Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
The ultra-low latency group of 5G use cases, collected under the banner of URLLC (ultra-reliable low latency communications) has been depicted as a catching-up exercise for wireless communications against wired options, especially fiber. But it is more than that, because it opens up use cases in autonomous driving and robotics that cannot be served by wired communications anyway. Beyond that, the low latencies in these mobile scenarios will create new possibilities that will require addressing delay bottlenecks elsewhere in the line of processing, especially in data analytics. This will also play into sectors such as robotics and autonomous driving where almost instant decisions relating to safety have to be made under exceptional circumstances, sometimes in compliance with regulations. In the…
Malaysia has been mulling a shared national 5G network for some time as a way to speed up roll-out and encourage availability of 5G to support national industrial objectives, including the digital economy blueprint unveiled early this year. The plan is now coming to fruition though the costings and funding structures remain obscure. The government has set up a special purpose vehicle called Digital Nasional Bhd (DNB) to implement, own and manage the network and to hold spectrum in 700 MHz and 3.5 GHz. DNB has requested bids from eight vendors to help build and manage the shared network. Malaysia is not one of the countries that has sought to exclude Huawei from 5G build-outs, and in fact there are…
It is critical to the near term 5G business case that total cost of ownership is reduced in as many ways as possible. This is particularly true in markets where key expected drivers of new 5G revenues will not emerge at scale for some years, particularly the growth of enterprise services that will underpin operational transformation in many sectors – but not necessarily for some years to come. Where additional revenues are not easy to find, but operators are still under competitive or regulatory pressure to build out 5G rapidly, clearly a new cost model is needed. Over the next decade, the move to cloud-native networks, and the transformation of many telco processes, will help to deliver that new model,…
When a nuclear power plant completes these days it must feel weird – almost no-one has managed it outside of China in the past decade, and it is usually after a ten year build plus a 3 or 4 year overrun at best, and at least 10% to 15% cost overruns. So this week when Southern Company said that engineering firm Bechtel had set in place its passive containment cool water tank, there was an audible gasp from the investor community, unsure if perhaps we are approaching the point where the Vogtle 3 and 4 units being built for Georgia Power, the Southern subsidiary, were approaching their final end dates. But such is the constant theme around nuclear that a…
The commodity prices for both steel and iron have continued to rocket to record levels, with iron in particular reaching all-time highs this week. While governments ramp up infrastructure investments and economic activity – a natural driver of demand – heavy emitting mining and steelmaking companies are facing increasing pressure to curb production levels. Until emission-free steel can be produced at scale – possibly the back end of this decade – these prices can be expected to stay. Naturally, with iron ore accounting for 70% of the metallic raw material inputs into global steelmaking – and with the steel industry accounting for 98% of iron ore’s end use – the price of iron ore is closely tied to the demand…
Yet another geothermal company in the US, Fervo Energy, has raised a funding round of $28 million in Series B financing. The round was led by Capricorn Investment, and existing investors including Breakthrough Energy Ventures, 3X5 Partners, Congruent Ventures, and Elemental Excelerator and Helmerich & Payne, a drilling systems company which has a technology partnership with Fervo. In February this year BP and Chevron jointly backed a similar Canadian company Eavor, with $40 million. Both companies seem to have the same idea – take drilling platforms designed for fracking and drill down around 2 kilometers, and then two horizontal layers of about the same distance, and then complete the drilling with another vertical drop, so that water or a specialized…
Five years ago this week… AirTies gave up pursuing hardware any further, launching its Remote View software which allowed engineers, consumers and help desks to troubleshoot and fix WiFi issues remotely. Bolstered by improved mapping of a typical WiFi home, as well as better reporting on data usage per device, AirTies hoped to reduce the insane amount of fruitless truck rolls operators were carrying out – with one client reporting 90% resulting in ‘no fault found’ or password problems. There was one catch – operators would have to buy all their access points from AirTies, or license its software to be loaded into existing install bases, which were generally Broadcom or Quantenna chips. — Uruguay-based cable operator TCC has…
OEMs in the RDK Broadband community are busy developing new devices to support newly opened 6GHz 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 6GHz bands by regulators the world over, describing the new spectrum as a tremendous greenfield opportunity for WiFi. As mentioned in our longer story on RDK Video this week, RDK Management has revealed that 80 million devices worldwide are now running RDK software, an impressive 20 million uptick on this time last year. However, as always with these things, RDK refuses to break out numbers by device. While we are confident that video accounts for the lion’s share of…
Dipping into TV of Tomorrow Live (TVOT) for one last session, how could we possibly resist a panel teasingly called Pandemic Experiments? Some dramatic changes in viewing habits have been easier to correlate and explain than others over the past year – prompting experimentation around audience measurement and advertising as the focal point of discussion. What has surprised Comscore’s Chief Research Officer, Michael Vinson, most during the pandemic is the different time scales. In the early days of lockdowns, the US measurement company observed a quick increase in viewing as expected. Then, as time went on, Comscore started to notice differentiation of viewing habits by geography. Through summer and fall 2020, as Covid-19 infections ebbed and flowed, Vinson highlighted New…
Despite the hype around AVoD, Faultline has always maintained that the business model makes no sense long-term, especially if the platform in question is eyeing up premium content. So, it is reassuring to hear that a secretly huge OSS/BSS provider for the video industry is already having conversations with these platforms to set up subscription revenue streams. Evergent’s latest update to its Customer Care and Billing (CCB) product suite promises a range of monetization strategies across AVoD, SVoD and TVoD (transactional VoD). The company’s CEO, Vijay Sajja, told us that this is often a case of ad-supported streamers bringing in new monetization opportunities. Sajja recalled how, five years ago, Sony’s OTT service in India (SonyLIV) was almost entirely AVoD and…
Beefing up its security credentials while consolidating the video streaming sector, software provider JW Player is acquiring video orchestration vendor Vualto for an undisclosed fee. This a striking example of Faultline being right at the nucleus of activity within the video software sphere, having interviewed executives from both JW Player and Vualto on separate occasions during the past nine months. The spooky part is that both parties agreed wholeheartedly with our observations about the commoditization of certain software components within their respective product portfolios – prompting each to reveal exclusive glimpses into roadmaps devised to surmount this very commodity conundrum. With just 12 weeks between the two conversations, we are almost inclined to say we sowed the seed for JW…
Imagine starting a sales pitch not with the usual tactics of convincing a prospect why your products and services are better in performance or value over the competition, but on the notion of your company being more financially stable than the competition – and therefore a more reliable long-term choice. That is precisely how Marc Mulgrum, SVP of Sales at Setplex, chooses to approach every sales pitch – and his conversation with Faultline this week was no different. He boasted of a solid and highly profitable company with zero debt, which even owns its own office building outright – together forming a decent anchor that instills confidence in any potential buyer, before even touching on technology. It may be an…
Faultline was only permitted (accidentally, it transpires) to attend a single session during this week’s 2021 RDK Leadership walled garden event, which just happened to be the well-rounded RDK roadmap that we craved – revealing previously unseen plans for the expansion of RDK video and broadband. Following four key themes – Lightning, RDK Accreditation, growth update and SoC partnerships – Comcast’s SVP of Device Software, Labeeb Ismail, revealed that the US giant is currently in the process of deploying RDK4 across all Flex devices, powered by the new Lightning-based UI that signals a move to a pure local software interface. We learned that there are actually four different UIs been trialed between Comcast and Sky right now, all deployed on…
NTT and Fujitsu hook up to look beyond 5G Japanese electronics giants NTT and Fujitsu have struck an alliance to develop technology and standards promoting multivendor interoperability in the mobile and optical transport fields. The partners have stated they will conduct joint research and development activities toward a variety of “energy efficient, sustainable technologies” in areas including open architecture optical transport and mobile communications, combined with disaggregated high performance computing. This will become possible through photonics/electronics convergence in devices, according to the companies. “In order to promote more open mobile networks in anticipation of the Beyond 5G era, the two companies will study the development and promotion of open interface-based technologies, as well as the development of global businesses based…
There has been much fanfare around Ethiopia’s plan to liberalize its telecoms market, as international players eye the diminishing number of markets that have not already opened up to new entrants. However, the country’s recent suffering from renewed civil conflict and the pandemic have dampened enthusiasm, and only two bidders actually emerged for the two new licences on offer, despite two extensions to the original deadline of December 10 2020. Those bidding to compete with incumbent Ethio Telecom highlight the role strategically-placed Ethiopia tends to play in wider geopolitics. One is South Africa’s MTN, backed by China’s Silk Road Fund; the other is a consortium led by Vodafone, but backed by US and UK financing. The funds come from a…
The US tower operators are riding high on the boost to their business from 5G expansion and telcos’ rising interest in an edge cloud to support their disaggregated networks and their 5G services. Crown Castle’s CEO Jay Brown said, on his firm’s Q1 earnings call, that “following a period of building excitement and anticipation, we have seen a significant increase in activity as our customers have started to upgrade their networks to 5G at scale”. The towerco raised its 2021 forecast for site rental revenues and for EBITDA as a result, emerging triumphant a year after activist investor Elliot Management sought to force Crown to reverse its strategy to grow a fiber, small cell and edge infrastructure business to complement…
Last year, the Open Networking Foundation set up SD-RAN, an initiative to develop a platform for a key element of Open RAN, the RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC). At the time, the ONF insisted it was not breaking with the O-RAN Alliance and would use that body’s RIC specs as the framework for its own effort, but it wanted to push forward a developer ecosystem for the xApps that will run on top of the RIC, especially in the challenging near-real time environment. It also commented that O-RAN had become very vendor-driven, while ONF – which has its own engineering teams rather than relying entirely on those of members – would stick firmly to operator-defined specs and requirements. It has now…
The Mioty Alliance, set up to challenge the existing big four low power WAN protocols, has gained semiconductor firm STMicro as a member but still needs to attract more big technology companies to really threaten the established order. The Mioty protocol does though score by addressing shortcomings of the existing protocols while attempting to cater for a wider variety of IoT applications or use cases, including environmental monitoring and smart metering. In particular, Mioty benefits from being based on the recently introduced narrowband TS-UNB specification from the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), developed as a replacement for the Wireless Meter Bus (M-Bus) standard that has been widely deployed for smart metering in Europe, as well as some countries of Asia…
The Open Industry Alliance 4.0 (OIA) has emerged as a leading candidate global forum promoting IoT, 5G and edge technologies as well as standards, after gaining some major multinational members with Microsoft latest to join. Siemens has also added weight as a new recruit given its huge manufacturing base, but being German that is a less significant addition to what had initially looked like a European club. Indeed it was dominated initially by German manufacturers and electronics companies after its formation in April 2019, and these still account for the majority of its members now numbering almost 80. That reflects both the pre-eminence of German manufacturing and the country’s leadership role in the industrial IoT (IIoT), which has led to…
AT&T told the US regulator, the FCC, that it plans to add Open RAN-compliant equipment to its network “within the next year”, a similar timeframe to that of Verizon. But it says there is significant work to do to “ensure that O-RAN can meet our complex feature set”, especially for high end enterprise applications and the FirstNet public safety system. AT&T – together with China Mobile – contributed much of the initial code for the O-RAN Alliance’s specifications, when that body was formed from the merger of the AT&T-founded xRAN Consortium, and the China-centric Cloud-RAN Alliance. However, it has been less active in Open RAN trials and roll-outs than operators in Japan and Europe, so far, and may be planning…