Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
India has initiated an anti-dumping probe on solar glass, once again at the request of Indian glass producer Borosil Renewables. This time the investigation is aimed at China and Vietnam (where a previous probe looked at Malaysia). India’s Directorate General of Trade Remedies (DGTR) may apply a punitive tariff designed to level the playing field for domestic Indian glass makers, perhaps analogous to the 40% module and 25% cell tariffs, although these were a matter of government policy rather than trade administration. That in turn would mark another major supply chain segment which Indian manufacturers could attempt to reshore – with Borosil having opened its third solar glass furnace a year ago, which brought its production capacity to 1,000 tons…
Japan’s Proterial – formerly known as Hitachi Metals – has unveiled a new alloy for use in electric motor cores, which it claims could drive power efficiency gains by up to 5%. Proterial claims this product will also help alleviate pressure on rare earth material markets by using ferrite magnets with less detrimental effects than it would usually involve. Proterial has been light on details as to what exactly this mystery material is, other than calling it a laminated bonded amorphous alloy ribbon, which it could only convert into material suitable for motor cores through the company’s advanced transformer core technology. Proterial claims that the alloy is 5x stronger than a standard non-oriented electrical steel sheet, creating issues related to…
1s1 Energy, a US- and Portugal-based start-up founded in 2019, is among those electrolyzer ventures in prime position to capitalize on wider market dynamics and take center stage if it manages to bring its next generation PEM (Proton Exchange Membrane) electrolyzer to market with an economically viable method. History Founded by Daniel Sobek (CEO), Sukanta Bhattacharyya (CTO), Thiago Figueiredo (CBO), and Don Tilley (Professor at University of California, Berkeley), the company is still at the early stages of commercialization, with the first pilot agreement having taken shape in 2023 with Enel Green Power – 1s1 Energy brought a 2 kW, 300 cm2 active area design to the table. In 2020, the company formulated its first boron-based membranes, initiated its first…
M&A, IP, Patents The European Commission has approved Orange’s Spanish merger with MasMovil. The combined entity will have over 30 million mobile subscribers, 7.3 million fixed line subs, and 2.2 million TV customers. It comes as rumors spilled out of the EC concerning a planned relaxing of anti-merger rules for the sector, to ensure they can achieve the necessary scale needed to build ‘next generation networks.’ 5G Standalone AT&T and FirstNet have announced a ten-year $8 billion investment roadmap, which will create a 5G Standalone core network, add 1,000 new base stations in the next two years, and ensure that first responders in the USA receive always-on priority. T-Mobile USA has claimed a new 5G uplink record, of 345 Mbps,…
The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) is laying out its case for Bluetooth’s role in the ‘Ambient Internet of Things.’ The 2.4 GHz IEEE 802.15.1 PHY layer has lost ground in the IoT to the 802.15.4 family, now mostly centered around Zigbee and Thread, despite having its own mesh networking implementation. Bluetooth Mesh missed its window. After attending a soft launch event, back in 2015, it was frustrating to see so many delays before the official launch of Bluetooth 5 – in July 2017. During that time, Thread made a lot of noise, and both Zigbee and Z-Wave were vibrant alternatives. There was a clear benefit to having a smartphone-native low-power mesh protocol, but the market was not interested, and…
It can be hard separating the wheat from the chaff, when it comes to judging the Generative AI (GenAI) pronouncements of the major mobile equipment vendors, which all have their own distinctive spins. There will be a spate of announcements at Mobile World Congress 2024, in Barcelona next week, but Nokia has jumped the gun by presenting a GenAI tool for industrial applications with talk of testing with existing customers in the field later in 2024 just ahead of first commercial availability. Nokia describes it as the “first OT (Operational Technology) compliant GenAI solution for connected workers,” although Huawei may have something to say about that, having launched what it called pre-trained industrial models at its annual Huawei Developer Conference Cloud in…
When Ericsson completed its acquisition of Vonage almost two years ago, there was still widespread bemusement about its motivation to spend $6.2 billion on a company that was chiefly associated with declining telco opportunities such as VoIP. However, the Swedish vendor set out a compelling vision of taking Vonage’s underlying communications platform, and its technology for aggregating third party APIs (application programming interfaces) and turning them into a key enabler of new-generation services for its operator customers. The realization of the strategy has been slow, and last October, Ericsson took a $2.94 billion non-cash charge in its third quarter to reflect the diminished value of its purchase over the first year of ownership. Now, Verizon has announced that Vonage is…
With Mobile World Congress 2024 looming, the Open RAN community is preparing to dominate the conversation in Barcelona, as it has, in different ways, for the past two years, though recent high-profile deals for tier 1 vendors show their dominance over smaller providers. In 2022, the first full-scale MWC after the pandemic hiatus, the mood around Open RAN was in keeping with the return to ‘business as usual’, upbeat and optimistic. Last year saw something of a reset in expectations, as vendors and operators acknowledged that a transition to a multivendor, cloud-based architecture for the RAN (the most expensive and business-critical investment they ever make) came with significant risk and time-to-deploy. The definition of ‘Open RAN’ was widely scaled back,…
A whiteboard sketch in a subterranean office maps the University of Bristol’s first test network. The drawing has been on the wall since 2016, a researcher explained, and though people have planned to map all the test networks on the university’s system, there are now so many – both fixed and wireless – that the updated map would take-over the office. Last week, Wireless Watch took a tour of the Smart Internet Lab and sat down with Professor Dimitra Simeonidou, Head of Bristol Digital Futures Institute, to learn about the latest at the burgeoning laboratory. The University of Bristol’s Smart Internet lab is a communication and network research unit and networking testbed formed in 2017. The research unit consists of…
A draft white paper from the European Commission shows just how ready the body is to compel Big Tech to pay ‘fair share’ contributions to help build Europe’s mobile networks, and while M&A may be needed across the continent, the case against fair share still holds strong. In a draft paper leaked last week, the commission showed a softened approach to telecom M&A, unlike that seen in recent years, to help fund 5G roll out for European operators with low growth prospects. A recent survey by TelecomTV showed that the market was split over fair share. The group surveyed, which included operators, vendors and enterprise players, showed that views were split almost right down the middle on the topic. Some…
Five years ago this week… Australian telco Telstra sold off Ooyala to its rival Brightcove for $15 million—pennies compared to the $500 million Telstra paid to acquire the video platform vendor. Brightcove was buying Ooyala’s online video platform Backlot, as well as Analytics and Live Products and backbone IP technology in particular. Amusingly, the union of the two rivals definitively put to bed a 2017 fight between the vendors, where Ooyala accused Brightcove of stealing business strategies relevant to Latin America, including customer lists, sales pitches, pricing, market plans and corporate strategies. At the time, Faultline wrote “We can tell you for sure that the Ooyala strategy is not working in Latin America, so we’re not sure what is worth stealing.” …
A world-first video encoding breakthrough has come not from AWS Elemental, Synamedia, Harmonic, Telestream, or Vitec but from an unlikely source in UK-based Open Broadcast Systems – claiming the first encode/decode platform supporting 100 Gigabit Ethernet. The engineering exploit will further shepherd the transition of broadcasters from SDI to IP and cloud-based video infrastructure. Faced with strong customer demand for bulk encoding from ST-2110 (the video-over-IP suite of standards) to MPEG-TS (Transport Stream) or SRT (Secure Reliable Transport) streams, the result of Open Broadcast Systems’ leap forward is a “game-changer” for customers in the business of live video delivery. Sky, Warner Bros Discovery, and IMG are three clients Open Broadcast Systems can name publicly which are currently on 25 Gigabit…
Behind an OTT video customer announcement from satellite operator Hispasat, Faultline learns that the Spanish connectivity and video services provider is planning a bigger push for its wholesale white-label service in Latin America. Ecuadorian FTTH provider Netlife is Hispasat’s first non-satellite customer, two years after launching its Wave OTT Plus platform-as-a-service, to create its own OTT video product—dubbed Netlife Play, pre-loaded with local and international content. This pre-acquired content is the “Plus” add-on to the existing Wave OTT platform, a “new flavor”—in the words of Hispasat’s Head of Product and Verticals Business Development. Jorge Rodríguez. The necessity of introducing a new taste to the service became apparent when Rodríguez revealed that Netlife is the first customer of Hispasat’s OTT offering…
The arrival of new WiFi standards may be slowing, but consumer data consumption is showing no similar mercy. Network management vendor OpenVault has released its latest Broadband Insights (OVBI) report, which suggests that US homes could be consuming over 1 TB of data per month by 2029. Average broadband data consumption in the US has now surpassed 641 GB per month, up 9.3% from the end of 2022. The vast majority of this is downstream, at 600.9 GB per month, while upstream usage is just 40 GB. Average speeds are 508 Mbps downstream versus 28 Mbps upstream. If current growth rates persist, it looks likely that average bandwidth usage for US homes will be over 700 GB per month by…
When we think about NextGen TV, the main consumer-facing selling points are interactive features, personalization, 4K HDR, and enhanced audio – all available for free over-the-air with compatible hardware. Environmental impact has never come up in conversation as a weapon for the ATSC 3.0 camp to use against pure play streaming services – but that could be about to change. Faultline has learned that broadcasters in the US are interested in creating a copycat version of a report published in France two years ago, which sought to bring light to the disparity in energy consumption between IP-based video delivery and traditional digital terrestrial television (DTT). This 2022 report was published under the guise of the Low Carbon TV Delivery (LoCaT)…
The news about hydrogen refueling stations, whether aimed at trucks or passenger vehicles, is not very positive these days. Closure announcements are taking center stage amid general concern surrounding the green hydrogen industry. The wider hydrogen industry, meanwhile, is still supplied in great proportion by grey hydrogen produced from natural gas. This type of hydrogen, as the process suggests, is closely linked with the price of the feedstock which is nothing short of highly volatile. If multiple sectors are to place their bets on hydrogen to decarbonize they need a fuel with a better price structure in place. The green hydrogen industry will take a while to scale up but when precisely should your business look into opening a hydrogen…
M&A, IP, Patents Nokia has announced its seventh major smartphone patent license agreement, which closes a renewal cycle that commenced in 2021. It expects a €400 million lift to its Q1 sales, due to prior periods of non-payment. Altice Group is reportedly seeking $10.78 billion for its Portuguese assets. STC has been tied to the acquisition, as has Iliad Group, and a joint bid involving Warburg Pincus. A plan from CK Hutchison to sell a 60% stake in the network assets of Italian subsidiary Wind Tre to private equity company EQT Infrastructure for €3.4 billion has been scrapped because conditions of the deadline had not been met, according to CK Hutchison. 5G Core BT has said it is in the…
Samsung and Vodafone have announced what they claim is the first end-to-end data call (session) using AMD’s CPUs. Running in Supermicro servers, using Wind River’s Studio Container-as-a-Service (CaaS) platform, and Samsung’s vRAN software, the Epyc 8004 CPUs, appear to have delighted Samsung and Vodafone. This should alarm Intel, the chief x86 CPU rival, but the question of general purpose versus bespoke silicon in the RAN market is still a hot topic. This is true in many other niches in the communications market, but with Samsung looking to challenge the old guard in the RAN sector (Ericsson, Huawei, Nokia), this AMD endorsement is significant. The test was carried out in Samsung’s R&D lab, in Korea. In September 2023, Samsung and AMD…
The potential for Layer 4 Switching (L4S) at the transport level, above the network to reduce latency for time critical applications delivered over mobile services, has been demonstrated in a trial just completed by Verizon and Ericsson. The pair claimed this demonstrated L4S could help ensure consistently low end-to-end delays for a variety of time sensitive interactive applications, especially AR/VR (Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality), drone operations, video conferencing, and V2X (Vehicle to Everything) communications in the automotive sector. All of these require sustained throughput at specified bit rates, while keeping within strict latency budgets. In this case, the L4S trial, conducted at Ericsson’s 5G innovation and co-creation lab in the US, tested an XR application accessed through a headset using the…
Telecom security firm SecurityGen provides security to operators in sub-Saharan Africa, South East Asia and the Middle East. Wireless Watch sat down with SecurityGen CTO Dmitry Kurbatov and CEO Amit Nath, to discuss the global telecoms security space and the unusual behavior of hackers of late. While 5G is inherently more secure than earlier generations, certain applications, like Internet of Things (IoT) and multi access edge computing (MEC), will create more opportunities for attackers to access the network. In particular, the virtualization and cloudification of radio access network infrastructure exposes telcos to bad actors. But constrained capital expenditures and operating expenses mean that operators are more concerned with building and maintaining their infrastructure than predicting the security threats that could upend them.…