Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Viavi Solutions has released its ‘State of 5G Deployments’ document, expecting 55 live networks to have been deployed by the end of 2019. We spoke to Li-Ke Huang, VP Wireless Technology in Viavi’s Wireless Business Unit, and Owen O’Donnell, Marketing Manager at Viavi Solutions, to get a bit of background ahead of MWC. The report itself notes that 5G is ahead of schedule, as it was initially thought that the technology would make its debut in 2020. It found that 13 commercial 5G networks were launched in 2018, across mobile and fixed-wireless, and anticipates 42 additional launches this year. Europe will take first place, with 21, and the Middle East will hold second with 14, followed by 10 in Asia,…
A few weeks ago, the LoRa Alliance announced that it had achieved coverage in 100 countries, thanks to its pretty extensive ecosystem. At the time, we wrote that despite Sigfox’s recent struggles, one could never rule the company out of the running. A couple of weeks after that, Sigfox announced a deal with Groupe PSA and IBM, somewhat affirming our position, and after that article, Sigfox’s CEO Ludovic Le Moan reached out, to talk about annual results and the plan for Eutelsat to launch a constellation of satellites to expand the network footprint. We began by asking for details of the Groupe PSA deal, which apparently constitutes 250,000 devices. Le Moan said that Sigfox was working with IBM on other…
Roku device shipments surged 40% during Q4 2018, accounting for a 28% market share of streaming devices, just one percentage point behind market leader Amazon, according to a sample of US households conducted by WiFi software specialist Plume. Google Chromecast accounts for a 15% share while Apple has 18% and Plume notes that nearly one-third of all Plume US households now have a streaming device connected to their WiFi network. Orange added 445,000 TV subscribers across its footprint last year to total 9.55 million, including 182,000 gains in its core French market, where it now has 7.04 million subs, and 90,000 in Spain, totaling 716,000 on IPTV and satellite. Total fixed broadband returned to growth with 19,000 net adds in…
The 5G network will be as much made up of wireline technologies as wireless, not just for dense fiber backhaul and fronthaul, but as operators move towards converged access and core. These trends have brought the Broadband Forum (BBF) into increasingly close contact with the mobile standards bodies, and recently the Forum submitted proposals for 5G fixed/mobile convergence to the 3GPP. These proposals were drawn up at the request of operators which take part in both standards bodies, the BBF said, after a “comprehensive cycle of iterative feedback between the two organizations”. “Two years ago, 10 of the world’s biggest operators came to us with their concerns that the 5G infrastructure which was being developed would not let them take…
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. It signifies a willingness to work with the western world on technological standpoints which may never have seen the light of day were it not for the recent telecoms storm (see separate story in this issue). 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…
Encoding.com might not be the first name on people’s lips when musing about the video transcoding market, and in fact we recall the company’s frustration at being left out of the cloud transcoding forecast from our research arm Rethink TV a couple of years ago. That said, the US vendor has just nabbed what looks to be a huge deal with Akamai involving a substantial customer migration project. As of last week, Akamai announced it has begun retiring Media Service On Demand (MSoD) transcoding services, its complementary VoD transcoding product, instead sliding in Encoding.com, a long-term media processing partner of Akamai turned preferred partner for a major transition project. It means Akamai is now recommending customers transition to Encoding.com’s cloud…
Not all stream piracy is conducted under the radar by peripatetic sites that keep reemerging or via third party plug-ins to open source media players such as Kodi boxes, or for that matter via VPNs. There are also sites operating in the open within given territories by exploiting what they may consider loopholes in the law, perhaps old contracts that appear to confer rights at low prices. Such a case has just blown up in the US where the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), an anti-piracy coalition of major studios and content producers including Disney, Warner, NBCUniversal, Netflix and Amazon, is suing a Kansas City based wholesale content provider called OmniverseOne World Television. Also in the dock is the…
The Huawei case has split both nations and Telcos with even the US harboring opponents of Trump’s flat out campaign to hobble the company, at least as an international force. It is after all just 13 months since Google struck a deal with Huawei over messaging which has been under review but not yet rescinded since the affair blew up alongside the wider trade war between the US and China during the second half of 2018. Other countries, notably Japan, Australia and New Zealand, have adopted the strong US stance by banning use of Huawei equipment in 5G networks. Other countries have been caught undecided, as have many telcos, so not surprisingly the issue has dominated the run up to…
Nokia has been ambitious in its diversification strategies, pushing into new enterprise sectors (and giving its enterprise business a high level of autonomy) and adapting to platforms driven by software, cloud technologies and open source. Ericsson has been far more conservative, especially since its CEO Börje Ekholm took the helm, reversing many of the moves his predecessor Hans Vestberg had driven to expand into growth markets like enterprise and media. Ericsson is now focusing heavily on its core strengths in end-to-end mobile networks, and especially 5G – but if that strategy is not to be dangerously constrained, it needs to leverages its 5G platforms for as many growth areas as possible. Ericsson insists it has not given up on enterprise…
The CBRS Alliance is keen to put on a big show of progress at Mobile World Congress later this month, after its schedules were set back for a while by the US government shutdown. No date has yet been set to auction rights to the licensed portion of the USA’s three-tiered CBRS spectrum scheme, but the Alliance expects to see initial commercial deployments in the unlicensed tier during the second quarter of this year, and full commercial services in Q3. The CBRS scheme applies to the 3.5 GHz band and relies on spectrum access systems (SAS) to assign channels to devices in order of priority. There is guaranteed access for the top tier – federal incumbents; next priority goes to…
The 5G network will be as much made up of wireline technologies as wireless, not just for dense fiber backhaul and fronthaul, but as operators move towards converged access and core. These trends have brought the Broadband Forum (BBF) into increasingly close contact with the mobile standards bodies, and last week, the Forum submitted proposals for 5G fixed/mobile convergence to the 3GPP. These proposals were drawn up at the request of operators which take part in both standards bodies, the BBF said, after a “comprehensive cycle of iterative feedback between the two organizations”. “Two years ago, 10 of the world’s biggest operators came to us with their concerns that the 5G infrastructure which was being developed would not let them…
As we have often argued in Wireless Watch, the edge computing trend has shifted significantly over the past year, and moved further away from the operators’ grasp. New alignments in the nascent sector reflect that, from the recent merger of the OpenFog Alliance and the Industrial IoT Consortium (IIC), to the launch of yet another grouping, the Kinetic Edge Alliance (KEA). This is not an open source or industry standards effort like some of the other edge groups, but has been spearheaded by Vapor IO, around its own edge platform. This Kinetic Edge architecture supports multiple micro-data centers spread across a city, which can be combined into a single virtual facility with citywide coverage using software-defined interconnection. As founder and…
The new operators may be moving rapidly, but AT&T is the poster child for an old-school telco which has seized the opportunity of transforming itself with digital, cloud and virtualization technologies. This long and challenging process should, it hopes, greatly enhance the range and value of services with which to ensure return on its 5G and fiber investments. As part of its transformation process, it has shaken up its supply chain and introduced new vendors alongside its traditional partners. The latest new partner is cloud platform provider Mirantis, which has won a three-year deal to help the telco build out the next generation of its Network Cloud, this one focused on 5G. AT&T has been building this Network Cloud using…
In Japan, so often the center of mobile industry innovation, the challenges of the 5G era are exemplified. The three MNOs – NTT Docomo, KDDI and Softbank – are known for technical innovation but exist in a saturated, over-regulated market, and now have to cope with the imminent entry of a newcomer, ecommerce giant Rakuten, which plans to build on its existing MVNO business now it has secured its own spectrum. Rakuten is the epitome of the modern digital operators which could shake up this industry in the 2020s (Reliance Jio of India being another). It has a significant digital services business based on ecommerce and payments. It can leverage its own 4G network to expand the mobile aspects of…
There is more disruptive potential in ComReg’s decision to set aside a 3.5 GHz licence, in its recent 5G-oriented auction, for a new entrant. This was won by Dense Air, a subsidiary of vendor Airspan, whose model is to build neutral host, small cell networks, geared to locations or industries where it is hard to for multiple MNOs to justify the cost of build-out (for instance, railways, roads or large indoor/outdoor industrial complexes). Dense Air is a good example of a vendor extending its business model, as Nokia is doing with WING (see below), in a way that should drive adoption of its equipment and services, but also add new revenue streams. The significance lies in the decision to support…
Some of the telcos are new entrants, which are helping to redefine the rules and push the incumbents to rethink their models. Others, like AT&T and KDDI, are old-timers which are starting to go through that process of identifying new markets, and the platforms they will need to capture them. In all cases, the most MNO innovation is being seen in countries where there is a combination of consolidation and new entrants. Although it seems counter-intuitive, some of the most interesting markets are those where old, slow-moving operators are merging, but rather than reducing competition, that is enabling a new and more creative company to enter the game. This has happened in India, now reduced to three large operators (plus…
As with NFV, so with software-defined networking (SDN) – operators have good intentions, but are at the very early stages of large-scale implementation. So perhaps, as in other areas, telcos can learn from the web-scale industry, which is already a lot further along with SDN. And if Google is to be believed, it has already progressed to a whole new phase of SDN, which it calls a ‘network brain’ (or ‘temporospatial SDN’). The latest study to indicate how gradually SDN is making inroads into the central operations of operators comes from IHS Markit, whose survey found that most service providers have started evaluating or deploying SDN, but that barriers remain. The highest ones relate to products not being trusted to…
The FCC’s first millimeter wave (mmWave) spectrum auction may be seen as a milestone for 5G, because of the regulator’s leadership in getting these high frequency airwaves into operators’ hands, but it will not excite the US Treasury. Provisional winning bids (PWBs) totaled $702,572,410 as the process ended. The regulator has 107 licenses in the 28 GHz band still available, but has received no further bids, withdrawals or other action after 176 rounds of bidding, which started on November 14. “Therefore, bidding in the Commission’s first auction of Upper Microwave Flexible Use Service licenses has concluded under the simultaneous stopping rule,” the FCC said on January 25. It has announced March 14 as the start date for its next mmWave…