Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
There is a growing divergence between most of the electricity industry and the oil and gas industry – whereby one half believes in the 1.5 degree worldview of the IPCC, and the other ignores it completely. This is now shown in stark contrast by a report out this week from Carbon Tracker, an organization which has explored the financial implications of the shift to a lower carbon economy over the past 8 years. It turns out that almost all oil companies are investing in projects which cannot reach any kind of payback if the world meets its 1.5 degree targets. Here at Rethink Energy we have been calling out individual forecasts from oil companies which insist that the world will…
Large motors conglomerate CNH Industrial has announced it will put $250 million into the Nikola Motor Company and wants to create a single lease plan for vehicles which includes the vehicle, service, maintenance, and fuel costs in a single lease price – this will be done to offer early adopters of the electronic and hybrid trucks predictable prices to run a zero emissions truck fleet. The investment is all about getting the three Nikola announced truck designs to market across the US, then bringing them to Europe, using the financial muscle of CNH Industrial commercial vehicle and its powertrain technology. Nikola expects to raise as much as $1 billion in the funding round, giving away 25% ownership to new investors.…
Pod Group’s offering of custom IoT connectivity, provided by its divisions that are focused on each specific required piece of that puzzle, has taken good shape over the past few years. Speaking to Pod Group USA’s CEO Sam Colley, we looked to get an update on progress and the shape of the market, particularly with the advent of nanosatellites and the recent pricing announcements on both sides of the pond. Colley noted that there still aren’t eUICC (eSIM) options for Cat-NB, and the lack of SMS capabilities means that in order to perform device profile swaps, you actually need to send multiple messages. This necessitates having dual-mode devices, and Colley says that mass deployment of ‘simple Cat-NB’ is still not…
The unveiling of an addressable advertising arm by recommendation engine expert ThinkAnalytics appears to be driven by the movements of one particular tier 1 customer – which could result in some unusual overlap. That customer is Sky and the technology is called AdSmart, only last month bearing its first fruits after five years of field trials. Could ThinkAnalytics have picked up a trick or two from Sky’s revered AdSmart system over the years through the installation of its content recommendation software at the European powerhouse? It’s possible, although ThinkAnalytics is well-known for its in-house innovation. Of course, with the UK vendor serving some 250 million subscribers in 43 languages today, some might say ThinkAnalytics could make its advertising debut without…
Android TV is now approaching full throttle after five years of negligible impact following the 2010 launch of its ancestor, Google TV. It could be a case study of how powerful companies can resuscitate a failing project or strategy by listening to their potential customers and it was the Operator Tier version that finally started lifting Android TV’s fortunes from 2016, with initially a few poster child deployments in Europe and Asia Pacific. These included Swedish cable company Com Hem and Vodafone Australia, but this still left Android TV shut out of tier 1 accounts and also the US, where the alternative RDK platform radiating initially out of Comcast had gained traction among the leading MSOs. At one stroke, Android…
Just as we were about to go to press, the enigma that is Velocix published a brief but poignant pre-IBC press release – highlighting developments in programmatic advertising, low latency streaming and hybrid cloud video architectures. The Nokia spin-off doesn’t appear to have rolled out any updates to its product portfolio, but these are three key trends to watch at the show next week nonetheless. French middleware firm Wyplay has stepped up its collaboration with RDK Management, saying it will support service providers with turnkey and hybrid RDK deployment models. In what appears to be another step away from its flagship Frog roots, operators seeking to deploy RDK can benefit from Wyplay’s engineering experience, including working with an Open Source…
A bizarre love triangle is forming between Sky, Liberty Global and a newly formed subsidiary called Liberty Fibre, with the three firms establishing a fiber network collaboration which could see Sky swap its current wholesale partner Openreach for Virgin Media. Openreach’s grip on the UK market is waning, but is there scope for a Sky-Liberty fiber foray elsewhere in Europe? With Liberty Global’s European cable TV exodus in full swing, following the sale of assets to Vodafone including Unitymedia in Germany along with UPC in Hungary and Czech Republic, getting hard and fast into fiber is looking increasingly like a field Liberty wants to reinvest these proceeds. While for Sky, the collaboration is an opportunity to funnel its Comcast-backed OTT…
If we said P2P networking is destined to replace the traditional CDN, people would respond with “it’s been tried before”. If we proclaimed that a blockchain-based architecture could throw the transcoding industry into disarray, we would be laughed out of the building. But while disruption manifests itself in many different forms, few have intrigued us more recently than a start-up called Eluvio, emerging from stealth mode only today – with the potential to achieve all of the above and more. “It would be arrogant to say our technology could replace this or that – native disruption is not the idea here,” said a modest Michelle Munson, co-founder of Eluvio, speaking to Faultline Online Reporter this week. Eluvio’s vision is difficult…
Five months on since NAB 2019 which marked a significant turning point for the UK’s V-Nova, the compression company has come out with the third installment of its long-misunderstood Perseus codec. Called P+, the next evolution of the Perseus Plus codec includes the world’s first implementation of the bi-layer MPEG-5 Part 2 LCEVC (low complexity enhancement video coding) standard. V-Nova has been promising a codec revolution for years now and here at Faultline Online Reporter, we have not shied away from voicing our frustrations regarding the vendor’s under-achievements. Now V-Nova is proclaiming how P+ will transform the codec landscape by providing operators with a way to deploy better video quality with lower encoding costs to existing and future workflows. LCEVC…
Wireless Watch has often tracked the setbacks in mobile operators’ push towards denser networks based on more commoditized small cells. Many technology breakthroughs have been made, including more discreet form factors for city use and open architectures, such as Telecom Infra Project’s OpenCellular, to drive down cost and promote interoperability. However, for every move forward in the platform and supplier ecosystem, there seems to be a step back in terms of the ability for operators to access sites cost-effectively and to deploy equipment quickly and cheaply. But progress is being made on small cell products and processes that will address some of the qualms that cities, road and rail operators, and enterprises may have about small cells. Verizon and Deutsche…
Huawei and ZTE are showing a certain resilience in the face of rising uncertainty about their ability to compete globally in the 5G market. They have various cards to play, including their famous price competitiveness, backed by access to significant Chinese government financing, and their advanced developments in some core 5G technologies, such as Massive MIMO and cloud core. This is highlighted in their very strong patent position in 5G, compared to their status in 3G or 4G, when they were best known for keen pricing rather than cutting edge innovation. While operators fret about being denied access to advanced technologies at affordable prices, the wider industry is concerned about the risk that, if US and other western nations persist…
New open source technologies and conventional standards are still needed to push 5G deployments forward from the current ‘phony war’ of conventional architectures and 4G cores, to something genuinely disruptive. Some of these are high profile and radical, like new low latency and high density aspects of 3GPP Release 16, due early next year, or the emerging open specifications from the ORAN Alliance. Others, potentially like ONAP (Open Network Automation Protocol), risk being outdated before they are widely deployed – in the ever-receding horizon of true 5G, the definitions change all the time. ONAP seemed like something radical when AT&T donated the underlying code to the Linux Foundation – now it looks like a monster, an attempt to create a…
Delays may be hitting Rakuten in Japan (see previous item) but they are also a risk for other MNOs with particularly ambitious network roadmaps, especially when those roll-out plans are bound up with acquisition uncertainties too. Both Sprint and T-Mobile USA, whose proposed merger is still under regulatory review, are missing deadlines as they wait for clarity on their future position, allowing larger rivals AT&T and Verizon to forge ahead in terms of 5G scale and reach. The need to rival or better the big two’s 5G spectrum position is one of the drivers behind TMO’s planned acquisition of Sprint from Softbank. While the ‘Uncarrier’ has the best position in coverage-friendly sub-GHz spectrum in the USA, following its purchase of…
Many operators say, confidentially, that in their ideal world, they would start 5G deployment at a later date when new cloud architectures and radio technologies are more mature. However, government and commercial pressures are forcing them to embark early, which involves compromises in terms of the technologies enabling their first roll-outs. Imagine the pressure on Rakuten Mobile, then, which has to build a network from scratch to launch commercial services in one of the world’s most competitive markets, Japan, this year. It is, of course, starting with 4G, but it is aiming to deploy the world’s first end-to-end cloud-native mobile network, so in architectural terms it is closer to ‘true 5G’, and should be 5G-ready. While this is easier to…
Nokia laid claim to the world’s first fully cloud-based 5G vRAN, deployed with a US operator which is almost certainly Verizon in Dallas. Details were sparse, but the roll-out used a combination of central cloud-based functions and those based on distributed units at the cell site – an architecture which is increasingly looking more viable for 5G than the fully centralized vision of the original China Mobile concept of Cloud-RAN. But this is unlikely to have met the full definition of a 5G vRAN yet – those goalposts keep moving, but no vendor or operator has yet claimed to be able to deploy a pure cloud-native, containerized RAN, and that is likely to be the next goal.. Of all the…
When a new generation of technology is over the horizon, its easy to assume that the newest operators with the most disruptive visions will be the first to cash in. But sometimes the legend of the tortoise and the hare comes into play. China Mobile was supposed to the first major operator to move to 5G New Radio Standalone (NR SA) with a full 5G core, while Rakuten was hot favorite to be the first to deploy a fully cloud-native end-to-end network (initially for 4G). But the Chinese leader pulled back from the plan to roll out NR SA from day one and now has no firm timeline to deploy its cloud-native core at scale, amid many business case challenges…
This has been in the UK wind plan for a while, but news out this week that the Crown Estate is putting up another 2.8 GW of nameplate Wind farm capacity will come as a trigger to get back to converting the UK to at least 30% wind energy. These are all offshore wind projects and they are extensions to existing wind farms online since 2010 through to 2018, and come after the Estate completed a review of how wind farms have affected natural habitats. The requirement to research this was abundantly clear in the 2017 awards and auctions, and these will now go the commercial award of rights. The HRA, which The Crown Estate has undertaken as a requirement…
One Australian newspaper put the figure of A$4.4 billion of subsidies on a report out this week which said the Adani Carmichael coal mining project in Australia, would otherwise be “unbankable and unviable”, The report was from the Institute of Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, and it concluded that the Australian Government had pushed subsidies, favorable deals and tax concessions throughout the project’s proposed 30-year life. It got the final go ahead in June, when Rethink Energy said that it was doomed as an investment after it produced revised plans on how it would look after groundwater and got permission from the pro-coal Australian government to go ahead. Adani is an Indian company, and it plans to extract the coal,…
After going straight for the jugular of Google and Facebook through its aggressive privacy-focused marketing campaigns this year, Apple has ironically been forced to apologize to Siri users after the company was found grading – the practice of employing staff to listen in on voice recordings. Grading aims to improve speech recognition, but public outcry forced Apple, Google and Microsoft to fire staff, although Apple said it will continue to use grading for Siri users who opt in. Top Hollywood studios have joined hands with the UHD Alliance to release a new viewing format called Filmmaker Mode, hoping to give consumers a glimpse into the vision of filmmakers and provide more cinematic experiences on UHD TVs. Filmmaker Mode will disable…
Reliance Jio has made its presence felt in India since it launched its 4G-only network three years ago, but there has been some disappointment that its service models have not been more innovative. In a price-competitive market where consumers badly need higher network quality and greater variety of services, Jio has largely followed the time-honored way to gain market share in India, undercutting its rivals’ fees. Yes, it does proclaim itself to be a digital service provider rather than a connectivity provider, offering a suite of Jio-branded applications and content spanning the home, phone and car; and it is building quad-play propositions with its investment in fiber and media. But the strategy that has enabled it to overtake Bharti Airtel…