Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
“For us, any potential merger between SRT and RIST is trivial. We will support these two protocols in any way. But for customers, it would definitely be a good thing,” was the frank conclusion from Ronen Sadan, VP of Marketing and Products at VideoFlow, a supplier of IP-based software and hardware for the broadcast industry. He was of course referring to Faultline’s scoop a few weeks ago about possible convergence between the groups driving adoption of Secure Reliable Transport (SRT) and Reliable Internet Stream Transport (RIST). Since then, we have been eager to hear opinions about what a common, open source, low latency standard would mean at various levels of the video technology stack – and the opportunities from increased…
Liberty Global’s Virgin Media merging with mobile operator O2 in the UK would be an infinitely better outcome than Vodafone getting its hands on Virgin Media and one that is much more likely to appease regulators – but that should not deter Vodafone from lining up a counteroffer for Virgin Media. Even if the more favorable deal on paper between Virgin Media and Telefonica-owned O2 goes ahead, we feel the UK could still be in danger of experiencing an equivalent to the formation of VodafoneZiggo in the Netherlands, a disruptive deal that somehow slipped past antitrust regulators with major long-term implications. The warning signs are all there – combining a cable TV and fixed broadband powerhouse with a strong…
Last week we talked about the National Renewable Energy Authority (NREL), in the US, pulling together facilities to make a leap from the labs to scale production of perovskite based solar panels. See NREL drags academia and business into US Perovskite fight-back. So afterwards we chatted to Joe Berry at NREL the senior scientist, perovskite and hybrid solar cells team lead, who is heading up this new initiative, to get some details of the “go to market” strategy. He talked up the possibilities from the first, “Perovskite has gone from nothing to something in 10 years, and it is on the cusp of taking off. I personally have come to believe in it, from the position of previously being a…
Debates over privacy and battery life have rather overwhelmed the primary problem of accuracy in the urgent drive to implement effective large scale contact tracing using BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) via smartphone. We reported the historic collaboration between Apple and Google over contact tracing two weeks ago and how they were planning to address the other problem – lack of buy-in from users – by embedding the technology in the operating system so that it worked automatically without need to download an app. The question of accuracy of course arose at the outset, with both Google and Apple admitting work needed to be done to improve that beyond the current level that can be almost guaranteed of around five meters,…
Australian operator TPG had high hopes, a year ago, of being a fourth MNO in Singapore and unleashing disruption similar to that of other challengers like Free in France. But changes to the rules governing the 5G auction made it almost impossible for the newcomer to secure a viable spectrum position, and the three incumbents have duly sewn up the licences between them. In October, the regulator, IMDA, said it would offer four 5G licences, rather than the original plan for two, but only two would bring nationwide spectrum rights (the others support localized networks). The winners would be decided based on a combination of auction and beauty contest, the latter related to bidders’ network roll-out targets and investment commitments.…
Operators are likely to react in different ways when it comes to reassessing their supply chains in light of economic crisis. Some will cling to tried and trusted vendors, even on a ‘devil you know’ basis, because they are familiar and, as far as any business can be now, stable. That could see such operators sticking to conventional supplier relationships, even if they are migrating to new architectures such as virtualized, disaggregated RAN and core in the 5G era. Others will feel greater urgency than before to rewrite the rules when it comes to cost-effectiveness and openness in their networks. With less cash to play with, but sometimes with accelerated capacity upgrades required, they may overcome nerves about new suppliers…
At the start of January, 2020 promised to be the year of the challenger mobile operator. Armed with 5G, open networks and more flexible spectrum licensing schemes, these new entrants would compensate for their newcomer status with lower network costs and cloud economics, which in turn would enable eye-catchingly low tariffs and an array of digital services. So, will the pandemic crisis end that dream and see the mobile markets consolidate again, around the companies with the biggest investments in physical infrastructure and the huge customer bases? This could happen because of investor caution, or because regulators and policy makers decide to play it safe. TPG’s dream of being a fourth MNO in Singapore was ended last week after the…
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…
Success in huge countries like China, India and the USA has a disproportionate effect on vendors’ performance because it does not just bring big-dollar contracts, but improved confidence throughout the ecosystem. That factor is even more critical during times of uncertainty and crisis, whether the suppliers are big or small. The negative side is seen in the horrified response to Nokia missing out on both the most recent massive network contracts in China (see previous item). But Nokia has done better in India, with a huge deal, reportedly worth about $1bn, with Bharti Airtel, the third in the country’s triumvirate of huge MNOs. Smaller suppliers are even more susceptible to the confidence boosts of success in a large market during…
For the second time in a month, Nokia has been left out in the cold in major Chinese 5G networks contracts, while Ericsson has managed to retain a position alongside the home suppliers, Huawei and ZTE. Two weeks ago, it was revealed that China Mobile had awarded the second phase of its 5G RAN and core deals, a huge contract with a total value of around $5.2bn, which will help the leading MNO to increase its 5G base stations from 80,000 to 300,000 in number this year. Ericsson gained only over 11% of the total (though that still equates to almost $600m), but Nokia won nothing. More details have now been released of Ericsson’s win at China Mobile. It will…
To ensure interoperability with the low latency protocol RIST (Reliable Internet Stream Transport), the RIST Forum has released the availability of Virtual Machine images for product and workflow testing. SipRadius developed the VM operating system, which includes an open source library called libRIST, a streaming engine and a web GUI, which provides support for one media stream and two libRIST streams. President Ciro Noronha hailed the VM testing tool as “hugely valuable in promoting easy implementation of RIST and therefore improving interoperability within the industry.” The Airtel Xstream OTT video app, operated by Indian telco giant Bharti Airtel, has surpassed 1.5 billion multi-DRM licenses served by the cloud-based Nagra Security Services Platform – marking a personal record for cloud.SSP. The…
Kudos to Bitmovin for pulling out all the stops during a fully-stocked three-week virtual extravaganza, as the encoding vendor entered its final week of NAB webinars. Bitmovin’s marathon wouldn’t be complete of course without getting AWS in for a showstopper, although it did seem strange to see the cloud behemoth so full of praise for Bitmovin over its own Elemental encoding division. During the ‘Saving Bits with Bitmovin on AWS’ webinar, AWS was buttering up its Snow Family for data collection and migration. Snow is a great way to get content into S3 for storage, via a number of physical devices and capacity points, most with built-in computing capabilities designed to physically transport vast amounts of data into and out…
Following up its eyebrow-raising ad tech announcement last week, MediaKind was back in action with the launch of Aquila Broadcast – a supplement of the Aquila Streaming technology which recently received a Google Cloud boost. We are so used to seeing broadcast technology companies launch streaming video products that this feels like an unnatural evolution. But that backwards path to offering broadcast software – specifically IP-based broadcast software – is precisely why MediaKind has an edge. The Ericsson IP video spin off describes Aquila Broadcast as a step-by-step transition from appliance-based platforms to all-IP media delivery, based on software-based video compression, control and stream processing techniques. Spiking costs of satellite transponder capacity, and the reduced availability of this capacity, has…
Verizon has seemed somewhat desperate to appear relevant in the world of media as of late, so perhaps it is hoping that a new set of trainers will keep the naysayers, including Faultline, at bay. The telco has countered a concerning set of Q1 results with a trio of upgrades to its ad platform, content control and live broadcasting offerings. The headline feature is Smart Prebid, a server-side ad integration that optimizes the order of bidding in publishers’ favor, as well as 4K HDR broadcasts and the promise of sub-second latency in live streaming. While advertisers will likely appreciate the operational efficiency of some of the upgrades, namely Smart Prebid, these offerings do not distract from the feeling that the…
Adtran and WiFi pioneer Plume have signed a partnership deal that will see Plume’s in-home capabilities integrated with Adtran’s Mosaic Subscriber Suite, which is offered to ISPs and operators to better manage customer relationships. The pair plan to launch “exciting new smart home services,” and for Adtran’s typical customers, as a telecommunications equipment vendor, this is a chance to expand into a stickier package offering. Plume is riding something of a wave at the moment. Having enjoyed great success with its Comcast win, February saw Liberty Global pick Plume to power its European operations, following on from the Virgin Media UK operations. Back then, we knew Plume had around 10 million homes using its WiFi mesh technology, and said it…
Momentum is continuing to build in the Vietnamese wind power market, with Enercon signing a supply deal for 310 MW of its turbines this week across six projects in the country. With an intended installation in Q3 2021, these projects are among many that face a narrowing window to reach completion, which depends on minimal impact from Covid-19. While Vietnam continues to ramp up its plans for wind power, how this intended growth is sustained will depend on whether the central government decides to extend its Feed-in-Tariff deadline. Through Enercon’s new contract, it will deliver nearly 75 of its 4.2 MW turbines, to projects across the country, bringing its total pipeline across Vietnam to 400 MW. Enercon is among several…
The first time we heard the word “blockchain” at an energy conference, it was just ignored. Not because people did not know what it meant, but because attendees felt bored with the suggestion that it could solve almost all energy management issues. It is a very compelling solution to one problem, and one problem only – when the world needs a ledger that cannot be tampered with or in any way altered, and which can be shared among a large number of market constituents. In its purest form it is a type of distributed database, which for over 40 years has been a solution looking for a problem. The fact that as a concept it was first put together as…
A 2 GW solar project boasting the world’s lowest tariff is on the cards in the United Arab Emirates, after EDF Renewables and Jinko Solar submitted the lowest bid of $13.50 per MWh to a tender for the Al Dhafra project. After state-owned utility Abu Dhabi Power negotiates a PPA with the developers, the project is expected to come online in Q2 2022. A second tender for another 2 GW solar plant will be held at the end of this year. If negotiations with EDF and Jinko Solar were to fall through, then the second-lowest bid was from Saudi developer ACWA Power. The Al Dhafra region has daily solar radiation of 6,500 watts per square meter per hour in summer,…
It is not just Dish which has selected Mavenir to help it deploy an open RAN. Vodafone Idea, the largest MNO in India, has made a similar choice, as it looks to harness the low cost and flexibility of cloud-native platforms to be more competitive against its aggressive challenger, Reliance Jio. Jio, as a new entrant, has been able to adopt open, affordable architectures from day one and to leverage an agile digital platform, and low cost of ownership, to launch a wide range of digital services and to undercut its rivals in all its tariffs. Jio has just announced that Facebook has taken almost a 10% stake in its parent, Reliance Platforms, which will boost its ability to expand…
There may be financial storm-clouds hanging over Dish’s 5G build-out because of Covid-19 (see previous item), and that will make itlas even more important that the company can prove its naysayers wrong, and manage to roll out a national network for just $10bn as it has promised. It has pledged to do this by following the example of another greenfield MNO, Rakuten Mobile of Japan, in adopting open architectures that allow a heavily software-centric network to be deployed mainly on common server hardware. It will also keep capex and, particularly, opex under control by turning to partnerships for many aspects of the network, such as passive and cloud infrastructure. Dish has already issued three RFPs (requests for proposal) for its…