Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Now that T-Mobile USA has completed its marriage with Sprint – and got its clutches on the most prized piece of the dowry, Sprint’s hefty chunk of 2.5 GHz spectrum – the work of integrating their networks and customer bases begins. This will not be easy. In some ways the operators’ networks are complementary, so there should not be too much rationalization – TMO has built its early 5G for coverage, in its plentiful 600 MHz spectrum, with small amounts of millimeter wave; while Sprint has focused on 4G and 5G build-out in 2.5 GHz. However, while the spectrum combines to give TMO an ideal position, the networks themselves have been built very differently, and the two companies have contrasting…
Facebook is to invest INR435.74bn (about $5.7bn) for a 9.9% stake in Reliance Platforms, activating a deal that was reported last month but apparently put on hold by the pandemic crisis. Reliance Platforms is owned by conglomerate Reliance Industries (RIL), and operator Reliance Jio is a subsidiary of Platforms. This is the biggest investment Facebook has ever made except for the $16bn acquisition of WhatsApp, and makes it the largest minority shareholder in Reliance Platforms (which is still primarily owned by RIL). The deal values Jio Platforms at INR4.62 trillion ($60.2bn). The deal will be important to the social media giant for a variety of reasons: It will strengthen its ability to reach the users of the world’s second largest…
Nokia, whose stock has dropped in value by 40% over the past year, saw it leap by 12% on reports last week that it was battling a hostile takeover bid worth about $17.4bn – a price that would come close to being a fire sale, in the wake of the pandemic disruption and Nokia’s own performance problems of late 2019. The company did not comment of course, but the rumors – originating with TMT Finance – said Nokia had hired Citi as advisers to help it fend off a hostile attack. This followed reports in March that the Finnish firm was exploring its strategic options, including potential sale. That report was denied, but there is no doubt that Nokia is…
Many of the interesting changes associated with the 5G era are only indirectly to do with new technology or the famous 5G use cases. Instead, they relate to a redefinition of the mobile industry landscape. The profile of a mobile network vendor or operator has not changed dramatically for two decades – companies consolidated, new start-ups arrived, but all within the same, largely closed arena. Other types of companies stole some of the revenues and branding away – MNOs were generally weak in monetizing the mobile Internet beyond connectivity fees; cellular network vendors tried to become all-IP infrastructure suppliers, but not always successfully. But the 5G landscape will be different in terms of who will be selling the equipment, and…
Solar net metering in the US is facing a legal challenge from the New England Ratepayers Association, channeled through the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). The appeal has demanded that “exclusive federal jurisdiction” should be given “over wholesale energy sales from generation sources located on the customer side of the retail market,” which essentially means that FERC would have control over the rates that markets pay to consumers for electricity fed back to the grid. Solar net metering has been a key part of the solar build out in the US for the last 20 years and has helped increase rooftop PV penetration across 41 states. It seems almost ridiculous to report, but a study commissioned by the Finish Government…
The second half of our solar tracking service write up this week shows which countries are remaining strong in solar delivery through 2019, and which newcomers we feel are likely to make it permanently above the 1 GW of solar additions per annum. Our first table shows which of the major countries are significantly up or down in the year in terms of market share of the 559.3 GW of solar that are installed globally. The big fall is some 17 GW in new adds from China, which the entire industry will have their eye on this year, because it could potentially affect the rate at which prices fall. The rest of the market almost, but did not quite claw…
The oil crisis the world finds itself in will cause unavoidable hardship and recession in key parts of the world, and the tenuous accommodation between the US, Saudi Arabia, Russia and Mexico may not hold, and an even more significant crisis could cause long term damage to the US as the world’s most prosperous nation. Don’t expect anything related to oil to be the same ever gain, and certainly not before 2022. A few weeks ago, Rethink Energy reported on the early signs of oil prices shifting into the negative, and with production cuts falling short of addressing the plummeting demand for oil through Covid-19 and reversing the fall in prices, this week has seen the first time in history…
The French government has published its energy policy roadmap between 2019 and 2028, with the intention of cutting greenhouse gases by 40% by 2030. Through this period renewables look set to rise to 33% of total energy consumption, with significant additions from onshore wind and solar, while floating wind causes a surge in offshore capacity. However, some of France’s promises to phase out coal and nuclear remain in contradiction to current action across the country. President Macron’s government published a decree in the country’s Official Journal this Thursday detailing its multi-year “Programmation pluriannuelle de l’énergie (PPE),” and steps to increase the presence of renewables in France, while reducing the share of nuclear power in the electricity mix. The country currently…
Half of Europe’s hydrogen could come from North Africa and the Ukraine, according to a new report from Hydrogen Europe which sets out a roadmap for 80 GW of electrolyser capacity by 2030. While this would have been dubbed as a pipedream a few years ago, a new surge of large-scale projects could see the hydrogen boom come years ahead of schedule – especially if investment is tied into Coronavirus stimulus packages. The report entitled “Green Hydrogen for a European Green Deal: A 2×40 GW Initiative” aims to promote a mammoth effort to establish Europe as a leading market for electrolysers and green hydrogen. Hydrogen Europe has stated that such a plan would save approximately 82 million tons of CO2…
Broadpeak is hosting a one-week virtual interactive event in place of NAB. The three-pronged event will feature vMeetings, vLive Demos and vLive Presentations, taking place from April 27 to 30. US video platform provider Kaltura is hosting a virtual session today (April 23) at 11am ET, featuring new, GM of Media & Telecom, Nuno Sanches, who recently moved over from Vodafone. Nagra had a busy week in PR and marketing. The Swiss security expert launched a forensic watermarking product called NexGuard ClipMark, claiming to be the only product on the market designed to detect short-form video leak sources. It enables content owners and post-production houses to supplement existing NexGuard watermarking technologies for pre-release workflows. By short, Nagra means no less…
It’s no secret that the advertising industry is suffering from a corona-crunch, with the knock-on effects hitting ad-supported streaming, FTA broadcast and pay TV alike, as major brands slash budgets by as much as 80%. That is why Faultline recently implored the industry not to down tools by making contingency cuts and preparing for the worst, but to invest in advanced advertising technologies now – while it matters. Since we made this call to arms, a surprise candidate has responded with enhancements to its own ad tech portfolio, in the form of MediaKind – the Ericsson IP video spin off – announcing the reconfiguration of its Prisma portfolio. MediaKind coincided the announcement with a handy webinar to provide crucial details…
A week after snaring Net Insight, IP broadcast specialist Zixi has just announced that VideoFlow is joining the party, in a partnership that will see Zixi’s Zen Master software integrated into VideoFlow’s Digital Video Gateway stack, for broadcasting video over IP networks. For VideoFlow, Zixi isn’t the only thing to sing about this week, as Hitachi Kokusai Electric Comark signed a reseller agreement for ATSC offerings. For Zixi, the deal sees it expand the reach of its pitch for ‘broadcast quality video over IP networks,’ which the firm is delivering via its software-defined offerings. There are four main components to this; Enabled Network (an ecosystem of nearly 900 firms that support the Zixi transport protocol), Video Solutions Stack (core media…
As well as playing cupid during the What Would’ve Happened at NAB 2020 webinar hosted by Faultline (see separate story this week), we were also treated to a conveyor belt of exclusive teaser presentations from four video streaming technology pioneers – Beamr, Haivision, the RIST Forum and Wowza. Each provided a glimpse into what would have gone down on the Las Vegas show floor this week, while more importantly outlining how business has changed – if at all – during worldwide lockdowns. Content adaptive encoding expert Beamr took the floor first. From Beamr’s top five priorities for NAB 2020, company President Eli Lubitch pointed to cloud platforms being the most critical trend at the industry event. “AWS, Azure, and Google…
You have likely already heard of Icebucket, the connected TV (CTV) spoofing scam that has shaken an already fragile ad tech industry. Hiding among the murky depths of server-side ad insertion (SSAI), at its peak the operation was responsible for imitating over 3 million devices across the world, with fake “cash-out” publishers selling non-existent ad inventory. This week, a webinar was hosted by the whistleblower, global cybersecurity firm, White Ops. The key takeaway was that the wider ad tech industry needs to come together and standardize security procedures in order to keep the faith in its data. Yet it seems that some victims, namely Roku, are still in denial about what has happened, which could prove an obstacle to the…
During Faultline’s recent What Would’ve Happened at NAB 2020 webinar, discussing distinctions between the disparate but increasingly aligned low latency streaming protocols – SRT and RIST – was top of the agenda. The RIST Forum’s President, Dr. Ciro Noronha, stunned the audience when, instead of shrugging off the notion that his organization should merge with the SRT Alliance, he completely agreed. Noronha’s enthusiasm for SRT-RIST convergence was, however, not matched by representatives from Haivision and Wowza, who were also part of our vendor panel. While the two SRT co-founders each expressed indifference to combining efforts, there was no direct disagreement that pooling resources from the two camps would do the industry a favor in the long-run. “What the SRT Alliance…
In the wake of Rakuten Mobile turning on the first sections of its live 4G network in Japan, several of its 20-strong supply chain have announced products and partnerships based on their contributions to its ground-breaking cloud-native platform. Altiostar is a common denominator in many of these, since it supplied the virtualized network functions (VNFs) for the RAN, a particularly challenging element, and one which will be attractive to hardware makers without their own commercially robust VNFs for this domain. Two of its recently announced development and marketing alliances are with Airspan and Cisco, both Rakuten vendors, and it has now extended the Cisco deal further to include WWT, an integrator and a reseller of communications solutions. The three companies…
UK incumbent telco BT has been a significant supporter of Huawei over the years, but has selected Ericsson to provide its next generation, cloud-native 5G core. When BT re-entered the mobile business with the acquisition of the UK’s largest MNO, EE, it inherited a Huawei packet core. It stated in 2018 that the Chinese company’s technology would be phased out. Despite BT’s extensive use of Huawei equipment in its fiber network and in EE’s RAN, the telco had an existing policy of excluding the vendor from the core. Initially, then, the decision to change EE’s supplier was in line with that policy, and of course, any change of heart was made impossible when the UK government decided that, in 5G,…
WiFi 6 can be seen as 5G’s WLAN counterpart, designed to cater for a vast anticipated increase both in mobile data volumes and use cases, but both have come just too late for most during the global Covid-19 crisis, when they would have made a big difference to user experiences. The timing has been unfortunate for WiFi 6 given the unprecedented contention on many WiFi networks because of the sudden boom in remote collaboration and especially videoconferencing. WiFi has borne a disproportionate share of that load because so much of the activity has taken place indoors and especially in homes. While that has underlined the widespread dependence on WiFi for mobile data indoors it also exposed the great shortcomings of…
As the major RAN vendors develop virtualized platforms, they have been forced to engage in a significant reassessment of their base station chip strategies. The economics of the cloud-based network give them the opportunity to save cost by adopting general purpose processors (GPP) from Intel or an ARM partner; though general purpose architectures also rob them of the differentiation they had while still designing many of their chips inhouse or through captive semiconductor vendors. But as Nokia’s U-turn on its 5G base station silicon showed late last year, the cost advantages of merchant, partially off-the-shelf solutions are hard to ignore. But some RAN processes remain beyond the capabilities of current GPP and must be supported with specialist, even proprietary chips;…
Xilinx has announced that its Versal ACAP platform for intensive compute tasks will be used by Samsung in 5G base stations. This comes hard on the heels of the announcement of Versal Premium, a high end member of the family targeted directly at telecoms networks. Both pieces of news are welcome for Xilinx supporters. The company has been open about several challenges recently: It has been hit by the US/China trade war, with the prospect of being restricted in supplying Huawei and other key customers; and this uncertainty has been worsened by the impact of Covid-19 on the semiconductor supply chain and the delays to some customers’ deployment plans. Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) – the product category which Xilinx…