Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
French operator Canal+ has booked a ticket for its video business on the Apple TV luxury yacht, offering subscribers to cable TV and IPTV services in France an Apple TV 4K device to rent for €6 ($7) a month, as an alternative to the traditional set top. To be clear, Canal+ is not offering any special service, but simply acting as a reseller of a connected device. Essentially, rather than go about further cannibalizing its already troubled satellite TV operations, Canal+ has decided to go after the lunch of French IPTV service providers – meaning potentially bad news for Free, Orange, Altice-SFR, Bouygues and their respective vendor suppliers. First off, we need to clear up the confusion this announcement has…
The UK incumbent, BT, may be one of the most publicly cautious telcos about the near term business case for radical new 5G services, but it has no such inhibitions about the disaggregated network platforms that will underpin next generation fixed and mobile deployments – and eventually make the case for those 5G models. Chief architect Neil McRae said in a recent interview that BT’s future network strategy would rely on software deployed on white box switches and routers, and in future, on full cloud-native, containerized software architectures. McRae’s comments echoed those of telcos like AT&T, which has been the most vocal operator about software-defined, disaggregated deployments, with plans to implement a white box router at almost every cell site…
The uncertainty over ZTE’s future could leave a vacancy for a challenger equipment vendor, nipping at the heels of Huawei, Ericsson and Nokia. Even if ZTE bounces back (see lead item), the operators are very keen to expand their supply chain and encourage more competition when it comes to 5G infrastructure. Some of these challengers may emerge from the ranks of start-ups being supported by MNOs within initiatives like the Facebook-led Telecom Infra Project (TIP), but there are some other candidates which are far closer to the commercial big time. In particular, Samsung and NEC, which outside their home countries have had little impact on the RAN market, are gearing up for a bigger role in 5G. NEC hopes to…
After years of speculation, Liberty Global has finally agreed to sell significant European cable assets to Vodafone. Over the years, various outcomes have been anticipated for the two companies, from full merger, to Liberty acquiring Vodafone, or vice versa. They had already combined their Dutch operations in a joint venture which was widely seen as a dress rehearsal for something bigger. The final agreement does exclude Liberty’s UK subsidiary, Virgin Media, but includes UnityMedia in Germany. In the past, Germany was expected to be a sticking point for any Liberty-Vodafone deal because it would create a cable giant by combining UnityMedia with Vodafone’s Kable Deutschland. However, the regulatory mood at the European Commission has become more merger-friendly as over-the-top services…
ZTE suspended most of its business operations last week in the wake of the Trump administration banning US companies from selling components to the Chinese firm. Far more reliant than its larger compatriot Huawei on foreign suppliers, the company’s future was looking rocky. President Trump appeared to relent on Monday, tweeting that he would work to help the firm stay in business, but the outcome for ZTE, and its supply chain, still looks uncertain. And even if there is a last minute rescue this time, the developments have created nervousness among Chinese and US firms alike, about escalating trade tensions and unpredictable government interventions. In the same week, there were two pieces of news which highlighted China’s determination to become…
Intel has been hyperactive in AI; both at the hardware level with its dedicated Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), and on the software front, applying associative learning to support decisions in quality control and maintenance. The biggest splash was made by the announcement of its close collaboration with Microsoft over application of its FPGAs in the latter’s Project Brainwave, which has just been released. Intel and Microsoft were once almost joined at the hip in the early days of personal computing in the 1980s, and recently their collaboration has intensified again around AI, with Project Brainwave woven around FPGAs to accelerate AI applications. At this stage, many ‘real-time’ AI applications will require dedicated hardware to meet performance expectations given the…
Four major automakers and a host of suppliers have founded the Mobility Open Blockchain Initiative (MOBI), to try and develop a standardized way to enable payments and data sharing between vehicles. Not looking to create a new blockchain system itself, MOBI aims to link the different approaches taken by automakers as they explore the potential of blockchain technologies in vehicle ecosystems. The automakers involved are BMW, Ford, GM, and Renault-Nissan, flanked by major auto suppliers Bosch and ZF. On the technology vendor front, Accenture and IBM have thrown their hats in, and in the blockchain world, the IOTA and Hyperledger Foundations bring a lot of players to the table, flanked by Chronicled, Consensys, and Xain. It’s an influential group, and…
Video compression company Beamr quietly set the timer on what could be a widespread disruption bomb back at NAB, lying low until detonation in a few weeks’ time. How will the transcoding majors react when Beamr launches its Free to Start initiative – giving away 100 free hours of Beamr Transcoder VoD to every sign up, every month? According to Beamr, there is only one outcome. “The other guys are going to freak out, the small time operators, who only need to transcode some 100 hours of file-based content a month, love it,” said Beamr’s VP Marketing Mark Donnigan, speaking to Faultline Online Reporter at TV Connect in London this week. It sounds completely bonkers, but Beamr has nothing to…
When AV1, the first version of the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) codec, finally arrived with a frozen code base late in March 2018 the debate over how great its impact will be continued with contradictory results over performance. One problem is that the relevant codecs, especially the legacy H.264 and its successor HEVC from the ISO MPEG camp, along with VP9 which provided a foundation for AOMedia, in addition to AV1 itself, are all at different stages of their development, making meaningful comparisons difficult. Meanwhile AOMedia already has its next version AV2 under the wings in R&D, while MPEG also has its sequel to HEVC called JEM (Joint Exploration Model) available for early testing, as is being done by…
TV Connect is back at Olympia and the feeling at the show was that while it has not recovered its old panache quite yet, it will survive to next year. In fact one of the organizers said we can quote him on it, so we are. Strange how history repeats itself, as we told the very first organizer before he sold it to the current owners, you need panel chairmen who ask tough questions, and none were on show. Last time we offered our analysts to run the Q&A and were taken up on it, we doubt that will happen next year. One panel we attended was run by Jon Watts, director at strategy consultants MTM, someone we are clear…
While we are fairly clear that the transaction announced this week for Vodafone to buy key parts of Liberty Global in Europe will go through, but to do so it means it has to avoid the scrutiny of the Bundeskartellamt, the German competition regulator. That means the deal must be presided over by the European Commission, and not the Bundeskartellamt, usually referred to as the Cartel Office. And that will ruffle some traditional German feathers. We firmly believe, as does Mike Fries, CEO of Liberty Global, that this is a deal where the regulators have already ironed out the “kind of terms” that would be acceptable – we can predict them here, but essentially some control over any exclusive content…
One of the biggest challenges for T-Mobile USA, should its proposed acquisition of Sprint be approved, will be to integrate networks that have been designed around completely different assumptions. To achieve the promised goals of the merger will require a highly efficient platform which combines the strengths of each network, but also has a fully unified platform for migration to future 5G and telco cloud systems. This will be no mean feat. Sprint has been focused on dense capacity, squeezing massive performance from LTE in its 2.5 GHz spectrum. The network has been a long time to come to reality, partly because Sprint has – in line with its historic behaviour – been technologically ambitious. It has been an early…
Apple defied critics again and turned in strong quarterly results, while its value soared on an increased investment from the ever-influential Warren Buffett. But the smartphone maker remains hugely over-reliant on one product line, the iPhone, and needs to convince its partners and shareholders that it has convincing long term plans to diversify its revenues, while protecting the crown jewel against challenges from Samsung and, in particular, the rising power of Chinese phonemakers. Currently, Huawei is the most threatening, now it is in third place in the smartphone market worldwide and has some high impact models. But its virtual exclusion from the US market for mobile infrastructure seems to be spreading to handsets (AT&T and Verizon both recently dropped plans…
Open network platforms are only part of the picture if the 5G vision, of an open ecosystem of operators and vendors, supporting a huge variety of business models, is to be realized. Open spectrum, able to support many service providers through sharing, while keeping some airwaves for critical or optimized performance, is equally vital, and equally hard to achieve. The Dynamic Spectrum Alliance (DSA) held its annual global summit in London last week, and gained support for its call for more flexible licensing schemes from some unlikely sources, including UK regulator Ofcom. If the recent UK 5G spectrum auction, in the 3.4-3.6 GHz band, was anything to go by, Ofcom had lost its previous credentials as a relatively open and…
Standards body ETSI has been a critical contributor to the spread of virtualization and SDN in telco networks. It is the home of several initiatives which have turned into key foundations of the new software-driven telecoms network, notably NFV (Network Functions Virtualization), OSM (Open Source MANO or management and orchestration) and MEC (Multi-access Edge Compute). However, as open source methods become increasingly important to operators via initiatives like OpenStack and the Open Networking Foundation, some argue that the processes of the traditional standards body are outdated and too slow. Even in areas where ETSI has done the groundwork, nimbler and wider open ecosystems are often taking up the baton. The Linux Foundation-hosted ONAP (Open Network Automation Protocol) has attracted broader…
The Open Networking Foundation has announced its latest open source community initiative, focused on bringing disaggregated networks to the optical domain. Its new project is the ODTN (Open Disaggregated Transport Network), which aims to break the platform down into a series of white box optical components, which can then be mixed and matched to form different solutions. Specialized vendors will be able to work on a specific component, such as a transponder, without having to deliver an end-to-end solution, boosting innovation and competition. The operator-driven ONF aims to create an ecosystem in which operators can select best-of-breed elements and slot them together relatively easily, using standard interfaces, while avoiding any vendor lock-in and supporting new software-defined architectures. Each of the…
A small handful of operators is seizing the initiative in open, software-defined platforms so decisively that they stand a good chance of transforming their own operational base, and raising the drawbridge once again to keep out newcomers. There are not many names on this list, and some are helped by a relatively closed commercial environment, as in China. In the USA, however, the most competitive telecoms market for many years is developing, thanks to the convergence of fixed, mobile and video/media services; and to the high mobile ambitions of the leading cable operators. These developments, coupled with the prospect of an enlarged third player, should Sprint and T-Mobile USA be permitted to merge, are putting the pressure on AT&T and…
On the road to 5G, mobile operators face all kinds of dilemmas which did not afflict their 3G or 4G strategies. One is what to do about shared spectrum. Now that cellular technologies, not just WiFi, have moved outside exclusively owned bands, MNOs could access a rich store of affordable airwaves, without having to take on the wild west of the WiFi market. But once Qualcomm pushed MulteFire, which allows LTE to run in shared spectrum without a licensed-band anchor, there was the daunting prospect of the MNOs’ chief source of power, their spectrum assets, being eroded, with the barriers to entry for alternative wireless operators being lowered significantly. The other dilemma concerns open architectures. Open interfaces and even open…
Nokia has arguably been the most edge-focused of the major network vendors, throwing heavy support behind ETSI’s MEC (Multi-access Edge Computing), and behind services that would leverage a combination of wireless connectivity and a distributed cloud. Now it has gone a step further and announced its own edge server, a compact addition to its AirFrame cloud infrastructure platform, sporting an open architecture and Nokia’s own new ReefShark chipset. First shown at the recent Zero Touch and Carrier Automation conference in Madrid, this is designed to support ultra-low latency processing, whether to support the links between the edge and the central cloud in a Cloud-RAN, or to enable IoT services for consumers and industries. As such, it fits well with operators’…