Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Kumu Networks has been an early proponent of full duplex technology to boost capacity in wireless applications, including 5G, wireless and backhaul, but it has struggled to hit the commercial mainstream. Now it has secured a $5m award from the US Department of Defense (DoD) to prototype a 5G full duplex system for integrated access and backhaul (IAB), an important aspect of the 5G Release 16 standards. This will make heavy use of Kumu’s signature IP in self-interference cancellation (SIC). IAB can extend coverage by using spectrum from a cell site both for backhaul and for access to surrounding sites, essentially setting up a mesh network. Full duplex allows the same channel to be used for transmit and receive, potentially…
LG’s much publicized exit from the global smartphone market was swiftly followed by a less prominent reiteration of its commitment to cellular research and particularly 6G. The Korean technology player has struck a new partnership with US-based test and measurement group Keysight Technologies and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST), to pursue research on future 6G technologies around transmission in the so called terahertz frequencies between millimeter wave and infrared light. This is one of several recently announced collaborations around 6G at a time when even its predecessor – 5G transmission in the mmWave frequencies between 6 GHz and 300 GHz – itself still lies in the future for the vast majority of countries and operators, as…
Nokia has enjoyed mounting success in the burgeoning 5G security field by banging the drum loudly and repeatedly, while profiting from Huawei’s discomfiture in this area. We should acknowledge the company’ commitment to the field while also noting that its rivals are hardly going to leave it a clear run. Indeed, Ericsson has been beefing up its security activities with its focus on a holistic approach, while Huawei continues to court mindshare with seminars and white papers. Without the kickback against Huawei, following the US sanctions and actions targeted specifically against the Chinese company, which President Biden shows little sign of relaxing, Huawei would still be setting the pace over 5G security technology. In the event, Nokia has been the…
Intel’s new CEO, Pat Gelsinger, has a huge task on his hands, to re-inject growth into the company at a time when it has intensified competition on many fronts from Samsung, Broadcom, Marvell and others; when it may face restricted access to the huge Chinese market because of geopolitics; when its PC market is fading and its domination of servers is threatened by new low power architectures. Even in the area where it once claimed untouchable leadership, manufacturing process, it has stumbled on advanced geometries and risks being eclipsed by TSMC, the foundry that supports most of Intel’s biggest rivals. Gelsinger seems, publicly at least, undaunted by the challenge. He was a man of vision when he was previously at…
Only a few years ago, Wireless Watch was taking only a limited interest in the semiconductor industry. In the mobile world, the networks remained dominated by proprietary chips designed by the major vendors so the major interest in covering the merchant chip industry focused on devices. Even there, significant change was rare as Qualcomm hung onto its domination of sales and intellectual property in the handset system-on-chip over successive generations, seeing off challenges from Intel, Broadcom and many others. Now the mobile semiconductor landscape is very different and coverage of its major players is fundamental to understanding the main drivers of the 5G era. There are many reasons for this, but three are particularly foundational, and play a central role…
Five years ago this week… Vivendi’s expansion continued, engaging in a 3.5% share swap with Italy’s Mediaset that forged a threatening pay TV alliance. Together, both companies had the potential to create a major content owner and distributor in Europe’s Latin markets, which held a customer base of over 18 million at the time. A few years later, in mid-2019, Mediaset shuttered the DTT operations of its Mediaset Premium pay TV platform in place of a bullish OTT-only approach with Mediaset Play, which is merging with the legacy Infinity OTT offering to form a single streaming platform set for launch this month. — CommScope has confirmed the inevitable as it begins the process of carving out its Home Networks…
MediaKind has picked a name from the partnership tree that has never before graced the Faultline archive in the form of Tangerine Global – a long-term Mediaroom technology reseller that earned its stripes installing HD IPTV systems across Asia Pacific. Today, Tangerine Global is more focused on the North American tier 2 operator market and hopes a new product cocktail called Citrus MediaFirst TVaaS will make a lasting impression. But will the deal be as juicy as the name? Peeling back the layers, Citrus MediaFirst is a full turnkey TVaaS platform targeted at cablecos, telcos, and ISPs seeking a cost-effective option to entering the modern era of creating, managing, and delivering next-generation streaming services across multiple devices. More accurately, it…
Regarded by many industry onlookers as the “Copyright Case of the Century,” a new precedent has been set for copyright law that has swung in Google’s favor following a landmark court ruling, 10 years since Oracle first cried foul play. By allowing Google to run with Oracle’s intellectual property, Faultline’s interpretation is that the Supreme Court has singlehandedly written a new definition of copyright in technology. It questions everything. If a piece of code cannot be copyrighted because its use was integral to building bigger and better things in the public interest, then where are the lines drawn? Could a piece of hardware be manipulated in the same way to avoid copyright? What about content? Successfully copyrighting a film or…
Red5 Pro has a hankering for coining its own acronyms. The US low latency streaming start-up created the Experience Delivery Network (XDN) to embody its vision for bringing the CDN into the modern era, while the newly named Quantum Delivery Network (QDN) will take the possibilities of video delivery to stratospheric heights. Hold onto your hat, because Red5 Pro’s QDN breakthrough will deliver live streams to your screen before they actually happen. Okay, so Red5 Pro wins our award for this year’s best April Fools’ Day joke. In a normal world, Faultline wouldn’t dream of gifting exposure to a cheap social media cheap gag posted at the expense of a few innocent industry bystanders. However, the lengths Red5 Pro went…
The UK Government is facing increasing pressure to bail out the country’s struggling steel industry both in the wake of Covid-19 and as the necessity to transition to green methods of production become more acute. Once again, this provides ministers with an opportunity to pair the country’s economic recovery with advancing a leadership in decarbonization, with many pleading for a £250 million Clean Steel Fund to be accelerated from its scheduled release in 2023. As we’ve seen in industries from power generation to automotives, the mantra of ‘grow or die’ has fast been replaced by a ‘change or die’ alternative, with those resisting a transition to net-zero facing dismal stock market performance. The moment a clean and economically viable technology…
The UK government appears to have gone all out to stick to its guns on using Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) and plans to open two gas power stations in the UK, in the North East Humber region, both of which are being described as decarbonized. To us this appears to be a completely blind alley that the UK government has gone down – one power station will have a pipeline created to dump captured carbon into the now well known Equinor undersea carbon storage facility under the North Sea, while the other claims it will burn Hydrogen. However given that Equinor is involved in the project, it is likely to that this is Blue hydrogen, with created by steam…
Five years ago this week… AOMedia embraced open source, issuing the first cut of the raw code base for its as-yet unnamed royalty free codec (soon to become AV1 of course), plugging together the best bits of VC1, VP9, Cisco’s Project Thor, and Mozilla’s Daala. At the time, this seemed to be a highly political move from the incumbent AOMedia members to prevent Apple controlling the video world through its domination of MPEG-LA, and, of course, Apple went on to join AOMedia in 2018. Although this code-base went on to become AV1, this was still in a skeletal state as of writing in April 2016, with the definitive bitstream specification beefing up the codebase later that year. — …
Cybersecurity slinger F-Secure has been picked by Kaon Broadband to help power Kaon’s new Quantum Open Standard Platform. As the name suggests, Kaon’s Quantum centers around an app store, in which F-Secure’s Sense suite can be found, aiming to provide operators with a ‘world-class connected home security’ offering. F-Secure says it now has business relationships with over 200 internet service providers 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. That seems like a no-brainer, and you would hope our collective understanding of security would agree on that point. However, the more exciting finding is that some 72% of that…
With the real NAB pushed back to October this year, the broadcast industry is plotting enough noise to fill the April void in the events calendar as the two-week virtual NAB Amplify extravaganza looms. Unsurprisingly, ATSC 3.0 is a topic that is already getting plenty of attention in the late March/early April spotlight, either positive or negative, depending on how you look at it. Despite being synonymous with delays, no one can criticize companies involved with ATSC 3.0 rollouts for pandemic-related delays, which stalled broadcasters from hoping to launch in all 62 markets by the end of last year, to having launched in roughly 20 markets today, reaching around 20% of the US population. The new hopeful target of launching…
Everyone from pay TV juggernauts to niche OTT applications have rushed to introduce co-watching features to their video experiences to keep viewers socially engaged – but is there any real value in such features, or is co-watching destined to be remembered as a flash in the pan(demic)? While investments in co-watching software have skyrocketed, the underlying technology has been around for some time in one form or another, usually under the guise of synchronization (think Net Insight circa 2015/16). However, this counts for nothing when features are rushed to market, with many co-watching platforms still fundamentally failing at the core purpose of staying in sync. While the co-watching experience itself might feel alien to some, the demand is obvious with…
Big questions will be asked of the fixed network infrastructure in Italy after Telecom Italia and sports streaming franchise DAZN doubled up to snatch domestic soccer streaming rights from Sky Italia – sending the lion’s share of matches OTT for the first time. Sky Italia will be incensed that it was pipped to the post by DAZN with the backing of its fierce operator rival in TIM, which is chipping in about 40% of the €2.5 billion paid by DAZN. The deal covers rights to show a total of 266 Serie A matches over three years (not including 114 co-exclusive matches), with DAZN streaming seven out of ten matches a week on an exclusive basis, and the remaining three on…
After years of stagnation, Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) is staging a comeback in a variety of new forms. The approach taken by Australian startup RayGen is so unusual that it might be better referred to as Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV). A RayGen solar plant employs satellite-grade photovoltaics at the concentrator to produce one-third of its energy, while the other two-thirds of the power goes into heating water in a thermal storage pit to just below boiling. Traditional CSP plants use vast heliostat mirror arrays to concentrate heat on a receiver, bringing a molten-salt Heat Transfer Fluid (HTF) to around 500 degrees Celsius. The salt is then used to heat water to power steam turbines, and also serves as long-duration energy storage.…
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm announced multiple pieces of funding from the Department of Energy (DoE), aimed at slashing the costs of American solar by 60% by 2030. Sad to say that’s an ambition that China can achieve on its own, but every little helps. The event held by the Solar Energy Technologies Office pledged a relatively small amount to a handful of projects – $128 million in total, the most important of which is support for a new generation of CSP (Concentrated Solar Power). It will offer $33 million for improvements in reliability of CSP plants which use long term thermal storage, which is critical to decarbonizing many industrial processes. A further $25 million will be used to demonstrate a…
The first quarter of the year is usually quiet for solar, but Q1 2021 has instead seen an incredible surge in demand, with China, the USA, and India all expected to set annual installation records. Our forecast suggest we will hit 178 GW, up from 146.5 GW in 2020. Two fundamental ways to gauge the scale of the industry are manufacturing capacity and – at least this year – the supply of raw materials. Specifically, polysilicon remains a harsh limiting factor on the solar industry, especially for the Chinese factories whose exports amount to about 50% of global supply (not counting domestic demand). That’s not so much because the supply of polysilicon was impacted by last year’s accidents; by now…
The Biden administration has finally unveiled a stream of measures to boost the nascent offshore wind industry in the US. The headline figure: a 30 GW target for 2030, while long-term intentions line up a potential capacity of 110 GW by the middle of the century. The announcement, made on Monday by the Departments of Interior (DOI), Energy (DOE), and Commerce (DOC), outlines a range of practical measures, which aim to streamline the planning and development of offshore wind farms – primarily off the east coast of the country. This will include opening up new swathes of seabed acreage, as well as new public finance for the domestic supply chain. The plan comes as part of President Biden’s wider objective…