Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Last week, we noted how Silicon Valley-based digital audio ad platform and Pandora subsidiary AdsWizz was working to upgrade its offering. The roll out of new features, alongside an optimistic whitepaper, suggested the company was prepping for a surge in business driven by a growing pool of podcast enthusiasts. An interview this week with the company’s SVP of Global Demand, Pierre Naggar, confirmed our hunch. AdsWizz is doing all it can to make digital audio the next gold rush in advertising, despite the current shortfall in business due to the pandemic. Interestingly, this includes investing in improving the actual ads themselves, rather than the platform which delivers them to the consumer. As previously noted, podcasts are a seemingly unstoppable new…
There’s a definite air of one-upmanship in the telecoms sector currently, as the big boys try to show how well architected their networks are, and how they are handling the uptick in traffic from the COVID-19 lockdowns like champs. However, given the griping that has been made to regulators, particularly in the context of data caps and per-GB pricing, there’s a decent chance that some of these claims are going to be cited in lawsuits over the next few years. AT&T waived data caps and late payment fees, with Verizon waiving overage charges and promising that it would not charge late fees or cut users off. Charter promised free broadband packages for students in homes that don’t already have an…
In the fragmented smart home market, start-up Yonomi has a unique model. Founded in 2013 in the USA, it offers a smart home integration platform with the mantra of “agnostic interoperability”. Co-founder and CEO Kent Dickson explained in a recent interview with Rethink: “Our goal is to make it easy for innovators to build great apps that connect with the smart home.” This view works against the prospect that Google and Amazon will forge an effective duopoly, where newcomers are unlikely to survive unless they integrate with one of those ecosystems. Dickson responded: “I don’t think you have to choose your side early on. If you’re a device maker or service provider, you’ll want it to work with everyone else,…
Ever since the AV1 video codec was conceived around 2015 as a successor to VP9, there have been disruptive disputes over patent rights and royalties. In 2018, the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) launched AV1 onto the video scene with the promise of being royalty-free, but it wasn’t long before patent licensing programs emerged on intellectual property management website Sisvel – and in recent weeks those have evolved into a fully-fledged AV1 patent pool. Fundamentally, the building blocks for video have remained the same for three decades, the product of extensive cross-industry collaboration and patent sharing, even while their target connections and devices have proliferated – including to mobile broadband of course. Codec R&D does not come investment-free and so…
The history of cellular low power WAN (LPWAN) technologies has been one of confusion and firefighting. The kind of connectivity required by machine-to-machine applications – low power, often low bit-rate – was mainly confined to GSM, and specifications in the 4G standards were left fallow and unimplemented. Then the signs of an emerging Internet of Things refocused attention on the need for a more advanced cellular M2M network – to provide greater functionality than GSM; to allow operators, eventually, to sunset 2G networks; and to fend off the new challenge from LPWANs in unlicensed spectrum, such as LoRa and Sigfox, which could be used to challenge the MNOs in a market that suddenly looked attractive again. This led to the…
Rakuten Mobile will finally launch its first commercial 4G services on April 8, with an unlimited data plan priced at around $28 a month (though only within the company’s somewhat limited footprint – when roaming, users are capped at 2GB a month). The company has its eyes on markets beyond its own direct mobile base however. Like a select group of operators before it, such as SK Telecom of South Korea, it believes it can take its experience of integrating and deploying a radical new architecture to the wider MNO community, in a mixture of contributions to open platforms, and revenue-generating services. CTO Tareq Amin thinks Rakuten has unique experience which is of high interest to others. It has rolled…
There is no doubt that Rakuten Mobile’s greenfield roll-out in Japan has been the most-watched network deployment in the world over the past year. The new MNO set out its plans with a great fanfare at Mobile World Congress 2019 and proceeded to select more than 20 vendors to help it roll out an end-to-end, open, cloud-native 4G network (soon to include 5G). A year later, and with inevitable delays and setbacks along the way, the first commercial services were announced and the first phase of the build-out completed. In the spirit of the open networks it espouses, Rakuten has not been secretive about its suppliers, and all of them have been able to use their involvement to raise their…
Just weeks after HPE made its biggest play yet for the 5G market with the launch of a hosted 5G core (see Wireless Watch March 16 2020), it has announced an open source project with Intel and the Linux Foundation, also focused on the core. While its previous announcement brought the as-a-service model, so familiar in the enterprise, to operators, this new cooperation imports another enterprise norm that is slowly taking hold in the telco world, the open source platform. Both these changes help to bring the economics of the IT and cloud markets to telecoms, and in doing so, provide an opportunity for new 5G entrants like HPE to try to unseat the incumbent vendors along with their proprietary…
Facebook has been a significant force behind the mobile industry’s move towards open, cloud-based networks, especially since it founded the Telecom Infra Project (TIP), and now it is digging even more deeply into the 5G value chain, with reported plans to take a stake of at least 10% in India’s disruptive MNO, Reliance Jio. The deal has been delayed by the pandemic crisis, but insiders indicate the social media giant is still keen to push it forward later in the year. It would be a logical extension of Facebook’s existing activities in promoting open networks and a new, broader ecosystem that would enable lower cost networks. The heart of those activities has been TIP. This was initially a telco network…
As telecom networks become cloud-based, and IT and network infrastructure converge, the jostling for position between telco, IT and cloud players is fascinating. The past five years, in particular, have seen the webscalers getting closer and closer to the telecoms operators. Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Amazon AWS and Facebook have all, in different ways, embedded themselves in the telco space. They have invested directly in connectivity, especially to extend access to their services in underserved areas, harnessing shared spectrum. Google even tried to deliver a kick to the US fiber-to-the-premise roll-out by investing in its own, briefly. Longer term initiatives include Google Loon and Microsoft TV white spaces networks in emerging markets, or Amazon’s trials of enterprise edge services in…
While Spring 2020 will be remembered for other things, WiFi was this week’s winner as the industry made a huge stride into the 6 GHz unlicensed band. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has circulated a draft order to allocate 1.2 GHz of spectrum to WiFi – which would open the door for WiFi 6E trials in a band providing more capacity than all other WiFi bands combined. A vote will take place on April 23. Verizon, however, has argued that part of the 6 GHz band should be allocated to 5G, due to the difficulties in obtaining additional mid-band spectrum for 5G, despite the FCC slicing a 280 MHz chunk in C-band spectrum for auction. Every man and his dog wants…
When the US placed Huawei on its entity list last April, two of the companies which quickly distanced themselves from the vendor were Google and ARM. The former created one of the biggest challenges for the Chinese vendor, which was poised to challenge Samsung to be the world’s largest smartphone supplier, but with a product line that ran Google’s Android operating system. Although Huawei can use the open source version of Android, it can no longer offer Google’s own applications, such as Maps, Search and the Play Store, which outside China are intrinsic to the user experience for many customers. Huawei’s response was to dust off an old project to create its own Linux-based mobile OS and applications and seek…
A small silver lining from a world void of physical gatherings is that we are spoiled for choice when it comes to webinars right now. IP video software specialist Zixi recently pledged to carry out two whole weeks of virtual showcases to make up for NAB 2020’s cancellation – covering announcements, partner integration demos and new updates. This week, Zixi kicked off with a 24/7 IP Contribution and Cloud Transcoding webinar in collaboration with encoding expert Bitmovin – arguing the case for how the two vendors are a match made in heaven. Live sports OTT video service fuboTV was credited for its cupid skills – bringing Bitmovin and Zixi together for the first time and – as they say –…
CableLabs came out with specifications for DOCSIS 4.0 at an opportune time, talking up the technology’s propensity for spearheading video conferencing, remote learning, health care applications and virtual reality use cases. These markets are either already seeing unprecedented usage spikes or are expected to rise from the ashes as the coronavirus crisis waves in a new dawn of technology on the back of economical and societal shifts. Enabling speeds of 10 Gbps downstream and 6 Gbps upstream, DOCSIS 4.0 is the final step on the path before Full Duplex DOCSIS, bringing symmetrical 10 Gbps downstream/upstream with lower latency. DOCSIS 4.0 takes in elements from Full Duplex and Extended Spectrum DOCSIS (ESD) – doubling maximum download speeds possible with DOCSIS 3.1…
Confirming what Faultline foresaw weeks ago, commercial rollouts of ATSC 3.0 – which were due to begin this month – have been pushed back to June 2020. While industry insiders insist this is (another) mere blip on the road to NextGen TV, with every day of delay the window of opportunity narrows. Indeed, the FCC has only received 24 applications to date for the broadcast-broadband hybrid standard, a number which NAB 2020 was destined to pump up. With the major broadcast TV event canned and technology vendors on lockdown – and therefore unable to physically install ATSC 3.0 equipment – the market opportunity hangs precariously on loosened restrictions in the coming months. Assuming lockdowns are lifted within the next six…
This week Ireland has announced the largest offshore floating wind farm, the DP Energy’s 700 MW Inis Ealga project off the southern coast. DP Energy originally submitted plans in December, and is still awaiting further approvals and surveys, but wants to appoint a partner and start construction by 2026. Several offshore wind farms have been announced since Ireland’s June 2019 Climate Action Plan was announced. Public consultation recently opened on the foreshore license, which pertains to cable routes, the layout of the wind farm, and the cabling landfall sites. More work has to be done on wind strength and environmental concerns, and geotechnical/geophysical considerations. The project will be spread across 54 kilometers of the island’s south coast, from Cork Harbor,…
The UK advertising watchdog, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), has ruled that incumbent telco BT has been making misleading claims about its WiFi Disc in-home repeater, with ads that said: “Only we guarantee WiFi in every room”. The operator had previously pitched itself as “the first broadband provider in the world to guarantee a reliable connection in every room”, when it pre-launched its new WiFi strategy in January 2018, ahead of commercial launch some 10 months later. Now, the ASA says it has been unable to verify any of BT’s claims that, having tested its devices in 1,000 households of varying shapes and sizes, a single repeater could provide full coverage in an overwhelming 96% of homes. But not according…
Where is all the virtual reality? A millions of people the world over hunker down into virtual worlds of work and entertainment, hordes of outlets have highlighted the void of physical contact during the pandemic as a prime opportunity for VR use cases to flourish. The fact that virtually nothing of note has happened in the VR landscape in recent weeks has been interpreted as a sign that the fundamental technologies are still not ready for mainstream roll-outs. But would it be wise to rush products to retail? Arguably not at the high end of the scale, in serious gaming for example, but the floor could be wide open for companies to come out with a basic, low- VR headset…
Nokia has had a challenging time in the past few months. Having asserted leadership in some key 5G enablers in 2018, including virtualized RAN and network processors, its homegrown base station system-on-chip ran into expensive problems and it had some teething troubles with early 5G deployments. A change of CEO, and of SoC strategy, are among the remedies it put in place last month, and since then, it has been releasing a steady stream of positive technical news, clearly designed to impress upon customers and partners that the tide has turned in its 5G platform. One of the most interesting is a boost to the capacity of its 5G AirScale base station, in tests that delivered about 3Gbps total downlink…