Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Until now, flying drones or robots have been inspired by fixed wing aircraft or helicopters rather than flying insects. But that could be about to change for smaller sizes at least, thanks to research taking advantage of AI-based technologies. While being inspired by insect counterparts, emerging drones with flapping wings also promise to help clear up remaining puzzles over the aerodynamics of insect flight, as well as opening new IoT applications in remote monitoring and surveillance. Their main advantage lies in smaller size since making working propeller-based drones on that scale would be prohibitively expensive per unit. The new designs also score on agility, through making use of insect-like aerodynamic capabilities. At least two significant steps have been taken in…
Throughout the era of rapid expansion in public WiFi, India has usually lagged behind in freeing up licence-exempt spectrum. A decade ago, the number of WiFi hotspots in the huge country was tiny compared to most other markets. In recent years, the pace has picked up considerably, and operators have been reducing the cost of their wireless broadband build-outs – and compensating for small cellular spectrum allocations – by turning to WiFi. This has also been accelerated by Google’s build-outs of hotspots, many around railway stations, and efforts by government-backed initiatives and industrial players. Progress on the regulatory side is still slow compared to many other countries, however. The Indian government has only now freed up significant amounts of spectrum…
It took a few weeks but Faultline Online Reporter eventually managed to nail down some time with WiFi Alliance CEO Edgar Figueroa and given the current climate, it’s no wonder his schedule is jam-packed. There is a real sense of excitement about the role WiFi will play in the 5G era rather than becoming a dusty old delivery mechanism like some top figures have recently suggested, namely the CTO at UK regulator Ofcom, and the increasing hype is driving the exact innovation the WiFi Alliance was craving during our last conversation 9 months ago. “We are happy to be play a complimentary role to 5G, but still WiFi will be an essential technology in the 5G era,” noted Figueroa, who…
There is a huge gap between hype and reality over application of blockchain in the media, but no shortage of money piling in to start-ups calling for a radical overhaul of prevailing business models. They argue blockchain can liberate the long tail of content by streamlining critical trading activities, such as relationships with business partners and distribution of revenue across the value chain. Even for large content creators blockchain offers opportunities, with the potential to gain more control over distribution through flexible license models, as well as a greater share of revenue by cutting out the middle layer, which could also lead to faster monetization. The corollary is that blockchain threatens distributors, even possibly the largest such as Spotify and…
CommScope and Arris have agreed a $7.4 billion takeover deal. The most pressing issue for us is how CommScope, as a network infrastructure supplier, is likely to accelerate the unraveling of Arris’ focus on set tops, while the Arris network product line will be geared towards complementing CommScope’s existing portfolio, rather than opening up a whole new world of prospects for the world’s largest set top business. On the other hand, there is a slim chance the merger could give Arris scale for a remarkable CPE turnaround to better compete with Samsung, Humax and Huawei. When M&A rumors first swirled a couple of weeks ago, the two firms were similar in size, Arris with a market cap of a little…
Rising frustration at the slow pace of telco network virtualization has been a strong theme of 2018, pouring cold water on the heady enthusiasm of earlier years, and the hopes that NFV and software-defined networking (SDN) would quickly transform the cost base and service models of the MNOs, well ahead of 5G. In fact, first-stage 5G roll-outs are coming more quickly than major virtualization programs for most MNOs, particularly when it comes to the RAN, and operators are having to rethink the economics of their early deployments. One problem is that there are so many efforts to achieve the much-needed common framework. Some are conducted by open industry alliances, some by standards bodies, and in many cases they overlap or…
Throughout the era of rapid expansion in public WiFi, India has usually lagged behind in freeing up licence-exempt spectrum. A decade ago, the number of WiFi hotspots in the huge country was tiny compared to most other markets. In recent years, the pace has picked up considerably, and operators have been reducing the cost of their wireless broadband build-outs – and compensating for small cellular spectrum allocations – by turning to WiFi. This has also been accelerated by Google’s build-outs of hotspots, many around railway stations, and efforts by government-backed initiatives and industrial players. Progress on the regulatory side is still slow compared to many other countries, however. The Indian government has only now freed up significant amounts of spectrum…
SK Telecom of Korea struck a blow for the vital operator goal of multivendor interoperability, announcing successful tests of a 5G Non-Standalone (NSA) Core, developed by Samsung, with 5G base stations from Nokia and Ericsson. The test took place at the company’s 5G testbed, in its Bundang offices. The MNO is in the vanguard of industry efforts to ensure there are fewer vendor lock-ins in the 5G era. It has worked with other operators, such as Orange and AT&T, to develop standard interfaces within 3GPP and NGMN processes. It is also engaged with some of the newer open initiatives, such as Telecom Infra Project, which are seeking to define uniform interfaces to allow any vendors’ gear to interoperate. The hope…
One way in which 5G promises to be very different from its predecessors is in its focus on open platforms and interfaces above the physical layer. Several high profile events in the past weeks have shone the spotlight on the essential requirement for standard interfaces throughout the 5G network, and this work is increasingly being driven by open initiatives as well as by conventional standards bodies. The Facebook-initiated Telecom Infra Project (TIP) and Linux Foundation-hosted ORAN Alliance are both working on common ways to interface the remote radio head, in a disaggregated RAN, with the virtualized baseband. There were strong hints, at the recent TIP Summit in London, that the two might converge their efforts, which are largely complementary, driving…
There can be few business prospects more unappealing than entering a saturated and competitive mobile market as a new entrant, without any of the infrastructure, brand awareness and partnerships enjoyed by the incumbents. Yet, even as established operators in many markets look to consolidate, and achieve better economies of scale, there are still some bold companies which believe they can change the rules of the mobile game, and come out on top. Some of these are established in adjacent markets – wireline providers moving into the mobile space for instance. That is challenging, but they do have the advantages of established customer bases in the telecoms and media space, plus a wealth of home WiFi and wireline backhaul links to…
// M&A, Strategies, Alliances // Delair has acquired some of Airwave’s assets, after the drone startup went bust last month. Delair has snapped up the Redbird analytics software, and 26 staff. Denso has acquired Ease Simulation, an automotive diagnostics software specialist, which Denso plans to use in its software and services business. OpenText is acquiring Liaison Technologies for $236mn ($310mn CAD), adding the application and data integration specialist to its EIM data management stack. // Hardware // ON Semiconductor has announced a new Bluetooth Mesh developer kit, based on its RSL10 family of Bluetooth 5.0 SoCs, housed in a USB dongle. STMicroelectronics has launched its new STM32L4xx MCUs, focused on very low power usage for longer-lasting smart device battery life.…
Nokia’s latest quarterly results revealed slight revenue improvements, a 40% year-on-year drop in net profits but improved operating margins. They were overshadowed by news of more job cuts, making it clear that, to achieve more impressive figures, the Finnish company still needs to slash its costs, as well as accelerating its expansion into new software and enterprise markets, and leveraging 5G. Its efforts to inject growth into its business and move beyond the current period of stagnation show a contrasting approach to that of arch-rival Ericsson. While Ericsson’s CEO, Börje Ekholm, reversed his predecessor’s strategy of expanding into new markets, especially vertical industry sectors, Nokia has been pushing aggressively to turn itself in to a software-driven company which has a…
You will have heard of IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat, priced at a 61% premium over closing share prices. This is either a move to snatch a leader and then aggressively scale it, returning multiple dollars in future business for each dollar spent now, or it’s a big gamble with a lot of risk. Your view will depend on your opinion of IBM leadership, but one wonders the rates one would get sticking that kind of cash in the bank. To some extent, this is IBM moving to counter Dell EMC and its VMware wing, to shore up core business while it tries to prove that there’s big money to be made in AI and blockchain (the two buzzwords that…
After drowning in analytics dashboards back at IBC and struggling to see much in the way of uniqueness, Faultline Online Reporter drew the conclusion of a saturated market where casualties will inevitably be claimed. We were therefore skeptical about diving into a conversation with CMS and analytics software vendor Zype, only to discover this is the type of start-up actively taking business from the old guard of OTT video like Ooyala – which actually explains a lot. “A lot of people turn their noses up when they hear CMS,” admitted Zype CEO Ed Laczynski, but in just 4 years the company has built what looks on the surface to be a comprehensive product portfolio around its core CMS API –…
Synamedia officially set up shop this week as private equity firm Permira Funds finalized its purchase of the Cisco Service Provider Video Software Solutions business. The last couple of months have been all strategy talk and speculation, as Faultline Online Reporter covered in great detail from IBC in Amsterdam, while the next few will be a critical execution period for the new look NDS amid increasing scrutiny. First of all, some additional fat trimming may be on the cards as we head into 2019. Still the company cites a workforce of “thousands” which, unusually for a large private equity takeover, seem to be safe – for now anyway – as leaving staff behind at Cisco and taking a price hit…
The use of VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) to bypass geoblocking has long been known and practiced, but it seems premium sports rights holders are only just discovering this for themselves. Next to secure communications, bypassing territorial controls in various guises has emerged as a major use case for VPNs with tools or apps available from legitimate sources such as Google Play Store. But it has also spurned a major and growing industry in VPN detection to enable rights holders to block their use and inevitably this has developed into an arms race. Various methods have evolved to avoid geoblocking, involving some form of location spoofing by avoiding transmission of the source device’s IP address, but VPNs are the most successful.…
When we tried to think through the strategy of Plume Wireless after last week’s run in with its CEO and co-founder Fahri Diner at BBWF, we found there remained more questions than answers, so reached out once more and this time Diner brought his technical heads to put across his corporate vision – and we have to relate that the vision is bigger than we gave the company credit. Alongside Diner was Bill McFarland the CTO and Aman Singla, VP engineering. The first thing you realize is that despite the world’s media, ourselves included, lining up Plume against WiFi software rivals AirTies, SoftAtHome, Celeno and ASSIA, that’s not supposed to be its business at all. The company has a simple…
Comcast’s first quarterly results after sealing the Sky acquisition for $39 billion in September, continued the recent theme of heavy churn from cable to OTT, offset by healthy growth in high speed broadband. The cable TV exodus shows no sign of slowing down with 342,000 net subs lost for the first nine months of 2018 after taking account of gains registered by the Xfinity Instant TV OTT service. Unlike Sky’s Now TV in Europe, Xfinity Instant TV is only available to Comcast broadband subscribers, but that is likely to change soon as the operator starts to align its global strategy more with Sky. This partly reflects failure of Comcast’s defense of multi-play bundles in the US as consumers continue to swing more…
Over the past two months we have been hearing murmurs about Broadcom going about its business in a previously unheard of manner, squeezing out parallel chip providers either with promises of higher discounts for pure Broadcom devices or threatening with higher prices if equipment vendors do not do as they are told. We advised one or two of these companies to get in touch with the European Commission DG4 and it looks like one or more of them have. While we have heard this story multiple times, we have not been able to gather sufficient evidence to run with it as a story – it seems the era of CEO Hock Tan is all about the money and not at…
Intel and ARM are engaged in an unusual burst of collaboration, announcing a partnership to reduce the complexity of the onboarding process for IoT devices , while allowing customers to move between different onboarding architectures and cloud provisioning systems. The cooperation focuses on extending Intel’s Secure Device Onboard service to support devices powered by ARM cores; while enabling ARM’s Pelion IoT Platform to onboard and manage x86 devices and gateways. Jim McGregor, principal analyst at Tirias Research, told EETimes that the collaboration probably arose from ARM’s acquisition of several IoT companies which were already working with Intel platforms. Whatever the motivation, “this is good for developers looking to leverage different platforms and good for ARM to include the widest array…