Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Just weeks after Microsoft acquired virtualized packet core vendor Affirmed Networks, it has added Metaswitch to the expanding telecoms capabilities of its Azure cloud platform. No price was disclosed, but rumors pointed to a tag of around $1.35bn. Metaswitch is a venerable name in the world’s of telco IP communications, including VoIP, and has been a leading light in virtualizing the IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) to make this essential, but unwieldy enabler of 4G voice and messaging easier to roll out. It also has some 5G virtual core functionality, mainly on the user plane. Microsoft made its agenda clear in a blog post to announced the deal, writing: “Our intention over time is to create modern alternatives to network infrastructure.”…
The expanded T-Mobile and Dish Network are still hammering out the final details of their deal, which will see Sprint’s Boost prepaid business sold to the satellite TV operator for an initial $1.2bn. But while this arrangement helped secure regulatory approval for T-Mobile USA’s merger with Sprint, once it is activated, the companies will become competitors – even though, until it rolls out its own network at scale, Dish’s main coverage will come from its seven-year MVNO arrangement with TMO. The new TMO has a significant advantage over Dish in terms of established networks, services and user bases, but it has to go through a difficult integration process (see separate item). Meanwhile Dish has spent years collecting spectrum but failing…
The US mobile market has been engaged in 15 years of almost constant M&A activity, from the re-assembling of AT&T from several former ‘Baby Bells’ in the middle of the last decade; to the failed AT&T bid for T-Mobile USA; the successful takeover of Sprint by Japan’s Softbank; and now T-Mobile’s acquisition of Sprint. Meanwhile, US operators were early to deploy 5G, but are losing their country’s imagined 5G race with China, when it comes to scale. Spectrum has been taken first from broadcasters and now from satellite operators to feed the hunger for mobile broadband. The wave of consolidation has been offset by a string of new entries to the mobile game – by cable operators, notably the formidable…
The world’s largest wealth fund has dumped $3.3 billion in fossil fuel assets. Norway’s $1 trillion fund owns approximately 1.5% of the world’s listed stocks, having previously benefited from the country’s revenues from oil and gas production. The fund has now ditched companies with high activity in the coal sector to reduce its exposure to stranded fossil-fuel assets. Exclusion include coal miners Glencore and Anglo American; utility RWE; and oil producer Suncor Energy. It has also placed BHP Group, Vistra Energy, Enel and Uniper under observation. Brazilian Miner Vale SA has also been excluded from Norway’s Wealth Fund due to links with environmental damage. This came in spite of the company’s pledge to spend $2 billion on cutting its carbon…
Sembcorp’s development of a 60 MW floating solar plant in Singapore has signed a 25-year PPA with the National Water Agency, PUB, at an unspecified rate. The Tengeh Reservoir Floating Solar Plant will supply power from next year to five nearby PUB waterworks. At 60 MW, the plant is large by floating solar standards – a few years ago it would’ve been the world’s largest, but there are now several larger than it in China, the biggest being 150 MW. There are now gigawatt-scale plants under planning in India and South Korea. Sembcorp is a Singapore-based utilities and marine group with a global presence, and a large share of the rig-building market. Singapore’s other floating solar projects include a 5…
Most of the time when we mention lithium-ion storage at Rethink Energy, it refers to stationary systems, often of utility scale. But with fossil fuels currently having a key advantage in transportability, market entrants like Germany’s Instagrid have suggested that portable and integrated battery systems will be key to displacing small-scale fossil-fuel generators, while also opening up opportunities in smart networks and electric vehicle charging. Speaking to Rethink, Instagrid founders Sebastian Berning and Andreas Sedlmayr, detailed to us how the company’s portable battery aims to improve on the performance of diesel generators, while minimizing local sources of pollution, in the same way that electric vehicles are displacing those running on fossil-fuels. The first Instagrid battery is being developed with a…
We’re in the early stages of a race to build-out the production capacity for green hydrogen, with the energy sector starting to come around to the idea that the technology will be key to tackling emissions outside the electricity grid. But with a lack of renewable capacity going spare for electrolysis, finding other sources of clean production will accelerate how quickly the ‘hydrogen economy’ materializes. Ways2H is among the wave of start-ups that are exploring other technologies, suggesting that municipal solid waste can be processed to extract hydrogen at competitive costs in the near term. In conversation with Rethink Energy, Ways2H CEO Jean-Louis Kindler was keen to steer away from describing the company’s process as ‘gasification’ – worried about the…
There was a time when the latest smartphone SoC launch was something that Faultline kept a very close eye on. In the past few years, however, there hasn’t been much to keep track of. The latest generations didn’t do much worth writing about. Generational shifts died off, in terms of screens and capabilities, and instead, change became incremental. To this end, Qualcomm and MediaTek might just shake things up again, thanks to two new designs and an apparent focus on mobile gaming. Qualcomm unveiled its Snapdragon 768G, positioned a few steps down from its latest flagship Snapdragon 865, but a couple of notches up from the midrange Snapdragon 765 – both of which were launched in December. That new family…
As economies around the world slide into recession, any business deviating from the downturn will always catch our eye. Enter California-based ad-buying platform, The Trade Desk, which has finished the first quarter of the year with a strikingly impressive set of results, albeit because of pre-Covid victories. Despite a shortfall in business in March, the company’s net income is up 138% year on year (YoY) to $24.1 million, while revenues are up 33% YoY to $160.7 million. Earnings call transcripts saw CEO, Jeff Green, rallying the troops for a tidal wave of CTV-centric business when the market returns, although he was unable to give any reassurance of when that may be. Of course, the pandemic has not left The Trade…
Amazon has emerged as the guiding light to lead AMC Theatres from the brink of bankruptcy and into a new post-pandemic dawn. While Faultline’s coverage during the ongoing crisis has tended to lean towards positive projections, as far as cinema chains are concerned, it is intrinsically and increasingly difficult to see any light at the end of the tunnel. Déjà vu, anyone? The story is a carbon copy of one which circulated throughout 2018, about Amazon acquiring Landmark Theatres. Except, of course, AMC represents a sizable upgrade in ambition from Amazon, if reports are true. Nevertheless, the world’s largest movie theater chain – with some 10,000 cinemas – will be desperate for Amazon’s reported buyout to complete. Naturally, the industry…
IBM has unveiled a series of software solutions and applications designed to help telcos and enterprises develop and execute their edge computing strategies. The new edge portfolio is heavily driven by 5G, said the company at its Think Digital conference last week, where new CEO Arvind Krishna boasted of how the OpenShift Kubernetes platform from Red Hat (which IBM acquired last year) can be used in distributed architectures as well as centralized data centers. The new offerings include: IBM Edge Application Manager – a tool for the remote management of AI, analytics and IoT workloads at up to 10,000 edge nodes. This is the result of work that IBM has contributed to the Open Horizon project under the auspices of Linux…
Operators are gradually starting to entrust more core software systems to the public cloud, mainly for certain OSS/BSS applications, though some are starting to talk about cloud-based core and even RAN functions moving to Azure, AWS or Google in future. For smaller operators, this is already happening, and vendors such as Nokia, Mavenir and others offer some of their software for public cloud platform. And of course, Microsoft itself recently acquired one of the virtualized core network suppliers, Affirmed Networks. Netcracker has been joining the trend, and has announced that its OSS/BSS portfolio is now available on Amazon AWS, adding to an existing deal with Google Cloud. The first publicly announced customer for the AWS-based offerings is T-Mobile Netherlands, which…
Rakuten, though famous for achieving the world’s first end-to-end cloud-native cellular network, has been very open about how difficult this was. The vision of being able to assemble multivendor VNFs on commodity servers with the same ease as configuring the apps on a new PC is very far from a reality, as Rakuten’s chief architecture officer, Tareq Amin, has made clear. He put some more detail behind his view, and laid down the gauntlet to large and small vendors, in a fascinating interview with SDxCentral. In it, he highlighted the need for suppliers to get far more experience of actual deployment of multivendor, cloud-based networks, so that operators will not need to invest such large amounts of cost and resource…
Four years ago, the UK telecoms market was completely reshaped when incumbent telco BT acquired the country’s largest MNO, EE. That created a very powerful quad play operator with clear leadership in fixed and mobile services, and its own pay-TV offering too. At the same time, however, regulators blocked a bid by Hutchison and Telefónica to merge their respective UK MNOs, Three and O2. The grounds were that this would reduce the number of MNOs from four to three, whereas the BT transaction would not – so Three and O2 were left to compete separately against a significantly more powerful BT, and Telefónica was forced to stay in an overly competitive market it had clearly wanted to exit. If those rulings…
Some key developments in the history of mobile communications have been a result of geopolitics – particularly the USA failing to achieve the leadership it has enjoyed in most areas of technology since World War II. There were tensions in the 1980s and 1990s because 2G was driven by France-based European standards group ETSI (GSM once stood for Groupe Spécial Mobile) and monetized by vendors from France, Germany, Finland and Sweden – even though so much foundational work had been done by Motorola in the USA. Part of Qualcomm’s success came from support for an American alternative in CDMA. Recently, these relatively healthy hi-tech rivalries have become intertwined with bigger geopolitical tensions between the USA and China, whose flagship vendor…
Whether you believe formal standards organizations or open source initiatives are the best way to drive 5G-era mobile networks forward, the dream on both sides of the fence has been the same – a common global platform that would create massive economies of scale, and allow companies of all sizes and nationalities to participate in the value chain. Of course, it has never worked out that way. The 2G and 3G platforms were split between GSM/UMTS and CDMA; 4G almost went the same way with WiMAX. But finally, LTE and then 5G appeared to provide a globally agreed set of mobile standards, and as networks starting to virtualize, there was the hope of an additional dose of mass-scale commonality from…
Dish Network hemorrhaged another 413,000 subscribers in Q1 2020 as its pay TV footprint withered further to 11.3 million – spread over 9 million Dish TV satellite subs and 2.3 million on Sling TV. These latest losses mark an increase from 259,000 net pay TV declines in Q1 2019. Zoom Video is seeking to shake off its reputation of vulnerability by acquiring secure messaging and encryption service Keybase for an undisclosed sum. After its much-maligned rise to fame during lockdowns, Zoom wants to amalgamate enterprise-scale communications, easily deployable security, and end-to-end encryption into one communications platform, which it claims no one on the market currently offers. Sky has come to the temporary rescue of the UK advertising industry with…
Virtualization is almost as old as commercial computation, dating back over half a century to IBM’s development of virtual machines running on its monolithic mainframe hardware. The motivation then was to extract maximum use of very expensive and scarce computers by allowing each one to run multiple operating systems and thereby emulate other machines with their own workloads via time sharing. Now virtualization has, in one sense, been turned upside down, because while 50 years ago it was motivated by the high cost of hardware, it is now driven by the fact general purpose CPUs have become so cheap. This has made it increasingly attractive to migrate network functions away from dedicated chips (ASICs and FPGAs) onto COTS hardware based…
Although the current pandemic is putting many in the ad tech ecosystem on red alert, Edinburgh-based video measurement vendor TVSquared seems to be keeping its cool. The company is still expecting to grow this year by providing analytics to what it identifies as an increasingly budget-conscious industry. TVSquared is taking the long view – approaching the pandemic as a catalyst for the demise of linear TV. Speaking to Faultline this week, the company’s founder and CEO, Calum Smeaton, assured us that TVSquared is well prepared for this change. But we could not help but wonder whether there may be some shortfall in business as the transition takes place much quicker than expected. For the moment, TVSquared is in the envious…
Few had heard of Firstlight Media before the company salvaged the remaining Quickplay assets from the iron grip of AT&T two months ago. Maybe fewer had heard of a technology company founded on the premise of prizing a business from one of the world’s most powerful operators for a reunion with its original co-founder. That is precisely what Firstlight Media set out to do in January 2019, going on to complete the acquisition of Quickplay from AT&T in March 2020 with financial backing from private equity firm Highview Capital. Now with Firstlight coming up for air, offering a modular end-to-end OTT platform, our first bone to pick was why Firstlight sees a future in Quickplay when AT&T clearly does not.…