Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
In an English-language exclusive, Faultline can reveal that Belgian video middleware developer Zappware was recently acquired by a venture capital firm under cover of darkness. By cover, we mean an early April 2021 press release that was only published in Dutch and went unnoticed by the rest of the world, until it was brought to our attention this week. Consolidation and commoditization alarm bells sounded in synchrony on first acknowledgement of the news, through fear for Zappware’s future in a fast-moving TV software world, particularly for a company that has for too long relied on a single major customer to prop up the business. These concerns about venture capitalists rubbing their hands together at the thought of impending job cuts…
In China this week the National Development and Reform Commission and the National Energy Board have jointly put out a paper for a one month comment period on taking Chinese grid energy storage capacity to 30 GW by 2025. It looks like the pieces are being put into place to attract the major lithium ion battery suppliers into the business, by making it financially worthwhile. Given that this is a capacity measure, and that most installations are based on two hours or four hours of support, this looks to us like a plan to install 60 GWh to 120 GWh of battery by that time, which would put ahead of the Rethink Energy forecast on global energy storage made a…
Germany is latest country to fund 6G research The German government has earmarked up to €700m ($833m) for research into 6G technologies running up to 2025. The country’s Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) is starting the first German research initiative on 6G technology this week, with the initial priority to establish a foundation for an innovation ecosystem around the emerging technologies. “We have to think about the day after tomorrow and help shape new key technologies and standards in communication technologies right from the start,” said federal research minister Anja Karliczek. “5G is already setting important standards here and will take digital networking to the next level. 6G, however, will be the mobile data technology of the future…
Huawei has grand plans for its HarmonyOS smartphone software, planning to have the new operating system running on 300m devices by the end of 2021. That figure would be reached by selling 100m new devices with native support, and upgrading the rest from Android. The target was announced at last week’s Huawei global analyst summit and it was clear that, like Android, HarmonyOS would be a multi-device platform, also targeting smart TVs, IoT devices and potentially cars. This will be important at a time when Huawei’s smartphone shipments are falling, because of international restrictions but also loss of market share in China to other local rivals such as Oppo and Xiaomi. HarmonyOS was hastily brought off the back burner when…
There is no shortage of industry alliances targeting the convergence of connectivity and the cloud, especially at the edge of the network. But the latest, the Open Grid Alliance, has announced its objective as no less than supporting a re-architected Internet. “Like the power grid, from which it gathers its metaphorical inspiration, the Open Grid will be a software-defined system that stretches across the globe to support multi-cloud services via fungible resources that are employed, when and where they are needed, on demand, and with guarantees and service-level agreements,” states the group’s launch manifesto. Within that, 5G will have a critical role to play. This ambitious goal is being chased by a group of edge infrastructure and software-based network companies,…
Nvidia is the latest semiconductor company to announce a new processor combining AI and 5G functionality, and brings its huge weight in the AI landscape to bear behind a burgeoning trend. Its announcement came complete with a set of big-name partners to help target specific applications or vertical sectors. The latter include general enterprise, healthcare, industrial IoT, managed edge compute services, and mobile infrastructure itself. Nvidia’s move follows a string of developments and releases over the past year, bringing together AI and 5G. These have come from both major semiconductor companies and start-ups. The GPU giant’s strategy is to recruit partners to fashion its 5G and AI package in methodical pursuit of different use cases. The AI-on-5G platform itself integrates…
Convergence of wireline and wireless networks, and the converged core, are generally on a later stage of operator’s roadmaps than wireless-only migrations, but in the medium term, many telcos aim to take advantage of the fact that the 5G core turns 5G into a multi-access platform, in which convergence could enable new services while delivering cost and operational efficiencies. This vision has made wireline-focused industry bodies increasingly active in 5G, whether standard bodies like the Broadband Forum, or trade groups like CableLabs, the North American cable industry’s R&D arm. CableLabs has increasingly contributed to 5G standards and to initiatives like Open RAN, and it has now initiated two projects that aim to drive further inter-sector collaboration on network and service…
Massive MIMO has been crucial to the performance of early 5G, and deployed at a far earlier stage and faster rate than was forecast a few years ago. The antenna arrays, featuring between 16 and 128 transmit and the same number of receive elements, allow operators to boost cell range, and so to use the same site grid that supported 2.5 GHz or even 1.8 GHz LTE, for 5G in higher bands around 3.5 GHz. The technology also supports sharp increases in capacity and cell edge performance. But it is at the start of its evolution. Already, 256T256R platforms are being tested. Huawei has applied a variant of the technology to an indoor architecture called Distributed Massive MIMO. One of…
Huawei’s annual analyst summit, hosted in Shenzhen last week, was dominated by the vendor’s own campaign to expand on the well-known triangle of 5G use cases (eMBB, mMTC and URLLC), and create three more that redress the balance in favor of the uplink and the enterprise. These come under the banner of 5.5G (naturally), and consist of: Uplink-centric broadband communication (UCBC) Real time broadband communication (RTBC) Harmonized communication and sensing (HCS) Huawei has been touting these three cases since its 2020 Global Mobile Broadband Forum (MBBF), where its executive director, David Wang, described them as cornerstones of the company’s vision for the next phase of 5G development. As Wang put it then: “5.5G is our vision for the industry. It…
It may be only a year since 5G really started to be rolled out at scale in many markets, but already the telecoms world – or at least its hype machine – is bored with plain old 5G. The R&D projects and even deployment commitments for 6G are piling up along with the political posturing from the leading hi-tech nations. Operators, particularly in the USA, are already labelling certain services ‘5G-plus’ or similarly inflated titles. Huawei made ‘5.5G’ the centerpiece of its global analyst summit, held last week (see below). But there is interesting reality beneath the hype. ‘5.5G’ may recall previous 4G attempts by vendors to persuade customers they were more advanced than their rivals, but these sometimes turn…
There is a continuous tendency for the aviation industry to believe that it is a special case. Airlines think they are so important that they expect governments to bail them out, and that growth in trade can only happen when just as many people are airborne as there were in 2019. How real is that? Government ministers in most countries simply go blank when it comes to aviation, shrug their shoulders and allow airports and airlines to do just whatever the hell they like. Because no government yet has come up with a plan to phase out or even reduce CO2 from air travel – passenger, freight or otherwise. It is almost as if air travel just has to be…
Approaching two years since we explored the disruptive promise of decentralized encoding via a start-up called Livepeer, the company has issued a crucial roadmap update on its vision for progressive decentralization. While Livepeer has accomplished some of its goals since raising $8 million in Series A funding in June 2019, the company says some verticals remain a work in progress, such as the continuing expansion of the Livepeer Network’s capabilities beyond initial adaptive bitrate transcoding, as well as the evolving governance structure. A recent company blog post, penned by Livepeer founder Doug Petkanics, claims the Livepeer Network in its current state performs one job “very well” – which is ABR video transcoding. But Livepeer is dreaming much bigger, having identified…
Targeted advertising is one of the few glimmers of hope for those in the linear ecosystem – a short-term remedy for an otherwise gloomy future. Getting there has been too slow, however, with a sizable part of linear audiences already lost in the past five years, but it does seem as though the industry is finally getting its act together. Faultline has noticed in the past that the DVB is increasingly following in the footsteps of its cooler, younger cousin, HbbTV. So, we were not surprised to come across the former hosting a webinar on the latter, specifically on how European broadcasters and ad tech vendors are pushing ahead with HbbTV to drive targeted ads over linear. Smartclip’s Director of…
Most people would want to take a breather, after successfully beating a $228 million intellectual property claim against them. Roku, however, decided to celebrate this victory by going on the offensive, and has filed suit against Universal Electronics, over alleged patent infringement. Roku prevailed against ESW Holdings, a division of ESW Capital, which had filed the case in the infamous Western District of Texas court – not to be confused with the infamous Eastern District that used to be the favored location for patent trolls. The case was brought in February 2019, and the trial kicked off on April 5. Lasting just four days, the jury found that Roku had not infringed on the five patents claimed by ESW. Faultline…
Huawei has unveiled its HarmonyOS expansion target, planning to have the new operating system running on 300 million devices by the end of 2021, having sold 100 million native devices and upgrading the rest from Android to the new OS. Unfortunately, it seems smart TV adoption will pale in comparison to smartphones. Of course, the background to HarmonyOS is that Huawei has been forced into a corner, due to the actions of the US government placing it on the naughty list. This has cut Huawei off from using Android, or rather, has prevented Google from providing new support for Android to Huawei. This meant that Huawei has had to pivot to its own operating system, for use across its portfolio…
Kerlink supports LoRaWAN peer-to-peer network in IoT gateways Kerlink, a French specialist in Internet of Things (IoT) technology, has added support for one of the world’s first peer-to-peer wireless IoT networks based on the LoRaWAN low power WAN (LPWAN) protocol to its indoor Wirnet iFemtoCell, and outdoor Wirnet iStation IoT gateways. Called ‘The People’s Network’ and launched by US firm Helium, this global and distributed network of hotspots provides public, long range and low power wireless coverage for LoRaWAN-enabled IoT sensors and devices. This exploits Helium’s LongFi architecture that combines LoRaWAN with its own blockchain technology. LongFi delivers roaming capabilities and supports micropayment transactions so customers only pay based on network usage without needing to deploy gateways or network servers.…
F-Secure has been picked by Kaon Broadband to help power Kaon’s new Quantum Open Standard Platform, which is focused on connected home security. F-Secure says it now has business relationships with over 200 ISPs globally. It cites some research it collected in a recent survey, which suggests that 84% of consumers believe it was important to protect all Internet-connected devices in their home. The more exciting finding is that some 72% of that group said they were willing to pay for that protection. It has been shown that consumers are willing to pay for premium WiFi, usually in the form of a whole-home monitoring app and perhaps a suite of mesh nodes to extend the range of the original access…
As a very long-running saga nears its end, Google has won a major victory over Oracle in the US Supreme Court, which has ruled that the search giant did not violate a key Java patent – owned by Oracle courtesy of its acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2010 – in Android. Oracle originally sued Google over Java copyright and patents in 2010 and there have been many hearings since, with Google losing a major round in the battle in 2018. The scope of the legal action has been reduced over time – the first lawsuits covered seven patents and a copyright claim, but by 2012 the case centered on copyright for 37 Java APIs, consisting of less than 12,000 lines…
Japan’s NEC has seen its profile in the global telecoms ecosystem steadily enhanced by 5G. This has been partly because of its role in Open RAN, developing the 5G radio and core for Rakuten’s roll-out and establishing its credentials as an alternative to the big five radio vendors, but with all the benefits of multiple decades of cellular experience with the demanding Japanese operators. However, while NEC may not previously have escaped from Japan in the RAN market, it is a global player in some other sectors that are also being transformed or expanded by 5G – notably transport and backhaul networks, orchestration (via its Netcracker subsidiary) and systems integration. This combination of capabilities has attracted partnerships with other large…