Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Axonize, an Israeli start-up now headquartered in Bonn, Germany, is one of several start-ups addressing the fast-expanding field of IoT software development platforms – designed to ease and accelerate application development. Founded in 2016 with $7.8mn funding raised so far, it has been faster off the blocks than some of its competitors partly because it arrived at the right time, when demand for IoT development services was ramping up, while rivals had struggled earlier to gain traction. The firm’s ability to get smaller projects that demonstrate ROI up and running quickly has helped amass an impressive range of big-name customers in a short time, with Singaporean telco SingTel and Australia’s Optus latest to sign up in November 2018. They join…
The SIM card has always been the mobile operators’ tool to keep users locked in and to monetize their connectivity. In recent years though, their grip has weakened. Dual-SIM devices, low cost SIM-only deals, and the rise of the embedded SIM have changed the rules. With eSIM, handset makers like Apple, or IoT service providers, can control the SIM and adapt it for any operator remotely. And in 5G, there will be even more changes to the landscape. The SIMalliance has just published its technical definitions of a 5G SIM card, saying the aims is to support “optimization of 5G SIM capability beyond network access to unlock the full potential of 5G network investments”. The organization recognizes the challenges that…
The decision by Canadian connected car cloud platform start-up Mojio to join the Internet of Things Consortium (IoTC) has been trumpeted loudly by both parties over the recent holiday period, perhaps hoping to make a splash ahead of the Consumer Electronics Show. The IoTC has struggled to make itself heard against the clamor from IoT standards bodies and industry associations and has so far failed to gain the thought leadership position it hoped when founded in 2015. It has however gained more prominence with the continuing rise of the connected car and signing up Mojio, as one of Canada’s fastest growing start-ups, has somewhat boosted its profile. The IoTC was set up as a forum for knowledge sharing and establishment…
The mood in the world of AI has changed subtly during 2018, stemming from a desire to avoid a hard landing from the hype that has lifted the field to stratospheric heights of over-expectation. This has not tempered enthusiasm so much as dampened some of the rhetoric associated with deep machine learning in particular, where the essential error has been to exaggerate the level of general intelligence that has been achieved. That echoed earlier mistakes dating right back to the dawn of AI, when progress on a very limited use case confined to a small vocabulary led to wild prognostications that machine translation would be solved within a few years. Such mindless over excitement has caused the larger AI field…
The sale just before Christmas of 774,200 DTH TV customers by Liberty Global is a rationalization that has probably come too late to save the value in this customer base. When last reported individually, these markets were Romania (356,500), Hungary (258,400), the Czech Republic (99,100) and Slovakia (75,500) – but since 2017 Liberty has lost some 45,000 DTH customers – likely due to lack of attention and this segment already being unofficially on the market. The cheeky private equity-run M7 was perhaps always the most likely company to take them on, due to its attention to detail and its ability to make money out of smaller existing DTH customer bases, which are perceived in the market as weak. It acquired…
Casual credentials sharing over OTT services where people give passwords to friends and family so they can tap their subscriptions is almost certainly more common than “official” figures suggest. It is almost encouraged by some services, in both SVoD and live sports, by typically allowing two or three simultaneous active streams. Until recently this has been regarded like shrinkage in retail as something that has to be tolerated and nothing much can be done about, even though it represents lost revenue. Most surveys put the incidence of regular casual password sharing in the range 25% to 40%, but it is a good bet well over half of subscribers indulge in the practice occasionally. There is also evidence that password sharing…
The SIM card has always been the mobile operators’ tool to keep users locked in and to monetize their connectivity. In recent years though, their grip has weakened. Dual-SIM devices, low cost SIM-only deals, and the rise of the embedded SIM have changed the rules. With eSIM, handset makers like Apple, or IoT service providers, can control the SIM and adapt it for any operator remotely. And in 5G, there will be even more changes to the landscape. The SIMalliance has just published its technical definitions of a 5G SIM card, saying the aims is to support “optimization of 5G SIM capability beyond network access to unlock the full potential of 5G network investments”. The organization recognizes the challenges that…
As if Italian operators don’t have enough to deal with – given the entrant of disruptor Iliad and the high price of the recent spectrum auction – they are now facing new competition from Sky Italia. The pay-TV provider is taking a shot at a quad play offering by launching mobile services via an MVNO agreement, to complement its plans in the fixed broadband sector. That could make it a significant player in the market, particularly challenging fixed-line providers. The existing operators were put on notice when Sky Italia was added to regulator Agcom’s public register of communications operators, which means it has official status as a telecoms operator. Earlier this year, Sky confirmed plans to launch fixed broadband services…
Huawei is fighting back against mounting pressures with bold statements about its 5G leadership, and commitments to convince governments that its security record is “clean”. The firm’s rotating CEO, Ken Hu, told the Financial Times that Huawei had won 25 5G contracts and was on course to report annual revenues of more than $100bn – in other words, it is the best placed vendor to supply any operator which wants to roll out 5G at an early stage. “Our customers continue to trust us,” he said, hitting out at “efforts in some markets to create fear about Huawei”, and at political interference in business matters. This was a clear reference to the USA, which has excluded Chinese vendors from national…
Most commercial deployments based around emerging open RAN architectures are in small cell networks, which are often in greenfield environments and can be deployed at limited scale, at far lower risk than a main macro network. These early roll-outs will provide valuable lessons about how open architectures work in practice and how they compare, in performance terms, with traditional networks. At the Telecom Infra Project Summit in London this autumn, Parallel Wireless gained a significant profile boost when it was selected as one of the vendors which best met the scope of an RFI (request for information) from the TIP’s OpenRAN project group. The aim of the process was to identify and highlight suppliers which might be well positioned to…
In 2018, the ideas of open RAN have really gained prominence. A year ago they seemed abstruse and confined to small cells. Now the activities of the Open RAN (ORAN) Alliance and Facebook-initiated Telecom Infa Project (TIP) have recruited major vendors and operators to the cause of an open network based on commoditized hardware; open interfaces between the elements of a disaggregated RAN; and a heavy dose of virtualization. If these two initiatives succeed in converging next year, the proprietary RAN market really could start to change. Just before the year ends, the ORAN Alliance – formed from the merger of the AT&T-founded xRAN Forum and the China-oriented C-RAN Alliance – finally signed up Verizon. Although the US carrier had…
There are three key milestones in 2019 which will shape the way 5G networks are deployed and the use cases they can support in future. These are the next phase of Release 15 standards from the 3GPP; and two big decisions by the ITU (International Telecoms Union) – the selection of official IMT-2020 technologies, and the allocation of global 5G spectrum bands at the World Radio Conference 2019. Both the ITU events will take place towards the end of next year, while the next stage in 3GPP standards-setting has been postponed by three months. The ‘late drop’ of specifications for Release 15 was due to be frozen at the turn of the year, but that will no happen in March.…
With disputes looming in many of the millimeter wave bands (see preceding item), the cellular industry is scrambling to make the argument for most of this spectrum being turned over to 5G. The CTIA, in the USA, has proposed to squeeze satellite incumbents into part of the 50 GHz band; while the GSMA is wooing regulators and goverments with claims that mmWave 5G could boost the total growth in GDP, enabled by 5G, by 25% – and boost tax coffers. Harnessing high frequency spectrum to support innovative 5G services could add $565bn to global GDP and $152bn in tax revenue from 2020 to 2034 , according to the GSMA-commissioned report, entitled ‘Socio-Economic Benefits of 5G Services Provided in mmWave Bands’. However,…
As of Monday (December 17) the FCC’s 28 GHz auction had reached $688.7m in total bids after 74 rounds of bidding. There will be a break in the process from 1pm (Eastern Time) on Friday December 21 until 10am on January 3 2019. There are now 2,939 licences in the 28 GHz band with provisional winning bids and 133 left on the table. That auction is clearly reaching its conclusion, and the probable final prices will reflect changes in the perception of high frequency spectrum. Prices per MHz/pop will be low because of the high capacity of this band – in the upcoming 24 GHz auction, the opening prices have been set a full 188 times lower than those for…
So, there’s still no smoking gun. Bloomberg doesn’t have one of these suspect-servers in its storage cupboards, nor does it have logs that might prove the associated command and control servers that were supposedly responsible. Similarly, there’s not web-logs that prove that one of these apparent servers was leaking secrets or talking to sketchy strangers in internet chatrooms, and to the best of our knowledge, the only damage that has been done by the supposed attack is that which has been wrought on SuperMicro’s share price. Apple and Amazon saw brief dips in their prices, caught up in the allegations, but have since seemed unscathed – although both have suffered declines in share price since the accusations. However, most technology…
The crisis facing Huawei and ZTE is deepening. Last week, Huawei’s CFO, Meng Wanzhou – who is also the daughter of the company’s founder – was arrested in Canada, at the behest of the USA. This was a move that dramatically escalated the tensions between China and USA over trade wars and national security claims, which have become heavily centered on 5G. The USA wants to extradite her, as part of its investigation into Huawei’s alleged use of the global banking system to get round US sanctions and export blacklisted items to Iran. That was the same allegation that led to sanctions and fines – and a temporary bar on any access to US components – against ZTE. Then Japan…
The two main bodies developing open source platforms for management and orchestration (MANO) tend to announce their rival specifications at the same time. Once again, ONAP (Open Network Automation Protocol), the AT&T-initiated, Linux Foundation-hosted group, unveiled its latest release within days of new technology from ETSI’s Open Source MANO (OSM) project. ONAP’s new release is called Casablanca and claims to make its software more modular, and easier to deploy for the efficient, flexible management of virtualized networks. For the first time, it will support physical network functions (PNFs) alongside their virtual equivalents (VNFs), a critical step forward for many telcos, which expect their physical and virtual worlds to coexist for many years. Casablanca’s 5G blueprint aims to extend zero-touch orchestration…
Virtualized RAN has so far been a big disappointment to operators. The more bullish ones expected to start deploying it in the latter stages of 4G, improving the flexibility and cost of their networks even before 5G arrived. In reality, operators wanting to make an early start on 5G have faced a choice of adopting conventional architecture, since standardized, affordable vRANs are still not available; or investing in something hand-crafted and expensive (as SK Telecom has, for instance). But vRAN still lies at the heart of the planned transformation of network economics, which will be essential to justify 5G deployment at scale. And Nokia believes the acceleration of 5G roll-out in some markets will have a knock-on effect on the…
Despite the hype about 5G, many MNOs are clear that LTE still has considerable headroom, and a mature ecosystem. For many applications, including those requiring wide area coverage and affordable gigabit data rates, they will continue to enhance their 4G networks, adding new spectrum and smaller cells to boost capacity. However, there is one area in which 4G – or rather, the way MNOs have deployed it – has failed, and that is in deep indoor coverage. High quality indoor mobile signals remain elusive and in many industries, in-building coverage is scandalously low. This severely limits the extent to which enterprises can support basic applications like unbroken voice calls, let alone think about ultra-reliable IoT services or other 5G-class activities.…
AT&T has been a driving force behind the conversion of telco networks to white box platforms, and last week, at the ONF (Open Networking Foundation) Connect conference, it announced its latest milestone – large scale production testing of white box cells site gateway routers. The progress was discussed at the event by Andre Fuetsch, chair of the ONF, president of AT&T Labs and CTO. He said: “This is really exciting. This is a first for us. We believe in our community of operators it’s a first for the industry.” He believes the use of white boxes in this area of the network will be essential to keep the costs of backhauling increasingly dense 5G networks under control. The white box…