Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
State Grid Corporation inaugurated its Blockchain Technology Laboratory on July 6th in China, to support its aims regarding a decentralized digital grid which uses the Internet of Things. The Laboratory will see both R&D and run pilot projects of blockchain business models. State Grid is the country’s state-owned utility, with assets worth $600 billion dollars. Last October, the Chinese premier Xi Jinping himself identified blockchain as an important innovation for the energy sector and industrial reform, and the government has been pushing it since 2016. Blockchain technology promises to play a central role in distributed energy generation, consumption, and trading, allowing peak-shaving and Demand Response actions, performing a role similar to Virtual Power Plants. All of these will be important…
We’re not sure that Stephenson would have been glad to have the TÜV SÜD around in 1829 when he perfected steam locomotion, but the company is certainly ready for the next generation of fast trains – those based on Elon Musk’s Hyperloop invention. Some may argue whether or not Musk had much to do with it, as he posited a single San Francisco to Los Angeles route in 2012 and then abandoned the idea, but he open sourced all his company’s thoughts and advanced the technology of a tube for carrying fast transit capsules full of people, to the point where others have taken it seriously. We heard the idea a full ten years earlier when a 3,000 mile per…
Joe Biden has pledged a net-zero electricity sector in the US, should he win the Presidential election in November, alongside a whopping $2 trillion to combat climate change through what would be his first term in office. But in the small print, the country will not see a definite end to coal, fracking or investment in failing carbon capture technologies. In a speech in Washington on Tuesday, the Democratic candidate placed climate-friendly investment at the center of a broader ‘Build Back Better’ economic recovery package, which will include an accelerated $2 trillion investment in carbon-free power and grid infrastructure, mass transit, efficient and sustainable buildings as well as climate-smart agriculture, while also rebooting the US auto industry with 1 million…
Ahead of NBCUniversal’s unveiling of Peacock this week, all the headlines pointed to how the freemium streaming service would be absent from Roku and Amazon devices. Peacock shares common ground here with HBO Max, having also reached stalemate in negotiations with the two streaming stick heavyweights as they reportedly demand egregious terms for distribution deals. There was also early confusion among Android users as Peacock was nowhere to be seen in the Google Play store in the early hours of the platform’s US debut, but this has since been resolved. As for content, Peacock launched with over 13,000 hours of content on the free tier, almost double what NBCU initially said would be available on an ad-supported basis. In more…
While it was the name Comcast Technology Solutions that attracted us to a Haivision-hosted webinar this week, it was the name Eurovision Services that was at the forefront of our mind by the time the Secure Reliable Transport (SRT) session wrapped up. Our interest was piqued further to learn that Eurovision Services was one of the earliest adopters of SRT shortly after it was open sourced in April 2017, as well as getting hard and fast into fiber early by deploying a fiber network way back in 2004. We were therefore bamboozled as to why a company getting ahead of the curve had never crossed our radar before, until it became apparent that Eurovision Services was only formed in January…
Versatile Video Coding (VVC) has officially arrived bang on time despite talk of a potential pandemic-related release date push back. It comes days after the shuttering of the MPEG Group (as we have historically known it) was also officially finalized by founder Leonardo Chiariglione. A large factor in Chiariglione’s departure boiled down to disagreements over HEVC, so VVC – as the successor to HEVC – being waved in so quickly afterwards is symbolic of a new era for video. The release could also be seen as retaliatory to some of Chiariglione’s recent musings, specifically the opinion that HEVC and VVC will go nowhere if left by themselves, proposing the assistance of EVC as a mezzanine standard between HEVC and VVC.…
CDN alternatives have been something of a forbidden fruit for a long time, yet despite the rise of decentralized delivery software, the promise of disruption continues to fall short of manifesting into anything truly convulsive. But if anyone knows disruption, it is SRT co-founder Haivision, having just secured its second delivery technology acquisition to unsettle established players – buying peer-to-peer technology specialist Teltoo. That said, Faultline is regularly reassured by fans of P2P software – including Teltoo’s largest customer Liberty Global – that the technology is more about refining specific network models into a hybrid of sorts, as opposed to anything resembling a long-term CDN replacement. In acquiring the LightFlow Media Technologies part of video optimization outfit Epic Labs in…
Nokia has denied reports that it is being pushed out of Verizon’s 5G network, which would make the US telco dependent just on Ericsson and Samsung, unless it decided to open up its supply chain to new entrants. Verizon also said that Nokia was still a supplier, and the report might have been just another quickly forgotten rumor, were it not for the atmosphere of uncertainty that surrounds the Finnish vendor at the current time. Having been forced to change its 5G chip architecture last year, and with reports of performance issues for some early customers, notably Sprint, Nokia now going through a change of CEO amid reports of takeover bids, while trying to regain lost momentum in 5G with…
Ericsson has announced its 5G NR Standalone (SA) platform for low-band and midband spectrum. This will work with its dual-mode cloud-native core, announced earlier this year, to provide a full commercial SA system. All Ericsson’s radios developed since 2015 can move to 5G NR SA with a software upgrade. “These standalone capabilities will enable even more use cases and applications,” said Per Navinger, head of product area networks at Ericsson, in a statement. He said he expects operators to add 5G NR to existing 4G sites and also to deploy it in new networks, especially in unconnected environments such as factories. Devices that support SA can connect to a 5G network six times more quickly than a device operating in NSA mode,…
The latest high profile company to invest in India’s Jio Platforms is Qualcomm. The US chip provider has a track record of taking stakes in operators in order to increase momentum behind some of its key technologies, and the latest example is a $97m investment, through its venture arm – though that will get it only a 0.15% stake. However, the move is strategic, as it was for Facebook, whose larger investment kicked off a 12-week run of deals for stakes in Jio Platforms – the subsidiary of Reliance Industries (RIL) which controls disruptive MNO Reliance Jio. Although some of the total of $15.7bn raised in these 12 transactions will be used to pay off Jio’s debt, the operator has…
Nokia may have hit a low point in its bedrock mobile RAN business, with setbacks to its 5G platform still hitting confidence in the vendor, but it has been more successful than arch-rival Ericsson is expanding its commercial offering beyond telcos. We have often covered its development of cloud platforms and flexible networks to support enterprises and private operators. Another important area of targeted expansion is the webscale space, where Nokia has been building on switch and router assets acquired with Alcatel-Lucent to move beyond carriers. Its ‘petabit’ router and underlying processor architecture, unveiled last year, is one example of a product that, while it could be adopted by a high end telco, is primarily aimed at cloud infrastructure companies…
Hard on the heels of Nokia, which unveiled its big pitch for the emerging O-RAN market, Samsung has also announced plans to make fully virtualized RAN (vRAN) with support for the open RAN interfaces and architecture, commercially available by October. The Korean vendor is aiming to achieve a global market for its network infrastructure for the first time. In the 4G era, its deployments were largely confined to Korea and to WiMAX technology. In 5G, it has scored early wins in the USA, Canada and elsewhere, especially where it can leverage its advances in fixed wireless access (FWA) and in millimeter wave spectrum. But it has lost its flagship European 4G customer, 3 UK, and is still seeking broad adoption.…
Network slicing is one of the essential elements of the full vision of 5G as an agile network which can be tuned to any user’s requirements in a dynamic fashion. Without slicing, it will be hard for 5G to meet the needs of many of the industries which hope to use it as part of their digital transformations. The demanding, and very diverse, connectivity requirements of sectors such as public safety, manufacturing, logistics or smart cities cannot be met optimally on a general purpose network, but the individual private network model, while important for some scenarios – especially in-building or localized build-outs – is hard to scale, and hard for MNOs to align with their core profit models. Slicing, then,…
Among the many dilemmas facing operators as they move towards the new software-based 5G architectures is one of timing. They can deploy relatively mature virtualized cores right now, if they rely on virtual machines and the NFV (network functions virtualization) platform that has been the bedrock of telcos’ cloud migrations so far. But this approach is increasingly seen as a compromise – far more complex, heavy and cumbersome than the emerging cloud-native platforms. These rely on lighter containers and agile orchestration frameworks, which can configure, reconfigure, assemble and reassemble microservices on the fly, and in limitless combinations, to meet a particular user requirement. However, if an operator is in a hurry, cloud-native platforms remain immature and there are question marks…
Some large operators are starting to set out clear roadmaps to a cloud-native, container-based architecture for their 5G core, though the cloud-native RAN is some way behind, possibly by several years in terms of large-scale, macro network deployments. Vendors like Nokia are offering cloud-native vRAN systems, and also supporting open interfaces such as O-RAN, but most operators indicate they will initially trial such technology in greenfield, secondary or localized networks, rather than risk any performance trade-offs in the main network at this early stage. It is different for fully greenfield MNOs, of course. Rakuten Mobile, Dish Network and others have the luxury of not having legacy physical networks to integrate, sunset or depreciate. But even for these new players, the…
For a long time, the virtualized RAN (vRAN) has been something more of dream than substance. It has been discussed ever since China Mobile’s seminal white paper, a decade ago, launched the concept of a RAN whose digital functions were run as software in the cloud. But commercially, it has remained the preserve of a few very expensive, hand-crafted deployments, mainly in South Korea, Japan and China; and some roll-outs of small cell or secondary networks, where it has often proved less risky and disruptive to test the new technology without touching the primary macro network. Now, several factors are conspiring to turn on the accelerator. The start of the gradual shift to full 5G, with a 5G sliceable core;…
The European Commission is aiming to launch a €40 billion Just Transition Fund, to help launch a green economic recovery to Covid-19. All member states agreed last week that the new fund should exclude nuclear and fossil fuels projects, including natural gas projects – a position also shared by the EU Commission – but under current proposals for finance rules it is likely that some gas projects could find loopholes to receive just transition funding. The full assembly will vote in September on whether or not to approve the rules. A Japanese start-up, spawned from former Nissan employees, claims that it can make “all-polymer batteries” that can cut manufacturing costs by 90%. APB Corp received backing from a group of…
A report from Global Energy Monitor this week entitled Gas bubble 2020, shovels the dirt on Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) terminals and their requirement for investment and how shaky it is. First it paints a picture of what looks like a global fracking conspiracy, to turn the US and Canada into the center of the natural gas global community, which needed to eat up some $196 billion in financing for LNG terminals, which has been put together by almost every global bank you can name, including those who have sworn off the idea of supporting fossil fuels. In a report out on the same day focusing purely on Japan’s ambitions to be a global terminal for LNG, under a strategy…
Green hydrogen could become cost competitive in under 5 years, according to Enapter, but this will require a serious rethink of how value is prescribed in the energy sector, and for the industry to shake off its obsession with centralized generation. When following the nascent growth of hydrogen production, it’s easy to get drawn in by the large-scale production figures – just look at our story on JV project in Saudi Arabia this week – but it’s likely that the key development of the sector will lie outside the remit of these gigawatt scale projects. In conversation with Rethink Energy, Enapter co-founder Vaitea Cowan detailed how the company intends cost reduction to be driven by the serial fabrication of standardized…
The European Commission has revealed its long-awaited hydrogen strategy, bringing into existence the European Clean Hydrogen Alliance to bring the contribution of hydrogen consumption for energy purposes from 2% up to 14% by 2050. Despite not ruling out ‘blue’ hydrogen from CCUS, the strategy outlines a possible cumulative investment of half-a-trillion euros in green hydrogen in Europe, powered by as much as 120 GW of renewable capacity. Some have speculated that green hydrogen could provide as much as half of the fight towards net-zero emissions by 2050, so a target of between 13% and 14% will come as a disappointment to some. But in the near-term, several concrete steps have been set out which will help the industry take-off, and…