Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Every so often, over the past two decades, a company proposes a flexible, wholesale mobile platform in the USA, to open up the market for enterprise services to a wide variety of providers. Clearwire pushed this idea when it was building a WiMAX network in the early years of the century. When it was acquired by Sprint, the larger operator – which had largely pioneered the MVNO model in the USA – kept the flame alive for a while, particularly when it formed a shortlived venture with several cablecos to create an alternative network and model to those of AT&T and Verizon. Sprint reverted to LTE and a conventional approach, but Google was setting out visions of how a more…
AT&T is in the unfamiliar and unwelcome position of being third-placed in the US wireless market, having been overtaken by the T-Mobile marketing juggernaut, enlarged by Sprint with its big spectrum dowry. AT&T Communications CEO Jeff McElfresh told an investor event: “I want to be very transparent with that. We find ourselves not as the share leader, and it has been many years since we’ve actually grown our wireless premium postpaid business.” His strategy to reverse that situation is to target growth in key industries and locations where AT&T believes 5G usage should rise steeply, at least post-pandemic, such as sports venues, retail, gaming, travel and transport, healthcare and public safety. In addition, it will layer on more enterprise 5G-related…
Despite the US operators’ big claims about “world-leading” 5G build-outs and investments, in fact they are being relatively circumspect about their capex spending (except when it comes to the C-band spectrum auction, of course). Compared to China’s massive expenditure on rolling out a gigantic network very quickly, the USA’s spending looks cautious, and is not set to jump significantly until 2022 onwards, though there is an uptick in 2021 compared to 2020. Even from 2022, the operators are hoping to keep capex growth under control, even as they deploy 5G Standalone at scale, by leveraging the efficiencies of more open, cloud-based networks and by working with third parties, such as public cloud providers and tower operators, to spread or reduce…
For the past couple of years in the USA, we wireless watchers have had the fun and fascination of the ‘5G race’ with China, and the biggest spectrum auction of all time. But now it’s time for us, and the operators, to come back down to earth, stop thinking of grand visions and promises, and understand how the telcos are going to turn all that frantic network build-out and spectrum bidding into profitable business. The USA’s 5G build-out may not, whatever the politicians say, have the scale of China’s, but its operators and ecosystem are highly influential over the whole global industry. In many ways, US operators are atypical – in the spectrum they own; the high ARPUs and capex…
BP will look to fund a substantial chunk of its transition to renewables through energy trading, indicating a shift in its dependence away from fossil fuel revenues to stimulate cashflow. Following a strong performance from its trading segment through Covid-19, this move also highlights BP’s belief that market volatility is far from over. Reports of the strategy stem from a leaked internal presentation, highlighting that BP’s trading arm made nearly $4 billion in 2020 – equaling the record figure seen in 2019 – despite the collapse in demand for retail fuels (down 14%) and aviation fuels (down 50%). According to the presentation, which pooled together oil and gas trading under an ‘integrated supply and trading umbrella,’ the $4 billion figure…
Any perovskite solar startup is interesting, but Power Roll, a north of England company which plans to get a 5 MW to 10 MW pilot line operational in the second half of this year, may have something more special yet. “We have developed a new way to make two-terminal electrical devices, with a unique architecture.” says Neil Spann, the CEO. For now, that means perovskite ink, deposited in a proprietary microgroove structure. But in the future, the company plans to use the same architecture as a basis for capacitors and potentially supercapacitors, useful in EVs, as auxiliary to battery storage in renewable power installations. Thirdly, the properties of the “microgroove architecture” will make it useful for sensors as well. A…
China is facing a new surge of scrutiny surrounding plans to slash its leading share of global CO2 emissions. Following a draft version of its 14th Five Year Plan – released this week as an economic blueprint through to 2025 – targets have widely been labeled as disappointing; it hasn’t even gone as far as promising any reductions in coal consumption. While it’s worth noting that China sets modest targets in these economic outlooks, which it then often surpasses, the void of demonstrated climate ambition will suck in speculation and cast aspersions on the country’s recently announced plan to reach net zero CO2 emissions by 2060. With other large economies across the globe focusing their economic recovery towards a green…
As cookies begin to be phased out, advertisers need new trusted systems by which audience segments and identities can be ratified and used. Media measurement mammoth Comscore thinks it holds the key with its Predictive Audiences offering and took us through the offering during a webinar this week. This webinar was suspiciously timely. Only last week, Google released a blog post announcing that it will be phasing out third-party cookies entirely by the end of 2022, arguing that digital advertising must evolve to “address the growing concerns people have about their privacy.” It also served as a desirable distraction from Comscore’s annual results which dropped the following day – showing shrinking revenues across all segments. The Ratings and Planning segment,…
We are starting to see signs that the digital advertising economy is not just rising from the ashes of early 2020’s adpocalypse, but returning stronger and smarter than before. Brands keeping ad dollars close to their chests has given broader advertising markets time to reset, rethink, and return with more advanced technologies riding on the coat tails of pandemic trends. So, when the terms artificial intelligence, ad tech, social media, and The Walt Disney Company flashed up from a product announcement this week, courtesy of unknown vendor Paragone.ai, we smelled disruption in the water. In turns out our senses weren’t wrong. Paragone was a new name on our radar for good reason, because the company was formed only moments before…
Three UK boosts mobile backhaul and 4G/5G capacity Hutchison-owned Three UK has added 10Gbps backhaul – a 20-fold capacity boost – to more than 3,200 sites to improve quality of experience for 4G and 5G. This is part of the company’s £2bn network investment which has seen its 5G sites reaching 1,250 in number in 193 towns and cities, up from 1,000 sites at the end of last year. The operator has also added 20 MHz of 1.4 GHz spectrum to 1,500 sites to double 4G capacity and improve indoor and outdoor coverage. This will be added to more sites during the year. COO Susan Buttsworth said the operator’s average data usage, per customer per month, has surpassed 17GB, driven…
The USA’s decision to open up much of the 6 GHz band for unlicensed wireless broadband use sparked a wave of interest among regulators and service providers round the world. The WiFi Alliance developed an extension to its WiFi 6 standards, WiFi 6E, to address the expanded spectrum, and this will help ensure a broad base of equipment and devices to encourage support in other markets too. Brazil has decided to open the full 6 GHz band (5925-7124 MHz) for unlicensed access, and a group of other countries in the Americas are expected to make their own regulatory decisions this year too. The spectrum is not earmarked for WiFi, though that is the technology in pole position in unlicensed spectrum,…
Sub-GHz spectrum maximizes the cost-effectiveness of covering large, sparsely populated areas with wireless connectivity because of the long ranges of its signals. But even sub-GHz economics can be inadequate to make a strong profit case for operators to deliver universal and high quality rural coverage – so shared networks, for so long anathema to many MNOs (especially if mandated by a government), are becoming more popular. The UK is pushing ahead, at least haltingly, with its Shared Rural Network, and now China is exploring how to open up more of the 700 MHz band for a rural 5G network, probably shared between multiple operators. A paper, issued jointly by the Chinese State Council and Communist Party Central Committee, argues for…
Ligado Networks, which is seeking to build a wholesale 5G network in its L-band satellite spectrum in the USA, has signed up to trial Rakuten Communications Platform (RCP). The aim is to use Open RAN technology to deploy 5G cost-effectively, though Ligado is still battling for final approval to run terrestrial wireless in its 40 MHz of spectrum in former mobile satellite bands (1.5/1.6 GHz). It finally looks likely to achieve this goal -, the FCC has twice voted, in recent months, to allow Ligado to run both 5G and satellite in its bands. The effort has lasted for almost two decades, including a spell in bankruptcy protection, because of opposition from the GPS community on the grounds of interference…
At the end of 2019, when Orange announced its latest five-year plan, called Engage 2025, its fledgling banking arm was given center stage as a key source of growth. But now, there are reports that Orange may sell a controlling stake in the four-year old bank amid heavy losses. In Engage 2025, Orange identified three main sources of revenue growth in 2020-2025 – the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region, business-to-business (B2B) services, and financial services, including the Orange Bank. CEO Stéphane Richard would seem unlikely to give the bank that kind of profile today, though he insisted last week that there were no plans to give up control of the unit, and that it remained strategic to Orange. In…
One of the areas where the Open RAN community hopes to steal a march on more established RAN architectures is in cloud-native, containerized networks. While the incumbent vendors and platforms can boast their many years of expertise in high performance radios, on the long road to cloud-native RAN, there is a far more level playing field. For the RAN vendors, it has therefore become highly strategic to find strong partners in network cloud management and operations, focused on container management. Rakuten and Parallel Wireless have worked with Robin.io in this area, while Mavenir has just announced a partnership with Platform9 for its Managed Kubernetes (PMK) system. Mavenir has integrated its own Webscale Platform, which is based on Kubernetes, on top…
The USA’s two most recent auctions were both focused on midband spectrum, vital for the economics of 5G but in desperately short supply for two of the big three MNOs. The CBRS auction introduced an innovative three-tiered approach to allocating spectrum in the 3550-3700 MHz band. The recently finalized C-band sale, in 3700-3980 MHz, hit records for the amounts paid by operators – reflecting the midband spectrum hunger of Verizon and AT&T. But those two auctions, both historic in their way, are not the end of the saga of the USA’s 5G allocations. Next on the block will be the 3.45 GHz band (3450-3550 MHz), which sits just below the other two, and is already the focus of heated debate…
The ‘Make in India’ initiative to drive expansion in the country’s manufacturing sector has been a factor in the government’s vacillations over whether to restrict Chinese vendors in 5G infrastructure (see separate item). But that is only part of the story. The initiative was founded in 2014 as a programme to reduce dependence on imports and foster a strong manufacturing base capable of becoming a major global force by building on a rapidly expanding domestic market. This is the basis upon which the USA established a dominant manufacturing base from the late nineteenth century onwards, establishing global brands in energy, automotive, food and others, which Japan to an extent emulated through the 1960s to the 1980s, and then most recently…
Indian telcos, rather as we expected, have called for China’s Huawei and ZTE to be included in the country’s 5G trials ahead of impending spectrum auctions that had been postponed further as a result of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. The operators have written to India’s Department of Telecommunications (DoT) urging it to scrap restrictions on 5G lab trials, imposed on participants from countries sharing a land border with the country. This is code for China, given that the other six countries on that list – Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bhutan, Nepal, Myanmar and Bangladesh – are not in the frame. The letter, sent via Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), implied that India’s 5G deployment program, already lagging those of most peer…
Telecom Infra Project (TIP) has announced its latest project group, focused on bringing open platforms into 5G private networks. Private networks are currently enjoying a strong surge even in 4G, as enterprises and industrial sectors look to harness mobile connectivity to enable their own digital transformations. Enterprise services are expected to be the biggest source of new revenue and ARPU growth for 5G operators, though there will potentially be conflict between the established MNOs, and more specialized enterprise-focused service providers, whose economics will be enhanced by access to shared or unlicensed spectrum such as the USA’s CBRS general access band. Another factor in making it more cost-effective for non-MNOs to deploy private networks is affordable equipment with a broad ecosystem…
Facebook’s influence on the mobile network ecosystem, and on encouraging more open and cost-effective RAN platforms, is certainly not channelled entirely through Telecom Infra Project. The social media giant is developing and deploying its own equipment – from low cost OpenCellular base stations to satellite platforms for backhaul – in some scenarios, not to turn into a network operator but to kickstart partner efforts and build confidence. And it is also driving its agenda for ubiquitous Internet connectivity through direct alliances with major operators, with the huge Indian market a key focus. In May, Facebook announced an INR 435.7bn ($5.7bn) investment in a 9.9% stake in Jio Platforms, the subsidiary of Reliance Industries (RIL) in which disruptive MNO Reliance Jio…