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Wireless Watch
3rd August 2020

India is the next frontier for Google and the other US webscalers

Like telecoms equipment vendors, the webscalers face a double challenge – identifying growth regions as their core markets get more saturated and replicating their model effectively; while seeing some opportunities being constricted by geopolitic and recession. Of the famed BRIC (Brazil Russia India and China) economies, which were meant to deliver huge growth for ICT in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, China is increasingly closed to US providers, and Brazil and Russia are hit by economic meltdown and isolationist politics. That leaves India – certainly badly affected by the pandemic, and with its own brand of populist government, but still open for business and keen to stimulate its economy and its hi-tech ecosystem with help and money from…

Wireless Watch
3rd August 2020

Orange is the latest MNO to be lured by Google’s collaborative edge

Google remains firmly in third place in the cloud market, and that is true in the telecoms space, but it is making significant gains on Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure. In the past week, it has announced strategic partnerships with Orange and Verizon, and other major cloud partners include AT&T, Telefónica and Telecom Italia. It seems to be leveraging three main advantages in the operators’ eyes. These are: Their fear of being locked into a single powerful webscaler as surely as they were previously locked into their network vendors. Verizon and AT&T, for instance, are sharing their cloud partnerships around. Verizon has agreements with AWS and Google, while AT&T has Azure, IBM and AWS as key partners in different areas…

Wireless Watch
3rd August 2020

Google’s impact on the 5G landscape is growing to match Amazon’s

One of the most important factors that will shape the future of the mobile industry is how the role of the webscalers evolves. The Internet giants have already reshaped the user experience and with it, the device landscape, and have largely driven the change in mobile network usage that has come with consuming most content and data streamed from the cloud. However, for the Internet players which are also cloud infrastructure and services giants – Amazon AWS, Google and Microsoft Azure and their Chinese counterparts, Baidu and Alibaba – there are further opportunities to take a bigger share of the value chain, largely at the expense of operators again. As networks become cloud-based and operators seek to expand their content,…

Rethink Energy
30th July 2020

Renewables orders this week

Nordex has received an order for 41 of its 4.5 MW turbines for a wind farm in Colombia. An undisclosed 100 MW electrolyzer plant is currently in development in California in the US. The Emirates Water and Electricity Company (EWEC) has been awarded a contract to a consortium including TAQA, Masdar, EDF and JinkoPower, for the 2 GW Al Dhafra Solar project near Abu Dhabi. The contract has been signed with a power price of $13.5 per MWh, with the plant schedules to be commissioned by the end of 2022. McPhy has been selected to develop hydrogen infrastructure in the Dijon metropolis in France. Rougeot Energie, the EPC representing the project, has commissioned the €4 million project, which will use…

Rethink Energy
30th July 2020

Explaining the sudden exit of NEC from the BES market

The sudden exit of NEC from the Battery Energy Storage (BES) market was caused indirectly by Donald Trump’s pressure to disenfranchise Huawei in the west. NEC HQ realized that it while it may have fumbled the ball on 4G, it could re-build a key relationship with NTT DoCoMo back home, and become a force in 5G. but to do that it needed to get out of anything that was burning through cash. We spokes this week to Hiro Ezawa, General Manager of NEC Energy Solutions and he made it clear that the two events were directly related. “There was a decision in our parent company to focus more on software and the telecommunications market now there was an opportunity in…

Rethink Energy
30th July 2020

What a Biden win would mean for American solar

Without a Biden win changing policy in the next few years, we have forecasted America’s solar capacity doubling from 69 GW at the end of the year, to 138 GW in 2025, then reaching 223 GW in 2030. This is a relatively conservative estimate compared to forecasters who we feel are too familiar with the USA, and not familiar enough with other markets. Beyond 2030, predictions become impractical due to perovskite and other innovations which will change the game. But if Biden wins, all aspects of the renewable transition would be cranked into overdrive by government incentives. This would be funded by raised corporate taxes and debt spending. Supposedly this would also have an eye on economic stimulus in the…

Rethink Energy
30th July 2020

Oil trading offers marginal protection for very few oil majors

We’re back into earnings season, and the figures from the oil majors are far from pretty pictures for their investors. So far, we’ve heard from Shell and Total, who have written off billions in impairments and seen profits decimated, despite some small recompense from their oil trading segments. Starting with Shell, the most dramatic figure is its bottom line, with net income falling from a positive $3 billion in Q2 2019 down to a whopping loss of $18.1 billion in Q2 2020. Adjusted earnings, which are what would have happened if there were no impairments to deal with, were down by 82%, to just $638 million from the quarter, compared to $3.5 billion this time last year, and $2.9 billion…

Faultline
30th July 2020

OTT Video News, Deals, Launches and Products

Five years ago this week… A video patent war was imminent as the second HEVC license – HEVC Advance – was unveiled with a suicidal price tag, charging content owners as well as device makers and with no upper price cap. This deliberate act of sabotage came nine months after the MPEG Licensing Authority (MPEG-LA) announced its own, reasonably priced patent pool, capped at $25 million a year. A second set of vendors who were furious to be left out of the MPEG-LA – companies like Dolby, General Electric, Mitsubishi – made this move in protest. If vendors began to flee the codec, out of fear of legal action from either patent pool, it seemed likely that Google and V-Nova’s…

Faultline
30th July 2020

Untapped treasures – Ethiopia welcomes investments in DTH, mobile 

Having spent several months working in Ethiopia, we cannot overstate the significance of the landmark launch of the country’s second premium DTH platform courtesy of French pay TV operator Canal+. Ethiopia is a country of untapped potential like no other, where a government reticent to foreign influence has limited much of the population to basic FTA broadcast TV services, as well as a single incumbent – and incompetent – mobile network operator. However, it speaks volumes that in a country of over 110 million people, the second most populous country in Africa, there are only 4 million satellite TV households, while 16 million homes remain without TV services. Coming in 2021 through a multi-year, multi-transponder deal with Eutelsat, Canal+ will…

Faultline
30th July 2020

With billions at stake, SES tells Harmonic to get C-band done pronto

Even though the weakly-worded press release would suggest otherwise, you can bet the selection process for Harmonic to win the C-band contract at SES was an arduous one – given the size of the prize at stake estimated to be in the region of $40 billion (of which SES is targeting 10%). It also points to a blossoming relationship between the two video delivery heavyweights that has all the ingredients to define a new era for satellite technology. Harmonic has been brought in to “fast-track” the deployment of technology upgrades to free up C-band spectrum for allocation instead to 5G networks, while maintaining quality of critical video services for existing SES customers on C-band – primarily DTH TV services. Describing…

Faultline
30th July 2020

Plex, Pluto TV steer LSG into linear-hybrid – attracting M&A attention?

Last week, Rethink TV, Faultline’s research arm, released its latest forecast, identifying that the pay TV barons have some serious competition on the horizon. These are free online video platforms, categorized as Long Form video services, Social Media platforms, and Gaming streaming platforms – LSG for short. News this week is further proof of the sway towards free online video as two Long Form platforms, Plex and Pluto TV, expand their offerings. A fresh entrant into the OTT market, Plex has just launched over 80 FTA live channels on its platform, adding to its existing range of AVoD content. Meanwhile, one of Plex’s prime competitors, Pluto TV, has landed its biggest distribution deal yet, partnering with Verizon Wireless – a…

Faultline
30th July 2020

Is relinquishing data to Amazon, Roku worth extra distribution revenue?

It was brave move by organizers of the OTT Blitz Week to place a proper technology firm on a panel alongside a mix of media organizations, but boy did it pay off, albeit probably not in the way FierceVideo and The StreamTV Show had in mind. During one of the opening panel sessions discussing distribution strategies, Symphony MediaAI was the only non-content company present – brushing shoulders with executives from Crunchyroll, Tastemade and PBS Digital – which the US revenue and churn management specialist used to its advantage. Symphony MediaAI’s SVP of Sales and Business Development, Andrew Thompson, warned players in the direct to consumer OTT video game not to get complacent. This was a poignant reminder at a time…

Faultline
30th July 2020

No more Mr. Nice Guy – Vecima’s Gainspeed buy takes fight to DAA big boys

Just as cable operators are increasingly shifting into wireless domains, one of the world’s largest suppliers of wireless equipment – Nokia – has decided to sell some of its pioneering cable assets to industry veteran Vecima Networks, a name we have associated more recently with pushing the trend of private and hybrid CDNs. Only last year, Canada-based Vecima told Faultline that the DAA market wasn’t growing nearly as fast as expected – bemoaning the complexities of multi-vendor environments inherent in Distributed Access Architecture (DAA) for bogging down deployments. At the time, Vecima referenced its ongoing DAA work with one “very large” North American cable operator customer – leading us to believe Vecima’s acquisition of Nokia’s Gainspeed business this week was…

Wireless Watch
27th July 2020

Round-up of highlights from the week’s news

Amdocs acquires former foe Openet Amdocs has acquired Openet, an Ireland-based BSS supplier with which it previously tussled in court, for $180m. Openet has become the default 5G policy and charging supplier for Samsung and HPE core networks, and the firm made revenues of $140m over the past two years. It also has partnerships with NTT Data, AWS and Accenture, plus operator deals including those with BT, Iridium, VADSA, Bell Canada, Telkomsel and SaskTel. Telstra chooses Nokia SON to support 5G automation Australia’s Telstra is one of the most loyal customers of Ericsson, which supplies nearly all its equipment, but it has chosen Nokia’s SON solution, EdenNet Self-Organizing Network, to help centralize and automate network operations as part of 5G…

Wireless Watch
27th July 2020

TIP partnership seeks to stimulate open ecosystem in Indonesia

A lot of the buzz around open network initiatives is focused on developed economies, particularly when a dose of politics is thrown in, as in the USA. However, many of the areas where the impact of open, affordable, software-based networks will highest are in emerging economies, as highlighted by a new Telecom Infra Project (TIP) project in Indonesia. TIP – which defines operator requirements and specifications to support deployment of open platforms such as O-RAN – already has initiatives running in parts of Latin America, Africa and Asia, directly or under the auspices of powerful members such as Vodafone or Facebook. Now it is joining forces with the Indonesian Government, the GSMA and local MNOs in a joint program to…

Wireless Watch
27th July 2020

Microsoft and Samsung join forces amid growing fervor for intelligent real estate

Few horizontal application sectors of ICT have proved as elusive and illusionary as smart buildings, a concept that first did the conference rounds almost four decades ago in the early 1980s. Each generation of course is circumscribed by the technology available at the time, but at all stages progress seems to have been stymied by lack of integration, as promising islands of automation fail to be joined up properly. That seems still to be the case today, or at least very recently, if we judge by how Google’s smart buildings strategy slid into disarray despite, or even because of, the success of Nest, the smart thermostat company it acquired for $3.2bn in January 2014. Nest established a highly successful island…

Wireless Watch
27th July 2020

Fixed broadband vendors tout clear channels in case for WiFi 6E

Threatened in some cases by fixed wireless access (FWA) over 5G, traditional landline broadband operators have been eagerly touting the advantages of the latest WiFi 6E for the final leg of distribution to consumers and enterprises. Even when such providers do not offer the routers and other kit directly WiFi has become vital to their cause since it has become the effective last mile of their infrastructure and services. They see WiFi 6E as being crucial for their continuing success in the 5G era when threatened by rival broadband operators as well as FWA. This realization has become more acute during the current Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic given the boom in videoconferencing that has exposed the limitations of WiFi networks based…

Wireless Watch
27th July 2020

Further bans on Huawei may spark retaliation against Ericsson and Nokia

European governments are becoming more cautious about their policies towards allowing Huawei equipment into 5G networks, whether in response to the UK’s recent adoption of a more hardline approach, or because of escalating geopolitical tension which may lead to Chinese retaliation for US-inspired 5G sanctions. The major economies of France, Germany and Italy had stood against US pressure to ban Huawei outright, and had argued that they would conduct full security risk assessments and base policy on those. However, few of these assessments have been published (except the UK’s, which did not advocate a full ban in the RAN), but the major economies are sending out more US-compliant signals, while their operators may be inclined to play it safe and…

Wireless Watch
27th July 2020

Nokia leaps ahead of rivals in enterprise, with private 5G SA solutions

Nokia has been by far the most active of the major vendors in pursuing the rising private networks opportunity. Many enterprise sectors are interested in 4G or 5G connectivity, especially where they require levels of mobility, coverage and reliability that are hard to achieve with WiFi. But where the networks will support business-critical applications, they want far greater control of the performance and the data than they would get on the public network. This is a double-edged sword for MNOs, whose business model has been built on rolling out huge, generic networks on which all kinds of users and applications could ride. Delivering specialized connectivity, much of it indoors, is harder to make profitable, though some operators, such as Deutsche…

Wireless Watch
27th July 2020

Ericsson slates European 5G inertia, pours cold water on O-RAN

Ericsson may have only privately acknowledged that ripping Huawei equipment out of mobile networks in Europe will, in the short term, hold back the continent’s advance into 5G. But it has publicly sided with Huawei in questioning the wisdom of rushing toward towards O-RAN (Open RAN) at a time when rapid deployment of infrastructure is critical for competitiveness at national levels. Ericsson CEO Börje Ekholm said on the company’s second quarter earnings call last week: “Europe as a continent needs to not be behind on 5G. And why is that so important? 5G is going to drive a lot of enterprise applications, in healthcare, in logistics, in smart city planning etc … For high performance applications today, ORAN is not…