Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
While the RAN gets the highest profile in the open cellular networking sector, the end goal of the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) is a platform that is open and disaggregated from end to end, driving cloud economics into all elements of 4G or 5G. It has several major projects focused on the transport network, under the auspices of its OOPT (Open Optical and Packet Transport) group. One of the projects within that area of activity is to develop an open platform for a disaggregated cell site gateway (DCSG), and KDDI of Japan has emerged as an early triallist. It will run an interoperability test for a TIP DCSG together with multivendor aggregation, RAN and core equipment. The initial interoperability tests…
As argued in the editorial above, the support of large-scale chip vendors is a critical enabler of affordable open networks platforms. There are many interesting initiatives, some focused on open source architectures such as RISC-V, but once companies look beyond private or small cell networks and towards the high performance 5G vRAN, many challenges arise. It is clear that considerable development and funding will be needed to deliver an open semiconductor platform that can perform even the most demanding Layer 1 and 2 RAN tasks to the same level as the major equipment vendors’ inhouse architectures. It is encouraging for the open RAN community, then, to see big names such as Intel and Marvell supporting this drive. Nokia’s missteps with…
The Telecom Infra Project (TIP) is having an increasingly heavy influence on the evolution of open cellular networks. It provides the pragmatic face of an open movement, especially on the RAN side, that can often seem over-simplistic and sometimes politicized in its goals. While bodies such as the O-RAN Alliance and Open Networking Foundation work on specs; operators run trials and pressurize incumbent vendors; and governments seek to influence the 5G supply chain, TIP is mainly concerned with making deployments more practical. It focuses on operator requirements, on design and roll-out blueprints, and on filling gaps in the platform where others have not devoted resources. However, TIP does have something of a split personality. Founded in early 2016 by Facebook,…
Where will it end? Yet another report came out this week pointing out that coal investment continues apace. Many of the companies which claim to have a policy against coal investment are named in the report – showing that their prior announcements are mostly greenwashing. The question is what precisely can be done about this? For the most part pension funds in Europe have agreed to divest, and many US private equity groups claim to have divested, but have left huge loopholes for investing in companies which only have part of their revenues in coal assets. The authors of this particular report are names associated in the past with whistleblowing on coal investments – Urgewald, Reclaim Finance, Rainforest Action Network,…
The Texas freeze of the past two week has taken on a new role – that of the bad example. They say that no man is entirely worthless, he can always serve as a bad example. Well so can Texas. In a way we mean a good example. You try it. Start with “unlike gas, if it froze up here suddenly, do I know a technology that would still work?” and here interject your technology of choice. Two have come to prominence in the last week, both involve temperatures although they are not both thermal storage; the Siemens Gamesa Electric Thermal Energy Storage (ETES) system which is thermal (in red in the diagram) and is hot, and the Highview Power…
Five years ago this week… Sky got involved in the dramatic land grab for OTT video subscribers in South East Asia, investing $45 million in emerging platform iflix for an undisclosed sum. iflix was then perceived to be the region’s Netflix-come-Hulu, and with Netflix having only just launched in the region, Sky was clearly racing to get ahead. It was not immediately clear what was fueling the European operator’s interest in the region, as iflix did not appear to have any key technologies or content, but it could have been a case of its parent 21st Century Fox wanting to access cash resources within Sky for the deal. Today, iflix holds 19 million MAUs, down on the 25 million it…
VidTrans 2021 was certainly one of the quirkier virtual events Faultline has ever attended, one that in many ways reminded us of exactly what has been missing from the saturated online conference scene. The broadcast over IP showcase was not a high-budget production by any means, with a clunky event map flitting you between Zoom sessions. Nor was this an event adhering to a strict schedule. The laid back feel was refreshing, if not a little chaotic at times, with casual conversations outweighing serious sales pitches, where even a dedicated virtual pub was available for such shenanigans. “Welcome to the first virtual VidTrans and hopefully the last,” came the honest and appropriate opening gambit. While we came to the Video…
Deutsche Telekom’s fascinating multi-faceted video strategy helped it emerge a quarter of a million TV subscribers better off in Germany compared to a year earlier, reaching 3.86 million subscribers on IPTV and satellite services at the close of 2020. In the rest of Europe, covering Greece, Romania, Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Croatia, Slovakia, and Austria, Deutsche Telekom saw an annual net increase of 112,000 subscribers on IPTV, satellite, and cable TV services, bringing its non-German pay TV footprint total to a little over 5 million. So, net gains all round for DT, but what’s going on behind the scenes to defy the odds of a year in which cord cutting knocked chunks out of traditional pay TV operators elsewhere? Well,…
Google has unveiled a Basic mode for Google TV, which strips out the Google services to show just Live TV and the HDMI inputs for the television itself. While making a smart TV dumb again can solve some device headaches, and potentially address e-waste concerns, there is a chance this is an attempt to assert some authority over the Wild West of Android on cheaper devices and open a door into China. Google is still persona-non-grata in China, but that hasn’t stopped Chinese devices embracing Android via the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) distributions. Unfortunately, these adaptations are often hatchet jobs, and are effectively hard forks that move them outside the security and feature update process from the AOSP developers…
Netflix has reminded everyone why it is infinitely more than a mainstream SVoD platform. Revealing a new microservices-esque ecosystem called Cosmos, with glue dubbed Plato and a portal coined Nirvana, Netflix is in the process of executing its largest ever workload migration effort – with some stark lessons for technology and business cultures. There is, however, one glaring omission from this week’s Netflix Technology Blog post – in the form of long-term Netflix cloud partner AWS. It suggests Cosmos, a cloud platform combining microservices with asynchronous workflows and serverless functions, signals Netflix coming of age by developing architecture independently of the cloud computing behemoth. Netflix has long used AWS for almost all its cloud processing and storage requirements, covering databases,…
Ateme was back with another 24-hour virtual extravaganza, as a slightly different company this time around having emerged from the pandemic a fiercer beast – aided by the recent assimilation of Anevia’s encoding and CDN technologies into the Ateme software suite. Our one-hour cameo at the Le Mans-inspired event cannot possibly justify what has been an astonishing year for Ateme, which is why revisiting select sessions on an on-demand basis is a must. The start line featured speakers from Microsoft Azure and Comcast Technology Solutions, kicking off the event at blistering pace as the panel addressed both pandemic-related tailwinds and headwinds (but primarily the latter), while channeling the lessons of the past year into making future predictions, and even where…
Sony launches launches NB-IoT chipset courtesy of its Altair purchase Sony Semiconductor Israel has launched the Altair ALT1255, a low power WAN chipset for the cellular NB-IoT platform. The chipset is designed for development of low power and affordable connected devices that can be deployed at large scale for monitoring, managing and controlling critical infrastructure, as well as for vertical sectors such as health care and logistics. The ALT1255 was developed in-house by Sony in Israel, based on the existing LTE-M/NB ALT1250 chipset, with which it shares software architecture, modem application and networking layer, as well as APIs for integration within the Altair product family. The product line was acquired along with Israel-based device-side chip designer Altair in early 2016.…
WebOS has a long history of trying to find its place in the connected world. It was one of a group of Linux-based smartphone operating systems that various players adopted to try to break the Android/iOS duopoly in the mid-2010s. Some disappeared, often the casualty of company politics – the jointly developed Intel/Nokia platform, MeeGo, was collateral damage when Nokia embraced Windows Mobile and sold its handset arm to Microsoft. Others adapted to try to target less competitive segments than the smartphones – Tizen was taken under Samsung’s wing and appeared in various connected devices and IoT products; and webOS eventually landed with the other major Korean device maker, LG. LG Electronics turned webOS into a smart TV operating system…
Demand for smart building technology has ebbed and flowed for at least three decades and now several factors are conspiring to propel a new growth spurt. Notable triggers this time are the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, the emergence of 5G, and maturing of more joined up IoT services. These are drawing in developments around the core components of building intelligence, namely HVAC (heating ventilation and air conditioning), energy management, lighting, advanced communications, air quality control, maintenance and general surveillance. These components are usually served by ICT infrastructure and knitted together increasingly by wireless communications rather than wired options. The wireless networks include WiFi, cellular and various lower power options, including established indoor protocols such as Zigbee, as well increasingly as longer…
There was little surprise that the three national telcos were also the three big winners in the USA’s recent auction of C-band spectrum in 3.7-3.98 GHz. The results of Auction 107 showed that, for all the talk of diversification of the mobile business in 5G, this is not yet affecting the outcomes of major auctions, unless a regulator intervenes to ensure this. What was a surprise was the vast sum Verizon paid, investing over $45.5bn in gross bids in its effort to make up for the lack of midband spectrum that has severely constrained its 5G efforts in the first phase. The need to acquire midband frequencies, which support high 5G capacity without the engineering and propagation challenges of millimeter…
It is far too early in a new US presidency to judge what toll US actions against Huawei will end up exacting, mediated by the Covid-19 global pandemic. There is no doubt though that the mood music emanating from the company sounds sweeter than it did at the height of the tensions and associated rhetorical exchanges, when Huawei itself warned of an existential threat to the company. The tone has changed from being defiant in the face of chilling adversity and intent on the part of a foreign power to destroy the company, to one of relief that the threat may not have been as great as anticipated, with growing ambivalence among many countries that had resented the political pressure…
One of the question marks over cloud-based core and RAN systems is how far they will be dominated, on the cloud infrastructure level, by established players like IBM Red Hat and VMware, and how far they will move to new platforms run by webscalers or new entrants. Among the cloud majors, Google Cloud has lagged behind Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure in market share, but in the past year has made a very targeted bid for the high growth that is expected in the telco cloud sector, on the back of 5G and edge computing. Its killer weapon is Anthos for Telecom, which brings its Kubernetes-based Anthos cloud application management platform to the network edge, and optimizes it to support…
The cloud-native core is certainly the best entry point for IT and data center vendors in the 5G ecosystem. Groundwork has been laid in the virtualization of the 4G evolved packet core (EPC), and even if the NFV-centric approach is rapidly looking outdated, it has been valuable to teach operators and suppliers about some of the challenges of making a large-scale core perform optimally on cloud infrastructure. In 5G, there will be many more opportunities for vendors to make a difference to operators’ performance by distributing the core widely, in conjunction with edge compute platforms, while supporting stripped-down enterprise cores, and moving to flexible microservices that allow both services and suppliers to be swapped and changed relatively easily. Some IT-centric…
We normally pay limited attention to the musical chairs of executives within and between enterprises, but an exception can be made for the departure of VMWare’s general manager for telco and edge cloud, Shekar Ayyar, to establish his own start-up AdMY Technologies. This is not so much a departure, more a strategic shift motivated by what VMWare, in keeping with other major enterprise IT technology vendors, has come to see as its biggest growth opportunity, the network edge. Especially the mobile network edge. The new company- not quite a spin-out because it is notionally independent of VMWare – is focused specifically on acquisitions in 5G and edge in areas complementary to VMWare’s own strategy. What this signifies is that VMWare…
Mobile operators’ move towards virtualized, and even cloud-native, networks has been more aspiration than reality for most players until very recently. A burst of deployments of virtualized LTE packet cores in the 2010s largely proved to be the one swallow that does not make a summer. Early virtualization platforms, including the telco-driven ETSI NFV (network functions virtualization), have proved to be very much a first generation technology. Far superior deployability and flexibility will come from cloud-native systems, and those will drive better economics in the 5G era – but have left would-be early adopters back in the phase of dealing with immature solutions that often come with risk or high upfront cost. While the core is driving development of fully…