The new co-developed system will have two parts – an integrated data platform called Nucleus, based on hybrid cloud technology, and a distribution engine called Dynamo, which will pull data from various sources and push key information back to end points to be used. Nucleus…
In a ringing endorsement, the TIP has officially adopted the Wireless Broadband Alliance’s (WBA) OpenRoaming spec as the basis for its new OpenWiFi standard. The move builds on the WBA’s attempts to bring convergence between the WiFi and cellular worlds, to create seamless handovers between networks, and much improved customer experiences. As a quick refresher, the Telecom Infra(structure) Project, to use its full name, was founded in 2016. Notably, Facebook was an influential founder, and a core focus has been to adopt general purpose equipment running specialist software, to replace the bespoke appliances that traditionally ran telecoms networks. To this end, its OpenRAN working group has been the most prominent wing of TIP, but work in millimeter wave (mmWave), as…
Not only do prices need to come down, but consumer perceptions of IMAX also need to change for the technology to achieve any sort of successful revival. Dedicated IMAX cinemas have been all-but consigned to the history books, while approximately 200 venues around the world are installed with IMAX 15/70mm film projectors or IMAX Laser projectors (almost 50% of which are split between the US and China). Meanwhile, the proprietary digital remastering technology has been showing signs of experiencing something of a second wind within the in-home consumer technology market, as appetites desperately crave immersion. The answer to our opening gambit hangs on how well IMAX and parent company Xperi can convince streaming services and TV manufacturers to deliver IMAX…
Transcoding provider Bitmovin has announced its Cloud Connect platform, designed to target AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure users, and allow them to implement Bitmovin’s encoding offerings inside an existing cloud deployment. With prominent support for VP9, AVC, and HEVC, the multi-codec angle is there to appease the OTT need to cater for the unpredictable devices of their viewers. On paper, this opens the door to potential customers that are not able to simply move cloud providers, in order to purchase Bitmovin’s services. For OTT customers, the additional stress is the need to be able to scale the deployment up and down, as demand shifts over time. This is why they are drawn to cloud computing, as you are able…
Advertising and cybersecurity are Abe Peled’s two technology passions right now, as expounded by the fabled Synamedia Chairman during our live Faultline fireside chat this week. Of course, Peled being Peled, these two topics were just the tip of the oxymoronic fireside iceberg. Discussion fluctuated from a stubbornness about the death of traditional pay TV being a fallacy, to an unexpected detour into realms of edge networking. When you have contributed as much to the pay TV market as Peled has, his almost omniscient view offers something for everyone, that is reflected both in the contemporary Synamedia product portfolio as well as his investment ventures on the side. The most surprising takeaway from Faultline’s viewpoint, however, came as Peled agreed…
India omits Huawei and ZTE from 5G trials Huawei and ZTE have been left out of India’s 5G trials, leaving Ericsson, Nokia and Samsung leading the charge of 12 firms involved in a six-month evaluation. The trials will be conducted by Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea, alongside state-run MTNL. This comes ahead of new procurement rules expected to be announced in June that will almost certainly formalize the ban, restricting Indian telcos to specified equipment from a list of trusted suppliers. T-Mobile USA upgrades subscriber forecast on back of strong Q1 T-Mobile USA has upgraded its estimate of subscriber additions for the year from 4.7m to 4.9m on the back of strong revenue growth of 78% to $19.8bn…
RDK is an open source platform for the connected home, which is growing an ecosystem of vendors around its RDK Broadband and RDK Video reference platforms. Device vendors within this community are now developing new devices to support the newly opened 6 GHz WiFi bands, according to Comcast’s executive director of systems architecture, Charles Moreman. Delivering a quick update on RDK-B this week, Moreman applauded the opening of 6 GHz bands by regulators the world over, describing the new spectrum as a tremendous greenfield opportunity for WiFi. RDK has revealed that 80m devices worldwide are now running RDK software, an impressive 20m uptick on this time last year. However, as always with these things, RDK refuses to break out numbers…
Wireless Watch’s sister service, Rethink TV, has just published a new report, entitled ‘Media & Entertainment Transcoding Workload and Device Royalty Forecast 2020-2030’. This is a 10-year look at the expected shape of the transcoding workload, and the penetration of the new video codecs into devices for video consumption – which are increasingly mobile, or at least, 5G-connected. The report examines the expected device royalties that will apply in this market, which will deeply affect the business case for technology and service providers in the media sector, and also, potentially, the costs for consumers. The forecast is made against a backdrop of competing standards for video codecs, which we have followed over the years in Wireless Watch as they impact on the…
Vodafone Group has signed a six-year deal with Google Cloud, which will see the companies collaborate to develop a new analytics system, with up to 1,000 staff from both firms due to work on the project. This system will allow the operator to move and process “huge volumes of data globally from multiple systems into the cloud”, it said, targeting volumes of 5,000 data feeds per day, or about 50 terabytes per day “and growing”. The new co-developed system will have two parts – an integrated data platform called Nucleus, based on hybrid cloud technology, and a distribution engine called Dynamo, which will pull data from various sources and push key information back to end points to be used. Nucleus…
Microsoft insists it has no desire to compete with mobile operators, despite its acquisition of two cloud-based packet core providers, Metaswitch and Affirmed Networks. These assets give it the ability to provide network-as-a-service to enterprises wanting private 5G, or even to smaller telcos, but the company wrote in a recent filing that it was “committed to working with, not disintermediating, operators”. The comments were made in filings, with the US regulator, about Open RAN, in response to a Notice of Inquiry issued by the FCC on the topic. Microsoft no doubt has its eye on increased business with operators for its Azure cloud platform, potentially to support telco networks as AWS is going to do for Dish Network. Microsoft believes…
The Trusted Connectivity Alliance (TCA) is celebrating the maturing of the integrated SIM (iSIM) in a paper just published, asserting that the technology is now ready to underpin new IoT use cases. The document advocates global and open standards developed by the GSMA among others, ensuring that iSIM technologies are both interoperable and at least as secure as either removable or embedded SIM (eSIM). The paper, entitled ‘Integrated SIM functionality: drivers, approaches to standardization and use cases’, defines an iSIM as an implementation of SIM functionality on a hardware tamper-resistant element (TRE), integrated into a host system-on-chip (SoC). It is an extension of the eSIM), which is a programmable SIM card incorporated in a device but still occupying a dedicated slot distinct…
Many mobile operators are now in the process of migrating their infrastructures towards more open platforms in the backhaul, core and even RAN domains using various technologies such as disaggregation, network functions virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN). And some are just starting to move on from NFV to the more modern and agile cloud-native platforms, which implement network functions as containerized microservices rather than virtual machines. The migrations are being driven by competitive forces, including hoped for capex cost savings, flexibility, freedom of vendor choice, future-proofing and speed of deployment. In theory, 5G should allow a clean break from legacy but in practice there will be coexistence at various levels for some time, especially in the RAN and at…