Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Adani Green Energy has been selected by the Indian government to develop 8 GW of solar projects and 2 GW of solar manufacturing capacity, with an overall price tag of $6 billion. The largest of the individual projects will weigh in at 2 GW. By 2022, 2 GW should be complete, with the entire 8 GW to be finished by 2025. Adani Green Energy has exercised an option to double its original bid for 4 GW solar, 1 GW manufacturing, in the SECI tender held in November. Another winning developer, Indian developer Azure Power, was awarded that 4 GW and 1 GW option as well. Power prices and offtake agreements have not been disclosed by the Solar Energy Corporation of…
Tokyo deploys smart poles Tokyo will start deploying smart poles at the end of June 2020 for equipping with small 5G base stations as well as WiFi, street lighting and digital signage. These will be installed by Japanese conglomerate Sumitomo, and will support a Smart Street Lighting offering from NEC. There will be two versions of the NEC platform, both equipped with digital signage and pedestrian traffic flow analysis cameras. One model will be equipped with a 5G shared antenna system for joint use by multiple carriers, while the other for whole site sharing will incorporate 5G base stations. Mitsubishi and NTT take joint 30% stake in HERE Technologies Two Japanese giants, Mitsubishi and NTT, have jointly acquired a 30%…
The ink has dried on the opening paragraph of TiVo’s next chapter, completing its merger with semiconductor maker Xperi after joining hands in the dying days of 2019. As expected, the TiVo legacy will live on – for now – with Xperi operating a number of technology brands which together form an intellectual property powerhouse. Long before a deal was struck, it was clear that Android TV Operator Tier would be central to TiVo’s new software direction away from DVRs, securing deployments at TDS Telecom, and Tele2/Com Hem, as two examples either side of the pond, to offset its replacement at big accounts like Liberty Global’s Virgin Media UK operation. But there is much more to the merger than developing…
Among the vendors defining a post-pandemic video technology ecosystem is LiveU, a company renowned for its HEVC bonding units housed within cellular backpacks for remote production. Despite the US-based IP transmission specialist’s entire engineering team being uprooted from development labs to home, the company still managed to push out a new product launch this week. LiveU is pushing to make mobile bonding units mainstream, by adding remote production capabilities and 5G connectivity. The big question is, even with all the bells and whistles, can LiveU usurp the established broadcasting equipment providers once big crews are allowed to convene together again in live production environments, or is the company happy being more of a reliable back-up technology for live sports and…
Billing and business support systems (BSS) have always been the intersection point between the worlds of IT and telecoms. Telcos traditionally sourced their back office solutions mainly from specialized vendors with understanding of the specific demands of an operator’s model, but in recent years, they have been more willing to buy more generic business products and services. That creates challenges for telecoms software suppliers like Amdocs and Netcracker, but also opportunities to extend the business beyond operators to other enterprises and service providers with similar challenges. And as the whole network becomes a series of cloud-based applications, vendors which own a strong virtualized BSS portfolio can find this to be a useful defence against the incursions of suppliers from the…
For Cisco and Juniper, the move to base telecom networks on white box switches and routers is an obvious threat, even as the vision of deploying virtualized 5G RAN with huge numbers of edge routers may be a good opportunity. AT&T has not only championed white box switches and core routers, but provided specs to the Open Compute Project (OCP), which exists to commoditize data center and network hardware, and break down the business model of the traditional vendors with their expensive integrated appliances. No wonder, then, that Juniper chief product officer, Manoj Leelanivas, speaking at a Bank of America technology conference last week, was still pursuing the line beloved of his company and Cisco – and the RAN vendors…
If NEC succeeds in expanding its RAN and core capabilities to operators outside Japan this time around, it will be partly thanks to the very high profile support of Japan’s newest MNO, Rakuten Mobile. Rakuten’s 4G/5G network may not be quite as pure in its cloud-native, end-to-end simplicity as claimed, but it is ground-breaking in many ways, not least the number of suppliers it brings together (coming up for 30 across all the domains). And it has certainly captured huge amounts of attention, and served as an early case study of how networks could be deployed, and supply chains managed, in a new way. All that has thrown a spotlight on the vendors involved, particularly NEC. For 4G, Rakuten stuck…
Various big names not so familiar in the cellular industry are starting to make their presence felt as 5G gets rolling, determined to seize a major stake in what they see as a field now well suited to their products and technology. They even threaten the incumbent players, or at least would like to, as Oracle made clear recently in stating it planned to challenge the dominance of the mobile core by the big three – Ericsson, Huawei and Nokia – which account for around 80% of that sector between them. Some also want to go beyond the core and deliver operators their whole 5G infrastructures via cloud-based SaaS (software-as-a-service) models. This comes at time of major disruption anyway in…
The past 15 years have been ones of a shrinking vendor base in mobile networks. Operators whose governments wish to restrict Chinese equipment in 5G build-outs complain bitterly that they will be left with a choice of only two global and long-standing suppliers, Nokia and Ericsson, with Samsung as a possible counterweight. But the argument is over-simplified. In some respects, as the 5G network transforms to new virtualized and disaggregated architectures, the supply chain has not looked as diverse for many years. This is not really about the wave of specialist vendors pinning their colors to the O-RAN mast. Initiatives like the O-RAN Alliance and Telecom Infra Project are greatly to be welcomed as they show the way to a…
The $565 million, 350 MW Cleve Hill solar plant has been approved in the UK, the largest in the country by a big margin. The project is located on the southeastern coast, in North Kent, and will use the same transmission infrastructure as the London Array offshore wind farm. Final Investment Decision will be taken prior to the beginning of construction in 2021, and completion in 2022. A lithium-ion battery component is also being considered of up to 700 MWh. The project’s developers, Wirsol and Hive Energy, are not seeking a subsidy and will not participate in next year’s Contracts for Difference (CfD) auction. Following a prolonged environmental debate, half of the project’s area will be left uncovered for ecological…
The UK government has proposed its new carbon pricing scheme to replace the European Emissions Trading System (ETS) upon the country’s split with the EU, as the Brexit deadline approaches. While this presented an opportunity for a reform to the country’s carbon pricing, the UK’s aim to maintain uninterrupted trade with Europe has meant that proposals have fallen short of any changes that will have any significant impact on carbon emissions. Announced on Monday, the plan follows a consultation of stakeholders in the UK’s ‘carbon market,’ with the plan putting forward a first phase from 2021 to 2030. The design of the system has aimed to allow it to operate as a standalone system, while also maintaining the preferential possibility…
An open access article in Nature Communications, a highly respected, peer reviewed academic journal, demonstrates in some detail this week how China might choose to decarbonize, and how that could be done effectively, quickly and cheaply. It is entitled “Rapid cost decrease of renewables and storage accelerates the decarbonization of China’s power system,” and was written by Gang He, Jiang Lin, Froylan Sifuentes, Xu Liu, Nikit Abhyankar & Amol Phadke – academics at Stony Brook University, New York and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in California and can be viewed here. Effectively it was an update to the 2015 seminal work on this subject from the Energy Research Institute, National Development and Reform Commission in China, and as such the…
Recent rumors regarding a new Google streaming device have been confirmed. Codenamed Sabrina, the Android TV dongle looks like a squashed Chromecast, taking on a more oblong shape compared to its rounded predecessor. A marketing video obtained by XDA Developers shows the top half of a new dedicated remote, confirming Google’s long-expected shift away from smartphone cast functionality. In the UI, YouTube TV will come integrated into a live tab and Google Assistant gets a new response interface. Sabrina supports Dolby Vision and is based on an Amlogic SoC, according to the report. It remains unclear whether Android TV will be rebranded to Google TV, although Faultline has been reassured by a Google representative that Android TV Operator Tier will…
The focus of this week’s investigation into vendors defining a post-pandemic video technology ecosystem is LiveU, a company renowned for its HEVC bonding units housed within cellular backpacks for remote production. Faultline has been coaxed to the company in recent months with the emphasis on remote production, in which time LiveU’s notoriety has skyrocketed, and somehow – despite the US IP transmission specialist’s entire engineering team being uprooted from development labs to homes – the company still managed to push out a new product launch this week. LiveU is pushing to make mobile bonding units mainstream, by adding production capabilities and 5G connectivity. The big question is, even with all the bells and whistles, can LiveU usurp the established broadcasting…
Remote production specialist The Switch has launched its new MIMiC service offering, promising to provide on-demand cloud-based video production in an as-a-service model – allowing it to be spun up and down as needed, to help customers keep costs down. Much like cloud computing, this approach to video production is going to slowly squeeze out legacy approaches, but it is going to take some time. Of course, we’ll probably never reach the point where a van full of gear is replaced solely by a tablet, nor when the in-field camera and capture equipment is done on an auxiliary device like a smartphone. However, there are an awful lot of efficiencies to be gained from the industry moving towards a software-driven…
Comcast’s Freewheel has relinquished full ownership of its peer-to-peer media data platform, Blockgraph. The initiative will now be jointly owned by Comcast, Charter and ViacomCBS, providing some credibility to its early appeal as an open, secure, and unbiased platform for sharing audience attribution insights. Why has this come about? Perhaps all three co-owners are getting sick of the inconsistencies and loopholes that plague audience attribution. So, standardized means of presenting attribution data that reflect the new video landscape are needed. As touched upon in a NAB Express roundtable last month, Nielsen’s archaic system is just not well suited to the diverse video advertising landscape. Blockgraph is a software platform created to aggregate, anonymize, and share audience attribution data. This data…
Metrological has become somewhat averse to public showings since being gobbled up by Comcast last year. An appearance by the Dutch app aficionado during a recent webinar therefore caught our eye, where Metrological’s Greg Riker, SVP of the Americas division, alongside Sky’s Fraser Stirling, CPO, delivered an unexpected progress update on the open source Lightning Component Framework. “Lots of operators” – beyond the two main drivers Comcast and Sky – are beginning to embrace the HTML5-based Lightning framework in their ecosystems for UI development, according to Riker, speaking during a Broadband TV News webinar session this week. Indeed, the Lightning Framework is something Faultline and few other trade publications have given much time to, due to it receiving little-to-no mention…
The ink has dried on the opening paragraph of TiVo’s next chapter, completing its merger with semiconductor maker Xperi after joining hands in the dying days of 2019. As expected, the TiVo legacy will live on – for now – with Xperi operating a number of technology brands which together form an intellectual property powerhouse. Long before a deal was struck, it was clear that Android TV Operator Tier would be central to TiVo’s new software direction away from DVRs, securing deployments at TDS Telecom (see separate story in this issue on TDS) and Tele2/Com Hem, as two examples either side of the pond, to offset its replacement at big accounts like Liberty Global’s Virgin Media UK operation. But there…
HBO Max has become a perfect example of how to launch a technically sound streaming platform and how not to market it. A week on since launch, complaints have poured in from bamboozled HBO Now subscribers wondering why they haven’t automatically been switched over to HBO Max, despite the two offerings each costing an even $15 a month. This breakdown in communication between AT&T and its existing subscriber base is typical of a lumbering pay TV operator – stuck in a cyclical process of launching new services and continuing to deliver woeful customer service. HBO Max’s stumbling start also represents another marketing mishap for AT&T, following on from the much-maligned seven-syllable mouthful that is AT&T TV Now. Running with HBO,…
European court annuls decision that blocked UK mobile merger The General Court of the European Court of Justice has annulled a decision made in 2016 to block the merger between two UK MNOs, Telefónica O2 and HutchisonThree, on the basis of fears of reduced competition. Four years on, Telefónica is looking elsewhere, planning to merge O2 with Liberty Global’s UK cableco, Virgin Media. But the change in the precedent could have an important broader impact on regulatory attitudes to telecoms mergers in Europe, a saturated region which is likely to see a further round of consolidation, even as incumbents are being disrupted by new entrants with very different business models, such as Iliad. Telia deploys 5G network powered entirely…