Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
More details have emerged of the UK’s decision to give Huawei limited access to 5G networks, which was announced as we went to press last week. Although the country resisted US pressure to bar the Chinese vendor from 5G altogether, its Supply Chain Review decided to exclude “high risk vendors” from core networks; to cap the amount of RAN inventory they can supply at 35%; to limit the amount of Internet traffic per year that can pass through their equipment, also at 35%; and to restrict the amount of fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) network equipment, such as GPON or DOCSIS 3.x, they can supply, again to 35%. Those high risk vendors were not named, but since ZTE does not have a UK…
Trade and cybersecurity wars between the USA and China have created an artificial ‘race to 5G’ which threatens the future of the mobile standards-making process. As both sides try to reduce reliance on the other’s technology and patents, they are retreating behind their walls, investing in building up homegrown suppliers and threatening to block the other’s vendors from their 5G contracts. Of course, the race is unequal – China has Huawei and ZTE to set against the USA’s clutch of start-ups and $1bn support fund in the RAN; and has already rolled out more than 10 times the number of 5G base stations, despite starting deployment later than AT&T and Verizon. But that will only increase western defensively, none of…
It is not just 5G that is opening the industry’s doors to new innovations. Other changes are helping to break open the ecosystem, with shared spectrum being an important example. The hottest example of shared spectrum is currently the USA’s CBRS band, which will start to support commercial applications this year, and which is already fostering a set of new vendors and service providers. Among those is Artemis, one of the highly innovative start-ups that has raised its head above the parapet several times over the years, without achieving a real breakthrough. It will be hoping that CBRS may be the catalyst to give it that breakthrough. The example of WiFi looms large – unlicensed spectrum was the key enabler…
The 5G network may provide a final opportunity for second tier equipment vendors to secure a place in the RAN, and for start-ups to gain scale. The closed ecosystem, which has effectively been reduced to three huge vendors and two challengers (ZTE and Samsung), is being broken open by a combination of factors, including: geopolitical pressures on Huawei and ZTE, which are excluding or limiting their role in some 5G build-outs and restricting operator choice still further. the shift to virtualized RANs and to smaller cells, both of which have been catalysts for interest in open, multivendor architectures such as those promoted by ORAN Alliance, Telecom Infra Project (TIP) and Small Cell Forum (SCF). both vRAN and small cells have…
To deliver its full potential impact on industry and society, 5G will need to do a lot more than improving the speed, latency and reliability of 4G. It will even need to do a lot more than supporting fully immersive user experiences or life-critical safety networks. Its key difference from 4G will not lie in one particular capability, but in its diversity. That will enable it to provide optimal connectivity for a wide range of applications, industry sectors and user groups, some of them currently hardly harnessing wireless communications at all. To support these diverse requirements and so maximise its value, 5G will need to take advantage of as many technologies as possible. Cloud-native core networks, advanced orchestration and slicing…
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 second in a series of three articles in which we lay out this process, covering the second step – actually using your connected things (the first step) inside your internal business applications. The third and final step is creating the actual Internet of Things, or rather, the World Wide Web equivalent for the IoT – interconnecting all these internal business applications for external collaborative use. In terms of transitioning from phase one to phase two, most of the initial pilot project work will have stemmed from experimentation. Most of the global corporations have some form…
There are now three CEVAs we have to pay attention to in the IoT, after the launch of the Corporate Electric Vehicle Alliance this past week. Founded by Amazon, AT&T, and Siemens, among others, CEVA wants to accelerate the adoption of EVs in corporate fleets, and wants to lobby on behalf of that ambition. CEVA says it will help its members ‘make and achieve bold commitments to fleet electrification, and is expected to boost the electric vehicle market by signaling the breadth and scale of corporate demand for electric vehicles — expanding the business case for the production of a more diverse array of electric vehicle models. It will also provide a platform to coordinate support for policies that enable…
Blockchain protocol developer Algorand has found its first major environmental use case in air pollution initiative PlanetWatch, a startup that bundles elements of blockchain currency trading, air pollution sensor deployment and a data marketplace in an altogether perplexing offering. It’s still very early days for PlanetWatch, but – as is often the case – we find it hard to see this becoming a key new use for blockchain within the IoT. The ideas behind the project are certainly intriguing, but as Riot has observed numerous times, most blockchain business ideas never get to the required level of ubiquity in order to provide the service they intend to – failing to reach critical mass. PlanetWatch is using Algorand’s platform to create…
Apple has poached a senior Netflix video engineer to lead the iPhone maker’s Apple TV+ streaming business towards the light. The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple’s recent spate of engineering hires is to avoid syncing faults and information display errors which have historically plagued its other services businesses like Apple Music and Maps. The new Apple hire, Ruslan Meshenberg, also served as Netflix’s Director of Cloud. The US ranks fourth globally for penetration of streaming devices, behind the UK, Denmark, and Sweden which ranked first with 55% of respondents to an Ampere Analysis survey saying they own a connected TV device or dongle. It means 1 in 3 users across the top 16 markets own a device such as…
The mobile industry’s approach to patent licensing has made a few companies rich and dominant, but has been the source of many problems for smaller vendors, and for operators, for years. At the start of the 4G era, there was much talk of placing standards-essential patents (SEP) into more transparent frameworks than the secretive bilateral deals, based on sometimes contradictory definitions of Frand (fair reasonable and non-discriminatory) access, the basic premise that governs all SEP. Instead, the IPR licensing costs for handset and equipment vendors rose; there was a wave of disruptive lawsuits such as those between Apple and Samsung/Qualcomm/Nokia and others; and attempts to establish patent pools failed to gain enough support to thrive. At the start of 5G,…
Is in-flight connectivity still the highly lucrative prospect that figures once forecast? Almost two years ago, the opportunity for perfecting in-flight WiFi – and therefore in-flight entertainment (IFE) – was pitched at $36 billion by 2026, yet monetization struggles have since triggered a revision of in-flight connectivity revenues – pushing it back to $36 billion by 2028. Concerns over defense don’t stop after airport security, with digital security vulnerabilities a central factor holding back market growth. Wireless IFE expert Gogo could finally have the answer, partnering with DRM specialist castLabs to develop an encryption technique for browsers – going against the grain by doing away with apps and dedicated plug-ins. Rolling out in the next five months, select airline passengers…
Just three months ago, a consortium of smallish Spanish operators quietly formed a united front to defend against the changing media landscape in Spain, together launching a new OTT video offering called Zapi TV. Anything resembling modesty has since dissipated and now the start-up service aims to bag 600,000 subscribers in Q1 2020 with a multi-platform approach that includes Android TV operator tier set tops. At the time of launch, Zapi TV selected a technology stack comprising US digital security specialist Verimatrix, French video processing vendor Anevia, UX expert Mirada, and electronics firm SEI Robotics. But this week, Anevia pushed out a new press release boasting about Zapi TV deploying a full suite of low latency video technology. A contract…
DVB, the European broadcast standards body, has upended its technical foundations – forming five new technical groups and altering another. It marks a substantial reorganization of the DVB’s working sub-groups which all have one thing in common, IP video. DASH, multicast ABR, discovery, metadata and targeted advertising all feature and their promotion by the DVB to dedicated technical modules is a celebration of the incredible achievements of IP video engineering teams. But crucially, will the DVB’s new-look technical module stack prove a panacea for the broadcast industry’s struggles? At the heart of this upheaval is the DVB-I specification, the broadcast-broadband hybrid delivery mechanism based on HTTP technology that was approved in November. Let’s start with the new TM-I (Internet) sub-group,…
When UK operator Sky eventually embraced Netflix into its pay TV ecosystem for the first time in early 2018, the move was construed as the toppling of the last bastion of pay TV’s resilience against OTT video. Far from breaking ranks, Sky was years behind rival Virgin Media in this respect, which makes Sky’s reported approaches for an exclusive Disney+ deal all the more momentous. At the time of Sky’s surprise Netflix move, Faultline highlighted how one month is a long time in the TV industry. Strategies change fast and loyalties even faster. Less than two years later, here we are with Sky relishing the chance to partner a major US SVoD platform – relenting rather than resisting. If one…
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, SRT (Secure Reliable Transport) and RIST (Reliable Internet Stream Transport). Oddly enough, omission of the word secure in RIST gives away one of the differences so far, given that SRT supports end-to-end encryption while RIST does…
Oh great, another SRT article. But with NAB just three months away, Faultline couldn’t resist being first to find out what the low latency streaming protocol’s co-founder Haivision has in store for the latest Las Vegas SRT bonanza. You may have noticed that Haivision has experienced some pretty enviable momentum since the Secure Reliable Transport protocol was open sourced, and the encoder supplier isn’t expecting a slowdown anytime soon. However, you may also have noticed that Faultline is inherently more interested in what the company doesn’t publish press releases on. So, what are the barriers for future SRT adoption on which Haivision is relying so heavily? Apparently, every company in the broadcast market will admit to not fully understanding the…
PGE Group, Poland’s largest energy company, has been granted environmental permits for two gigawatt-scale offshore wind farms 20 kilometers off the Polish coast. The 1498 MW Baltica 2 and 1045 MW Baltica 3 projects are now expected to begin construction in 2022 and begin generation in 2026. In October, the company, which currently owns around 40% of the county’s energy market share, entered discussions with Orsted regarding a potential 50% stake in the projects. Of Poland’s gigawatt-scale offshore wind projects these have progressed the furthest, but RWE Renewables also has a 4-project pipeline totaling 1500 MW around the Slupsk bank, on which construction may begin in 2023. Coal is currently the source of more than 75% of Poland’s 42 GW…
Green Hydrogen has burst into two commercial markets this week, with projects tackling both injection into the gas grid for heating as well as storing surplus electricity from renewables. After years of “will it? won’t it?”, this signals the baby-steps of a Green Hydrogen market which is finally looking set to enter the commercial scene at competitive cost. This has the potential to provide an ideal route for heavy industries to net-zero emissions, without going down the uncertain road of carbon capture and “blue hydrogen.” The largest of these projects is the Hyport Oostende plant in Belgium – the world’s first commercial-scale green hydrogen plant to be powered solely by offshore wind. The birthchild of DEME, PMW and the Port…
More than 80 organizations have worked together to develop the world’s first 5G cloud-native proof of concept (PoC), under the auspices of the Linux Foundation (LF). The prominent role of operators showed how the telecoms industry is seeking to leverage its 5G advantages, combined with its own shift to open source and the cloud, to challenge the webscale players in key emerging opportunities such as edge compute. The 80 organizations included telcos, developers, vendors and other LF members, which between them built all the elements of the live PoC. The Foundation was quick to contrast the speed with which this was created through cooperative, open processes, with the slow-motion pace of the traditional telecoms industry. In an interview with TelecomTV,…
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 (see Special Report). 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…