Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Bifacial solar modules will temporarily remain exempt from US import tariffs, after Invenergy’s appeal against the government’s decision to reimpose them was granted by a US court. Bifacial solar panels were initially exempted from tariffs imposed in June, due to limited supply in the US, despite some opposition from US-based manufacturers. This was initially overturned in October, with factories opened in the US by First Solar and Hanwha increasing the country’s manufacturing capacity, although Invenergy appealed on the grounds that insufficient notice or comment was given prior to this. Not sure how long this suspension will last. Better Energy has announced plans to independently add 7 GW of solar capacity to the Danish grid in the next 6 to 8…
In a major strategic shift, US solar company SunPower has announced its plan to split the company in two, creating two independent businesses to focus separately on the technology and project development sides of the solar industry. With uncertainty mounting around tariffs and subsidies in the US’s renewables sector, SunPower will hope that this move will reassure shareholders and provide protection from Chinese solar manufacturing competition. To some extent US shareholder perception was at the heart of this change – losses last year perhaps showed that SunPower is not large enough to mix it with the global solar panel manufacturers, but is better off working purely at home in the US market, emulating the successes of SunRun, Vivint and SunOver…
Poland is playing a long game with the European Commission, on the one hand sticking steadfastly to its coal based electricity generation, which is 80% dominant, and on the other pushing ahead with renewables – most recently offshore wind, with a government plan about to move through its freshly elected government. But for renewables at least, it is a slow process, and this represents the biggest thorn in the side of any EU strategy on climate change. One of the first steps the new Commissioners at the EU must work out is how to change Poland’s beliefs. It won’t be easy. The Wind bill discussed openly this week by Polish Minister for Energy Krzysztof Tchorzewski, will make room for over…
Liberty Global, now rooted in the UK, may be ruing the sale of its operations in four European countries to Vodafone, or at least its shareholders will be as respective quarterly results move in opposite directions. Liberty Global total revenue from continuing operations left over after the sale of the businesses in Germany, Hungary, Romania and the Czech Republic, were $2.84 billion for its Q3 ended 30 September, a year-on-year fall of 3.0%. Vodafone, by contrast, enjoyed an instant uptick from acquisition of those Liberty Global assets, reporting revenues up 0.4% year-on-year to €21.9 billion ($24.1 billion) for the first half year ending on the same day. Admittedly, this dichotomy was not a result of those transferred operations making all…
Arguably the most credible competition to ever go up against Netflix arrived this week in North America with Disney+ and – as Faultline correctly predicted – the launch wasn’t all smooth sailing. Technical issues plagued the launch just two hours in as the floodgates opened to some 10 million sign ups. “With Disney prematurely boasting how its forthcoming OTT video service is ready for anything the world can throw at it, you can almost guarantee that launch day will be a disaster,” wrote an opening gambit from an August article. But as the company’s financial results filed late last week showed, the streaming service has a mountain to climb before it can be considered anything other than a cash guzzler.…
Measurement behemoth Nielsen is preparing to spin off its Global Connect business into a separately run company – while the Global Media business will stay put. After more than a year of takeover rumors and the completion of a strategic review, the underlying and perhaps unfortunate message is that activist investor Elliott Management is singlehandedly orchestrating more disruption in the US entertainment landscape right now than any technology company. The New York-based hedge fund says the separation of Nielsen’s contrasting divisions will “unlock the substantial valuation upside of both businesses, which today trade at a meaningfully depressed level after a year of uncertainty.” Faultline’s immediate thought was what the move will mean for our friends over at Gracenote, which was…
It only took the best part of 18 months and one of the most disruptive horizontal mergers in history, but trade association Cable Europe has finally become GigaEurope – in a bid to revitalize an industry which increasingly looks like a deer in the headlights. News of the rebrand was delivered through gritted teeth on stage at Cable Congress this week, which does not exactly evoke confidence for the new-look cable policy string-puller. Cable Congress, otherwise known as the Liberty Global back-patting party, therefore took on a different persona this year – dominated heavily by Vodafone and mobile conversations since the telco acquired Liberty’s cable assets in Germany to become the country’s largest owner of gigabit-capable network infrastructure in Germany—controlling…
Itron is looking to make a splash at European Utility Week, with the past year boasting huge deals with public and private utilities around the world. It seems the company is on its way to comfortably carving out a huge slice of the smart grid and connected lighting market, but still faces bitter rivalries. Riot has noted how the utility market is undergoing change, as various companies pursue diverging paths – some are going for generation, others are focusing on transmission and networks, while customer relations is another lucrative option. For smart grid suppliers like Itron, this multitude of choice is fantastic for business. Energy firms must implement new infrastructure to accommodate their increasingly flexible role in the market.…
National Grid, Western Power Distribution, and Centrica have announced what they believe is the first coordinated flexible energy procurement project, based on Centrica’s Local Energy Market (LEM), where consumers and DER generators in Cornwall will be able to sell electricity through the virtual energy marketplace. The pilot is an important step in the journey towards a properly distributed smart grid ecosystem, but there is still a long way to go. This is the latest update in the testbed, the final component needed, which is exploring how each component of the grid will be modernized. National Grid, specifically its Electricity System Operator (ESO) wing, needs to know how it integrates its national operations with Western Power Distribution’s local networks. The latter…
It was always quite obvious that the mass market smart home offering was a race to the bottom, with premium devices quickly undercut by cheaper generic offerings. To this end, strong brand recognition and loyalty was a key requirement, and why so many in the smart home have moved so conservatively, but the expansionist opportunity for these device-slingers was always in the services channel. Smart thermostat maker Tado has done just this. Tado has now officially launched Tado 360, its new SaaS product that is being aimed at those companies making their living in the $84.5bn (£66bn) European heating repair market. Yes, that’s right – the market for repairing knackered boilers is quite a lot larger than our projections for…
LPWAN botherer Helium has fired up its LongFi offering in 425 US cities, using ‘over 1,000’ of its ad-hoc hotspots to provide what could be a pretty compelling spanner in the works for LPWAN rivals. Its U-LPWAN proposition, powered by gateways sold to its customers, could mop up a tidy chunk of the market in urban environments, and it is something that many network providers need to worry about. The business model is compelling. Customers that buy a $500 gateway are promised payouts in the form of the namesake Helium cryptocurrency, which is mined by the hotspots and denoted by the activity of the local network. Somewhat equivalent to a LoRa base station, or perhaps a WiFi access point on…
The ‘open’ embedded SIM (eSIM) technology supported by Deutsche Telekom, nuSIM, has been chosen by Qualcomm for use in its 9205 LTE modem, which supports NB-IoT, LTE-M and 2G IoT connections. Huawei’s chip subsidiary, HiSilicon, has followed suit, using nuSIM in its Hi2115 NB-IoT system-on-chip, and demonstrating the connection in a Quectel module, the BC95-G. This is a big development in the world of IoT-focused eSIM, as the vendors try to reduce hardware costs to facilitate wider adoption. With these two giants opting for NuSIM, rather than their own solutions, the technology is well on the way to becoming the standard choice. nuSIM was unveiled in the run up to this year’s Mobile World Congress in February, The launch supporters…
Silicon root of trust (RoT) technology is important for embedding security mechanisms at silicon level for a wide range of products from mobile devices to network cards to webscale servers. It is increasingly important as fears about 5G and cloud security rise, but it is also highly proprietary to each equipment vendor. To address that issues, an open source project called OpenTitan says it will produce a reference design and integration guidelines for silicon RoT. Although Google is a leading figure in the group, and its own RoT design is called Titan, OpenTitan will not be an open source version of that technology. All participants will co-develop a design from scratch that will be agnostic to platform and vendor, said…
Google is buying Fitbit for $2.1bn, in a move reminiscent of how the company acquired Motorola Mobility – and then a good chunk of HTC – in order to create the flagship devices that were needed to showcase Android at its best. However, unlike HTC, Fitbit doesn’t use the Android operating system, which presents something of a conundrum. While Google still owned Motorola (it later sold it on to Lenovo), the Moto 360 smartwatch was meant to be the direct rival to Apple’s Watch. But the market fragmented, as other Android Wear advocates emerged, and Samsung pressed ahead with its own Tizen platform. Then, the bottom fell out of the market anyway, massively driving down the prices for Android and…
European network vendors have been facing fears that the US-China trade wars might lead to Chinese operators relying more heavily on their homegrown suppliers, as the country seeks greater hi-tech self-sufficiency. That could mean lower sales for Nokia and Ericsson as well as actual US vendors. So they will have been relieved to be able to announce new 5G contracts from the three Chinese operators, which have switched on their first 5G services and are rapidly expanding their networks. Nokia said it had won contracts worth a total of CNY15.7bn ($2.2bn) from China’s MNOs, while Ericsson has also won deals, though has not revealed the value. Nokia’s win includes 5G cooperation framework deals for 2020 with China Mobile, China Telecom…
One of the spectrum assets that Dish owns (see lead article) is the largest US share of the 12.2-12.7 GHz band, which could increase in value dramatically as operators seek new sources of 5G bandwidth, and particularly, access to ‘midband’ assets with better coverage, and lower capex bills, than millimeter wave (mmWave). After Dish, the second largest owner of 12 GHz spectrum is a small firm called RS Access, which has about 15% or the total. Last year, RS Access signed a spectrum lease and purchase deal with MDS America, which acquired 80 12 GHz licences in 2004-5. It is not just a spectrum asset trader, but has deployed 300 links across 60 active markets, its equipment supplied by UK-based…
One way in which the cloud giants have influenced wireless markets behind the scenes, especially in their native USA, has been through relentless lobbying over spectrum. A combination of webscale and IT players helped to drive the opening up of many bands of spectrum for unlicensed, shared and flexible usage. Examples include: Increased unlicensed capacity for WiFi in 5 GHz Spectrum access systems for sharing with incumbents in TV white spaces, CBRS and potentially 12 GHz (see separate item below) Unlicensed use of 60 GHz (WiGig) Unlicensed and lightly licensed use of millimeter wave bands from 70 GHz to 90 GHz for fixed access and ‘wireless fiber’ Google even threatened to buy the single nationwide licence in the 700 MHz…
One of the biggest potential risks for 5G operators is that some of the high value business will be taken away by alternative providers, especially companies targeting industrial and IoT services via private networks. Of course, MNOs can and do support private networks where an industry requires something more specific and optimized than the public network can support – and in future, some aim to enhance the model with the flexibility of on-demand network slicing. But shared spectrum and virtualized networks also make it easier for non-MNOs to enter this space, and the operators will see their traditional suppliers helping the new entrants to achieve their goals. Nokia has been the most open about the potential to bypass its own…
Dish Network is the latest in a series of new entrants that are gearing up for 5G as a result of other operators’ M&A. Like Iliad in Italy, Drillisch in Germany and others, Dish will gain network assets as a regulatory condition of a merger, in this case between T-Mobile USA and Sprint. Dish already owns significant tranches of spectrum, and has been promising to deploy a mobile network for some years, but gaining more spectrum, plus sites and Sprint’s Boost customer base, as a condition of the TMO purchase, will give it greater scale to mount a viable challenge to Verizon and AT&T. But it still has a considerable challenge on its hands to provide a true alternative to…
There is a long list of ways in which operators aim to change the economics of their networks when they move to 5G. One of the most important is to move towards fully cloud-based architectures, so they can take advantage of the same economies of scale and flexible, programmable architectures of the webscale world. In the first wave of deployments, most operators have taken only baby steps along this road – a virtualised, but not cloud-native, packet core perhaps; or a migration of some data center functions to the cloud. A few telcos, notably AT&T, are forming strategic alliances with cloud giants, often focused first on enterprise customers, but with a longer term roadmap towards rolling out whole networks on…