Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
A company of Tencent’s stature can afford to hoover up the competition from various markets and territories of its multifaceted operations, yet the Chinese internet behemoth faces inherent struggles to expand its business internationally due to backlash at being fundamentally controlled by the Chinese state. Evidence of this came recently with its attempt at jumping into bed with popular mobile game Pokémon Go, leading to widespread ridicule of Tencent’s censorship practices and boycotts across social media. This turned out to be the calm before the storm, days later having its marching orders handed to it by the Indian government along with 56 apps owned and operated by Tencent, most notably the teen social media phenomenon TikTok. Having acquired Malaysian video…
End-to-end is a term Faultline slam-dunked into the buzzword dustbin years ago, and we take little pride in giving coverage to vendors peddling apparent end-to-end video platforms – given how they are almost always unspecialized, full of holes, and rejoice in taking all the credit from vendors doing the heavy lifting. That said, we reserve an element of respect for so-called end-to-end TV technology vendors that do so much of the dirty work to bring smaller OTT video offerings to market – increasing competition and diversifying the content landscape in the process. Last week, we left a webinar feeling unfulfilled, after the promise of hearing from a familiarly named company called Magine Pro turned out to be an Informa snooze-fest.…
Summarizing Dublin-based connected home start-up Sweepr as a specialist in sweeping up other people’s mess would be accurate and a disservice at the same time. Never before have we encountered a technical support platform so willing to understand the pains of the end user to the benefit of ISPs and network management vendors – and seldom have we seen a network software company bring cognitive psychology into the fold. It may sound like a no-brainer that contextualizing consumers’ WiFi woes is pretty effective – but why have operators never tried this approach before? Faultline had a small apology to make to Sweepr’s CEO Alan Coleman this week, following our stern assessment a few months ago about a tie-up between Sweepr…
India’s disruptive MNO, Reliance Jio, has asked the Department of Telecom (DoT) for permission to test the inhouse 5G technology it boasted about a few months ago. The DoT, amid postponed 5G auctions, has not yet given the green light for 5G testing by the private MNOs, or clarified whether Huawei will be allowed to take part, having been selected to take part in several planned operator testing programs. Jio Platforms, the subsidiary of Reliance Industries which controls Jio, has recently raised about $13bn in financing from Facebook and multiple private equity firms. While the first aim was to pay off the company’s debts, the investments are also likely to be harnessed to support development of 5G technology, and for…
Deutsche Telekom’s launch of a platform for the Internet of Things (IoT) was rather spoilt by the spurious claim to be the world’s first that was truly open. The claim of uniqueness was more justifiable in the narrow sense that all the leading platforms have distinctive features leading to their own specific lists of pros and cons. The claim was based on the depth of partners involved, including developers, operators, partners, and suppliers, as well as the ambition to unify the whole field. This latter may prove a strength or liability depending on your point of view, given that the IoT is not at this stage a coherent whole but more a series of disconnected islands serving disparate verticals such…
The idea that the mobile industry or wireless generally would become a driver for optical fiber transmission would have seemed laughable even a decade ago, but that is now the case as we enter the 5G era. Previously optical transmission, in keeping with backhaul generally, was seen as a black box utility that could be harvested on demand, offering effectively infinite capacity with the main constraint being the cost of digging to lay the fiber. Now at a time wireless capacity and performance is accelerating as millimeter wave spectrum becomes available and usable – admittedly with challenges – fiber has been heading towards a capacity crunch that can only be resolved through innovations in multiplexing and transmission techniques. In this…
One of the dangers of any attempt to achieve open platforms is fragmentation between competing approaches, especially if large vendors (or even countries) use them as proxies for their own wars. While O-RAN appears to have achieved significant momentum in the macro RAN – and dovetails with the ambitions of Nokia, Samsung, NEC and the US government, among others – there are other initiatives developing interesting interfaces, such as the Open Networking Foundation and Small Cell Forum. Meanwhile, Ericsson has yet to throw whole-hearted weight behind any of the options, despite some hedging about O-RAN, and could rock the boat in future. Other vendors, like Cisco, are trying to create their own ‘open’ initiatives. Cisco’s is called Open vRAN and…
To deploy an open RAN at scale in an MNO’s primary network is a difficult and high-risk migration at this early stage in the life of O-RAN, as outlined above. But in a greenfield network, it can be a way for an operator to adopt a radical new approach to service delivery and cost, from day one. This will apply to secondary networks implemented by MNOs, for instance for cities or enterprises; to new types of deployers such as neutral hosts; and to that rare but exciting breed, the brand new licensed MNO. Rakuten and Reliance Jio have blazed the trail in adopting new architectures from day one, in order to take advantage of their greenfield status to achieve lower…
NEC, until recently a nonentity in the RAN market outside its native Japan, is suddenly looking credible as a counterweight, along with Samsung, to the dominance of the largest suppliers – especially welcome to operators which are constrained from doing business with Huawei or ZTE. The Japanese company has leapt up the RAN rankings largely because of its prominent role in the high profile Rakuten Mobile deployment, for which is supplying a 5G radio and Massive MIMO antenna array that can work with multiple vendors’ virtual network functions (VNFs). This complex piece of kit was codeveloped with the operator and helped assert NEC’s credentials both for 5G engineering and for openness. Now, it is gaining new resources to develop its…
Nokia has introduced its latest 5G portfolio, updating its Cloud-RAN architecture with support for the O-RAN Alliance’s open interfaces. This launch represents high stakes for the Finnish company, coming at a time when it is in a precarious position in terms of market confidence in its platforms, and reported to be vulnerable to hostile takeover. A new CEO, and a new 5G RAN platform, will be tasked with boosting Nokia’s flagging market valuation, strengthening its defences against unwelcome predators, and kickstarting new 5G sales – no mean feat in the current climate, where the whole industry is beset by uncertainties over the impact of the pandemic and the USA/China cold war. Nokia’s incoming CEO, Pekka Lundmark, will take up his…
O-RAN continues to gather momentum, both as the main face of the broader movement for an open, multivendor RAN platform, and as the heart of a political push by the USA to reassert hi-tech leadership, especially in 5G, against China. It is not yet clear whether O-RAN itself is up to either, or both, of these massive tasks, which taken together, would reshape the whole mobile industry landscape. Full success would see the main bastion of power for Ericsson, Huawei and Nokia, the RAN, opened up to a whole variety of vendors – some major challengers from other industries such as the data center, some start-ups; some providing pre-integrated solutions, some just one or two hardware or software elements in…
The pledges from oil majors to reach net zero are falling short of requirements to fall within the limits defined in the Paris Agreement, according to an analyst note from Carbon Tracker. It states that “companies that continue to assume growth and sanction projects outside climate limits risk creating stranded assets, potentially destroying significant shareholder value,” while noting that targets must be expanded to address net-zero across scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions, and that interim targets are critical to ensure timely action. In ranking the targets of the oil majors, Eni came out on top, despite no pledge to fully reach net zero, due to its strong intentions upstream. Unsurprisingly ExxonMobil brings up the rear, with targets only covering…
This January Arizona public utility Salt River Project issued a request for proposals for 400 MW of solar power, 200 MW of which had to be within Navajo Nation territory. That RFP has now been answered by sPower with Navajo Power, which in May formed an agreement aiming for the 200 MW portion in the Nation itself, and by Navajo Transitional Energy Company with Photosol US, who last week announced they are angling for the whole 400 MW. A court battle against Salt River Project (SRP) progressed earlier this month as the Center for Biological Diversity challenged the utility’s discriminatory rates, which were cranked up 60% in 2015 for residential solar customers, as the utility blamed higher costs upstream. Similar…
We’d think that you have to be somewhat schizophrenic to work at Fortune 500 firm AES. It touts its zero carbon ambitions constantly, but continues to hold coal assets, and to develop fresh gas assets such as LNG import terminals. This week however it has gone a step closer to its declared sustainability goals, dropping a full 10% of its overseas coal assets, dropping them from 45% of generational assets to 35%, by the simple expedience of selling to India’s Adani Power. AES said it has sold its equity interest in two coal fired plants, 51% owned by the state of Orissa, in the India region of Odisha. The older plants here are just 420 MW, built in 1984, but…
Amazon has announced its $2 billion venture capital Climate Pledge Fund, which will invest in renewable startups as well as established companies. The industries involved will range from transportation and logistics, to energy generation, storage, and utilization, to manufacturing and materials, to food and agriculture. Further statements from Amazon committed to reforestation projects from its $100 million Right Now Climate Fund, and claimed that outgoing packaging had been reduced by 33% from previous levels, eliminating the need for 880,000 tons of waste material. These announcements are comparable to Amazon’s move earlier this year, investing $700 million in electric truck maker Rivian and ordering 100,000 vehicles. In 2019, Amazon pledged to reach 80% renewable energy consumption in 2024, and 100% in…
Tencent’s rumored share grab in iQiyi was clearly a red herring, as the Chinese internet giant has gone ahead and acquired another OTT video platform iflix for an undisclosed sum. Founded in Malaysia, iflix has picked up an estimated 25 million to 30 million SVoD subscribers across Southeast Asia. Amazon is upping the ante in live TV by developing a dedicated live TV feature in Prime Video for 24/7 live linear streaming. Job listings from Amazon gave away the surprise, as spotted by Protocol, seeking software engineers specifically for OTT linear streaming. CDN software specialist Broadpeak has joined the new 3Ready Entertainment Ecosystem from multiscreen vendor 3SS. Broadpeak brings its S4Streaming server-side ABR technology to the party, coming…
Another Android TV Operator Tier platform has arrived in South East Asia, this time at Taiwan Broadband Communications (TBC). There were no surprises to see Nagra nabbing the security contract at TBC, both as a long-standing supplier to the Taiwanese pay TV operator and as a vendor with no shortage of Android TV wins across the continent. Serving some 750,000 subscribers, TBC has signed up to Nagra’s Android Fast Track Program, basing security for its new 4K UHD platform on the Nagra Connect and Nagra SSP (Security Services Platform) product lines, based on a Realtek SoC. As a quick reminder, Nagra boasts being the only company with pre-certification of Netflix on hybrid set tops and has been increasingly flexing its…
Satellite fleet operator SES is approaching something of an inflection point as CEO Ferdinand Kayser, someone who became infamous in Faultline for his public denials of a correlation between surging OTT video viewership and tumbling satellite TV subscribers, intends to leave the company at the end of this year. No doubt Kayser will be given a hero’s send off, although his record is hardly anything to shout about. In four years, video has gone from accounting for 67.3% of the company’s total revenues (€1.4 billion in 2016), to 61% of annual takings (€1.2 billion in 2019). This shrinkage is set to accelerate this year as first quarter 2020 revenues for SES Video were down 7%, accounting for 58.9% of total…
Where have all the CDN-disrupting technologies been this year, while traditional server-based networks have been resolutely handling the relentless demand for OTT video the world over? Last year was a story of peer to peer (P2P) networks creeping out of the shadows – spearheaded by two market-altering deals with Liberty Global embracing Teltoo and CenturyLink acquiring Streamroot. We have even witnessed the emergence of blockchain-based overlay networks to further make the established CDN vendors sweat. This year was therefore tipped to be the year that decentralized P2P software finally entered the mainstream, but along came lockdowns, and suddenly the resilience of the classic CDN was solidified – as demonstrated during the emphatic Akamai Edge Live event earlier this year (coping…
Covid-19 has had a noticeable effect on the video viewing habits of consumers globally. We recently explored the phenomenon in a Rethink TV forecast, but the increase has also been seen on the illegitimate side of things. Irdeto has seen a spike in piracy, and wanted to update Faultline on the scope and capabilities of these pirate services. Mark Mulready, VP of Cybersecurity Services, came to Irdeto after spending nine years at Foxtel, the Australian telco, and 16 years in the New South Wales Police Department. Making the jump from detective work into fraud and operational security was driven by a desire to put law qualifications to more use, and Mulready has now been at Irdeto for 10 years. Foxtel…