Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
One of the disappointing aspects of the first wave of 5G deployments is that most operators are not rolling out a full ‘5G platform’, but are building conventional physical RANs (see next item), while moving towards virtualized cores and digital infrastructure in a parallel, not an integrated, strategy. This is disappointing because many of the benefits touted for 5G are not delivered by the 3GPP standards alone, but by IT technologies which were expected to accompany them – virtualization, software-defined networking (SDN), cloud-native platforms and artificial intelligence (AI). When these are combined with 5G networks – which were conceived to work with a software-driven approach – they should deliver the gains that are often claimed for 5G alone, including cost…
Days after Facebook had revealed the Portal and Portal Plus, direct rivals to Amazon’s Echo Show, Google waded into the smart home video conferencing space with its Google Home Hub. Evidently, video calling is a killer app, drawing the eye of these web giants, but Facebook’s support for Alexa, and apparently enthusiasm for a Google Assistant integration, could provide a neutral host with huge reach for the two camps. Lenovo actually beat Google to market with a video-screen hub based on Google Assistant. Amazon was first out, although the first Echo Show did look a lot less polished than the updated version launched a few weeks ago. For all these devices, there’s not exactly much in the way of clamor…
Full autonomous driving may be decades away but already vehicle OEMs are feeling its destructive force, and preparing, through partnerships, for the new business models it will usher in. They are all aware of forecasts such as Accenture’s, that by 2030 revenues from manufacturing and selling vehicles still be stuck at around $2.3tn and profits at about $140bn. During that time, revenues from mobility services are projected to soar to almost $1.4tn with profits overtaking those from vehicles themselves to reach $255bn. This reflects the expectation that mobility services such as ride-hailing and car sharing will be first to embrace full autonomy, long before it becomes virtually ubiquitous across all public highways. The balance of power will therefore shift gradually…
The AI and machine learning community is inextricable from open source software at this point, and there is no sign of this changing. In the past week, Microsoft and Nvidia have both unveiled new open source projects, driving home the idea that the majority of the money that will be made here is through providing services. It’s a contentious point, but boils down to the fact that most companies using AI-based technologies are going to be buying it from a cloud vendor, packaged as part of a larger suite. The market for on-premises appliances seems very small, and while bespoke software integrations are useful for specialist applications, the bulk of usage is going to be through platforms like Google’s GCP,…
Low power developer equipment specialist Pycom has announced a major reinvention of its wheelhouse, with plans to enter the service game and offer consumer asset tracking. The platform, powered by a collection of LPWAN protocols, is illustrative of the power of consumer IoT technologies, but faces a rather large hill to climb – gaining enough buy-in to prove viable as a standalone platform. There are prominent Bluetooth-only equivalents, from Tile and Trackr, which have enjoyed success, as well as some cellular trackers and a few LoRa experiments. However, the PyGo device appears to be the most comprehensive unit to date, although it must first graduate through Kickstarter. Pycom has enjoyed considerable success with crowdfunding, however, smashing the goals for its…
eSports firm Dreamback, part of MTG, is collaborating with Discovery Networks Denmark and Danish soccer league Superliga to form a national league pitting clubs against each other on FIFA, the popular console and PC game, rather than opening it up to consumers. Discovery’s streaming service DPlay will broadcast the tournament, called eSuperLiga, twice a week. It will debut on November 5, when 16 professional Danish soccer clubs will compete for a €50,000 ($58,000) check. Nokia is rolling out a suite of new Fixed Wireless Access products for broadband deployments geared towards 5G. Called FastMile, the portfolio includes high-gain outdoor receivers and indoor gateways for higher speeds and more consistent performance at the cell edge, plus lower RAN costs for operators.…
A worrying number of services, technologies and even entire subsets of video markets hinge on the arrival of 5G and some businesses will crash out before they even get a sniff. One video industry in particular was on the receiving end of a major incentive at the end of last week – as the 3GPP Codec and Media Working Group completed work on support for 360-degree VR video streaming services within Release 15. Just a few weeks after Mixed Reality headset developer Magic Leap seemingly packed its consumer bags for pastures new, one of the latest in a series of setbacks for virtual and augmented reality projects, the latest development is a well-needed source of reignited enthusiasm. The 3GPP specification…
Our coverage of Haivision from a few weeks ago deserves some follow up treatment. In conversation this week, the live encoding company sounded somewhat disappointed that we focused on the news in question which was a niche deal with Microsoft Stream for making C-suites look and sound better, rather than its real vested interest – drumming up support for SRT (Secure Reliable Transport). Faultline Online Reporter is well aware of vendors using industry publications as mediums for gaining traction, but if SRT was emerging as a favorite in the months preceding NAB 2017 when the new low latency video streaming protocol was open sourced, then today it has already come to dominate the market. That in itself is worth discussing…
What will it take to stop Quantenna engulfing everything in its path, especially when the WiFi chip maker gets a whiff of a tier 1 operator nearby? It didn’t take long for the WiFi chip developer to make its mark on French telecoms giant Orange, expanding its chipset deployment from Poland to France in less than a month. Clearly the big boys are more focused on cellular right now but the likes of Qualcomm could rue the day it allowed Quantenna to take a sizable share of the WiFi silicon market for access points and repeaters, particularly with the significant news from last week concerning the FCC reviewing a plan to open up 1.2 GHz of extra spectrum for WiFi.…
Video service providers of all sizes and legacies are being swept up in the tide of IP, cloud and OTT by business pressures on both the supply and demand sides. They are under pressure from their subscribers both to make content from third parties available on their main TV and access their primary broadcast channels on connected devices elsewhere whenever they want. They are also under supply side pressure to reduce bandwidth costs and accelerate development of new features and service enhancements. Then there is the revenue dimension with opportunities for upselling through personalization and more pertinent recommendation, as well as addressable advertising. Finally, at least for larger operators with multinational ambitions, there is the desire to launch in new…
Several companies have prepared research which is supposed to drive the NewFronts revenue this week – video advertising that is showing online form major online platforms. They all tell a confusing story. The Interactive Advertising Bureau has out a new 40 page plus report trying to convince everyone of the merits of what it calls ASV OTT – Advertising Supported Video over OTT – both free services like YouTube and paid like Hulu, which contain ads. We have our reservations because it seems to suggest that these should be distinguished from TV viewers and SVoD views, and are an audience which is tough to reach any other way. When you realize that a large percentage (52%) of them are cord…
You will have no doubt heard of the bombshell Bloomberg report, which rocked the computing and business world. However, the response from the companies at the heart of the allegations, as well as Western intelligence agencies, and third-party cybersecurity experts weighing in, has muddied the waters. It’s a very juicy story that needs unpacking, and one that threatens to utterly sink a major vendor in the cloud computing world – Super Micro. For all businesses, if there is substance to the story (which it seems like there is), then a need and ability to audit supplier and vendors seems imperative. Some of the advice is pretty intuitive. Employ a sufficiently staffed and funded IT and security department that has enough…
// M&A, Strategies, Alliances // Hyperledger and the EEA (Enterprise Ethereum Alliance) have announced a partnership that sees each become members of their blockchain alliances. Honeywell is acquiring Transnorm, a warehouse automation specialist for $490mn, and spun-out its old Transportation Systems unit as Garrett Motion. Mondicon has acquired Simfony, an IoT PaaS provider that was targeting CSPs, including MNOs and satellite firms, providing a full stack system for services. TrackLoop has acquired ChainTrack, a provider of IoT-based supply chain tracking products, to add ChainTrack to its software and analytics offerings. Johnson Controls has acquired Lux Products, a smart home and smart thermostat developer and distributor, to shore up Johnson’s own smart home offerings. Emerson is buying GE’s Intelligent Platforms wing,…
Two separate announcements from close rivals are demonstrative of the beginning of a trend that might displace a number of companies in the smart metering, smart home, and smart grid sectors. It’s a feature-creep that might never materialize, but be warned, it’s definitely on the cards – as Amazon’s Alexa finds a home in Presciense’s Polaris in-home display (IHD) for smart meters, and Google’s Nest bypasses the need for professional installation with the Nest Thermostat E. Initially, the Polaris IHD will just display the data supplied by the smart meter, in the same fashion as a conventional IHD. However, the Amazon Alexa functions let the user say things like “Alexa, Ask Prescience Energy how much did I spend on energy…
Microsoft Azure has strengthened its dominance of the connected car cloud market with a worldwide deal to convert future Volkswagen cars into mobile Internet of Things (IoT) hubs. For Microsoft, this is vindication of its long-standing focus on the connected car, initiated by Bill Gates over 20 years ago, leading to Azure mopping up most of the world’s leading car makers. The latest collaboration with Volkswagen looks like the biggest so far since it is global and with the world’s second biggest car maker, but some of our peers are wrong to suggest it goes deeper than any other such partnership between Microsoft and car makers. That may have been true until March 2017 but then Microsoft announced it was…
At Xilinx’s developer conference, the FPGA developer announced a partnership with ARM that sees ARM’s Cortex-M CPU design be made freely available in Xilinx FPGA designs, without fees or royalties. As well as the launch of Xilinx’s ACAP products, outlined back in March, the FPGA world has seen Lattice Semiconductor update its network-edge focus, looking to entice embedded developers. Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are essentially reprogrammable chips, which can be customized in the field to optimize them for a specific computation task. The gist of their value is that they provide flexibility, allowing a user to create a system that can outperform general-purpose processors, like CPUs or MCUs. There are alternatives to FPGAs, chiefly ASICs, but these do not…
The promise of the USA’s multi-tiered CBRS spectrum band has been discussed for so long that it is easy to forget that there are still no commercial services in the 3.5 GHz band, either in its licensed or shared tiers; and still barriers to full deployment, though most of them are political rather than technical. And with the timing of 5G in shared spectrum uncertain, there is likely to be plenty of time for CBRS to make its mark on the mobile services landscape, even if impatience is rising for it to kick off its activities. So much is riding on the success of the FCC’s bold experiment with opening up a formerly federal band for mobile broadband, with three…
The Wi-SUN Alliance has launched its Field Area Network (FAN) certification program. Starting a little later than planned, the program aims to certify products according to the alliance’s low power mesh networking standard. The target is still utilities, but the alliance is hoping to expand into smart cities too. Wi-SUN has already proven popular among utilities, using it to connect both smart meters and grid infrastructure. Now, there is a formal certification for compliance, which should improve the device and product ecosystem. According to the group, the first approved products will appear in Q4. The alliance argues that proprietary systems are no longer sufficiently flexible or cost effective, compared to open standards like Wi-SUN – itself mostly based on IEEE…
Goodbye IEEE 802.11ax, welcome WiFi 6. Non-profit organization the WiFi Alliance has rebranded the standard, aiming to make it easier for device manufacturers and users – with the numerical system representing significant developments in WiFi technology. It also applies to previous generations, with WiFi 5 used for devices supporting 802.11ac and WiFi 4 for those supporting 802.11n. Semiconductor company Marvell was one of the earliest to commit to using the new branding and the WiFi Alliance has said it expects widespread adoption. Less than 5% of revenues are generated by single-play video at Charter Communications, according to the US operator’s CEO Chris Winfrey, despite nearly half of its Q2 revenues coming from video services – highlighting the importance of double,…