Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
The combination of 5G and various forms of machine learning (ML) has breathed new life into audiovisual content distribution by helping contain the bandwidth of increasingly rich and high-quality content. There are other angles across the whole AV chain, from pre-production to content consumption, where 5G Broadcast is making an impact as a complement or even alternative to traditional over-the-air transmission. This was reflected last month in the formation of the 5G Broadcast Collective as a new non-profit broadcast industry body, to promote the technology and help deploy 5G Broadcasting throughout the world. This coincided with the annual NAB Show of broadcasting technology in the USA, at which 5G Broadcast was prominent as a potential competitor to the latest generation…
Investors could not make their minds up about the UK’s BT Group this week. At one moment, large hedge funds and pension funds were betting that the share price would fall, and the next, the share price was ricocheting upwards. The upward trend looks like the long-awaited turning point where BT shrugs off unprofitable legacy units and can monetize its expensive fiber and mobile investments. Market sentiment was so buoyant that by the end of the week, shares of the UK incumbent had reversed most of the 29% decline of the last 12 months. On Friday, the share price was £133.66, up nearly 26% in five days, and just 10% below the value a year ago – and it has…
Japan’s Rakuten Mobile built an Open RAN network when the standards body, the O-RAN Alliance, was just in its infancy. More development of standards is needed to encourage Open RAN adoption, especially for operators of brownfield networks, according to Rahul Atri, Managing Director and President of OSS at Rakuten Symphony. Rakuten Symphony, the services and software subsidiary of Rakuten Mobile, has the unique edge of having assisted its parent company in the creation of a greenfield Open RAN network. Rakuten Symphony’s main customer for its services is Rakuten Mobile, which has around 6.5 million subscribers. As a vendor with a specialty in Open RAN, Rakuten Symphony is keen to see more direction from the O-RAN Alliance. “We are glad that…
Trends emerging from the International Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) NewFronts this year show a focus on shoppable ads, AI, accompanied with a need for better measurement as third-party cookies are not long for this world—yet their execution was delayed for the third time by Google. The tech giant has pushed Chrome’s sunsetting of third-party cookie support back to early 2025 at the earliest, as it is struggling to push its Privacy Sandbox cookie-less advertising tools as an alternative to advertisers. Google also claimed that its previous cookie-ending deadline for the second half of Q4 2024 would not allow enough time for the British regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), to examine evidence on the matter—including industry test results—which will be…
During a presentation on low latency DOCSIS (LLD) at this week’s Anga Com event, Tino Muders, Architect for Vodafone’s Fixed Access Center of Excellence, called on vendors of cable modem termination systems (CMTS) to help with implementing adaptive Proactive Grant Service (PGS) scaling. LLD treats delay-sensitive traffic, such as video conferencing, interactive video games, and AR/VR, differently from other queued traffic that is not delay-sensitive, such as large file transfers. It creates separate queues for latency-sensitive and non-latency sensitive traffic types, with DOCSIS 3.1 ASF (Aggregate Service Flow) classic and LLD flows for each cable modem. This way, latency-sensitive traffic gets consistent low latency even when a subscriber’s home or service group is congested. Proactive Grant Service—dubbed by Muders “the…
With a little over a week until a shareholder vote which could overthrow Xperi’s current board and derail its strategic roadmap, the media technology company has prematurely declared that an unnamed Japanese electronics brand will launch smart TVs with the TiVo OS, from June 2024. To highlight this forthcoming Q2 OEM deal as the headline act of the Q1 results filing is a sign of panic from Xperi, particularly given that the vendor does not receive license revenue directly from TV OEMs for TiVo OS. An accurate headline from Xperi would be to address that a total of $118.8 million revenue for Q1 2024 is the lowest quarterly total for the business since it was spun out as an independent…
It’s here. OpenAI’s ChatGPT has deployed video and audio capabilities at mass scale – a milestone the company’s researchers have been grinding away on for months. Voice and vision interactivity have already been baked into ChatGPT’s toolset for paid users for some time, but the disruptive force of the new update—coined GPT-4o—lies in the democratization of video and audio, by making these capabilities availability to all 100 million+ users globally. In doing so, OpenAI has arguably created the closest thing to an all-round digital personal assistant currently on the marketplace. This is by no means the polished article, as awkward early demos have proven, but the sheer scale at which GPT-4 class intelligence is now available to free users should…
Despite years of preparations, neither local broadcasters, nor US studio-owned platforms, have yet got to grips with their OTT offerings in Europe. That was our key takeaway from the Digital TV Group (DTG) Summit in London last week, where tales of slow evolution were haunted by the no-frills data in analyst presentations. Things got off to a poor start when the room was asked to vote on a no brainer – ‘is pay TV dying?’. With barely half the room raising their hand, we sensed we were sinking into a somewhat deluded day of discussion. Thankfully, telecoms regulator Ofcom was quick to put an end to the madness, with “broadcast viewing is in decline” illuminated in huge black and white…
An air of desperation has featured at recent media conference sessions, as media and TV executives grapple with how to engage the social media generation, or face obsolescence. On our search for the answer, Faultline has stumbled across a start-up which is arguably closer than any other streaming service provider in translating elements of smartphone-based video scrolling to the linear viewing environment. California-based Anoki offers a blend of AI-based tools for content personalization and generative AI for advertising monetization. The roughly 18-month-old start-up has recently productized its technology, releasing Live TVx as both a standalone free streaming service, currently available on Google TV devices, and as a suite of technologies that are licensable by rival ad-supported streaming services, the likes…
The US Treasury Department has announced that it is giving automakers another two years before the cost of graphite (used within battery anodes) is counted towards the Inflation Reduction Act’s (IRA) domestic sourcing and foreign entity of concern (FEOC) requirements. The official decision comes amidst the Ministry of Finance’s view that graphite products classify as a material which cannot be effectively traced. This is quite frankly a lie, as while it may be difficult to trace with exact precision, the actual reason is that without this moratorium, producers would be completely unable to comply with the IRA’s FEOC requirements due to China being the only source of battery-grade natural graphite products. The true rationale for delaying graphite’s contribution to IRA…
One of the companies we spoke to inform our recent Virtual Power Plant (VPP) report was Uplight. This Colorado-based company is big, perhaps the biggest VPP operation out there, with over 700 employees. “What we produce is white-labelled tools which utilities buy and use” explains Donald McPhail, Uplight’s Vice President, Business General Manager in Energy & Decarbonization. Uplight acquired Autogrid in February – supporting Uplight’s customer-end software with Autogrid’s expertise in energy management. “We’re looking at massive growth, and both Uplight and Autogrid are on the leaderboard of Distributed Energy Resource Management Systems (DERMS),” McPhail states. At time of speaking, which was a few months ago now so the numbers will have grown since, Uplight and Autogrid combined had a…
If there’s one thing that crosses the aisle of American politics, it’s tariffs on Chinese imports. The Biden Administration is understood to be planning to increase tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles (EVs) to a total of 102.5%, up from its current level of 27.5%, in a move to protect the country’s redeveloping automotive industry. 100% of the 102.5% tariffs are solely because the imports are of Chinese origin, while the remaining 2.5% is a general tax on global automotive imports. And somehow, this is the more tempered geopolitical position between the current leaders of each major American political party. This is quite simply an unashamed act of protectionism, and in our eyes an admission of defeat that says American automotive…
M&A, IP, Patents Canadian operator Telus has acquired Vumetric Cybersecurity which specializes in advanced penetration testing and specialized cybersecurity services. T-Mobile and Verizon are in discussions to carve up regional operator U.S. Cellular, according to The Wall Street Journal. T-Mobile has a deal to buy part of the firm for over $2 billion, taking over some operations and wireless spectrum licenses, while Verizon is in separate talks that may take longer to come to fruition. Pakistan Telecommunication Company’s (PTCL) acquisition of Telenor’s regional unit is under scrutiny. The country’s antitrust regulator has said that the merger will substantially reduce competition and could lead to higher prices and poorer quality services. The deal is still being reviewed by the regulator. Financials UK operator Three…
UnaBiz is wringing a little more life out of its Sigfox protocol, announcing that it has managed to add an 18x power improvement, if users are comfortable with less redundancy. For UnaBiz, the sole owner of the Sigfox assets post-bankruptcy, the protocol is a bit of a problem child, and there are long-term questions of when it will return to its LoRa roots. This is a slightly harsh characterization. UnaBiz has a long history with LoRa and LoRaWAN, as well as licensed cellular and satellite, but bid for Sigfox back in 2022. It is believed to have secured the global network for around $27 million – a bargain, if it can leverage the very low power functionality that Sigfox has,…
Telefonica’s German unit, O2 Telefonica, is following in the footsteps of Dish and NTT Docomo – building a 5G core network on AWS, using equipment and software from Nokia. This is the first time that existing customers and an existing network are being migrated to a cloud network running on AWS, the pair claim. This is a dip of the toe into the ocean for O2 Telefonica, since it plans to migrate just one million of its 45 million mobile users to the cloud network. Once cloud-native, core network functions can be updated faster and more cost-effectively, which fits the intended characteristics of a 5G network – one that can be instantly updated with new features, or to remove unwanted features. “With the launch of the…
Berlin’s U-Bahn underground train network has launched a 4G LTE service spanning all nine lines, comprising 155.64 km of track and 175 stations, and plans to roll out 5G soon. Until now, like many subway systems built over a long period (dating back to 1902 in Berlin’s case), the U-Bahn has had a patchwork of wireless technologies, comprising inconsistent WiFi, 4G, and even areas of 5G access. As in most other such projects, the Berlin mobile network is based on a neutral host model with access provided by all three major operators, O2 Telefonica, Vodafone Germany and Deutsche Telekom. Telefonica took the lead role in partnership with Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe (BVG), the public transport company managing Berlin’s subway. One novel feature…
Japanese operators KDDI and SoftBank are following the terms of the proverb: “if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” The pair have extended the terms of their shared 5G program, called 5G Japan, to include nationwide coverage and 4G infrastructure. Meanwhile, Malaysia is struggling to agree on the terms of its second national shared 5G network. The two Japanese MNOs were first driven together by the arrival of Rakuten Mobile in late 2020, which threatened to unseat their position in the domestic market. Rakuten started an ambitious greenfield Open RAN 5G network build, which gave other operators cause for concern. Subsequently, KDDI and SoftBank agreed to build shared infrastructure for rural…
The private networks (PNs) landscape requires more cohesion than competition between participants and technologies, according to speakers in Wireless Watch’s webinar on private 5G networks. Speakers Vijay Venkateswaran from consulting firm Viventum, Peter Cappiello from systems integrator Future Technologies, and Assen Golaup from MNO Liberty Global also discussed the popular architectures of PNs, spectrum, partnerships, and more. In the opening comments, Cappiello described his experience building PNs at Future Technologies. “We’ve been doing network transformation for the last 25 years, really focused on private networks – not just private 5G but also fixed broadband,” he said. “We’ve been doing private cellular networks since about 2010, starting in the military sector. In 2017, we started to do private 4G, starting originally…
The long-heralded global smartphone bounce back continues with Samsung taking more than its share of the spoils at the expense of Apple. It was a strong quarter almost all round for Samsung, which attributes revenue and market share gains across several key segments to the Generative AI wave. While GenAI should in theory benefit other vendors equally, Samsung has been very vocal about its incorporation in top-end Galaxy smartphones, while in other sectors it is playing to increasing AI-driven demand for servers, storage systems and memory chips, in particular. Samsung noted that the continuing increase in demand for servers and associated cloud services around GenAI was boosting revenues in those hardware sectors, even if there was no direct AI capability…
Microsoft has signed a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) with Brookfield Asset Management, with renewable energy to power data centers in the US and Europe, possibly elsewhere too, with a time frame of 2026-2030. The agreement states that the energy types involved will go beyond just wind and solar, but doesn’t specify. This 10.5 GW PPA figure is more than just the latest record which any sector with a 20% annual growth rate posts as a matter of routine. It’s some 8 times the previous biggest-ever PPA, according to BNEF tracking. It’s bigger than all of the PPAs which Microsoft announced across 16 countries last year combined (8.8 GW, for a cumulative Microsoft total of 23.3 GW prior to this deal).…