Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
After initially licensing Harmonic’s famed and feared CableOS technology last year, Canadian telco Seaside Communications has released details on its broadband transformation project using the US vendor’s latest leaps in DOCSIS 3.1, distributed access architecture (DAA), and Remote-PHY. It comes at a critical crossroads for network technology amid reports that operators are showing heightened interest in upstream spectrum expansion efforts via mid-split and high-split upgrades. Seaside Communications, based in Nova Scotia, was one of 11 new CableOS customer deployments for Harmonic last year (as of October 2020), on a list which included another Canadian operator in Access Communications, as well as Finland’s DNA. Such was the success of 2020 to Harmonic’s cable access division, that the company is now actively…
Of all the bizarre financial results Faultline has scrutinized during the pandemic, from lofty heights to alarming lows, the latest hot off the press from Xperi is one of the most striking – strutting figures that really put the late 2019 acquisition of TiVo into perspective. A lightning start to 2021 has seen Xperi ink renewed and extended entertainment patent licenses with Cox, TCL, and Sony, adding to the company’s achievement of a lifetime which saw it sign a 15-year-long license with Comcast in Q4 – a deal that has essentially secured financial stability for the foreseeable future. Having claimed the Comcast scalp after one of the industry’s most infamous litigation cases, TiVo has now wrapped up a full house…
The word security has a multitude of meanings in the Faultline world, spanning both local and remote content protection, conditional access, anti-piracy efforts, and now increasingly the services that an operator can provide to keep its customers’ home networks safe. Both the conventional definition and this emerging segment are on show this week, as Verimatrix has announced a win for its Multi-DRM offering with the MultTV consortium of 13 Brazilian ISPs, and Irdeto has partnered with Kaon to integrate its new Trusted Home service into the South Korean manufacturer’s latest broadband CPE. An overarching question is whether the two camps will converge, in time? There is definitely some overlap between the content-based security products and services that live on CPE…
In opening up its smart TV operating system to third-party licensing, LG Electronics has dealt a major blow to Comcast’s own X1 licensing ambitions, as well as throwing down the gauntlet to Android, Roku and Amazon in the smart TV scene. Releasing the webOS smart TV platform outside of the LG smart TV line-up will serve as a springboard for UX software developers specializing in LG’s webOS framework, those such as Accedo, 3SS, Norigin Media, and none more so than You.i TV which was recently snapped up by AT&T’s WarnerMedia. Initially, LG plans to license webOS to niche smart TV manufacturers such as Ayonz (via its Blaupunkt, EKO, and Seiki brands), RCA, and Konka, before building up to bigger and…
Swedish TV app aficionado Accedo has dipped into the M&A honey pot, picking out a niche company called Hibox, which features just below a US workspace software company of the same name in search engine results. Hibox, the Finnish one, has developed a middleware platform called Aura for OTT and IPTV experiences. Accedo has clearly set its sights on the TV metadata market here to complement its front-end UX expertise – slurping up valuable information on linear TV, VoD, catch-up, recordings, EPG, and channel packages. Hibox handles this metadata to manage subscribers, content, and devices, while integrating with billing systems, interactive services, and other third-party systems. But what does it mean for TV metadata partners connected with the Accedo One…
5G Standalone boosts coverage but not speed in low bands Deployments of 5G Standalone (SA) in low bands below 1 GHz reduce latency and extend coverage but do not increase speed compared with Non-Standalone (NSA), which relies on existing 4G cores. This finding has been reached by network analysis firm Opensignal from a study of T-Mobile’s 5G SA network in the USA, one of the largest SA deployments outside China. T-Mobile has deployed 5G in the low band primarily to boost coverage and so the finding that users’ time connected to 5G significantly increased after the SA network had been launched came as little surprise. But users might have hoped also for some increase in speed, given that SA is…
Liberty Global’s latest financial filing serves as a reminder of the group’s’ pedigree as a rising converged network powerhouse, as well as issuing a warning to rivals and regulators that the company is not done buying and selling its way around Europe – not by a long shot. To condense Liberty’s extensive financial documents into a single paragraph – a successful MNO venture has just been added to the arsenal in Switzerland with the acquisition of Sunrise, while the deal for UK-based mobile operator O2 could close in the next quarter. Operationally, the business added almost a quarter of a million broadband subscribers and over half a million mobile customers across its footprint last year. Still, profitability was just out…
In another example of Nordic networks setting a bar for the rest of the world, Finnish service provider DNA has flipped the switch on a revolutionary smart WiFi system based on technology from machine learning start-up Domos. Reaching 170,000 fixed network modems, DNA is the latest major operator to roll out machine learning directly on the CPE to improve home WiFi experiences. DNA Nettipulssi (which translates as online pulse) has been launched after DNA acknowledged that WiFi networks are the root cause of most home network woes, yet detecting these issues has been a thorn in the side of remote workers, home schoolers, online gamers, video streamers, and the DNA network team itself. In other words, DNA Finland is fed…
Malaysia has revived its plan for a state-backed wholesale 5G network, after several changes of policy during the past year. The country’s prime minister, Muhyiddin Yassin, now says the network should go live by the end of this year, with the aims of accelerating 5G progress, and extending availability cost-effectively to key industry verticals and to underserved areas. This is part of a broader digital economy blueprint unveiled last week, but also picks up some threads of 5G policy from previous administrations. Muhyiddin promised that MYR15bn ($3.87bn) would be invested over the next 10 years in the wholesale network, which would remain fully state-owned and would complement individual roll-outs by operators. The government plans to set up a ‘special purpose…
Spain’s Telefónica and Mexican telecoms giant América Móvil, controlled by billionaire Carlos Slim, have for a decade been slugging it out in the Latin American markets for fixed broadband, pay-TV and mobile services. Now Telefónica is set to exit many Latin American markets, except Brazil, so the competitive landscape will change in the coming 1-2 years. And there has been other competition emerging in some countries – AT&T has recently been a force in Mexico, while Gruppo TIM (formerly Telecom Italia) has been mounting the biggest challenge in Brazil, at least in mobile. Then former incumbent Telecom Argentina is the major third force in that country. Now América Móvil has moved to up the ante against rivals across the whole region in the…
Ericsson has unveiled its fourth generation of Massive MIMO radio/antennas, targeting the unpaired midband spectrum that is the mainstay of early 5G roll-out in most countries. It has made significant strides in the size and power consumption of its units, vying with Huawei in reducing the ‘massive’ element of these 5G units, at least when it comes to tower space and weight, and so lowering cost barriers to widespread operator adoption. And Ericsson was unambivalent in crediting performance and efficiency improvements to the new generation of its inhouse radio silicon, in a pointed riposte to the argument that an open silicon ecosystem could come to the macro 5G market any time soon. The Swedish company is cautious about merchant chips…
Mobile operators are entering the high precision positioning game with Vodafone among the leaders. The operator is partnering with Samcordia, a specialist German company in the field that has just enhanced its own satellite-rooted navigation system. Accurate positioning down to the decimeter (dm) level, or even to a few centimeters, is vital for a number of prospective 5G applications, including autonomous driving, precision farming, unattended automated vehicle (UAV) operation, and remote drone flying. Accuracy of current navigation systems based on LTE, or for that matter GPS, typically down to a few meters, is inadequate for use cases where errors greater than 1dm can be fatal. Drones can be flown remotely through use of onboard cameras and sensors, either in autonomous…
The diversity of 5G’s capabilities has always been its great differentiator against previous mobile generations, with the potential to support a huge variety of different connectivity requirements for multiple industries and applications. During the first wave of 5G launches, this versatility remained a promise rather than a reality. Only one point of the famous NGMN use case triangle was clearly visible – enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), but little evidence of massive machine-type communication (mMTC) or ultra-reliable low latency communications (URLLC). With the finalization of Release 16 of the 3GPP standards last year, and the start of work on Release 17, at least the base specifications were in place to allow radio networks to be optimized for non-broadband capabilities. But implementation…
A new report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) predicts massive foreign investment into India’s renewable energy infrastructure, attracted by a combination of record low solar power tariffs, falling module costs, record low interest rates, and government-backed 25-year PPAs. According to IEEFA’s analysis, there is a $500 billion investment opportunity through to 2030 – covering 300 GW of new renewable power plants and related infrastructure. We agree with a lot of what IEEFA says, but on this subject we are surprised at the optimism. That figure, equivalent to $50 billion a year, would see India rise from a fifth to a third of neighboring China’s rate of renewables development. In fact, $50 billion a year is far…
In another example of Nordic networks setting a bar for the rest of the world, Finnish service provider DNA has flipped the switch on a revolutionary smart WiFi system based on technology from machine learning start-up Domos. It marks another important milestone for Domos on the way to breaking into the US market. Reaching 170,000 fixed network modems, DNA is the latest major operator to roll out machine learning directly on the CPE to improve home WiFi experiences. DNA Nettipulssi (which translates as online pulse) has been launched after DNA acknowledged that WiFi networks are the root cause of most home network woes, yet detecting these issues has been a thorn in the side of remote workers, home schoolers, online…
Liberty Global’s latest financial filing serves as a reminder of the group’s’ pedigree as a rising converged network powerhouse, as well as issuing a warning to rivals and regulators that Liberty Global is not done buying and selling its way around Europe – not by a long shot. To condense Liberty Global’s extensive financial documents into a single paragraph – a successful MNO venture has just been added to the arsenal in Switzerland with the acquisition of Sunrise, while the deal for UK-based mobile operator O2 could close in the next quarter. Operationally, the business added almost a quarter of a million broadband subscribers and over half a million mobile customers across its footprint last year. Still, profitability was just…
Despite bold claims about AdSmart, it seems Sky is on an admirable, yet never-ending quest to streamline its advertising operations. The European operator’s ad sales arm, Sky Media, has now called on Imagine Communications to migrate its Landmark Sales application to the cloud, while also snapping up some of the latter’s inventory management tools. While the new arrangement is trialing in the UK, Sky Media plans to implement Imagine Communication’s technologies across its international footprint, with every European territory migrating to one common cloud-based platform. Previously a standalone, on-premise application, Imagine Communications’ Landmark Sales will become a cloud-based platform with a browser-based UI. Rolling out over the coming year, the grandiose-seeming “five-stage project” aims to evolve Sky Media’s campaign sales…
Belgian operator VOO has switched on its new multiscreen TV platform – giving the honors of overhauling the UX to personalization software specialist ContentWise. In unveiling VOO TV+, we noticed that there was no mention of the Altimedia middleware that was deployed to upgrade VOO set tops less than three years ago, before Altimedia was spun out of Alticast in 2019. It suggests that VOO has either switched out Altimedia or quietly embraced a more RDK-heavy approach given Altimedia’s expertise in implementing the open source framework. Faultline reached out to various parties for clarity but unfortunately did not receive any confirmation ahead of publication. Either way, VOO is clearly trying its hardest to keep pace with competition including the successful…
People are only just starting to talk about Disney’s ARPU dilemma as if it were a brand new revelation – over a year since Faultline spotted the ARPU hole in Disney’s streaming strategy. The world was too busy gushing over the Disney+ launch to notice that Disney’s OTT ARPU could only go in one direction – and the house of mouse had no intention of stopping it. Some 15 months since the streaming service debuted, the ARPU problem across Disney’s OTT video properties is indeed glaring. Disney+ has an average monthly revenue per paid subscriber of just $4.03, a concerning fall of 28% since Disney’s Q4 2019 results when Faultline first spotted the ARPU red flags. With Disney+ since launching…
There is no nice way to dress this up. If you are a company operating in and around video analytics or business intelligence – delivering data-based insights to video service providers in fields from content consumption, UI and navigation, device and account security, to advertising management, QoE/QoS, and more – then your business is about to be undercut by a new (but not) entrant. Synamedia has released an all-knowing, all-seeing business insights suite called Clarissa (clarity personified) that threatens to commoditize video analytics and entertainment data in a similar vein to how AWS has drained value from media and entertainment software. Ahead of this week’s announcement, Faultline spoke with Synamedia’s Amruta Shankar, Director of Data and Analytics, who described Clarissa…