Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
By becoming the world’s first satellite fleet operator to embrace ONAP (Open Network Automation Protocol), SES has reaffirmed its growing commitment to mobile connectivity as the company seeks to offset its waning video business. Naturally, SES doesn’t want anyone to interpret the move in such a way, yet the initiative could prove crucial in delivering next-generation video around the globe as service providers migrate to virtualized network functions. SES has teamed with Amdocs to develop a standards-based network automation platform built on the aforementioned open source initiative ONAP, driven by AT&T, marking the start of an ambitious cloud virtualization project – setting the bar for the satellite community. Amdocs’ network function virtualization (NFV) technologies, hosted on Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure,…
Russian hacking may be as rampant as ever but at least its regulator Roskomnadzor, otherwise known as the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media, can offer evidence of a crackdown on content piracy. Allegedly a disgruntled pirate set fire to one of its offices on at least three occasions, with a prosecution case currently ongoing. This has not stopped the regulator continuing to up the ante against pirates in a country where foreign owned rights holders especially had virtually no protection against content theft until just a few years ago. The first major signal of that changing came in August 2015 when Warner Bros Entertainment, as it then was, became the first foreign copyright holder…
Adaptive bitrate-optimized video delivery has blossomed into an extensively researched topic given the high stakes of QoE for OTT video services. Such ABR algorithms make use of various modern machine learning techniques, which may soon be joined by a new kid on the scene called Fugu – a continual learning algorithm for bitrate selection showing early promise. Fugu is capable of establishing the most efficient way to send streaming video to diverse real-world clients, according to a recent academic paper published by computer science researchers at Stanford University. Fugu was paired with Puffer, a public website developed to stream live TV, as part of a nine-day study of 8,131 hours of video streamed to 3,719 users. Conclusively, Fugu was found…
Once again AT&T stands out as the biggest loser of video subs after the round of Q2 results, because of the continuing DirecTV Now crash. But the results overall have been overshadowed by the fallout from the proposed $26.5 billion merger between T-Mobile and Sprint, which now faces a legal challenge from 14 US States including Texas. That trial has been postponed until December 2019 just after the proposed merger gained regulatory approval. The immediate ramifications for pay TV are that this puts Dish Network in limbo as it is the linchpin of the deal by agreeing to acquire Sprint’s prepaid businesses and spectrum for $5 billion, as well gaining access to T-Mobile’s network, in order to appease regulators and…
Deutsche Telekom’s familiarly reticent results do not paint a picture of an operator currently in the throngs of opposing a mega deal after regulators recently green lighted the deal for Vodafone to buy Liberty Global’s cable assets. Nor does its second quarter filing make much hoo-ha about the M&A activity across the Atlantic with its US MNO subsidiary merging with Sprint in a market-altering deal. The German giant’s Q2 results do, however, show a European video business which performed steadily in the second quarter with subscriber gains totaling 64,000, of which 58,000 came in its native Germany where its footprint grew to 3.48 million MagentaTV customers. Deutsche Telekom put progress in its broadband and TV operations down to the large-scale…
The UK MNOs have put details behind their proposed collaboration to bring LTE coverage to rural areas, and in so doing, have illustrated the problem that scaling out the IoT presents in the marketplace. The Shared Rural Network (SRN) proposal demonstrates why overlapping efforts from competitors are inefficient, and given the slow progress of the low power WAN (LPWAN) sector, makes a strong argument in favor of wholesaling wireless networks. Currently, the UK can claim 99% population coverage for LTE, and around 93% landmass coverage too. However, according to O2, one of the UK MNOs, only 67% of landmass receives coverage from all four of the MNOs, with 7% of the country receiving no LTE coverage at all. There are…
Vodafone has expanded and refreshed its network sharing deal with Telefónica O2 in the UK, and will also create “Europe’s largest tower portfolio” by placing its 61,700 towers, spread over 10 countries, into a new towerco, which will operate from May 2020 with its own management team and balance sheet. This sees Vodafone following a now-common trend for MNOs to offload their towers, either into arm’s-length subsidiaries, or with sales to third party tower operators. This removes the high operating costs from their balance sheets and is a first step to separate infrastructure and services businesses, allowing them to address the very different financial norms of those two markets independently, and generate more shareholder value as a result. There will…
As noted in the previous article, there are considerable hurdles to jump for operators which want to deploy radical new architectures – including 5G NR Standalone or a cloud-native core and RAN – in order to exploit the full potential of 5G. But some operators are making bold moves towards the new architectures, either because they are relatively greenfield players like Rakuten, Dish and Reliance Jio, or they feel are operating in markets, like the USA, where significant competitive pressure is partly related to the quality and advanced state of the network. AT&T and Verizon are very advanced deployers of virtualized, software-defined networks and white box hardware, and now T-Mobile USA is hurtling towards 5G Standalone (SA). TMO said it…
Telecom Infra Project (TIP) and the ORAN Alliance are two of the most prominent organizations which are seeking to disrupt the mobile network supply chain with open architectures and interfaces. Both have announced new developments in the past week, TIP with a new project group focused on more compact, power-efficient microwave solutions; ORAN with a win at NTT Docomo. The new group announced by TIP – which was initiated by Facebook to bring commodity hardware and cloud economics to the telecoms network, and now has significant MNO support – is called OpenBox Microwave. It aims to define specifications and reference designs for a single box integrating both access router and microwave backhaul technology, which would reduce cost and power compared…
While 5G and the opening up of midband spectrum is relieving the spectrum shortage for operators in most parts of the world, the US MNOs remain starved of the best bands to support a strong business case (see separate item). To make matters worse, they are facing new competitors, not just Dish and the cablecos, but the rise of private network operators, often targeting the enterprise and industrial applications which MNOs have often failed to address. These specialized providers will also be looking for licensed spectrum, for those services which are too mission critical to trust to shared bands, and the FCC is showing itself ready to consider some radical changes to some areas of the spectrum to encourage these…
Spectrum sharing is fundamental to 5G plans. Sometimes this is a way to open up a virgin band to multiple users, on an increasingly dynamic basis, in order to enable a far greater diversity of service providres in the 5G era, in line with the need to support many more industries and applications. Often it is a more defensive technology, aiming to extend the number of operators which can use an occupied band, while protecting the incumbent from interference – potentially a fairer, simpler and less politically contentious approach than pushing organizations out of prime cellular bands altogether. The most famous examples have been pioneered in the USA, especially the TV white spaces (TVWS) sharing scheme, which despite limited commercial…
Even before millimeter wave spectrum is deployed on a mainstream basis, researchers are starting to cast their eyes even higher, to the so-called terahertz spectrum (in cellular terms, from 100 GHz to 540 GHz). Technologies to make these very high bands usable by mobile devices are the foundation of the initial R&D projects referred to as ‘6G’. The latest development comes from the University of California, Irvine (UCI), whose Nanoscale Communication Integrated Circuits lab has demonstrated a wireless transceiver chip which can send signals in frequencies above 100 GHz, claiming lower cost and power consumption than existing designs. These are, of course, the two major challenges facing chips in any new spectrum band, especially at very high frequency. Now that…
The US operators, and the FCC, have made a virtue out of necessity by taking some creative approaches to address their shortage of optimal 5G spectrum. While the 3.5 GHz C-band is the primary new spectrum band in which most first-phase 5G networks are being rolled out, in the USA, this is occupied by federal and other incumbents. With the US operators lacking access to significant amounts of spectrum in this band, they will be denied the economies of scale of a global ecosystem, and AT&T and Verizon will be at a disadvantage to Sprint (and T-Mobile, assuming they merge), which has midband spectrum in 2.5 GHz. This is driving interest in alternative options, preferably in the midband, and possibly…
The satellite and 5G communities have an ambivalent relationship. On the one hand, there are interesting developments which could integrate the two technologies far more effectively to boost overall capacity and coverage. On the other, the two groups remain at loggerheads over certain spectrum bands, traditionally occupied by satellite but now coveted for cellular. On the former side, a good example is the SaT5G project, launched in 2017 with funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 program, with the goal of developing plug-and-play satcom systems for 5G in which the two technologies cooperate, and are orchestrated in the same virtual networks, to facilitate applications from backhaul to inflight connectivity to hyperdense video. On the latter front, the GSMA has fired…
Last week we published just too early for the item about UK Vanadium Flow businesses RedT and Avalon merging via a reverse takeover to create a leading player in the energy storage market. We guess they were thrown together by investors who felt that neither had a global reach, but together they might just about have. New funding is on the way – it hopes as much as £24 million. Technically Avalon has been acquired using redT shares valued at 1.65p a share making it worth $37.5 million. The combined business will have operations in North America, Europe and Asia. National Grid said it will use artificial intelligence to improve its solar forecasting and accuracy can go up by as…
We have been critical of most things that BP has done in the name of renewable energy, like partnering Bunge last week Brazil, in biofuels, a move that will simply encourage Brazil to slash more forest. But this week it has partnered the controversial rising star that is DiDi Chuxing, the Chinese ride sharing network, to build Chinese EV charging stations. This is where oil companies should take their exploration cash, and better spend it building out the infrastructure for the fuel of the future – electricity. BP has a head start in that where a petrol station is the right place for a charge station, it has that infrastructure in place already. The new JV will develop EV charging…
Liberty Global has completed the sale of its German and Central European assets to Vodafone in a deal which is not over the finishing line just yet as Deutsche Telekom plans, alongside cable industry associations and some smaller MSOs in Germany, to vehemently campaign to block the deal. As a result, Vodafone becomes the largest owner of gigabit-capable network infrastructure in Germany – the very reason for the backlash despite a concession agreement with Telefonica Deutschland. Remember Facebook’s Portal video streaming communications device which the social media firm unveiled to laughable initial reviews last October? Well, Facebook is back at it this week, approaching the likes of Disney and Netflix for partnership deals pending the launch of an all…
Solid growth in the software business unit was more than enough to offset continued declines in the silicon IP segment as digital security and analytics vendor Verimatrix filed its second quarter and first half 2019 results, five months since its acquisition by Inside Secure. As expected, the merged company is reaping early rewards as Q2 revenue grew 5% year on year to $33.3 million – with the Verimatrix side contributing $22.9 million and Inside Secure $10.4 million. On an IFRS basis, first half 2019 revenue soared 162% to $52.9 million, on gross profit of $44.5 million, as a result of the combined revenue streams – primarily from conditional access which drove double digital growth. For anyone wanting to dive in…
Advocates of blockchain in broadcasting have had little to cheer about over the last year except for one significant development, the commitment by Comcast to the technology with the launch of its Blockgraph advanced advertising platform in December 2018. At the time of the launch we commented that blockchain was much better suited for TV advertising than some of the other proposed use cases in video services, such as token-based payment mechanisms for subscription OTT services, and we have seen little to change that view since. In other areas too, including use of blockchain for ultra-local P2P sharing of content to alleviate consumption of CDN capacity and bandwidth in core networks, the technology is still largely on the drawing board…
A relative minnow in the US pay TV arena called TDS Telecom has joined the race to become the country’s first operator to launch a TV service built around Android TV Operator Tier. Despite strong suggestions from this week’s announcement that TDS could be first to market, the telco told us that fellow US operators Windstream and RCN are in the driving seat to get their Android TV Operator Tier offerings to market first, while TDS will follow “later this year”. Based out of Madison, Wisconsin, and listed as the 20th-largest multichannel video service provider with 156,000 video subscribers, TDS Telecom is preparing the roll out of a new TV offering built around its cloud TV platform TDS TV+. It…