Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Support for industrial cellular will help to identify the 5G leaders When edge cloud enters the 5G landscape, neutral host will be even more important Until industrial players can secure spectrum, hi-tech initiatives will exclude 5G Some MNOs take a lead with slicing, others may be pre-empted by WiFi 6 The 5G industry is a deeply divided one. It is beset by architectural differences – a quick radio upgrade, or a full transformation to cloud-native? It has become a focus for political rivalries both international (is the USA or China in the lead in terms of 5G deployment?) and industrial (will traditional vendors retain their lock-in, or will there be a new open ecosystem?) Most important of all, though, are…
Tribune has crept closer to at long last sealing a takeover as the US Department of Justice this week green lighted the spin off of 8 TV stations by Nexstar, as part of Tribune’s $4.1 billion takeover by the country’s second largest local TV station owner. In doing so, Nexstar has smoothed over proceedings with the FCC, following a similar deal to sell 11 stations to Tegna in a $740 million deal last month. Indian regulator TRAI has approved the country’s set top interoperability initiative, effective December 2019, meaning TV subscribers across the country can switch providers without having to switch out set top hardware. It sends a big message to the rest of the world, particularly in the wake…
While IBM Watson has risen through the ranks of Big Blue to become a household name, little has been written about the IBM Watson Media arm which was quietly formed within the supercomputer behemoth five years ago – before officially launching in 2016. Faultline Online Reporter grabbed some time with the relatively new division at NAB to discuss broadcaster demand trends as well as its direct work with the FCC – as IBM Watson Media competes more and more with Microsoft in the media space. Watson Media covers a number of verticals, from fields perhaps perceived by the mainstream as ‘uncool’ such as captioning and archive data tagging, to more buzzwordy areas like AI and esports. The company divides its…
A BBC representative took a bit of a grilling from fellow panelists at an exclusive Cisco event during last week’s NAB event, something of a rare sighting at a heavily US-centric event. To us this implies rising interest in technical activities on the other side of the pond – particularly with the British broadcaster’s increasing North American presence. The Cisco Insider Insights on the IP Transition in Media panel featured an honest account from BBC Wales’ Head of Technology Roger Crothers. “The biggest challenge for us is that most people don’t want to learn about IP. Most engineers have been there for 30 years and don’t care, but we have proved IP works,” he said, referring to the major IP…
Netflix has just posted a record quarter worldwide confirming bullish predictions of continued ascendancy in SVoD over the coming years even in the face of strengthening competition as Disney+, Apple Plus, WarnerMedia and Comcast’s NBCUniversal join the fray. All this begs the question challenging analysts in the field of whether, and if so, Netflix will sustain this growth as these other heavyweights raise their streaming game as more direct competitors? This will be a double whammy for Netflix in that it will lose a lot of licensed third-party content that fueled its early growth as well as helping to sustain current success, while at the same time facing strong new competitors peddling some of those assets. This competition is well…
The EU’s controversial copyright directive started off with all the right intentions but then took a Machiavellian turn as legislators became increasingly obsessed with US high tech and determined to hit them with a big stick. It became a melting pot for Europe’s paranoia and inferiority complex over internet technology and services, which has led to a big missed opportunity to update copyright law properly for the digital age. That after all was and still is the stated intention, along with protecting authors and performers, even if the directive has since become warped by its more political agenda. As so often when guns are fired indiscriminately the crossfire catches innocent victims and can lead to consequences almost the opposite of…
Plenty of drama engulfed the video streaming wars this week with Disney, Hulu and AT&T all chopping and changing strategies as the industry attempts to get to grips with how each will send any sort of tribulation the way of Netflix. Of course, then came the small matter of Netflix filing its first quarter financial report and inevitably blowing estimates out of the water. In other words, “Take a seat, kids, this is how it’s done.” Netflix onboarded a record 9.6 million new subscribers in Q1 2019, a 16% year on year increase, to total just shy of 150 million paid subscribers (148.86 million to be precise) globally, while an additional 6.6 million sit on free trials. Domestically, Netflix picked…
Orange has become one of Europe’s most promising champions of the smart home, with innovations ranging from its AI assistant Djingo (designed in partnership with Deutsche Telekom) to interactive mirrors, right down to the nittier and grittier world of sensors and networks. The French incumbent recently made a move in the latter field, rolling in Californian vendor DSP Group to enable future smart home applications via the ultra-low energy (ULE) protocol. Orange plans to roll out products and services based on DSP’s ULE chips this spring, including a motion sensor, smart plug, smart light bulb and door/window-opening sensor. The initial wave will reach some 3m homes installed with the latest Livebox router, allowing customers to enable the new services free…
Carbon Tax – some people hate the idea, others just dislike it intensely. And yet Germany is once again considering its introduction according to reports in Der Spiegel. The idea has been around since the mid-1990s and has been tried across Europe, Japan, South Korea, Canada, China and many other countries, usually with disastrous consequences. With the exception of Norway, which has always claimed that its advanced position on renewables is partly down to its early imposition of a carbon tax, it has been an unmitigated disaster and there are reasons for this. In some cases, such as Canada, it never got more than being in a party manifesto, and that party lost in a landslide. In others such as…
There is a long and somewhat torrid history of using PLC to connect grid assets. In general, it works well for the high and medium voltage lines, and can work well for automated meter reading. This makes PLC quite useful for grid operators, as it can be used to send and receive commands, and also poll meters for their usage. You can see how PLC could be used in smart grid deployments, but there are also many in-home protocols that make use of PLC technologies, such as KNX, X10, HomePlug, and G.hn. However, using a wireless protocol to do the same provides you with an out-of-band (OOB) channel, which adds a lot of redundancy to the network. If a powerline…
Fresh off its Apple victory, Qualcomm is launching a new campaign, rallying the troops around a new banner – the Qualcomm Smart Cities Accelerator Program. Effectively a channel to drive demand for Qualcomm’s products in the growing smart city market, the program, like all other similar projects, runs the risk of adding to the fragmentation in the IoT – but if it earns Qualcomm dollars, it’s not going to be too shaken up about it. In terms of the silicon vendors, Intel is the closest direct rival to Qualcomm here, and given Intel’s track record, we don’t envision it doing better than Qualcomm in this regard. Qualcomm is really pushing to have its chips at the heart of all manner…
Bank of America said this week it will commit a further $300 billion by 2030 to low-carbon and sustainable business activities, taking the bank’s total investments up to $445 billion since 2007. It says there is not enough capital out there to meet the challenges. Bank of America has already deployed $126 billion over the past twelve years in support of environmental business initiatives worldwide. It is also one of the biggest investors in the fossil fuel energy sector, so it’s hedging its bets. A group of university researchers have made the bold claim that investments in renewables will automatically offer investors a better ROI (Return on Investment) than the best carbon capture technologies. Their combined article from University researchers…
Scotland’s Faraday Grid has bought two Czech companies according to a blog on its website, using up some of the $32.5 million it raised in January to pay for them. It has already converted these acquisitions into a third 100 strong “innovation” center for its supposedly revolutionary technology, the Faraday Exchanger. We presume this is to support early market pilot installations of Faraday Exchangers and their associated software. We understand this is a development which turns the transformers (which step current up and down between two electrical circuits), into something resembling a router within digital technology, It allows electrical energy to flow in either direction, across any particular route to any destination. The Faraday Exchanger also has the benefit of…
Carbon Tax – some people hate the idea, others just dislike it intensely. And yet Germany is once again considering its introduction according to reports in Der Spiegel. The idea has been around since the mid-1990s and has been tried across Europe, Japan, South Korea, Canada, China and many other countries, usually with disastrous consequences. With the exception of Norway, which has always claimed that its advanced position on renewables is partly down to its early imposition of a carbon tax, it has been an unmitigated disaster and there are reasons for this. In some cases, such as Canada, it never got more than being in a party manifesto, and that party lost in a landslide. In others such as…
Microsoft and BMW’s announcement at Hannover Messe was the launch of the Open Manufacturing Platform (OMP), where the pair called form more partners to sign on, to create more reference designs that can run on Microsoft’s Azure platform. In the past few years, we’ve been pretty pro-Microsoft, but something about this has stuck in our craw. This would be an open platform if it could run on other cloud platforms, but currently, it can’t. This means that it is only ‘open’ if you are an Azure customer, and that’s not exactly open as in open source. There’s been no mention of Microsoft porting the OMP over to AWS or GCP, or any of the plethora of more niche-focused platforms like…
Sweden’s SeaTwirl, a designer of a new type of wind turbine which floats at sea, has landed €70mn of funds from two major investors; Colruyt Group an €8.6bn Belgium supermarket chain, which also owns Parkwind a wind energy group; and Norsea, a North Sea logistics group with good experience in supporting wind farms. The weird looking SeaTwirl S2 is due out in 2020 and will look much the same as the S1, but yield 1 MW peak. At that level if may struggle to compete with giant traditional wind turbines on floating platforms, such as those using turbines from Vestas from MHI Vestas Offshore and from Siemens Gamesa. These can give off between 6 MW and 10 MW, but are…
The cost and red tape associated with access to city sites are still slowing down the pace of densification, and the situation will hit crisis point when it comes to 5G’s requirements for smaller cells and dense urban capacity, argue operators like Sprint. In the UK, BT is calling for open access to infrastructure such as lamp posts, in order to lower the barriers to deployment. It wants an end to the exclusive concessions model, which is commonly used by local authorities in the UK. They award the right to deploy small cells or WiFi on their lamp posts and other sites to a single entity. Other service providers then have to pay a wholesale charge to the concession holder.…
One of the biggest future pressures on developed economies is going to be the growth of their elderly populations, and the consequent strain this demographic will place on healthcare systems, social welfare programs, housing markets, labor markets, and government tax revenues. To this end, this population represents a pretty lucrative chunk of the smart home market, as family, friends, and corporations, begin to provide ways on checking in on those more at risk of injury in their own homes. It might seem a little morbid, but you can easily liken these people to machinery. A smart home system could provide you, the offspring or the healthcare provider for instance, with a way to keep tabs on how the machine is…
Sonos saw the writing on the wall when Amazon, Apple, and Google all started gunning for a slice of the whole-home audio market that Sonos had dominated for so long. Despite its capable wireless platform, solid sound quality, and software experience, convenience and price from this trio would trump it offerings. So, it embraced Amazon’s Alexa, keeping one camp sweet for the meantime, and also forged an alliance with Ikea to develop the mysterious Symfonisk line, which has finally been unveiled. The two products, the book-shelf and the lamp-speaker, are attempts at integrating the smart speakers into conventional furniture and furnishings, hiding away the sometimes lurid gadgetry inside Ikea’s aesthetic design language. The likes of Amazon and Google have certainly…
Qualcomm’s expansion away from mobile devices continues. Having found not all that much in the way of demand for IoT devices, it is now chasing that other shiny new market – AI-based processing workloads in the data center. With its new Cloud AI 100 accelerator, a 7nm chip that claims 10x performance per watt than its rivals, Qualcomm is hoping to steal some thunder from Intel, Google, and Nvidia. Intel has been scrambling to find a way to make up for the shortcomings of its x86 CPU architecture in the new workloads demanded by AI and ML tasks – as these tasks favor the parallel computing capabilities of GPUs and FPGAs, which the serial CPUs can’t provide. Nvidia too is…