Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Adoption of the newly developed multi-AP mesh standard to drive interoperability between players in hardware and software will continue to be a key theme in the WiFi industry through 2018 and beyond. A significant step was made towards the trend this week as US equipment powerhouse Arris announced support for the newly released multi-AP EasyMesh specification, which is based on technical specs from non-profit organization the WiFi Alliance. This means Arris will submit products from its HomeAssure whole home WiFi portfolio for WiFi Certified EasyMesh certification. However, EasyMesh is considered to be a few years behind proprietary mesh architectures from the likes of AirTies and Comcast where technologies cannot interoperate. That said, it’s easy to assume a mesh standard could…
Amazon is unique in the scale of disruption it is causing across so many sectors, from retail to cloud computing, data analytics and now increasingly pay TV. On the consumer side its Prime service is the funnel through which it wants to pour all its products and services to become the purveyor of everything. Not surprisingly then it will be through Prime it will be selling access to its recently acquitted £100 million ($140 million) package of rights to EPL (English Premier League) football matches. Spread over three years for Amazon this is small beer in the context of its overall content budget and its statement that it is willing to spend up to $1 billion on a single TV…
Mobile app developers who aren’t already taking advantage of microphone-accessing permissions on smartphones will now be inclined to take a peek into how enabling the feature could bring bonuses, after the official app of La Liga, the Spanish soccer league, was revealed to be “spying” on users for an anti-piracy crackdown. Recent losses at La Liga reportedly amount to over €150 million ($177 million) at the hands of pirated broadcasts. Desperate times called for desperate measures, in the form of last week’s Android app deploying an update “to develop statistical patterns on soccer consumption and to direct fraudulent operations of the retransmissions of La Liga football matches.” The idea targets law-breaking bar owners, using microphones to “detect if what it…
Ever since the dawn of commerce and the invention of money, new markets have emerged which replace older markets, and which make new people rich. If you owned a canal in 1895, it was a good bet to start a railway, and if you owned a railway in 1950, it made sense to invest in motor cars. The AT&T verdict handed out this week, keeps that tradition alive, and creates no new obstacles to vertical integration through mergers, something that has always been true and not just in the US. During the 1980s it became an oft held belief that vertical integration led to companies which were inefficient, who failed to stick to what they were good at. Such mergers…
As expected, approval of the AT&T-Time Warner mega merger kicked Comcast into gear by increasing its bid for 21st Century Fox assets to $65 billion all cash. The ink on this issue of Faultline Online Reporter will barely be dry by the time Disney submits a counter bid, a situation which could continue back and forth until one party cracks. Even though 21st Century Fox initially shunned Comcast for Disney, despite the US cableco offering a higher price, our gut feeling is Comcast will eventually beat out Disney, with the House of Mouse emerging bloody and bruised from a brutal bidding war. The Murdoch family’s doubts about taking the hand of Comcast have stemmed from concerns antitrust regulators would block…
Huawei has announced eRAN13.1, which it claims to offer the first NB-IoT system that supports 3GPP Release 14 standards, enabling significant leaps in performance. The Chinese vendor is claiming a sevenfold improvement in peak uplink speeds and single-user downlink, reaching 157kbps and 102kbps respectively. Both cell capacity and cell coverage have doubled, it says, with the network now supporting 80,000 devices per cell. Huawei says its proprietary uplink channel estimation technology is responsible for improving the cell range, which is critical to the economics of a network that needs to achieve low cost and power, yet support some applications, such as smart agriculture, which must support near-universal coverage. Since most operators’ LTE networks have far lower penetration than their 2G…
MediaTek has lost some of its momentum in smartphone modem and system-on-chip products in recent times, and has been focusing its growth efforts on sectors, such as wearables, where Qualcomm is less of an imposing incumbent. However, the Taiwanese company says it will ship its 5G modem next year, ahead of schedule – and less than a year behind Qualcomm’s and Intel’s commercial offerings. Nokia, NTT Docomo, China Mobile and Huawei have all worked with MediaTek on the technical specifications for its modem, no doubt keen to encourage an alternative supplier to take an earlier position in 5G, compared to 4G, which was completely dominated by Qualcomm for at least the first 2-3 years. The San Diego vendor has still…
Only a few 5G-targeted auctions have taken place so far, and they have provided few hopes that regulators are thinking as radically as they need to, if the new networks are to live up to their heavy burden of expectation. Cost-effective support for a huge range of new applications for consumers and vertical markets, enabled by wide spectrum bands and flexible, software-defined platforms, lie at the heart of the 5G vision. So, for many governments, does the idea that a larger community of service providers should be supported, either through a far more advanced version of the MVNO model, or by harnessing shared spectrum or even licences awarded for regional or industrial use. While most governments have roadmaps and vision…
// M&A, Strategies, Alliances // Siemens is acquiring J2 Innovations, a software specialist that serves the connected building sector, using its Fluid Integration Framework – expanding Siemens’ Synco and Gamma. Pareteum is acquiring Artilium for $104.7m, building on a strategic alliance that saw the pair jointly pursue new markets. Pareteum is a communications platform. // Forecasts, Surveys. Reports, & Blue-Sky Thinking // Otonomo and Edison Research have published a study that says the majority of new connected car buyers are willing to trade personal data for improved safety and services. // Hardware // Telit has launched the ME1910C1-WW, a new globally compatible LTE-M (Cat M1) and NB-IoT module that supports 13 LTE bands and quad-band EGPRS fallback. Sierra Wireless has…
Since the credit crunch a decade ago, banks have faced increasing workloads approving mortgages because they have to employ tougher checks against mis-lending and toxic debt. At last, AI techniques are helping reduce the cost and time of mortgage approvals while inevitably raising the question of whether jobs in the financial sector are in jeopardy as a result. For this reason, Black Knight, a firm based in Florida, analyzing mortgage applications for large banks, was keen to emphasis that its move into AI will displace its staff into more creative roles rather than replace them. Like many other established firms across a range of sectors, Black Knight has fast-tracked its recruitment of AI through acquisition, buying a two-year-old start up…
The Intelligent Transportation Society of America (ITS America) has announced a partnership with startup Terbine, to create a fist-of-a-kind data exchange – to be used by the transportation and logistics industries as a way to trade and share data, derived from vehicles and sensors. Based on Terbine’s cloud platform, the goal is to facilitate the seamless exchange of data between multiple parties. The Exchange, as it is known, will support any kind of data type, and will also incorporate feeds from public agencies, corporations, and universities. Available now, to ITS America members, the backend service will ensure that all data is correctly treated and integrated. Providers, apparently, will retain maximum control over the data they commit to the Exchange –…
Network infrastructure provider Huawei has announced eRAN13.1, which it claims is the first Release 14-based system for NB-IoT on the market. If it performance claims are true, this will provide a very big step forward for NB-IoT adopters, which are often hampered by their relative lack of LTE penetration, compared to their legacy 2G networks. Riot has long maintained that there’s a serious chicken-or-egg problem for LTE-M and NB-IoT, in that they are confined to the existing LTE network footprint. The claims of how easy it is to upgrade LTE infrastructure to support the new protocols are a moot point, if the network operator is not subsequently planning on expanding that footprint. As such, we have taken a dim view…
Intertrust subsidiary whiteCryption has announced the latest edition of its Secure Key Box (SKB) offering, with support for the Speck lightweight block cipher – used to allow low-power IoT devices to encrypt data using the cipher key. However, Speck is currently the subject of a controversy, with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) rejecting Speck and its brother Simon – because of the cryptography community’s distrust of its author, the USA’s National Security Agency (NSA). Now, whiteCryption isn’t Speck-only. Users of the SKB can opt to use different ciphers to encrypt their data, running it through the cipher using a secret key word that another trusted party can then use to decrypt the transmission. In the announcement though, whiteCryption says…
Microsoft is buying Github, the world’s largest open source software developer community, for $7.5 billion. Following concerns from the devout Github user base, the company pledged to retain its developer-first ethos and operate independently to provide an open platform for all developers in all industries. “Microsoft is all-in on open source. When it comes to our commitment to open source, judge us by the actions we have taken in the recent past, our actions today, and in the future,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. The new Microsoft-owned platform has also promised to continue supporting any programming languages, tools, operating systems, cloud services and devices. Launched in 2008, the Github community boasts 27 million developers from 1.8 million organizations. Augmented reality…
For all the intelligent features comprising next generation WiFi technologies, TV operators and telcos alike will increasingly rely on fixed networks for reaching additional premises and making the next gigabit jump. There are plenty of fixed technology options in the fight for the multi-dwelling unit (MDU) and this week the first products based on the MoCA (Multimedia over Coax Alliance) Access 2.5 standard have landed – from Swedish electronics manufacturer InCoax Networks. DOCSIS and G.fast technologies typically dominate these conversations, with large scale deployments in enabling the last leap in fiber to the home (FTTH) or fiber to the curb (FTTC) deployments, but the new In:xtnd product line from InCoax, based on MoCA Access 2.5, claims even more radical cost…
A slew of tier 1 operator deployments boosted sales at French video technology developer Wyplay by 6% for 2017 to €12.4 million ($14.5 billion). This is the first time Wyplay, a privately held company, has given a public glimpse into its financials. The reveal strongly suggests 2017 was Wyplay’s most successful year to date, since the company’s inception in 2006, and might even be flirting with profitability – an impressive achievement for a community-driven project. Could an IPO be looming? Despite the company’s flagship Frog middleware forming the foundations of areas of opposition to Android TV, by offering a similar open source experience – the trend towards embracing Android TV looks to be benefiting Wyplay. We therefore expect Wyplay to…
Middle Eastern entertainment news this week was so tied up with the chaos at beIN, which saw multiple TV channels go dark in the UAE following bootlegging allegations, that the spotlight was drawn away from Dutch app developer Metrological Media – winning a major deal at the Qatar-based pay TV operator, broadcaster and entertainment group. The Middle East and North African (MENA) markets are commonly pointed to as huge areas of growth potential for OTT video, while satellite TV remains dominant and is yet to reach saturation point. Yet the region is seldom seen by the majority of vendors as a priority target, perhaps due to the political turmoil and heavily regulated media markets. Nevertheless, the Middle East is only…
Having first launched its smart home offering in Norway in 2017, Deutsche Telekom has announced a distribution deal with a group of 15 energy companies to bring its Qivicon platform to market – through a new company called Hitch. Over in the US, the other major player in the Smart Home as a Service (SHaaS) game, Comcast, has announced a partnership with a start-up called Hippo, to explore using smart home devices to provide data for insurers to use in their pricing – a term known as Usage-based Insurance (UBI). This whole market has been very slow to emerge, despite its clear value to the operators – who can use SHaaS to tie customers into contracts and enjoy greatly reduced…
Cable operators in the US and elsewhere believe that 5G densification could boost the value of their HFC (hybrid fiber-coax) networks, since these can be used to backhaul small cells and advanced WiFi hotspots. That could simply create an additional source of revenue for the cablecos, by charging MNOs to use the lines for backhaul. Or it could help the cablecos to challenge the MNOs, by harnessing their HFC assets to lower the cost of building out localized small cell networks themselves. The interest in this topic is reflected in the latest initiative from CableLabs, the US cable industry’s R&D body, which has been increasingly active in 5G standards and regulatory processes. It has set up a Mobile Backhaul R&D…
ARM is bullish about expanding its architecture into PCs and into platforms for virtual reality, artificial intelligence, advanced video and the Internet of Things. But one Intel stronghold is proving very challenging – the server market. The ARM community has been working for years now to steal a piece of a sector that is 95% dominated by x86. A lot of the motivation has been to push the low power consumption and broad ecosystem of ARM at companies deploying cloud infrastructure. Most ARM licensees have not aimed to go head-to-head with Intel in the enterprise data center, but to steal a march in high growth, newer segments like Cloud-RAN, webscale infrastructure or coprocessors. So far, however, progress has been limited…