Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Financials Intel and Arm have set up an initiative for supporting start-ups, called the Emerging Business Initiative. The companies will provide IP support, manufacturing support, and financial assistance for startups developing devices and servers built on Arm-based SoCs and manufactured by Intel Foundry. Ericsson will cut its workforce in Sweden by 1,200 as demand from operators slows. The vendor cut 8,500 jobs in 2023. Telkom South Africa has sold its tower unit Swiftnet for ZAR6.75 billion (US$355 million) to infrastructure-focused private equity firm Actis. Funds will be used to pay down debt. The mobile money market grew by 14% last year in terms of total transaction amount, to $1.4 trillion, according to the GSMA’s Mobile Money Programme report. Sub-Saharan Africa…
Reports by Bloomberg that Apple was in discussions with Google to license its Gemini Generative AI models for iPhones would be consistent with recent growing collaboration between the companies over search – despite their antagonism in other areas such as messaging. Such a deal would indeed be a prime example of coopetition between companies that are archrivals in some areas but see mutual advantages partnering in others. There is also another factor, the elephant in the room that is Microsoft, feared by both, whose ascent on the back of AI we touch on separately this week. The nub of the rumor is that Google Gemini could drive some features of Apple’s upcoming iOS 18, to be used in the next…
Vodafone is selling its European assets, most recently in Italy and Spain, at a tearing pace. One deal, however – the proposed merger of Vodafone UK with Hutchison’s Three UK – is subject to a full-blown antitrust review and now “hangs on a knife edge.” Whether or not Vodafone succeeds in rationalizing its UK holdings, the sales of its Italian and Spanish divisions are part of a profound transformation of the UK-based group over the past few years, which is likely to see Vodafone increasingly looking for revenues from other operators via its huge platform developments. Vodafone’s recent sale of its Italian operation to Swisscom marks the “third and final step in reshaping our European operations,” according to CEO Margharita…
Five years ago this week… Israeli telco Bezeq announced its satellite platform Yes would cease DTH transmissions, migrating 60,000 subscribers to OTT in a final blow to Spacecom as Israel’s primary satellite operator. The move echoed similar transitions by DirecTV (owned by AT&T at the time) and Comcast’s Sky. Faultline argued that the biggest single factor making OTT video a viable alternative to satellite transmission at scale was the development and maturation of multicast ABR, which brings non-negligible cost savings over unicast delivery for the likes of live sports events. Ateme reached the milestone of €100 million ($108.6 million) in revenue for the full-year 2023, marking a 10% year on year lift for the French video encoding business. However, a successful year…
The floodgates are open for NAB Show 2024 previews, and surfing the crest of this wave through the doors of this year’s Las Vegas Convention Center will be artificial intelligence – on a scale like we have never seen before. One of the first pre-NAB press releases to catch Faultline’s attention comes from Telestream, the US-based video monitoring and analytics specialist, flaunting so-called AI-powered media processing tools that extend its tentacles deeper into remote production, live capture in the cloud, and quality control. But first, Telestream has aired its dirty laundry by highlighting how a capex-strung marketplace combined with a general reluctance to embrace advanced technologies, is culminating in missed opportunities for media entities to streamline operations – at a…
SES looked uncomfortably out of place at Connected TV World Summit 2024. Once the satellite fleet operator had presented its vision for HbbTV operator apps, reiterating that the SES HD+ platform has been integrated as standard by every TV manufacturer in Germany, a panel session followed in which two major European operators essentially rejected the entire premise of HbbTV OpApps. The panel concludes awkwardly with inconclusive comments about the actual number of live HbbTV OpApp deployments at operators around the world today (the forthcoming Freely application in the UK is the new flagbearer, but its joint owners are not operators). Meanwhile, SES reveals it is investigating internally about deploying pure IP devices too, as recognition of streaming trends and acknowledgement…
Content houses and studios are unhappy with FAST (free ad-supported streaming TV) platform walled gardens, and are speaking up about desires to tear those barriers down. The closing act of the 2024 Connected TV World Summit was a FAST panel session that was well worth the wait. Succeeding panels of milquetoast FAST talks culminated in a conversation full of disagreements and honest insights into the FAST world. Julie Mitchelmore, VP Digital for A+E Networks EMEA, lit the first match, plainly stating that FAST platforms are not providing enough information to studios – citing difficulties extracting data for separate channels on the same platform. Kasia Jablonska, BBC Studios Director for Digital and On Demand, echoed Mitchelmore in calling out the…
Naturally, Livepeer – the decentralized transcoding network provider – does not agree with critical observations that the web3 bubble has burst, or even deflated, but rather that this evolutionary technology movement has fractured into separate bubbles. One of those of course is generative AI, in an entire league of its own, and Faultline has learned that the Livepeer network will soon support genAI via the Stable Diffusion deep learning model, which added support for video generation in November 2023. The caveat, warns Livepeer CEO Doug Petkanics, in conversation with Faultline this week, is that this forthcoming genAI support is not a commercial release, per se. The new feature aims to demonstrate how cost-effective a decentralized network like Livepeer can be…
Wind power project EPC bidding in China’s Inner Mongolia region has fallen all the way down to $299 per kW in a recent project tender – a record low. Per industry estimates, 45% of this is equipment cost, meaning that turbines cost as little as $140 per kW, little more than the per kW price of solar modules. Manufacturing has begun for the world’s first 25 MW size wind turbines, with Luoyang Bearing Science and Technology Company producing gearbox and main shaft bearings from a new production line. In other large-size turbine news coming out of China this month, CSSC Haizhuang Windpower has opened an offshore wind turbine testing platform in the waters of Shandong Province, China, which is to…
Lithium Americas has announced that should it satisfy certain requirements, it will be receiving $2.26 billion in loans from the US Department of Energy to build phase 1 of its lithium mining project in Thacker Pass, Nevada. Alongside a $650 million equity investment from General Motors (GM), the loan will provide most of the funding required to bring phase 1 of the project online, as it aims for scale production of 40,000 tons of lithium carbonate per year from 2027. The DoE claims production from phase 1 could translate to 800,000 EVs per year, eliminating the consumption of 317 million gallons of gasoline per year. When finalized, the loan is going to come from the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing program…
ABI Research has found that announced battery recycling capacity currently outstrips potential feedstock from end-of-use batteries 4:1, implying dire consequences for companies within the space. The difficulties yet to be seen by the recycling industry have already been felt by Li-Cycle, which has now been effectively absorbed by Glencore for an initial $75 million investment. This is unlikely to be the only example of industry consolidation as companies assess their options, whether that be acquisition as the case with Li-Cycle, or the more likely option of reducing nameplate recycling production capacity to closer meet demand. The battery recycling industry seems to be following much the same fate as the cell manufacturing industry, seeing vast overcapacity because it’s one of the…
M&A, IP, Patents Vodafone has finalized the €8 billion deal to sell its Italian unit to Swisscom. Vodafone will provide services to Swisscom for up to five years, for €350 million for the first year after the deal is completed. Cisco has completed its $28 billion acquisition of Splunk, its most expensive takeover yet. Splunk has 7,000 employees which will increase Cisco’s employee base by 10%. Cisco plans to boost its AI offering by combining with Splunk’s secure data management capabilities. More on the great garage sale at TIM, the operator is planning the sale of its stake in towerco Inwit for around €300 million, according to Bloomberg. Financials As part of the various changes to resuscitate Vodafone, the operator…
Swedish TV app developer Accedo and Qualcomm unveiled a new extended reality (XR)-flavored partnership at MWC. The two companies have debuted a white-label product claiming to power and modify immersive experiences that are built on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Spaces XR Developer Platform, thereby making XR ever more accessible to operators. Snapdragon Spaces is a reference platform for XR distributed computing, allowing developers to create immersive experiences for XR devices. Aside from offering traditional TV functionality, the platform offers multi-user, AR streaming experiences via lightweight wireless AR glasses, as well as smart home control capabilities. How will this get operators through the door? Speaking to Wireless Watch’s sister service Faultline, a spokesperson from Accedo argued that operators are gagging to drive growth…
The RedCap 5G IoT platform continues to divide opinion over its prospects, partly because it covers a vast panoply of the IoT firmament. At MWC, 2024 RedCap was sometimes presented as merely the successor to the current LTE-M cellular IoT protocol, which would therefore have to wait for LTE sunsets kicking in around the end of the decade before it enjoys serious take up. Others depicted RedCap as the unification of cellular IoT protocols under 5G, which does include LTE-M (Cat-M) but with higher QoS in terms of bit rate and latency, which will therefore gain traction well before the sun sets over LTE. There was a general sense of RedCap offering jam tomorrow rather than today, even though both…
Private equity firm KKR has announced plans to acquire 2,000 towers in the Philippines, as part of a $400 million commitment made in the wake of a US trade and investment mission, led by the US Commerce Secretary. KKR will use its Pinnacle Towers wing to make the purchases, which is already the largest independent towerco in the country. As with most private equity portfolios, there is not much in the way of transparency from KKR. In total, it claims to have $176 billion in private equity holdings, plus $219 billion in credit lines, $69 billion in real estate, and $59 billion in its Infrastructure wing – which is where Pinnacle Towers is housed. The Infrastructure portfolio includes energy, healthcare,…
Nokia has opened the door at Saudi Arabian telco Zain KSA, for the deployment of 5G cloud RAN systems, on the back of a recently announced collaboration with Nvidia to enhance the associated RAN components with more advanced AI based capabilities. Nokia and Zain KSA have now signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), to collaborate on 5G cloud RAN infrastructure for specific areas, including enterprise and consumer services. Zain KSA COO Abdulrahman Al-Mufadda summed it up: “By exploring Cloud RAN technology, we aim to enhance network performance, reliability and scalability, ultimately enriching the digital experiences of our subscribers.” In 2023, Huawei had been appointed to help evolve and expand Zain KSA’s 5G networks, after also signing a MoU with the…
There comes a time when a 5G network built from scratch can no longer be described as a greenfield, and indeed when it no longer suits the operator to describe is as such. Dish Wireless in the USA, part of Dish Network, has reached that point and decided that the time has come to present its 5G network as having reached maturity – now tinged with brown, after its commercial service reached over 70% population coverage. In fact, Dish hit that 70% milestone for its 5G Standalone (SA) network in June 2023, equating to 240 million people, conceding then that more heavy lifting was needed to reach the next target of 75% population coverage by June 2025. As coverage expands beyond…
Vodafone is betting big on the ‘Industrial Internet.’ In her keynote speech at MWC, CEO Margherita Della Valle said that this is the bloated firm’s next great hope. But in reality, the world of private networks is highly competitive, especially for unwieldy operators, and the great revolution promised by the Industry 4.0 trend is a long way down the road. “The opportunity opening up in front of us today is the industrial internet,” declared Della Valle. “Just as 4G unlocked the consumer mobile internet, programmable 5G standalone networks with open APIs will enable the industrial internet, connecting machines and applications with cloud-based AI-powered services. We are only really limited by our imagination.” MNO desperation for enterprise revenue streams was tangible…
Europe’s largest operators are scrutinizing their infrastructure asset strategies even more critically than usual in the current environment of high inflation and high borrowing costs. Despite the high cost of capital, many are becoming more infrastructure-centric than in recent years. They may give up on growth from new services and applications – always a high-risk strategy for conventional telcos – and seek financing from state funds or private equity investors. This will drive new acquisitions in Europe, and the potential for operators to ‘de-layer’ – to separate their various operations into autonomous groups to maximize returns and facilitate potential sales. Large operators tend to go through cycles of different asset ownership strategies. Sometimes the main trend is to reduce costs…
Five years ago this week… Comcast announced that it wanted to bring its X1 set top to a bigger broadband footprint, hinting that the product may switch from being an exclusive premium offering to one that is readily available. X1 was one of the first US hybrid set tops able to accept QAM-delivered TV as well as DOCSIS-delivered IP video, and merge them into a single UI. Four years later, Comcast announced in January 2023 that it would roll out a single global UI for all of its video properties – Xfinity, X1, Flex, Xumo, and Sky Glass, including licensing partners in the US and overseas. Today, Comcast counts Mediacom and Cox Communications in the US, and Shaw Communications, Rogers,…