Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
The full potential of 5G cannot be reached until operators implement the Standalone version of the 5G New Radio standards, which involves implementing a virtualized, and preferably cloud-native, core network – the part that connects their radio access network (RAN) to their internal applications and the wider internet. Until operators have this core, their initial 5G NR Non-Standalone rollouts, which rely on a slightly updated LTE core, will deliver little more than 4G++. Deploying the new core will be no mean task, however, which is why every MNO with plans to launch 5G in 2019 or 2020 has opted for the simpler first step of Non-Standalone. And while a few will start to deploy the 5G core next year, the…
Now part of the Thales Group, Gemalto is still plugging away at the IoT market, selling wireless modules and supporting security software to manufacturers looking to create connected devices. With a growing services wing, the company is looking to solve as many deployment roadblocks pre-emptively, to get the IoT ball rolling. A new partnership with Eseye hopes to help here, and we spoke to Neil Bosworth, UK Country Sales Manager, for a perspective on the current state of the LPWAN market. Bosworth said that Gemalto was now quite used to its new position inside Thales, after the French firm paid $5.43bn (€4.8bn) for Gemalto back in 2018. Thales is still using the Gemalto brand to go to market, and wants…
Netflix wants to give back to the cinema industry it has helped destroy. New York’s last remaining single-screen cinema has been saved by Netflix cash this week, after the SVoD giant took a long-term lease in the 581-seat Paris Theater to show special Netflix screenings and other events. Naturally, the cinema scene has voiced a mixed bag of reactions to the move. Disney+ is reportedly onboarding in the region of 1 million new subscribers a day, totaling some 16 million mobile app downloads, according to app research outfit Apptopia. Disney is seeing strong demand for its $12.99 a month triple bundle of Disney+ with Hulu and ESPN+, according to the research, while standalone Disney+ costs $6.99 a month – raking…
As one of the top five longstanding content security specialists, Verimatrix almost disappeared from view during its protracted acquisition by Paris-based Inside Secure, which finally closed February 2019. Since then though matters have looked up in various ways, not least with the enlarged group’s adoption of the Verimatrix brand for all products and services while dropping the Inside Secure name which was little known beyond the immediate client base in IoT and connected car protection for example. The Inside Secure link is only acknowledged by retention of its tagline, “Driving Trust,” below the Verimatrix logo. For Verimatrix, the logic of the takeover, apart from greater financial stability, is the addition of complementary technology for its push out into the IoT and…
Peer to peer (P2P) networking techniques have long been nibbling at the heels of traditional content delivery networks (CDNs) and we have even seen disputable blockchain-based architectures emerging as potential video delivery disrupters. Neither of these technologies are harnessed by an edge storage company called G-Core Labs, which has burst onto the CDN scene with a back-to-basics approach – built from the ground up in 2011 by disgruntled gamers. Luxembourg-based G-Core Labs caught Faultline’s attention this week with the announcement of a new public cloud infrastructure, lauding the launch as the company’s most important move this year. While largely obsolete on its own, G-Core Labs has developed a CDN network footprint spanning over 50 points of presence, more than 200…
The newest collaborative effort to establish consensus among internet authorities has been snubbed by many major companies. Spearheaded by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the Contract for the Web encourages the protection of data privacy and pursuit of widening access to the internet. There are certainly some big names in the contract’s list of support, notably Google, Facebook and Microsoft. But it is impossible not to notice a gaping hole left by Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Hulu and the many other leading OTT service providers, not to mention the major ISPs regularly making headlines in Faultline. It’s no surprise in many senses. These companies are sick of external regulation regarding their conduct with user data, a resource without which their businesses cannot operate.…
There is no hiding from the exacerbation of piracy – with 2019 seeing illegal practices wreak havoc, particularly on live sports and none more so than beIN Sports. With the arrival of new content formats, new hacking techniques and a shifting trend from open to closed piracy, we turned to Viaccess-Orca this week for some advice on how to weather future piracy storms. During a webinar called Defining and Executing a Piracy Management Strategy, it wasn’t long before Faultline had a bone to pick. While laying out a three-step process to anti-piracy strategy, Viaccess-Orca’s CSO Dr. Guillaume Forbin, formerly of OSN and Disney, casually said that operators could easily build an anti-piracy intelligence system in-house to identify weaknesses within their…
When we think of intelligent WiFi, the names AirTies, SoftAtHome and Plume are among the first to spring to mind offering infinitely impressive yet imperfect systems. The rise of smart software like mesh WiFi combined with inadequate standards has in turn created new problems in the network, a gap in the market identified by a start-up called Lifemote which says the WiFi world has been crying out for a hardware-agnostic cloud-based analytics platform. Lifemote has developed a WiFi analytics arsenal designed to be offered not only directly to ISPs but to the very CPE firms mentioned in this opening gambit. “AirTies and Plume replace the technology stack, while we re-use existing mechanisms. For example, we can take a Broadcom-based gateway…
The way electricity resource adequacy is managed in the US is leading to billions in wasted dollars, according to a study published by Grid Strategies last week. The report, commissioned by the Natural Resource Defense Council’s Sustainable FERC project, highlighted that PJM Interconnection, New York Independent System Operator and ISO-New England retain greater power than state legislators in their respective areas, resulting in higher margins and capacity market prices, which in turn favors assets owned by the independent state and regional transmission operators. It is estimated that the growing reserve margins are causing around $1.4 billion to be wasted per year by the Northeast operators by securing an excess capacity of 34.7 GW. Analysts blame this on the use of…
What happens to renewables when a President is elected on the promise of “I will make my country great again?” Well it depends if you are in the US, then you get President Trump and support for fossil fuels. If instead you are in Mexico you end up with AMLO or Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, and you get deals favoring Mexican companies – in both cases, you get a slowdown in renewables. Despite his left wing stance, AMLO’s regime has meant some crazy home prejudiced legislation. Now a rule change in how “clean energy certificates,” or CLEs are allocated, which are virtually bankable, has been brought in to escape decisions made by the last Mexican government. AMLO has decided to…
The European Commission has estimated than an installed capacity of between 240 GW and 450 GW of offshore wind will be needed to make Europe a carbon-neutral entity by 2050, helping to limit global warming to less than 1.5 degrees. This week at its WindEurope Offshore event in Copenhagen, it released a report entitled ‘Our Energy, Our Future’ to give a country-by-country breakdown of where this capacity will be installed across the Atlantic; the North Sea; the Baltic Sea; and Southern Europe. Its report was less a forecast, and more a call to arms. But the lack of specifics, and attempts to please most stakeholders, has meant that major players will continue to argue that their own way is best,…
Ajit Pai, chair of the FCC, has run out of patience with the US-developed DSRC (Dedicated Short Range Communications) technology for vehicle-to-everything (V2X) connectivity, and is now giving new hope to Cellular-V2X to become a near-global standard. The 3GPP solution could now gain two dedicated 10 MHz chunks of spectrum in the USA’s 5.9 GHz V2X band. The FCC said it would “take a fresh look” at the 5.9 GHz band, 75 MHz of which was allocated to DSRC in 1999. Pai believes that, in 20 years, DSRC has failed to build on its opportunity to develop and deploy useful services. There has been little evolution of the technology and a disappointing level of deployment, critics say, and alternatives like…
New Zealand mobile operator Spark has pulled back from plans to use Huawei as its sole 5G RAN supplier, but has retained the Chinese vendor on its preferred 5G vendor list, alongside Nokia and Samsung. It will also continue to work with Cisco and Ericsson for the core. The company has so far launched a small fixed wireless access service in the town of Alexandra, and aims to extend it to another five similar locations by year end, taking a multivendor approach. “We’ve consistently said our approach to 5G will be multivendor. A key reason for this is that 5G technology is still emerging and is likely to develop significantly in the next few years, so a mix of vendors…
The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) held its latest World Radio Conference (WRC-19) in Egypt over the past few weeks, providing a new set of rules to achieve global or regional harmonization in key 5G spectrum bands. Agreements signed by 3,400 delegates from 165 states were enshrined in an international treaty on radio and satellite operations, the Final Acts of the Radio Regulations. Although the previous meeting, WRC-15, had listed a set of candidate bands in millimeter wave spectrum for further study, 2019 was the year when mmWave became part of the international treaty, rather than just subject to country-specific regulatory decisions. The high bands identified as international mobile spectrum were 24.25-27.5 GHz, 37-43.5 GHz, 45.5-47 GHz, 47.2-48.2 and 66-71 GHz. This omits the…
Any hopes of an uncontested cloud-based data standard now appear shaky, thanks to the announcement of the Cloud Information Model (CIM) project. The CIM looks set to compete with the Open Data Initiative (ODI), which launched in September 2018. Both want to solve the problem of cloud-level data interoperability, but they are now risking a standards battle which could prove challenging for data-intensive environments like AI-driven 5G or the Internet of Things. As both the ODI and the CIM recruit followers, the desired objective of pooling and standardizing as much data as possible becomes ever more distant. It is not clear why the two organizations could not simply merge now and pool their resources, nor is it clear why the…
Last week’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America event in San Diego, California had its eyes firmly on the migration of telecoms networks to cloud-native architectures in the 5G era, a significant opportunity to grow the containerized cloud platform in a previously untapped industry. Pat Gelsinger, CEO of data center virtualization stalwart VMware, has said that telco cloud and 5G represent a “great opportunity to participate in an enormous market”. There was a ‘live’ 5G call between San Diego, Montreal Canada, and Sophia Antipolis, France, presented by Heather Kirksey, VP of community and ecosystem development at the Linux Foundation; Azhar Sayeed, chief architect for service providers at Red Hat; and Fu Qiao, project manager at China Mobile. Behind those public faces,…
Nokia was very clear, at its Global Analyst Forum in Helsinki last week, that it would be essential for operators to go cloud-native in order to reap the full benefits of 5G. In particular, MNOs must start planning to deploy a fully cloud-native 5G core when they move to the Standalone version of 5G New Radio (current networks use Non-Standalone, which works with the 4G core). The company acknowledged that not all the building blocks or skills are in place for this migration, except for operators which take on a very highly customized inhouse implementation (as sometimes seen in Japan, Korea and China). But the platforms are starting to come together, and the vendor outlined the benefits on offer, in…
Google has been rather overshadowed in the telecoms cloud world by AWS and Microsoft Azure, but it is starting to gain ground with some significant operator partnerships, often driven by its AI (artificial intelligence) expertise. Hard on the heels of an alliance with Telecom Italia (see Wireless Watch November 13 2019), it has announced a similar arrangement with Vodafone. Many operators are turning their back on inhouse cloud and AI developments, in favor of taking advantage of the webscalers’ heavier investments and more scalable solutions in these areas. Vodafone has been using its own on-premises system, based on the Hadoop open source technology, to analyze business data across 11 countries, but that system requires eight clusters of servers (600 in…
Nvidia used to be the outsider knocking on the door of Intel’s castle with its GPUs (graphical processor units). Now, the GPU has grown well beyond its roots in powering PC visuals and become a key building block in high performance computing and cloud architectures – to the extent that Intel has been forced to abandon its former hostility to the approach, and announce its own GPUs. But Nvidia has a clear headstart here, and has been steadily bringing its architecture into the telecoms world. Its opportunity lies in the very high end infrastructure that will be needed to run a cloud-native RAN, in particular, to the same level of performance as a conventional access network. Even Intel accepts that…
Liberty Global, now firmly rooted in the UK, may be regretting the sale of its operations in four other European countries to Vodafone – or at least its shareholders will be, as the two firms’quarterly results move in opposite directions. Liberty Global’s total revenue from continuing operations – left over after the sale of the businesses in Germany, Hungary, Romania and the Czech Republic – were $2.84bn for its third quarter, a year-on-year fall of 3%. Vodafone, by contrast, enjoyed an instant uptick from acquisition of those Liberty Global assets, reporting revenues up 0.4% year-on-year to €21.9bn ($24.1bn) for the first half of the fiscal year. This was not all just about asset transfer. Compounding the contrast in fortunes, some…