Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
VMware has achieved a strong position in early deployments of cloud-based 5G networks, with many operators partnering with the Dell-owned company for their telco cloud platforms. Now it is pushing further into the RAN, to ride the wave of operator interest in Open RAN, and to try to stay ahead of rivals like IBM’s Red Hat and Wind River. It also needs to counter developments that would see 5G functions running on bare metal in the public cloud; or tier one OEMs packaging their own cloud platform with their RAN network functions. The recent announcement that Dish would run its 5G Open RAN in the AWS cloud prompted speculation that VMware’s deal with the US operator might be ending, but…
Telecom Italia (TIM) was the last to sign up, of the five European operators that recently announced a memorandum of understanding to support Open RAN deployment and a local ecosystem. However, it has leapt ahead of its partners in that venture – Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica and Vodafone – in deploying Open RAN equipment in a live network in Europe. Most Open RAN roll-outs to date have been trials, or deployments in greenfield environments such as rural expansion. But TIM is implementing a system supplied by JMA Wireless and MTI in an existing live network in the city of Faenza, near Bologna in north-east Italy. That raises the question of how its new vendors will coexist with those already active…
Vodafone and Qualcomm have announced a highly significant partnership to develop blueprints that aim to lower the barriers to smaller vendors entering the closed world of RAN equipment. Success would be a big step towards achieving a key aim of the Open RAN initiative – to broaden the choice of suppliers for telcos, in order to boost competition and innovation and reduce the power of incumbent vendors. However, it can be questioned how open the blueprint can be if it remains defined only by one chipmaker. The initial reference designs will be based on Qualcomm’s new 5G RAN platforms, including Radio Unit (RU) with Massive MIMO support and Distributed Unit (DU). This is the latest example of a major operator…
It was another good week for the Open RAN movement, with several operators, notably AT&T and Telecom Italia, firming up on their commitments to deploying future 5G networks based on the open specifications. Perhaps even more important for the building of that key enabler of success, a broad ecosystem on top of a common platform, was Qualcomm’s announcement of a cooperation with Vodafone around Open RAN (see below). As we have pointed out many times, for any tech platform to gain critical mass, but also to stay open to many vendors, it needs to have the support of major merchant chip providers – and those companies need to be able to match or outdo the performance of single-purpose ASIC chips,…
Diamond Foundry – a start-up growing diamonds in a laboratory – has gained a valuation of $1.8 billion after an investment of $200 million by Fidelity. The company is expected to boost its output to 5 million carats per year by the end of 2022, which would account for around 4.5% of global output by today’s standards. It would also represent roughly a quarter of the output of market leaders like De Beers, which produce diamonds through mining. Lab-grown diamonds typically cost around half of the cost of a mined diamond, which will boost their applicability in semiconductors, where their increased heat conductivity will increase the performance of electric vehicles, 5G technologies and data centers. South Korea has seen its…
Tesla results draw two types of reactions – criticism from those who hate Tesla, and praise from those that love it – leaving precious little for newcomers to the company to form a position. A Tesla crash a few days before the event was reported widely as a failure of its self-driving features, which of course turned out to be incorrect, and CEO Elon Musk made a point of telling his audience that self-driving was not switched on during that accident. End of discussion. We had already read some 20,000 words on the subject of Tesla results before we finally got around to looking at numbers – and universally every word we read was negative, and the price had been…
Population: 37,813,263 (-0.11% vs 2019) GDP per Capita: $15,645 (-2.8% vs 2019) Debt to GDP: 57.5% (+11.9% vs 2019) The headlines following events like President Joe Biden’s Leaders’ Summit on Climate last week typically focus on the ‘winners.’ But while the pledge to cut US emissions in half by 2030 has warranted speculation from across the globe, it is the absent climate ambition from countries like Poland that provide more transparency on the position of the world’s fossil fuel industry. For countries like Poland, any resistance to change will simply build up a larger driving pressure for when its shift to net zero emissions gets fully underway, providing marked opportunities for those that can sink their teeth in where domestic…
The US Departments of both Energy and Transportation have teamed up to score a massive “one, two” in favor of US decarbonization this week, with $8 billion of funding being found to transform the US energy grid, and existing regulations on major transport routes being eased to make transmission permitting straightforward. The combination of the two announcements is an open invitation for investors to pile into a transformation of the US grid, along the lines published in the famous (infamous) Seams study in 2018. This was written by a National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) team including Joshua Novacheck. The report was suppressed by the Trump Administration until there was an expose and public outcry last year. Essentially the report showed…
A quick Ctrl + F search for the keyword “DirecTV” in AT&T’s first quarter 2021 results filing surfaces a grand total of zero matches. The operator has long been trying to keep its dwindling pay TV business at arm’s length as the part-sale to private equity firm TPG drags on, but to completely avoid the elephant in the room is typical AT&T. The reality was a brutal start to the new year as 620,000 premium video subscribers cut the cord across the three pay TV properties of DirecTV, U-verse, and AT&T TV – taking the total base down to 15.9 million premium video connections. While an improvement on the nearly 900,000 subs lost in the same period last year, a…
Spurred on by recent events, V-Nova has published a research paper showing that its LCEVC technology can produce performance benefits over native AV1 including power consumption, battery drain and percentage of dropped frames. While the knowledge that LCEVC is capable of enhancing any base codec, including AV1, is no secret by now, V-Nova’s latest revelations have arrived at a poignant time with debates recently resurfacing about whether members of the Alliance for Open Media should turn to the MPEG-5 Part 2 technology. AV1 has become infamous for the first two KPIs mentioned in our opening gambit, with its power-guzzling reputation hastening the creation of a scalable version of AV1 with significant power consumption improvements. We will revisit SVT-AV1 shortly, but…
FIDO Alliance launches protocol to simplify secure IoT deployment The FIDO Alliance set up to promote stronger device authentication has launched its FIDO Device Onboard (FDO) protocol, an open IoT standard enabling devices to join or ‘onboard’ cloud and on-premises management platforms more securely. Through this standard, the FIDO Alliance is tackling challenges in security, cost and complexity associated with IoT device deployment at scale. FIDO Device Onboard advances the fundamental vision of the Alliance, which has brought together over 250 enterprises and government agencies around the world to address cybersecurity and where possible move away from reliance on passwords. Strong wireless growth helps boost AT&T Q1 revenues AT&T has reported increased revenues on the back of solid wireless growth, driven…
Rakuten Mobile is generally seen as the trailblazer for new 5G architectures, but even the Japanese disruptor has not put its RAN or core into the public cloud, but is instead building out its own dense edge cloud to support its roll-out. Dish Network, which often says it is following Rakuten’s blueprint, has gone a step further and said it will run its whole 5G network, even the vRAN, in the AWS cloud. This appears to be a massive gamble, which will force Dish to address its challenging roll-out deadlines using an entirely unproven platform. Its trial networks have used a VMware telco cloud layer, with RAN virtual network functions from Mavenir and Altiostar running on Intel FlexRAN. It is…
It is rare for a month to go by without a collection of new developments related to Open RAN, and April has been no exception. European operators continued to put weight behind an open platform, with Orange joining fellow heavyweights Vodafone and Telefónica in a pledge to deploy only Open RAN-compatible equipment from 2025. The UK government also offered support for Open RAN, following a study of 5G security and supply chain diversity issues, but missed some of the point by recommending buying quotas for the country’s four MNOs. Nokia expanded on its proposition to seize a good share of this market, but its challengers are on the move too, with Mavenir announcing new funding. And the USA’s Dish Network…
Like Japan, Germany has become a leading hub for industrial private 5G/LTE deployment, with many manufacturers there seeking to build their own networks in unlicensed spectrum without any role for operators. Major telcos have been forced to respond and have done so in various ways, with Deutsche Telekom, unsurprisingly, foremost among them. DT is seeking a leading role as a systems integrator bringing in all the components and tools required to deliver a complete industrial IoT service around a private network. Its principal partner in this venture is AWS for managed edge infrastructure and services. The telco has also unveiled two all-in packages for factory and warehouse-based edge-cloud analytics following a deal with German IT services company GFT. This brings…
Accuracy down to a centimeter or two for satellite tracking opens the door to new applications including autonomous driving, professional drone navigation and wireless industrial robotics control. The current level of accuracy for GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite Systems), of between one and five meters, is fair enough for satellite navigation systems in vehicles, Google maps and recreational tracking as in sports watches, although even some of these would benefit from an improvement. But for collision avoidance for drones and vehicles, and even more so for high precision process control, much greater improvement down to at least one or two centimeters accuracy is required. It is true that the latest generation GNSS systems, such as the European Union’s Galileo, boast improved…
The days when WiFi and cellular had clearly delineated functions have gone, in terms of industry discussion – the supposed battle between the two wireless technologies is a favorite recurring theme, only intensified by talk of a next generation of standards (WiFi 7 and 3GPP Releases 17 and beyond). Certainly, the capabilities of WiFi and 4G/5G have increasingly overlapped as both technologies have expanded beyond their initial territories. WiFi was conceived as a local area network mainly for indoor and stationary or nomadic use, but has steadily, over the past 15 years and more, expanded into public and outdoor hotzones, low power IoT networks, and mobile, QoS-sensitive enterprise systems. Meanwhile cellular technology, designed for wide area, mobile voice, mainly outdoors,…
Five years ago this week… Charter’s merger with Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks was approved by the FCC and the Justice Department. Critical to the approval was the FCC’s insistence that content players and OTT video were protected. Charter could not put a data cap on its customers for the following seven years, nor could it employ usage-based broadband pricing or charge interconnection fees, all of which had been used by Comcast, AT&T and Verizon to charge Netflix. Charter was also required to build out broadband access to 2 million US residents, at least 1 million of which were in areas sought by other US providers. Today, Charter is the US’ second-largest cable operator – behind Comcast –…
What virtual NAB lacked in star-studded panel discussions, it made up for in product announcements from the vendor community. Hosting only its second full online experience, with a little more time to prepare than last year’s virtual event, NAB Amplify 2021 played host to a blend of sponsored product presentations hitting on important themes of the past year. Faultline’s first port of call was an augmented reality start-up called Arti, which brings 3D visual experiences into video. Arti’s bullish stance is that, soon, video without AR will look as ancient as black and white TV, according to co-founder and CEO Yaron Zakai-Or. “All the effects seen here are created from my office with just a camera, a laptop and an…
Asking any big-shot panel for long-term predictions is rarely bound to end well, so extensive are the lengths of red tape that usually surround each company’s representative. But at this week’s StreamTV Sports Summit, FuboTV was willing to come out swinging against the hotly tipped rise of sports leagues going direct to consumer (D2C). Fighting his corner as the only aggregator on the panel, Fubo’s Head of Content Strategy and Acquisition, Ben Grad, argued that D2C platforms were leveling out, and that the next five years would see a shake out of the format after some initial hype for the next year or so. Looking to WWE for a case study, he noted that while its aggressive arrival on the…
As well as competing directly with NAB Amplify for virtual eyeballs this week, Harmonic’s cloud-centric Live Summit took the video and cable technology vendor deeper into battle with AWS. Sessions including ‘The acceleration of the video industry’s cloud transformation’ and ‘Must haves when streaming in the cloud’ encapsulated hours of sales pitches that were almost identical in content matter and message. While these particular sessions were missing a certain “je ne sais quoi” – probably in the form of customer case studies or independent voices – the backdrop of all this cloud-based video has been instrumental in another barnstorming year of business for Harmonic. One of Faultline’s standout takeaways from the event was the description of AWS as a “frenemy”…