Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
At Mobile World Congress, Wireless Watch’s sister service, Rethink IoT, interviewed several players in the low power WAN (LPWAN) market. This was against the backdrop of a Mobile World Congress in which low power WAN technologies were under the radar. There was little to suggest that the MNO community was particularly interested in either of the 4G options – LTE Cat-M or Cat-NB (formerly NB-IoT) – and among the unlicensed alternatives, Sigfox did not have a booth for the second year running. The articles are republished here. LoRa Alliance – focusing in on six key verticals: RIoT interviewed the CEO of the LoRa Alliance, Donna Moore, along with its director of marketing, Emma Pearce, as the group crossed the milestone…
“There is more and more convergence between mobile and fixed networks. There are going to be 5G small cells on every street corner using existing broadband infrastructure,” said Geert Heyninck, general manager of Nokia’s broadband access business unit, at Mobile World Congress. Those trends have brought the Broadband Forum into close contact with the mobile standards bodies, and recently it submitted proposals for 5G fixed/mobile convergence to the 3GPP. Among Nokia’s announcements was a major deployment at Japan’s KDDI, upgrading connectivity in multi-dwelling units (MDUs) to speeds of 830Mbps using interoperable G.fast and VDSL technologies. KDDI isn’t Nokia’s first G.fast customer in Japan – it has already worked with utility company EneCom to provide service providers with a smooth migration…
More countries, including Germany, are backing away from imposing outright bans on Huawei and ZTE in 5G, or other national infrastructure contracts. Despite pressure from the USA, may governments are also feeling the pressure from their own operators, which are furious that the prospect of being denied access to the Chinese companies’ innovations and price competitiveness. Huawei spent much of the run-up to Mobile World Congress, and the show itself, on a charm offensive, to persuade governments they were not risking their security by supporting the company. However, now it has gone on the offensive too, launching legal actions in north America. In the USA, Huawei has filed suit in Texas (site of its US headquarters) to challenge a new…
The next release of 5G standards, 3GPP Release 16, will help to deliver the platform’s key promise – to enable a wide range of enterprise and IoT services, expanding the cellular model well beyond voice and mobile broadband for the first time. ETSI, too, is broadening the remit of its standards work to look beyond operators, to other sectors which can leverage 5G to change their business. However, the potential of 5G to help industrial organizations to transform their processes and services will be limited if everything is left to the MNOs. Most operators acknowledge that they are finding it hard to firm up a business case for many IoT and enterprise use cases. Those which are pushing further into…
Cloud-native core and vRAN: the industry waits for these catalysts of change The biggest challenge for the 5G business case in the early years of the technology is that the first wave of standards are out of step with what many operators want to achieve. If 5G really is to become a super-flexible, super-economical platform supporting a huge array of industries and use cases, two of the critical success factors will be cloud-native technologies and shared spectrum. Neither of these is currently fully available for commercial deployment. As we have argued before, this means a major dilemma for operators which feel pressurized – by their governments, customers, competitors or their own business plans – to launch 5G services early (2019-2021).…
A comprehensive look at this week in the IoT // M&A, Strategies, Alliances // China Mobile has joined the Avanci platform, an intellectual property licensing marketplace that has strong ties to Ericsson. China Mobile will be licensing its 2G, 3G, and 4G standards essential patents to anyone in the IoT, through the Avanci marketplace. There are now 21 Avanci members, since launch in 2016. Esri has acquired Indoo.rs, one of its partners that provides Indoor Positioning System (IPS) technologies. Indoo.rs is being integrated into Esri’s new ArcGIS platform, which will offer indoor mapping services for corporate facilities, commercial locations, and retail stores. NTT Communications has acquired Transatel, an IoT-focused cellular connectivity manager and MVNE provider. No price has been given,…
It will be very important for operators to work out the relationship they would ideally like to have with the cloud giants. There is strong potential for the webscale players like AWS and Microsoft Azure to steal significant portions of the value chain as networks evolve into cloud-based IT platforms. But the telcos have assets to bring to the party too, especially as the cloud becomes more distributed towards the edge – these include their highly distributed sites, and their expertise in deploying and running connectivity. AT&T showed how operators and cloud providers could carve up the enterprise services market and each play to their own strengths, rather than going head-to-head for the whole pie. Like some other telcos, AT&T…
The Netherlands may play home to the first trial run of Disney+ prior to a US roll out, as we approach Disney’s hotly anticipated plans for the OTT video service set to be revealed on April 11. According to news outlet The Information, Disney is weighing up the option of partnering with cable operators and online platforms to gain a wider reach. In separate news, analysts at JP Morgan reckon Disney+ could be on course to pick up 160 million subscribers globally in the long-term – 45 million in the US and 115 million overseas. Troubled OTT video technology vendor Ooyala, in the process of being bought by rival Brightcove for $15 million, has actually won a deployment deal…
Another twist in Liberty Global’s frantic few months occurred late last week, as German telco Freenet slapped a veto on the acquisition of UPC Switzerland by Swiss cableco Sunrise Communications, in which Freenet owns a 24.5% stake. It gives the impression that doing business with Liberty Global is the last thing on anyone’s mind right now, even at a what should be a more than tempting price. The intervention echoes the sentiments of Christoph Vilanek, the CEO of Freenet, having admitted to Reuters in October that Freenet was open to offers for its Sunrise stake, valued at the time at around $1 billion, but he was firmly against any deal with Liberty Global. That price tag would bring Freenet a…
Fixed network infrastructure players know all too well the mammoth task ahead required to be heard in an increasingly wireless world, so we made sure to set aside time with at least one major vendor at MWC – sitting down with Nokia at its typically extravagant stand last week. “There is more and more convergence between mobile and fixed networks. There are going to be 5G small cells on every street corner using existing broadband infrastructure,” explained Nokia’s VP and GM of the Broadband Access Business Unit, Geert Heyninck, alongside Head of Marketing for Fixed Networks Stefaan Vanhastel. This same trend has brought the Broadband Forum into close contact with the mobile standards bodies, and recently it submitted proposals for…
Aggregation has ebbed and flowed in pay TV ever since it started over half a century ago in the US and at present the tide is on the way out with the impending launch of D2C (Direct to consumer) streaming services by major studios or content houses such as Disney and AT&T’s WarnerMedia. There are also other major tectonic forces operating, notably the ambitions of Amazon, Apple and Google in particular to assume the aggregator role, along with the rise of Android TV as a platform giving smaller pay TV operators a leg up by being able to embrace apps within their branded offerings. The integration of these forces does suggest though that we are entering a two-tiered era where…
Such is the importance of a show like Mobile World Congress to a company like InterDigital that the mobile technology vendor spends a full third of its annual marketing budget on the event. That’s why Faultline Online Reporter’s brief coverage of InterDigital from last week, buried deep in a Technicolor write up, deserves a follow up – as there is a lot more to come from InterDigital than its recent dealings with the French set top firm. As noted in our MWC issue, InterDigital outlined to us a future in which its three main business verticals – wireless, video and IoT – will gradually converge. So, does convergence, which is arguably a visible trend already in many cases, mean fewer…
Like other multiplay operators, Telefonica is having another crack at conquering the smart home now that the big internet players have set up their stall there and started to bite. The early history of digital home services like security and heating control is littered with corpses of failed first-time offerings from the big players. Telefonica is on that list having shut down its O2 Smart Home service in the UK only just over a year ago in January 2018 after poor take up. Other terminations include Verizon’s Home Monitoring and Control and BT’s Home Monitor, while AT&T’s Digital Life, Orange’s HomeLive and Belgacom’s Home Control Home View are no longer actively marketed and are either expiring or awaiting resuscitation in…
Akamai has souped up its security portfolio with a raft of new features in a rather incoherent announcement that homes in on large scale threats to service providers, notably DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) and web attacks such as SQL injection. As the world’s largest CDN vendor, Akamai is naturally well placed to defend against many of these threats that operate at long range across the internet, as well as to collect data on them. More recently though Akamai has set out its stall more as an all-round cyber security player by paying closer attention to threats inside its customers’ networks, not just those perpetrated by insiders but also malware and viruses that have penetrated firewalls, intrusion detection systems…
Two years have flown by since Sky first etched out its satellite exodus and finally the Comcast-owned European operator has cranked up the OTT volume – picking Austria as the test bed for its first fully OTT-delivered pay TV offering. Expect a quick expansion effort across the rest of Sky’s footprint should the first run out prove successful, although one Sky X feature in particular has already ruffled some feathers. Called Sky X, the app is set to make quite a splash, landing on mobile devices, Samsung and LG smart TVs, PCs, and PlayStation 4 consoles. A dedicated Sky X streaming device is also a purchasable option, which looks almost identical to the Sky Q Mini set top, a hybrid…
It seems that when it comes to renewables, Thailand is not so shabby at thinking outside the box – it has come up with a plan to cover its dams and reservoirs with floating solar panel farms, getting two types of renewable energy in the physical space that would normally be reserved purely for hydro. The 16 solar farms, across 9 dams to be built by 2037, will collectively be the largest floating renewable energy platform ever built – although as more countries catch on – it may well be surpassed quite rapidly. The State-run Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand (EGAT) said this week it would run its first auction in two months’ time, for an “exemplar” installation for a…
Necessity is often the mother of invention, and Telecom Italia’s financial pressures and ownership quarrels are pushing it towards radical cost-cutting in its networks. Some of its tactics, such as network sharing with Vodafone and cooperation with Open Fiber, highlight the way all operators will have to run their future networks, not just those with debt mountains. The economics of 5G will make dwindling sense if there is not more focus on infrastructure sharing and convergence, with the distant but logical end result of splitting a wholesale, scaled-up ‘pipe’ from the service providers. Long before that day, operators can achieve significantly better cost bases if they abandon their instinctive hostility to sharing, and it will better for the whole industry…
With Huawei being caught up in all manner of controversies, it was easy for its video-related announcement to slide under the radar unnoticed this week, as the mobile mountain dropped its guard and adopted the AVC/H.264 patent portfolio after a relatively short-lived dispute. The decision signifies a willingness to work with the western world, which may be part of the ongoing process of persuading US allies that Huawei is a partner to be trusted. Clearly Huawei is putting much more energy into triumphing in 5G markets than in the video codec space – but the about-face is unexpected and significant nonetheless, given that Apple and Samsung are the two lead players and beneficiaries of MPEG LA, the AVC and HEVC…
As operators see open interfaces and mix-and-match networks tantalizingly in sight for 5G RANs, the major vendors are consolidating their hold on as many elements of the network as they can, as illustrated by Ericsson’s decision to buy the mobile business of its long-time antenna supplier Kathrein. The growth and power in the RAN may have shifted to software, but there are, of course, significant physical elements that cannot be commoditized and which still offer a vendor significant revenue and differentiation. These are, notably, the antenna – increasingly complex in 5G with Massive MIMO – and the baseband processor. While arguably the latter could be a standard x86 (or ARM) CPU, in reality the heavy demands of running a RAN…
It will be very important for operators to work out the relationship they would ideally like to have with the cloud giants. There is strong potential for the webscale players like AWS and Microsoft Azure to steal significant portions of the value chain as networks evolve into cloud-based IT platforms. But the telcos have assets to bring to the party too, especially as the cloud becomes more distributed towards the edge – these include their highly distributed sites, and their expertise in deploying and running connectivity. AT&T showed how operators and cloud providers could carve up the enterprise services market and each play to their own strengths, rather than going head-to-head for the whole pie. Like some other telcos, AT&T…