Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Intel is supplying its True View technology to three English Premier League soccer clubs, Arsenal FC, Liverpool FC and Manchester City to power new features including multi-angle views of play, be the player capabilities, and a laser wall giving viewers a clear picture as to where players are positioned on a pitch. Intel True View uses the volumetric video capturing and rendering technology to record 38 5K UHD cameras, processing a substantial amount of data on servers running Intel Core i7 and Intel Xeon processors. Software then re-creates all the viewpoints of a fully volumetric 3D person or object – rendering a virtual environment in multi-perspective 3D with true 6 degrees of freedom. Esports production firm Espat Media has partnered…
A small but influential group of mobile operators are introducing radical new approaches to network build-out, to disruptive effect, in some key world markets. Free Mobile’s skillful harnessing of its existing fiber and WiFi assets to reduce cellular costs and undercut its rivals’ pricing has shaken up the French market in recent years, and parent Iliad hopes to do the same in Italy now. A similar approach might be taken by Germany’s new mobile entrant, 1&1 Drillisch, if it buys 5G spectrum. Reliance Jio has rewritten all the rules in India, and now ecommerce giant Rakuten plans to do the same in the entrenched market of Japan. Superficially, what the first three have in common is an aggressive stance on…
Claiming to be the world’s only vendor currently providing interoperable G.fast and VDSL technology, Nokia has landed a huge deal at second-placed Japanese mobile network operator KDDI – upgrading MDUs (multi-dwelling units) to speeds of 830 Mbps. At a time when Japan is caught in a fight with Korea and China to be first to 5G, aiming to deliver the next-gen mobile network by the Japan 2020 Summer Olympics, some significant broadband news makes for refreshing reading. The announcement notes that Japan-specific VDSL2 technology is relied upon by between 5 million and 6 million residents, those who require network upgrades, while over 30 million households receive FTTH/FTTB services, of which approximately 9 million are MDU residents. But as fiber picks…
Live encoding expert Haivision has unveiled the Makito X4 encoder, a 4K UHD capable bit of kit powered by the vendor’s new HEVC/H.264 programmable 8 core encoding engine. The result is support for 4K UHD or quad HD at a full 60 frames per second with HDR support, and this ability to pack so much bang into such a small package is testament to the development of the Secure Reliable Transport (SRT) protocol, which Haivision drummed up an orchestra about during a chat a few months back. Although targeted primarily at broadcast production studios for on-the-go encoding capabilities, Haivision has also marketed the Makito X4 as suitable for at-home production workflows – branching outside its core market in doing so.…
The AV1 codec from the Alliance for Open Media (AOM) has passed another significant milestone on the road towards widespread adoption with Intel’s launch of the first open source CPU-based encoder for the emerging standard. This complements the first reference decoders already available giving device makers and streaming providers a full tool set to start developing fully AV1 compliant products and services. We recall that the AV1 code base was finally frozen in March 2018, but it has taken until now for the first fully compliant encoder to arrive and even that is a software tool running in the CPU ahead of dedicated AV1 encoders being released later in 2019. The Intel CPU-based encoder, which supports Linux, macOS and Windows…
Telenor is the latest operator to dampen vendors’ hopes that 5G might drive a significant revival in their network equipment revenues. The Norwegian company said it has no plans to increase its overall capex spending this year, despite starting to prepare the ground for commercial 5G in 2020. The operator said, in its quarterly earnings statement, that it would invest between NOK16bn and NOK17bn ($1.9bn to $2bn) in capex in 2019, excluding spectrum licences, which would close to 2018’s figure of NOK16.8bn. It said its goal was to reduce its capex-to-sales ratio to about 15% in 2020, from 15.4% in 2017. Its priorities for those investments in 2019 will be network modernization in its home market – fiber expansion and…
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) totalled $702,572,410 as the process ended. The regulator has 107 licences 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…
TomTom is offloading its telematics and fleet management division to Bridgestone, the world’s largest tyre manufacturer, for just over $1bn (€910m). The move comes as TomTom tries to shift its focus to digital maps, location services, and the high definition maps needed for self-driving vehicles. This is to catch up to and counter the progress of Here, as well as Waymo. Based in Japan, Bridgestone says it plans to use the data generated by the 861,000 vehicles (49,000 customers, 200m data points daily) monitored by the new purchase, to improve its product development and maintenance systems. The telematics wing accounted for 18% of TomTom’s 2017 revenue, employing 670 staff, and the company had floated the idea of selling Telematics a…
A small but influential group of mobile operators are introducing radical new approaches to network build-out, to disruptive effect, in some key world markets. Free Mobile’s skilful harnessing of its existing fiber and WiFi assets to reduce cellular costs and undercut its rivals’ pricing has shaken up the French market in recent years, and parent Iliad hopes to do the same in Italy now. A similar approach might be taken by Germany’s new mobile entrant, 1&1 Drillisch, if it buys 5G spectrum (see lead item). Reliance Jio has rewritten all the rules in India, and now ecommerce giant Rakuten plans to do the same in the entrenched market of Japan. Superficially, what the first three have in common is an…
Ericsson’s slow crawl back to financial health continued in its fourth quarter, as CEO Börje Ekholm said the results justified his decision to pull the firm back from his predecessor’s strategy of diversifying into new markets. Losses for Q418 fell year-on-year and the Swedish company reported its first full year of organic sales growth since 2013. Its headline figures were a net loss of $723.3m, down sharply on the year-ago loss of about $2bn; while sales were up 10% year-on-year to almost $7.1bn. For the full year, sales revenues grew by 3% in 2018, to SEK205.4bn ($22.6bn). The largest division, Networks, increased its sales by 12%, and the faster recovery in the core business may encourage Ericsson to divest even…
Conventional standards bodies are often at their weakest when two separate worlds converge. When the mobile network also became an IP and data network, it required a massive adjustment by its core standards body, the 3GPP, and uneasy cooperation with previously alien groups like the IETF (Internet Engineering Taskforce, the main Internet standards body). Into that breach, proprietary solutions can too easily step, but so can open source initiatives. As these start to have the same influence in telecoms as they have already had in the data center, it is no surprise that the Linux Foundation (LF) is building a power base in some of the new intersections – particularly between the telecoms network and the cloud. In the mobile…
We have often bemoaned the timorous nature of the regulators in setting the rules for the first wave of 5G auctions. In most of the advanced 5G countries, there has been a huge gap between the visions of governments and the actual spectrum rules, especially when it comes to the challenges of delivering enterprise, in-building and IoT services. At last, some regulators are taking a more creative view, with Germany seeking to extend the 5G airwaves beyond just the established MNOs. However, its plans are highly controversial, and regulator BNetzA will face a political battle to adopt a new approach, but unless they win, some of 5G’s benefits will certainly be diluted or lost. Despite grand strategy documents outlining the…
Smart cities are one of the most difficult IoT applications to scale. Test pilots are easy, but actually connecting every single process or task that a city needs to function smoothly, before considering adding connectivity to all the other non-mission-critical elements, is a monumental task. Due to the number of stakeholders involved, the idea of an overarching smart city orchestration protocol has proven enticing. To this end, MXC and Enlink have just announced a new collaboration that will see MXC provide its MXProtocol to Enlink’s smart city hardware. That deal comes shortly after the TALQ Consortium began ramping up to launch its v2.0 certification program. Of course, many vendors and platforms can solve this problem, with the trade-off being that…
As a whole, the blockchain trend has had a bit of an Icarus year, flying too close to the sun and being burnt for its hubris. But while it hasn’t yet fallen into the sea and drowned, as per the Greek myth, it has certainly been taken down a peg or two. There is now a great deal of skepticism, and companies and investors are taking much longer looks at the startups that have embraced the technology. To this end, Riot spoke to Constellation Labs, a startup focused on enterprise-blockchain applications, with IoT ambitions, to get some perspective on where the market has moved to. The gist of Constellation’s proposal is a data marketplace that uses a backbone based on…
A Gfast market update from the Broadband Forum has highlighted the growing popularity among operators, reporting that there are now 42 certified-interoperable Gfast solutions for the 106 MHz profile. The report highlighted the UK’s BT Openreach, which is deploying FTTP to 3 million UK premises and has pledged to pass around 10 million homes with Gfast by 2021 – enabling 330 Mbps services over its current FTTC network. Other operators using Gfast cited in the Market Update include Orange, SandyNet, Frontier, Post Luxembourg, Swisscom, Skywire Networks, and Australia’s National Broadband Network (NBN). Danish operator Stofa says it has established one of the world’s largest Remote-PHY networks in the world in record time, completing the network transformation using Arris R-PHY nodes.…
Pressures mount on Huawei as more western countries follow the US lead and call for sanctions or bans. Some operators, most recently Vodafone Group, are also succumbing to government pressure or their own nerves and backing away from the Chinese giant, even though they have been vocal about the risks to their 5G business case if they have only three effective network suppliers to choose from (Nokia, Ericsson and Samsung, if both Huawei and ZTE are blacklisted). Until last week, Huawei senior executives were still taking an upbeat tone even as they repeatedly denied allegations ranging from spying to breaking trade sanctions to stealing industrial secrets. But now the company has warned of job cuts and possible exits from some…
Cloud-based OTT video network Magine TV has ended a prolonged period of radio silence with news its B2C business is being sold to chief rival Zattoo, which will inherit the guts of the operation and shutter the service effective end of February. European consolidation has taken another victim prefigured as a potential Netflix killer – sliding what remains of the company quietly into the back office shadows. Zattoo and Magine TV are two similar companies whose business models have shifted in recent years to focus on being B2B technology vendors, so it would not surprise us if Zattoo were to make a similar move in the next couple of years – scrapping its consumer-facing service and going pure B2B. Both…
Prospects are looking up on two fronts for the third generation ATSC 3.0 digital terrestrial standard in the US a year ahead of deployment in 2020. Firstly, there is growing conviction that the major networks will collaborate to provide a coherent nationwide service exploiting new capabilities, notably ability to centralize transmissions by banding multiple TV stations in a single market using SFN (Single Frequency Network) technology. This follows the announcement at NAB Show New York in October 2018 that Fox, NBC, Univision, Pearl TV and Nexstar Media Group would collaborate over introduction of ATSC 3.0. Secondly, the features of ATSC 3.0 have received surprisingly strong endorsement from consumers in a recent survey, suggesting that it can help the networks compete…
The emergence of open source platforms for virtualized networks is an important trend in carrier deployments, but it does not necessarily make their digital programmes easier to implement. Operators like BT have said it is far more expensive to deploy open systems because of the increased need for skills – inhouse or consultants – to address the complexity, fragmentation, and sometimes immaturity of the code. This presents a clear opportunity for software companies which can shield operators from these complexities and provide turnkey solutions in crucial areas like virtual network MANO (management and orchestration), based on open foundations but with the various elements pre-packaged, tested and customized for the operator’s requirements. The idea of MANO as-a-service is becoming attractive, then.…