Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Many operators in Asia and the USA have rushed to switch off their 2G and 3G networks and make more spectrum free for 4G and 5G. Freeing up sub-2 GHz 2G frequencies helps extend coverage and may even save an operator from bidding in often expensive auctions for low band spectrum. And the 2.1 GHz band most commonly used for 3G can add useful capacity to 4G/5G options like 1.8 GHz and 2.5 GHz. Japan, Korea, Singapore, the USA, Taiwan, Australia and New Zealand are among the countries that have been through 2G and 3G sunsets, or are due to complete them in the coming year. In Europe, the pace of sunsetting legacy networks is far slower, and most commonly,…
Orange added 65,000 subscribers to IPTV and satellite TV services in France during Q4 2019 to total 7.27 million, making it 226,000 gains for the year. Broadband customers increased by 200,000 year on year to a base of 11.66 million. German public broadcaster ARD will drop satellite delivery of SD TV channels by January 2021, saving it a pretty penny. In the same breath, ARD announced the addition of a replay TV function to set tops and smart TVs supporting the HbbTV 2.0.1 standard. French encoding specialist Ateme has teamed up with a video orchestration vendor called Vualto, integrating the Vualto Control Hub technology on Ateme’s flagship Titan Live and Titan Mux encoders. The vendor-agnostic VCH product allows broadcasters…
OTT video delivery is heading in two directions – up towards the cloud and out to the edge. In its latest step on this journey, streaming video pioneer Wowza Media Systems has inked a partnership deal with network technology vendor Fastly, a company that impressed us at the Video Streaming Exchange in London in early December 2019, to bring high-speed content delivery and near real-time visibility into bandwidth consumption. Basically, Wowza is bulking up its intelligent diagnostics and analytics capabilities through the integration with Fastly’s edge cloud platform infrastructure. This comprises 66 high-density points of presence (POPs) in strategic global locations and 58 Tbps of edge capacity (as of September 2019). Fastly says its network combines real-time insights with “comprehensive…
Like many before it, the English Premier League (EPL) soccer franchise seems set to bypass the big OTT players by streaming matches direct to consumers (D2C). This new service, dubbed ‘Premflix’ by many punsters, could see the EPL rake in $billions as soccer streaming explodes – particularly across Asia. Richard Masters, the new Chief Executive of the EPL, has come out swinging against broadcasters by revealing that a D2C OTT service is under serious consideration and has been for a while. There is no timeline set for when this pipedream service will roll out, but there has certainly been more than a hint that we can expect to see it in some form come 2022. Masters revealed that before the…
Video codec engines are whirring back into life, disturbed by recent HEVC Advance movements in Asia Pacific. Netflix sent out disruptive ripples of its own late last week by adding support for AV1 on Android smartphones in a move that will see adoption soar for the royalty-free, Google-backed compression technology. Netflix has reported 20% compression efficiency gains over VP9 by replacing it with AV1, which you could criticize for underperforming considering AV1 has promised as much as 30% efficiency increases over current generation codecs VP9 and HEVC (H.265). However, AV1 decoding is 30% more complex than VP9 or AVC. Only select Netflix titles are available to stream via the Data Saving feature that enables AV1 compression. Netflix is simply reacting…
Plume, the US supplier of mesh WiFi technology made famous by Comcast, has secured a major contract upgrade at Liberty Global in Europe. Plume’s promotion is a poignant reminder of where the cable giant’s priorities lie, at a time when Liberty is turning its back on traditional TV and placing more emphasis on the broadband business to facilitate new TV. Plume’s whole home mesh WiFi system is already installed on virtually all Virgin Media home gateways in the UK and will now be expanded to Switzerland, the Netherlands, Ireland and Poland. These territories will receive Plume’s Adaptive WiFi optimization software and WiFi Pods which serve as mesh boosters, while consumers can access the free Connect App for in-home WiFi management…
Plenty remains uncertain in the lengthy C-band debacle, yet if something is certain it is Intelsat’s dissatisfaction with the size of the FCC’s proposed payments to satellite fleet operators for repurposing spectrum for 5G services. Why else would Intelsat resort to some rather dirty tactics by threatening bankruptcy and thereby entangling the FCC and US mobile network operators in lengthy court proceedings? Such discontent is hardly surprising given Intelsat’s approximate $14 billion debt mountain and claims to have invested $36 billion in building its C-Band business over the last 40 years. Yet funds raised from auctioning C-band spectrum could rise to $14.9 billion, adding between $3.3 billion to $5.2 billion in parachute payments to cover transition costs to the upper…
There are three main steps to properly creating the Internet of Things; a problem that businesses seem to still collectively struggle understanding. This is the third and final part in this series, which deals with the most difficult step. However, without this final piece, we will never achieve the vision of the IoT, of one great interconnected economy, powered by data – the World Wide Web equivalent for the IoT. To recap the previous two parts, we have solved the matter of connecting things at the edge, evolved from pilot purgatory, and succeeded in incorporating the things into our core business processes. These capabilities are now core business functions, likely significant competitive advantages, and have been a long time coming.…
It is not just European operators which are looking at active and passive network sharing to mitigate the costs and risks of early 5G build-out. Operators in competitive mobile broadband markets in Asia and elsewhere are also weighing their options, and in Singapore and Malaysia, they are coming up with radical plans to improve their profitability prospects. The regulators in both countries have announced innovative but rather complex proposals for allocating 5G spectrum, with the aim of making it easier for networks to be built that meet city, industrial and indoor requirements, rather than just speeding up the existing 4G mobile broadband footprint. These did not deliberately set out to encourage new levels of spectrum or network sharing, but that…
Omni-ID, a 2007 spin-out from defense and security firm Qinetiq, has been busy in the RFID sector, creating tracking tags, the ProView visualization system, and claiming the patent for the first on-metal passive RFID tag. Now, the company has expanded into LoRaWAN, as well as Bluetooth Low Energy, with two new tracking devices that it is pitching to industrial types. Asset tracking has always been held up as a key use case for LPWAN, but to date, the systems have proven too expensive. Sure, they are a lot cheaper than satellite and cellular, but compared to barcodes and RFID tags, they are still relatively expensive. But there is a huge opportunity in between these two extremes, and that’s where Omni-ID…
The Things Industries, the commercial wing that has emerged on the back of The Things Network community, has announced the Packet Broker – a system that might finally properly interconnect LoRaWAN networks across the globe. This could be a very big step forward if the business can convince network operators to get on board, but many networks are not going to jump ship from their own network servers. This Packet Broker is essentially a mechanism that creates the equivalent internet infrastructure that lets your PC or mobile device talk to the servers that host this article you are reading. There is a complex web of interconnection services between the minor and major ISPs, data centers, and backbone traffic providers, which…
Semtech announced the launch of a 2.4 GHz version of LoRa, at the Things Conference, initially aimed at shipping applications. However, the current major caveat is that this is not LoRaWAN, and the announcement precedes any such public decision from the LoRa Alliance that it will adopt the new shorter-range variant. It does seem somewhat inevitable that the LoRa Alliance would adopt support for it, in time, and we do have MWC in a few weeks, which would be an ideal vehicle for such an announcement. Working on this basis, it means that we’re just in the middle of an awkward interim period, where a new version of LoRaWAN has been unveiled by an excited company at one of its…
Apple turned in its best quarter, on the iPhone front, for four years, and grabbed top position in global smartphone shipments, at least temporarily, in the last quarter of 2019. The company’s unexpected revival, after successive quarters when the iPhone failed to deliver its normal levels of performance, will be very welcome to shareholders. Despite the recent growth in other Apple businesses, notably content and services, and its investment in enhancing revenue streams such as TV, it is still significantly over-reliant on a single product family. The iPhone uptick can be credited to several factors. Launching a particularly desirable new model for the holiday season is not one of them. A year earlier, Apple revealed the iPhone X, a major…
One regularly applied rule of thumb here at Faultline is that approximately 40% of Amazon Prime subscribers regularly use the video streaming services on offer, drawn in initially by the retail delivery benefits. Very few (at least before Amazon’s arrival onto the live sports scene) sign up to Prime for the video alone. That is why Amazon’s declaration of reaching 150 million subscribers globally last weekend should not be misconstrued as 150 million wins for Prime Video. We should note that Netflix recently reached the milestone of 167 million subscribers globally at the end of 2019 and – just to be clear – Amazon is absolutely nowhere near that. However, Jeff Bezos revealed that Prime members watched double the hours…
Despite all its efforts and investments leading to vast technical improvements, reflected by the company’s growth figures, Hulu still crashed under the weight of eyeballs during Super Bowl 2020. Admittedly, it was fleeting and reportedly occurred during pre-match build-up, not the main event, but – poignantly – just days later plans were revealed for a huge Hulu restructuring effort. Coincidence? From a technology viewpoint, the inevitable overhaul is Disney’s way of stamping BAMTech’s (now called Disney Streaming Services) authority on Hulu – to align Hulu with Disney and ESPN+ in one all-encompassing and easy to manage bundle. One thing is certain – Hulu is no longer a free standing operation with a voice of its own. Hulu CEO Randy Freer…
Orange Belgium has gone live with its first mesh WiFi deployment using technology from SoftAtHome, who eventually – after a litte confusion – got back to us and confirmed Orange Belgium as a safehouse account for its WiFi software. We also learned that Taiwanese firm Arcadyan is the manufacturer behind Orange’s WiFi repeaters across Europe, including the new system in Belgium. Orange’s PR treatment (or lack of it) towards SoftAtHome is strange. Its reluctance to praise software that is showing impressive technical results (we are told), from one of its own subsidaries, seems self-depricatory. However, as Faultline has reported on multiple occasions, Orange’s approach to WiFi can come over as confusing, which unfortunately is an occupational hazard of being present…
Our forecast on floating solar in November played down the installation on man made lakes and played up the use of floating solar on dam reservoirs – a single particular type of manmade lake. But this week, by far the most constructive purpose has been found for German coal mines, as Baywa r.e. called for politicians to either subsidize floating solar on opencast lakes, or to at least reclassify them as conversion areas for renewable purposes. Baywa r.e. also called for some German tenders to be purely for floating solar and not play them off against one another. Baywa r.e. asked the Fraunhofer ISE research institute to count up all the lake area available and came up with 56 GW…
There have been 3,000 to 4,000 scientific papers written on Perovskite – but so far none of the 10,000 to 20,000 scientist we know who are working on it have made any real money out of it. The big problem as those researchers will tell you with Perovskite, is long term stability, and we know that the one rule in the renewables marketplace is that energy systems have to be stable for at least 15 years, better still 35, because national infrastructure just cannot change more frequently than that. For most of those academics studying perovskite – it is just not as mature a technology as it needs to be. Talking to Oxford PV CEO Frank Averdung last week, he…
The video technology business has a long record of confusing the field by duplicating efforts, or packaging essentially the same technology under different hats. We have had the Ultra HD Forum and UHD Alliance seemingly expending as much effort explaining why they both need to exist and how they are different, as they do promulgating their respective technological contributions to ultra HD evolution. Now we have two rival protocols pitched for ultra-low latency streaming, leaving many pundits struggling to establish clear water between them. These are SRT (Secure Reliable Transport) and RIST (Reliable Internet Stream Transport), both of which are pitching for default position in the mobile video market, among others. Omission of the word ‘secure’ in RIST gives away…
Apple turned in its best quarter, on the iPhone front, for four years, and grabbed top position in global smartphone shipments, at least temporarily, in the last quarter of 2019. The company’s unexpected revival, after successive quarters when the iPhone failed to deliver its normal levels of performance, will be very welcome to shareholders. Despite the recent growth in other Apple businesses, notably content and services, and its investment in enhancing revenue streams such as TV, it is still significantly over-reliant on a single product family. The iPhone uptick can be credited to several factors. Launching a particularly desirable new model for the holiday season is not one of them. A year earlier, Apple revealed the iPhone X, a major…