Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
The only thing holding back FreeCast, the cable TV alternative, from tearing across the US market like wildfire, is that no device manufacturer has the required inventory to keep pace with demand. “We’re shipping 5000 devices a month, but we need five times that,” exclaims a reenergized Bill Mobley, FreeCast CEO, over video call with Faultline. FreeCast’s success is largely – but not exclusively – dependent on the penetration of ATSC 3.0 services and devices. With availability of the hybrid broadcast broadband standard ramping up across the USA’s 210 designated market areas – targeting 75% of US households by the end of 2024 – this is good news for FreeCast. However, the limited crop of NextGen TV compatible devices is…
The fact that British Telecom’s Director of Broadband Engineering, Ian Parr, was briefing Faultline on the UK operator’s Multicast-Assisted Unicast Delivery (MAUD) project – rather than a Director of TV Engineering or similar – is emblematic of MAUD’s modus operandi. Broadband, BT recognizes, is TV. Preempting intense future demands on its fixed and mobile networks from large-scale linear events, MAUD is a method of coping with the mass migration to unicast delivery – via a mix of in-house multicast R&D and a helping hand from Broadpeak, a French software supplier specializing in multicast ABR. To dangle a contextual carrot for our US-based readers, MAUD is a technology perfectly suited for generating substantial network bandwidth savings – up to 50% at…
It is becoming more and more evident that taking grid operations into the digital space will be a key enabler of efficient usage of resources on a global scale. Energy sources like wind and solar farms, nuclear reactors, dams and fossil-based plants coupled with energy storage systems like batteries, gravity storage, pumped hydro, compressed gas, thermal storage and even seasonal hydrogen storage or vehicle-to-grid (V2G) will have to be thoroughly integrated in order to serve our energy needs consistently. A plethora of distributed resources which may or may not have intermittent generation and non-linear patterns of feeding the grid will all fall under the umbrella of virtual power plants (VPPs). Managing such assets is one thing but trading and utilizing…
Norsk Hydro has made the strategic decision to open a recycling plant in the USA focused on recycling aluminum into end-products useful for the region’s automotive industry. The company is increasingly focusing its end product towards the automotive sector as the Inflation Reduction Act’s protection stimulates demand within the USA. Boosting output while prices are low isn’t unheard of, as we’re seeing in the nickel market right now with production from Indonesian nickel projects continuing to ramp up. But it is fundamentally the antithesis to what most raw material producers want to do during periods of low prices without justification. Global aluminum prices have been relatively low recently following subdued demand from the construction sector, primarily as a result of…
AT&T announced that its capital investments will be around $22 billion in 2024, down around 10% from the amount spent in 2023. The US operator had revenues of $122.4 billion last year, up by 1.4%, the operating profit for last year was $24.7 billion, with 106.3 million mobile customers at the end of the year. AT&T also added 67,000 subscribers in the last quarter of 2023 to its fixed wireless access (FWA) offering, called AT&T Internet Air, that was a huge leap in total subscribers, which now comes to 93,000. The no-contract FWA service typically starts at $55 a month (that figure includes the on-premises equipment) but the US operators has been offering FWA at a discount of $35 in…
Last week, we covered the frontier years of mobile devices in the 1980s in the UK with BT’s Andy Sutton. This week, we move forward to the democratization of the mobile phone and the devastatingly expensive spectrum auction of 2000, when UK operators paid £22.5 billion for their 3G licenses and had small change left to build their networks. Some of the innovations used by UK MNOs in the early 2000s are useful lessons for operators in 2024, with little cash in the bank for their own infrastructure projects. In late 1992, Neil Papworth rang in a new age of mobile communication with an SMS message to his colleague at Vodafone that read: ‘Merry Christmas.’ The text was sent from…
Treasure Data, span out from SoftBank, still billing itself as a Customer Data Platform (CDP), and raised $234 million in November 2021, with SoftBank as the lead investor. Pelion, meanwhile, was acquired from SoftBank by Izuma Networks, in 2022 – a company led by Travis McCollum and Ed Hemphill, who had founded WigWag. Later that same year, Pelion was again purchased, this time in a management buyout backed by Scottish Equity Partners – although it is unclear from the outside whether this was a full-blown acquisition, a major investment, or whether Izuma ever actually held full control. That is just one example of the twists and turns that befell the IoT startups – as the investor pressure ratcheted up, in…
Ericsson’s status as a RAN powerhouse has often jarred with inconsistent financial results and stuttering growth. Yet the company has some reasons to be cheerful, after posting another lackluster set of results for 2023. As the only major vendor almost totally dependent on wireless, Ericsson is a unique bellwether of the industry and particularly at the moment the standing of 5G deployments around the world. Revenue for Q4 2023 was down 16% year-on-year, to SEK 71.9 billion ($6.9 billion), driven chiefly by a 23% fall in network sales to SEK 45 billion ($4.4 billion). Revenue from Cloud, Software and Services fell 4% to SEK 19.6 billion ($1.9 billion), offset a little by a 7% rise in its enterprise sales to…
Vendors and the GSMA are trying to drum up excitement over the impending 3GPP Release 18, the first of three that will deliver capabilities under the banner of 5G Advanced. This comes at a time when deployments of 5G Standalone (SA) are falling behind earlier hopes and expectations, even if they are not quite stagnating as some of our peers have contended. There are examples of major SA deployments, such as Reliance Jio’s in India, but it is true that many operators have been waiting for more decisive benefits, or evidence that the ROI will be achieved on the additional deployments within a reasonable time. Jio’s major rival Bharti Airtel is in this camp, contending that at this stage it…
Arizona-based remote control maker Universal Electronics (UEI) has won a patent suit against Roku – issuing a victorious press release. This mini-PR campaign is about all UEI will get from the ruling, as the outcome of the decision is the confirmation of a ban on outdated versions of Roku set tops that the streaming device maker no longer manufactures. The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld a December 2021 ruling from the US International Trade Commission (ITC), which determined that Roku had infringed on six claims of one 2018 UEI patent. Under the ruling, Roku will not be able to sell or import any products infringing US Patent 10,593,196, until it expires in 2032. This eight-year sentence…
Thanks to wealthy Hollywood parents, content distribution company Filmbankmedia is something of a gatekeeper between the major studios and non-theatrical settings seeking to license content. For this reason, the selection of Irdeto as Filmbankmedia’s forensic watermarking provider is a real coup for the Dutch vendor – effectively making Irdeto the de facto tracing technology for films and TV across the hospitality sector, corporate events, transport, healthcare, and more. The deal is another reminder that content distributors recognize the vulnerabilities of DRM-only strategies, and are looking towards forensic watermarking particularly for bubble-wrapping premium pre-release content. Co-owned by Warner Bros Discovery, Sony Pictures Entertainment, and NT Digital Partners, Filmbankmedia is deploying the Irdeto TraceMark product – a forensic watermarking technology proven to…
Apple is fighting tooth and nail to get record labels to embrace its Spatial Audio format, announcing that any tracks streamed in the format will generate up to 10% more royalties than standard audio files. Considering the vast sums that Apple has already spent promoting the format over the past two and a half years, this suggests that uptake by users has still not met internal targets, with a new financial carrot required to encourage record labels to promote it, too. Spatial Audio is Apple’s own-brand spherical audio format, which takes stereo surround sound standards 5.1 and 7.1, channel formats like Dolby Atmos, as well as ‘objects’ (distinctly placed single sources of sound), and combines these to create a 360-degree…
Edge node deployer Qwilt has inked a groundbreaking piggyback deal with a little-known entity called Cirion Technologies – better known by most as the resurrection of CDN provider Lumen in Latin America. Lumen’s assets, including terrestrial fiber and data centers, were taken over by US investment firm Stonepeak Partners in August 2022, in a sizable $2.7 billion deal, which preempted the retirement of Lumen’s CDN business in Q4 2023. Almost 18 months later, what remains is a skeleton CDN geared towards supporting scale-out of so-called edge-based CDNs like Qwilt. With Qwilt adding Latin American specialist Cirion Technologies to its reseller ranks, hoping to win Latin American ISP deals, the tie-up compounds what Faultline has been demanding of Qwilt for years…
Bitmovin’s Developer Report has arrived with its 7th edition. As with most reports of this type, there is a tendency to be siloed. Seldom do we see comparisons to previous years, which is imperative for drawing trend lines up and down. An annual snapshot is a blinkered one, so Faultline has a duty of clarity to expose the patterns that some people don’t want you to see. For certain subsets of streaming workflows, the damage ain’t pretty – notably for adoption of next-generation video codecs. With the exception of AVC and HEVC – the two widely established MPEG codecs – use of every single other video codec covered by the report’s scope has plummeted since last year. That means AV1,…
Direct-to-device satellite communications firm AST SpaceMobile has secured $306.5 million in funding from AT&T, Google and Vodafone, comprising grants, loans, shares and other debt structures. “With our first five commercial satellites fully-funded, last year we turned our attention to building and launching the next-generation BlueBirds, which are designed for a 10x improvement in throughput,” AST said. Vodafone, Rakuten, American Tower and Bell Canada together own over 20% of the firm.. Finnish telco Elisa will buy a majority stake in Moontalk Oy, the software-as-a-service (SaaS) firm, for an undisclosed sum, Elisa plans to become ‘Finland’s most trusted partner for digitalizing business processes.’ Ericsson bemoaned poor vendor acquisition rates this week and said it expects more decline in RAN spending in 2024…
In August 2023, Tareq Amin quit his role as CEO of Rakuten Mobile and its vendor arm, Symphony, and joined Saudi oil giant Aramco. The move seemed puzzling for someone whose recent career had centered on driving disruptive business plans using new technology platforms, with considerable success at Reliance Jio and more mixed results at Rakuten. There was speculation that Amin was disillusioned with his quest to redefine mobile telecoms economics via Open RAN, and would seek a quieter and more affluent life with Aramco. However, the reason for Amin and Aramco to want to join forces has become clearer now, with Aramco establishing a technology arm that is not just looking to support the oil producer’s own digital transformation,…
Events in India are conspiring for those elusive higher mobile ARPUs that its leading telcos have long been craving. They remain among the lowest in the world at around $2 per month, and comparable with countries where average incomes are considerably less. So far, 5G has failed to lift ARPUs more than a notch since roll out began late in 2022 after completion of the spectrum auctions, which is admittedly hardly surprising since packages have been offered at 4G tariffs. But now, as 5G roll out is complete in more urban areas, the two big operators, Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel, have both switched focus to raising ARPUs, rather than retaining or gaining customers. Achieving the latter without the former…
The latest mobile network performance metrics drill down deeper than ever, raising the question of which ones matter most to users and so make the biggest difference to customer loyalty and churn. The USA has been especially well analyzed and the latest results from two of the leading mobile analytics firms, Ookla and Opensignal, hold plenty of interest. They range beyond the mobile networks themselves to include some data on relative performances of the handsets. Ookla also glimpses at the chipsets that underly device performance in combination with optimization techniques employed by the service provider. The range of metrics for the networks themselves has also increased, with more detailed measurements of latency, video performance, uplink speeds, and consistency, which all…
The much predicted – or hoped for – recovery in smartphone sales after two years of decline occurred at the end of 2023, but immediately ran into supply chain clouds laced with a silver lining of great expectations from Generative AI. While shipments for 2023 decreased a further 4% to 1.1 billion units as the slump continued for most of the year, the recovery took hold in Q4 with an 8% jump year-on-year to 320 million units, according to bean-counting firm Canalys. This ended seven consecutive quarters of decline, culminating with Apple taking over from Samsung at number one in the annual rankings, albeit by a narrow margin with both close to 20% on unit shares. Apple surged ahead in…
Five years ago this week… NBCUniversal announced plans to launch a streaming service in early 2020, employing a freemium model comprising a free ad-supported tier, alongside an ad-free subscription-based tier – available not just to its own pay TV subscribers but to rivals like AT&T and Dish Network. Personalized ads were marked as a key feature for the launch, as well as a lower ad load—in a bid to differentiate this service from Hulu, of which NBCU parent Comcast also held a stake in. The streaming service, later named Peacock, was officially launched July 2020. Among the less glossy hardware launches at CES 2024 was a new censored smartphone targeted at children. Developed by parental control app provider MMGuardian and…