Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
ARM has joined the O-RAN Alliance, in an important, if belated, step forward for its own telecoms infrastructure ambitions, and for the goal of a truly multivendor mobile network platform from silicon to software. The O-RAN Alliance – originally spearheaded by AT&T and now under the custodianship of the Linux Foundation – is the most influential cross-industry initiative focused on specifications for an open, disaggregated, multivendor RAN. Together with Telecom Infra Project (TIP), a close partner, the Alliance aims to define common interfaces and platforms that will allow equipment and software from any vendor to interoperate. That, in turn, could lower barriers for smaller suppliers to enter the closely guarded, proprietary fortress of the big five RAN vendors, creating a…
One of the biggest challenges for operators looking to migrate to a virtualized RAN (vRAN) is to find the right chipset combinations. The vRAN may be all about software, but the 5G workloads are so intensive that many operators question whether general purpose hardware could ever support them as effectively as dedicated platforms. Traditionally, macro base station vendors designed or commissioned their own proprietary chipsets, fully optimized for intensive RAN tasks such as high end signal processing. The economics of dedicated, inhouse platforms are hard to justify when margins are tightening and operators are demanding the cost-effectiveness and scalability seen in the cloud. Nokia’s decision to move away from its own FPGA-based base station chips to a more packaged solution…
Arm has continued its drive up the IoT stack with its Pelion platform, announcing a partnership this week with Chinese smart-meter manufacturer based in Hangzhou, Hexing Electrical. Identifying the utility sector as a space with great potential for low-risk long-term revenue, Arm says the company aims to accelerate the penetration of smart technology in the energy system. In an announcement made on Wednesday, licensed core developer Arm unveiled the new strategic relationship. Hexing already uses Arm’s chip designs within its smart meters, but through this deal, devices will now leverage the company’s Pelion IoT platform for data management and processing, and device control. Pelion is an entire framework architecture allowing any type of Arm based device to speak to any…
Chile’s move this week to bring forward by two years its peak CO2 emissions to 2025 is likely to see a whole host of renewables companies opening a new office in Chile – but chances are if you have not already opened an office there you are too late. Although Chile has been a hotbed of fossil fuels, for some years that position has been undermined by solar in particular, but also onshore wind. The move to upgrade the commitment to the UN is long overdue, and a testament to the Minister of the Environment, Carolina Schmidt, who is one of the recently appointed ministers in the second Piñera government. That second set of ministers came about because of the…
Tensions across the European Union heightened this week with 13 of the EU countries having either their environment or climate ministers, sign a letter to the European Commission essentially stating that their coordinated defense against Coronavirus should center on the New Green Deal. While early funding may go into sharing protective equipment and medical skills, the idea is that rebuilding the various economies will revolve around renewable energy, energy efficiency in buildings, R&D funding for negative emissions, and the recovery of biodiversity and the circular economy. The ministers went so far as calling for the European Green Deal, the detailed policy of which is still being formulated, to be used as the framework for the response to Covid-19. The letter…
US digital security vendor Verimatrix is hosting its Virtual Summit from April 19 to 23. Attendees can participate in online events and benefit from private meetings with the team of experts. The Kickoff Webinar on April 19 will bring all the news planned on unveiling at NAB, as well as a product review and Q&A session. Then, on April 21, industry experts from Globo, Firstlight Media, and Phenix Real Time Solutions will join to offer insights about Video Content Distribution & Consumption: AC/DC and BC (After Corona, During Corona and Before Corona). Reserve a spot. The Reliable Internet Stream Transport (RIST) Forum will host a webinar on May 6 at 1pm EST, which will be repeated on May 7 at 9am EST. The webinar will…
The show will go on. A NAB-less April 2020 will not come without an assortment of NAB news to sift through. In fact, an abundance of both typical product announcements coupled with an influx of virtual event invitations has caused more newsroom pandemonium than normal. All these webinars jostling for position has sent the Faultline calendar into chaos. But still, the industry is crying out for a common platform where technology vendors, operators, broadcasters, news outlets, analyst firms and anyone else you would usually find at Las Vegas during mid-April, or at Singapore’s ConnechTech Asia in June, or even the increasingly doubtful IBC in September, can come together to present, discuss and network. This was epitomized during Akamai’s Edge Live…
Right on cue, in anticipation of Faultline’s NAB 2020 void-filling webinar tomorrow (April 17), the SRT Alliance welcomed a slew of big-name member organizations to the low-latency open source streaming protocol party. Indian telco giant Tata Communications, electronics maker Panasonic, CDN technology vendor Edgeware, and DVSport are the four notable names to join the SRT Alliance, from the 50 new members to sign up within the last four months. This brings the total membership list to over 350 companies. DVSport is the only unfamiliar name from the four new members. The Pittsburgh-based software developer has a rather different target market in the live sports market compared to other sports technology suppliers on our radar – supplying directly to teams, athletes…
There’s a war brewing in the Russian TV ecosystem, where the Association of Computer and Information Technology (APKiT) is imploring the government to reconsider a bill that would mandate a single provider of TV content over the internet – one built by the broadcasters. This bill would force the pay TV operators to build new software environments that would have to stream from this provider, called Vitrina, while APKiT and its supporters argue that the COVID-19 lockdown is being exploited by the government, to force this bill through. APKiT’s executive director, Nikolai Komlev, quoted in Kommersant, says that if passed without proper discussion during the pandemic, all Russian pay TV operators will have to update their systems without sufficient resources.…
Financial gurus have continually criticized Netflix for spending above its means on original content. Mainstream US media has repeatedly said it’s only a matter of time before Netflix starts running ads. Studios have slammed Netflix over the years for decimating the cinema. Now, the content industry is in crisis and who does everyone turn to? Netflix, of course. With movie theaters closed for the foreseeable future, studios are pitching content at major SVoD platforms – desperate for licensing deals before expiry dates render certain titles worthless. Netflix has reportedly received over 100 pitches from film and TV production studios within the last month or so, while Hulu has received around 50, according to The Information. Despite this substantial swing in…
Following a few weeks playing with fire, Faultline may have finally got to the bottom of a behind-closed-doors dispute between two heavyweights of the content protection era. Nagra was incensed with the recent suggestion that Verimatrix (now a bigger rival following the merger with Inside Secure) recently became the first digital security vendor to bring secure 4K UHD content to Broadcom-based Android TV Operator Tier hardware – and the Kudelski company wanted to put the record straight for good. What began as a marketing mix up – with Nagra refuting the claim as “playing with words” – has boiled over into a technical tug of war. If anyone shrugs this off as trivial, then we refer you to figures showing…
Faultline only caught the first 90 minutes of Ateme’s marathon 24-hour virtual showcase but a lot was digested in the opening couple of sessions – from how the viral elephant in the room is impacting business, to how the French encoding expert is embracing future trends. Ateme CEO Michel Artieres introduced the race and 24 hours later was waiting at the finish line with the checkered flag. Artieres coined this a “chasing the sun” webinar, a concept conceived to reach Ateme’s global client base in over 100 countries. Starting in its native France, then heading across the Atlantic to reach the East Coast US customers for breakfast and later joining the West Coast, before heading over to Australia and South…
The smart building mantra has been circulating for a generation now but major constructors are still often failing to provide the basic connectivity infrastructure to support the relevant processes. Partly as a result, smart building services, particularly security, lighting and HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning), have emerged as unconnected siloes employing separate protocols with their own wired or wireless communication links. Buildings in turn have disjointed connectivity, often with fiber up the risers, along with copper whose life is continually extended by ever more sophisticated interference mitigation techniques. Multiple wireless protocols such as Zigbee and Z-Wave, each optimized for particular use cases, coexist side-by-side without communicating, like ships in the night. But under the auspices of 5G, constructors have…
While Vodafone touts the role of old-style network functions virtualization (NFV) in protecting its networks from collapsing under the weight of lockdown data traffic, other operators are already in the process of migrating to the newer cloud-native architectures, and the process of network functions cloudification (NFC). In general, for deployments of the huge scale of Vodafone’s, there are good reasons to use something tried-and-tested, despite its downsides (see separate item), but for those with the confidence to progress to NFC, the results may be more dramatic, and of course, there will be no need to engage in another major migration for many years to come. T-Mobile USA is not always a radical thinker in terms of the mobile network itself…
What goes around comes around in ICT, and edge computing has been in vogue for some time now, though with actual business cases and value chain models for telcos remaining uncertain. A new global initiative called Seamster, centered around Deutsche Telekom’s existing edge spin-out MobiledgeX, has been formed to try to address that lack of clarity by focusing particularly on use cases for edge computing alongside 5G. This is addressing a new demand that has arisen from several trends. Initially, the rise of the cloud centralized data processing in big server farms. Two key drivers of distributing some of those resources closer to the user, at the network edge, were the growth in low latency applications and the proliferation of…
The pressure to ensure its network can cope with the sudden surge in data usage sparked by the COVID-19 crisis drove Vodafone to accelerate full roll-out of its virtualized digital network architecture across Europe, which has reduced its core network costs by half. The company has completed the deployment of network virtual infrastructure (NVI) using VMware’s vCloud NFV platform, enabling a single digital network architecture to underpin operations across its whole European footprint, and in 21 markets in total. The last market to go live was Albania, and Vodafone says it can now design, test and deploy new virtual network functions (VNFs) more quickly, securely and flexibly, enabling faster launch of new applications in response to market trends. Almost half…
Xcel Energy will sell a 720 MW natural gas plant to fund its corporate donations and support through Covid-19. This also comes as part of the utility’s plans to become fully-regulated and reach 100% carbon-free energy by 2050. The Mankato Energy Center will be sold for $680 million to Southwest Generation in a deal that will be completed in the third quarter of 2020. The plant was purchased earlier this year through Xcel’s newly-formed unregulated subsidiary for $650 million after Xcel Minnesota’s bid was rejected by the state regulators in 2018. Hyzon Motors has signed a memorandum of understanding to deliver 1,000 fuel cell buses to an unspecified party – probably in Australia. Hyzon will aim to deliver the first…
Neoen has submitted a proposal to develop a 600 MW, $185 million battery project at Geelong in Australia’s state of Victoria. The energy storage system would be by far the world’s largest, dwarfing other contenders. Those would be a 200 MW/800 MWh project which will come online in Dalian, China, this year, and Neoen’s own 150 MW/183.5 MWh Hornsdale Power Reserve, constructed using Tesla Powerwalls, near Jamestown not far from the South Australian coast in late 2017. Geelong, a port city of 270,000, lies 60 kilometers south-west from Melbourne, Australia’s second largest city. Alongside Neoen, Mondo Power will also be involved in the project, which would be located at the Moorabool power terminal; Mondo Power is a subsidiary of AusNet,…
Nokia has announced a deal with Polish energy company PGE Systemy, to further develop its proof of concept, private LTE network to support the country’s energy distribution and smart metering system – another win for Nokia in the private network sector, as it seeks to diversify its business outside its core MNO customers. PGE Systemy will build on previous work with Nokia to expand its network infrastructure to support up to 20,000 private radio users over a 5G-ready LTE network, as well as providing wireless connectivity for 14 million smart meters and 35,000 control and data acquisition connections throughout Poland. In its press release, Nokia hailed the project as “an important first step in assessing the use of the 450…
After Mediaset took another share-grab in ProSiebenSat.1 recently, which Faultline likened to opportunistic leach-like behavior in an obvious precursor to an aggressive takeover, the Italian mass media firm has finally admitted as much. Mediaset has filed to local regulator the Bundeskartellamt for approval to take a significant interest in the German broadcaster. Quibi launched with a bang and a whimper this week, reporting around 300,000 downloads on the first day, according to mobile app marketing firm Sensor Tower, which equates to just 7.5% of Disney+ downloads on day one. IP broadcast equipment supplier Zixi has partnered with cloud editing platform vendor Blackbird, expanding Blackbird’s toolkit to Zixi workflows via AWS, Azure and Google Cloud instances. The integrated software-defined video…