Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
The seemingly unrelated facts that Australia has this week pushed a new coal mine closer to being built, and that Norway has approved plans to dump investments in oil and coal, can be seen as opposite ends of a single currency. Which would make them not unrelated after all. The Norwegian 1$ trillion sovereign wealth fund has a past built on coal and oil, and most of the country’s economy has come from those sources over the past 50 years. It shows bravery and a clear understanding that these investments will be worthless in a few years’ time. Best sell them now, while others are not quite so clear of mind, and there are potential buyers. That pretty much goes…
How do you make a surefire investment in electric vehicles (EVs)? A clear answer is to invest in renewable energy as it is the “gasoline” of the future. Comments are bouncing around the US financial analyst community this week, forecasting gloom and doom for the automotive industry, over the transition to electric vehicles, and what that might mean to the global economy. What it means for the renewable electricity industry is far clearer. The analysts asking if the car industry has suddenly reached its peak seem to believe that global economic growth is the “be all and end all” of the auto industry. Whereas profit is the motive and that may be even harder to find in the coming years.…
CableLabs, the R&D arm of the US cable business, is becoming increasingly involved in wireless technologies. It is looking at this space from four main angles: Enhancements to WiFi, which is the main wireless connectivity option for most cablecos, to give it a central role in next generation services. Development of technologies to use new types of spectrum, especially those that may be within the grasp of cablecos (if they are likely to be easily shared). Seeking to drive future cellular standards in a way that will support the cable industry’s priorities. This used to focus heavily on cellular implementations in shared bands such as CBRS, but interests are broadening as more cablecos look to buy their own airwaves. Pushing…
Retail giant Walmart has announced that it is launching its InHome Delivery service in the US in Q3, starting in Kansas City, Pittsburgh, and Vero Beach. The service will be available to over a million customers, and will allow Walmart employees to make deliveries inside the customers home – with the initial plan being to put food away inside the refrigerators and freezers. This service, if it takes hold, opens the door for all manner of other services, as it should get customers familiar with the concept and mechanics of using technology to let someone into their home if they are not present. There are other delivery trials involving cars, where the automaker has a relationship with the courier to…
Comcast has given its blessing for the launch of Sky Studios, a new serious-sounding pan-European original content production house touted to more than double Sky’s investment in original content over the next five years. Tapping into resources from new partner company NBCUniversal, Sky Studios plans to roll out productions for Sky channels, NBC broadcast and cable, plus Universal Pictures and other distribution outlets, hoping to build on the success of original Sky series Chernobyl – currently the world’s highest rated TV show of all time. In a deal we perceive as going against the grain, Chinese cable operator Shenzhen Topway Video Communications has tapped a US supplier to handle UHD services – deploying live UHD video processing technology from Harmonic.…
Speakers during a webinar hosted by the Broadband World Forum trade show started speaking our language this week, with two industry experts taking turns to shred apart the jargon commonly used in discussions around network buzzwords – while aiming to provide a framework for avoiding falling into the easy trap of misleading customers. This was ironic considering the webinar was marketed as a fixed broadband network webinar hence our attendance, but it quickly transpired to be a heavily mobile network-focused presentation focused on debunking easy targets like 5G and AI. However, the warnings do overlap. Broadband service providers can learn from the mistakes of telcos when it comes to buzzword syndrome, with speakers slamming the telco sector for over-engineering and…
The current US anguish over reallocation of some C-band radio spectrum in the 4 to 8 GHz range is being keenly watched elsewhere as China, South Korea and some European countries are poised to follow. The exact portion of spectrum affected varies by geography but in the US, the FCC has been considering transfer of part or all of the C-band in the 3.7 to 4.2 GHz range to impending 5G networks. This was first proposed in June 2018 and has come to a head this month at a meeting hosted by the Technology Policy Institute in Washington DC to hear various presentations on the proposal to restructure 180 MHz of that spectrum to help expedite roll-out of 5G in the…
The World Wide Web was founded on the idea of peer to peer (P2P) networking with direct communication between machines and users, but for various reasons the internet evolved more into a broadcast or client/server model. P2P revived around 1999 with Napster and then the BitTorrent protocol released in 2001, but this was a mixed blessing given its association with piracy and especially illicit music streaming. By 2009, the volume of P2P traffic was in steep decline again at the time online video was arising as a centrally driven unicast service. But most recently the proliferation of online video has given a new lease of life once more to P2P distribution in the guise of P2P CDNs, which promise to…
Wyplay appeared to launch two contradictive TV platform products last week in a peculiar week for the French middleware developer – one built around Android TV Operator Tier and another in partnership with local video technology vendor Viaccess-Orca. The former, first of all, was a major statement from Wyplay, lauding the tagline “most exhaustive Android TV offering on the market.” Wyplay took its time responding to Faultline Online Reporter’s calls for clarity on this audacious statement and we’re glad that was the case – because the result involved Wyplay throwing a handful of competitors under the bus. With this new Android TV offering, Wyplay is essentially providing its technology and services across a variety of verticals where it sees chief…
Nvidia has shown off its new EGX platform, which aims to bring AI-powered computing to the network edge. But there’s been little fanfare in the press about the announcement, and the hype for both AI and edge developments is dying down. Nvidia is pitching EGX at companies that need to perform low latency AI processing at the network edge. It cites continuous data streaming between 5G base stations as one use case, as well as warehouses, retail stores, and factories, saying that EGX was built “to meet the growing demand to perform instantaneous, high throughput AI at the edge, where data is created, with guaranteed response times, while reducing the amount of data that must be sent to the cloud”.…
The FCC has announced the winners of the two millimeter wave auctions held so far this year, in 28 GHz and 24 GHz. Unsurprisingly, AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile were the big gainers, but while this boost the capacity arsenal for all three, they all lack significant holdings in the far more attractive midrange bands, which are the main focus of early 5G roll-out in most other parts of the world. To compensate, Verizon is starting to make use of the 3.5 GHz CBRS spectrum, which is becoming available this year in a multi-tiered system of licensed and shared access. The midband airwaves support high capacity hotspot deployment without the challenges of mmWave – the latter spectrum needs complex beamforming to…
While operators score quick points by deploying 5G base stations alongside their existing 4G cores, the really tough migration challenges will come when they move to a full 5G Standalone solution, with a cloud-native 5G core. For many fixed/mobile operators, this will also be the trigger to start implementing a converged core to improve flexibility and resource efficiency across all their networks, but that will add another layer of complexity to the migration effort. But others will put the convergence elements in place first, including the cloud infrastructure, and then deploy a single cloud-native core on top. This is the approach taken by UK incumbent BT, which has turned to Juniper to help deliver its Network Cloud infrastructure plan to…
Several players apart from Amazon may be lining up bids for Boost, assuming the Sprint/TMO merger proceeds with the sale of the prepaid unit as a condition. Analysts expect the price to be at least $3bn, possibly as high as $4bn depending on the levels of interest. According to Reuters, prepaid company Q Link Wireless is teaming up with private equity backers to place a bid; while Stephen Stokols, founder of disruptive WiFi-first operator FreedomPop, is said to be separately advising another private equity group in preparing a bid for Boost. Also in the frame, apparently, is Peter Adderton, who actually founded Boost Mobile, then sold it in 2004 to Nextel, which was in turn acquired by Sprint. And it…
No sector will be more deeply affected by the current tensions between the USA and China than the semiconductor industry. Even if the Trump administration comes to a settlement over trade and cybersecurity issues tomorrow, and removes the latest restrictions on Huawei, China will still be reconfirmed in its determination to build its own chip industry and become technologically self-sufficient. The world’s second biggest economy cannot be subject to the kind of abrupt, and very public, actions that almost crippled ZTE last year, and have now been imposed on Huawei. This will hit western semiconductor players in two ways. If sanctions persist, they will lose some significant customers. Even if they do not, they will lose Chinese business if ZTE,…
How do you invest in EVs with a surefire investment? A clear answer is to invest in renewable energy as it is the “gasoline” of the future. Comments are bouncing around the US financial analyst community this week forecasting gloom and doom for the car industry, over the transition to electric vehicles, and what that might mean to the global economy. What it means for the renewable electricity industry is far more clear. Those analysts are asking if the car industry has suddenly reached its peak? They seem to believe that global economic growth is the “be all and end all” of the car industry. Whereas profit is the motive and that may be even harder to find in the…
While the automakers have backed off their claims of the self-driving future being imminent, and the OEMs that supply them try to navigate an always-shifting market, one sector of the connected car supply chain that seems to have taken less of a hit in this expectation-shift is the software and services. To this end, there was a flurry of recent announcements that illustrate this trend, from NXP, Momenta, Teraki, Microsoft, Wind River, and Airbiquity, unveiled at the TU Automotive Detroit show. As we get closer to the age when every car sold has an integrated cellular connection, the market for all manner of supporting software and surfaces increases. Whether these are monitoring and predictive maintenance functions, fleet management and telematics…
Plenty of unfamiliar faces were jostling among the cable industry old guard at Anga Com this week, few hotter right now than SSIMWave – the Canadian perceptual quality start-up which has just unveiled its new VoD Monitor Inspector tool for video processing and delivery optimization. The launch doesn’t sound like much initially, until you remember SSIMWave is claiming a clean sweep of trials at North American tier 1 operators with public deployments potentially just around the corner. When Faultline Online Reporter got stuck into conversation with SSIMWave just a couple of months ago, the emphasis was largely on live streaming and how the main benefit of the company’s SSIMPlus technology over the competing metric VMAF (Video Multimethod Assessment Fusion), developed…
With Android TV Operator Tier threatening to drown out rival technologies while uniting others, it was pivotal for RDK (Reference Design Kit) to make itself heard at Anga Com this week. But while the Comcast-backed project proudly paraded a milestone of 50 million RDK devices in the field, the general tone of its annual update doesn’t exactly exude confidence – alluding to a prioritization of broadband within the connected home over TV. Open source consortium RDK Management claims the software has become the preferred stack for broadband gateways from leading suppliers – focused on providing RDK systems across DOCSIS, DSL and PON. But no longer individually as RDK says continued innovation in the connected home, driven by consolidation occurring the…