Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Satellite industry shapeshifter SES has committed to forming the C-Band Alliance (CBA) in collaboration with Intelsat, Eutelsat and Telesat – apparently agreeing on a way to cash in on the sale of mid-band spectrum efficiently and thereby accelerate the roll out of 5G. Somehow, Faultline Online Reporter has its reservations that the process will be quite so simple. With these four fleet operators on board, which occupy the vast majority of satellite C-band services in the US, the go-ahead for establishing a technical framework to give MNOs access to spectrum in the 3.7 GHz to 4.2 GHz band now looks certain, much to the dismay of the World Broadcasting Union, Google and others striving to close the digital divide. Unlike…
OTT video testing has become big business with fast growing demand for automation to cope with rapid feature evolution and device fragmentation. It is increasingly being seen as integral to microservices and DevOps methods, where software development, operations and testing are integrated around small components, which can then be deployed rapidly without disrupting the overlying service. Another big driver is the force of the big OTT and SVoD players, especially Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, which have both invested in huge QA (Quality Assurance) teams. They regard quality as being almost as great a differentiator as the content itself, at least at this market stage of online video delivery. This is even more true of live OTT services, where ironically…
The FCC has completed a year-long review, whereby it plans to extend US unlicensed bands, ostensibly for WiFi, and will bring a notice of proposed rulemaking to its October 23rd meeting, which will mean 1.2 GHz of extra spectrum can be released for unlicensed use. This almost trebles the amount of spectrum for most WiFi Access Points and chip makers, and software providers will be considering how they take advantage of this in the 2019 time frame. Assuming the vote goes the way it is expected and there are no dissenting votes, the announcement will likely create an epidemic of copycat regulatory activity across the globe aiming to harmonize 6 GHz spectrum for WiFi, as well as adopt unlicensed usage…
Two prominent standards surfaced in the headlines last week. The IoT umbrella interoperability standard, oneM2M, announced Release 3.0; and DECT published a paper that outlined how the venerable protocol plans to coexist with 5G (see separate item). oneM2M has also had a positioning challenge, despite its original, and ambitious, aim of being a framework to connect many other IoT standards and protocols. It has recently been wise to focus on the licensed spectrum low power WAN (L-LPWAN) market. By our measure, this sector is on track to be worth far more than the unlicensed options (U-LPWAN) such as LoRa and Sigfox, and given its membership, there’s far more crossover in L-LPWAN, and currently a lot more money at stake. But…
BlackBerry is continuing its transition to a services business, launching the Spark security platform that it is pitching at any enterprise looking for a way to connect and manage devices in a single pane of glass. Integrations to support the likes of Azure and AWS are prominent, and BlackBerry is stressing the security benefits that its expertise can bring to the table. It took the wraps off Spark in London, at the BlackBerry Security Summit, prefacing the launch by noting that there would be around 75bn connected devices in the world by 2021. That’s a lot of potential devices that BlackBerry can target with Spark, in a regulatory climate that seems increasingly frustrated with data breaches. These stakes are high,…
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…
As the previous item described, Orange has been calling for the industry to align around Open Network Automation Protocol (ONAP) for management and orchestration (MANO). But the rival activity in ETSI’s Open Source MANO (OSM) group still has its strong supporters too, led by cheerleader (and major code contributor) Telefonica. At the NFV and Carrier SDN event last week, Telefonica’s head of network virtualization strategy and technology, Antonio Elizondo, called for operators to unify around a single information model, that of OSM. He told the attendees that OSM was distinguished from other efforts by its focus on a common information model, and that it had the most advanced such model in the industry, focused on service orchestration. He pointed to…
Major operators continue on their mission to wrest control over next generation network platforms away from vendors. The latest example sees Vodafone and China Mobile leading an initiative to automate the development and deployment of applications across multiple carriers’ networks. This builds on Open Network Automation Protocol (ONAP), the open source system for management and orchestration (MANO) originally developed by AT&T and China Mobile. The latest project reinforces ONAP’s claim to be the dominant orchestration technology for emerging virtualized telco networks. That could be bad news for alternatives, notably ETSI’s Open Source MANO, and for large vendors which remain wedded to the more conventional standards processes, where their power has outweighed that of operators. One reason for that has been…
The number of features that have needed to be standardized for 5G, and the number of submissions for each one, have been greater in 5G than 4G, by 10 times or more, say the companies involved in the 3GPP process. The intensity of the development was illustrated this week when the 3GPP released a set of change requests for its already ‘finalized’ 5G New Radio standards. These changes show how complex this new network is, and how there will never be a ‘final’ set of specs to address all the requirements. But they also lend weight to criticisms of the 3GPP’s decision, last year, to fast track a subset of standards to get 5G to market more quickly – an…
The challenges that operators face when trying to densify their outdoor networks are well documented. It is tough to gain access to the right sites without a time-consuming process of individually negotiating for each one, but even the best efforts to achieve a standardized template – let alone a common scale of pricing – have run into many problems (see separate item). The latest opposition from US cities to proposals by the FCC shows the significance of the problem – and the USA has progressed a lot further than most countries in seeking to address the issue, as its operators gear up for major densification programs, which will only intensify with 5G. Even if the MNO succeeds in negotiating the…
Vodafone has discussed plans to introduce ‘outcome-based’ pricing for IoT connectivity, wherein customers are billed according to the outcome of the messages sent over the MNO’s network, rather than billed on a monthly cycle based around a usage limit. Speaking at MWCA, Vodafone’s Ludovico Fassati, Head of IoT, Americas, said that the MNO had to be creative with its pricing, as it does not have access to the US networks directly. To this end, it would explore a different way of billing for services, given that AT&T, Verizon, and the likely merged Sprint and T-Mobile, will be able to beat it down on pure price alone. So, the MNO is looking for other ways to compete – enter outcome-based pricing.…
Spotify plots to create the most personalized playlists you could possibly imagine, by basing track suggestions on actual DNA through a partnership with genealogy company Ancestry. Spotify users who have previously used a DNA test kit from Ancestry can link the two accounts to receive a playlist based on tracks deemed culturally significant from a person’s ancestry. The concept is to help people experience their cultural backgrounds rather than read about it – the downside being this is not guaranteed to translate to enjoyment. Chatter coming out of Amazon HQ suggests the company is looking at building its own advertising server to compete with Google and the likes of Comcast’s Freewheel, according to a Business Insider report. It suggests the…
IBC 2018 was awash with analytics products right down the video delivery chain, as our social media activity highlighted. The usual suspects were out in force but a couple of smaller players, including Cupertino-based Interra Systems and Sweden’s Agama Technologies, were showcasing some clever stuff. Introductions to both analytics technology outfits were appropriately timed, with Interra recently debuting AI and machine learning capabilities in its Baton quality control platform, while the Agama team arrived back full of energy from a long vacation to provide a rundown of what claims to be the industry’s first monitoring system for remote PHY (R-PHY) cable network architectures, launched this summer. Most noise around video analytics today is around on-device QoE and this is due…
Seemingly against the vested interests of Azure Media Services, Microsoft has selected encoders from Haivision, a company we have come to associate with removing the need for cloud transcoding by packing in full ABR cascades in HEVC or H.264 into small form factor appliances for on-the-go live events. Such is the rise of streaming though, that the Microsoft Stream video service housed within Microsoft 365 is expanding its reach with the help of Haivision – in a peculiar move targeting C-level executives. Broadcast-grade or broadcast-quality are terms often thrown around regarding OTT video technologies and more often than not these promises fall short of the mark. Haivision makes such claims, but with the support of Microsoft infrastructure it would perhaps…
CDNs have come a long way since Akamai kicked the field off in 1999 but the basic objectives of saving bandwidth and boosting performance are still the same. The aim 20 years ago was to load static web pages comprising largely text with a few still images more quickly in an Internet where low speed dial up access was still common, and DSL was still in the labs. Now CDN priorities are being dictated by OTT video services and gaming which once again are straining capacity, with latency this time round a major challenge, especially for live streaming. This has spawned a variety of approaches from Telcos and independent technology providers, as well as the major CDN providers themselves, notably…
After its stuttering start Android TV is now bursting ahead of alternative platforms, with RDK especially likely to be stopped in its tracks. This comes after a pretty good run for RDK with the number of devices running it worldwide rising 63% over the year ending March 2018, according to RDK Management. This left RDK advocates bullish at IBC 2018, but we expect this to be the last show where they can hold their heads so high. RDK also took a while to get going but then it did have the field to itself as a standard software stack for set tops and gateways to run video services and associated functions such as the UI. Having been specified by Comcast…
IBC last week was disappointingly deficient in developments around virtual and augmented reality technologies, so it was apt this week that the darling of the industry, Magic Leap, which itself suffered an underwhelming debut a few weeks back, is reportedly chasing deals beyond entertainment – starting with the US military. Just over one month after Magic Leap’s headsets went to retail in the US priced at a staggering $2,295, after three years of secretive development, has Magic Leap thrown in the proverbial consumer towel? Technology with such high expectations resigned to taking a similar path to the satellite industry – with the weight shifting from entertainment to governmental – surely cannot be how the short story ends for Magic Leap?…
We had got used to something like 12 years of Verimatrix being at IBC and talking about little else other than content protection, but as a margin squeeze has started to be apparent in DRM, Verimatrix has talked more often about new strategies and typically uses IBC to roll them out. We spoke this year to CEO Tom Munro last week at IBC and asked how Verimatrix would survive in an era where video can be delivered over a browser, which only offers a hardware root of trust only to the DRM of the browser supplier? Surprisingly he was very bullish and preferred not to talk about his “resilient” DRM revenues (“most video still goes to set tops you know”),…
The ARM community’s attempts to push its favored processor architecture into servers has not had much success so far. Start-ups like Calxeda moved too early, when ARM was only a 32-bit platform. But even after it went 64-bit, it has made little dent in Intel’s dominance of server chips. Even Qualcomm is reported to have put its much-heralded server platform on the back burner, having failed to secure hoped-for deals with webscale firms like Google. The only big name with an ARM-based position in the cloud and server processor space is currently Cavium, now part of Marvell, which was also an early-stage ARM server pioneer, but made little impact on the overall market. Many of the new challengers will come…
Many MNOs plan to deploy 5G initially in the macrocell layer, despite earlier expectations that the technology would often be rolled out first in limited hotzones of high capacity. However, the base station numbers that are being quoted by early adopters indicate that even a conventional deployment pattern will require large numbers of sites to be provisioned within a short time. Vodafone UK, for instance, said it would switch on 1,000 5G sites by 2020, starting with trials in seven cities from next month, and then starting commercial services in 2019, including in rural areas of Cornwall and the Lake District in Cumbria. And T-Mobile USA would need to deploy 38,000 cell sites by 2021, entailing an increase in network…