Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Broadcom may have had its hopes of acquiring Qualcomm dashed by President Trump’s intervention (see separate item), but it continues to eye other ways to expand its presence in the telecoms market. One is the launch of its Monterey Ethernet switch, which it claims is the first to be designed specifically for mobile fronthaul – the extremely high performance, low latency links between centralized baseband units and remote radio units in a virtualized RAN. This is a strategic area for a chip company to target, especially one as strong in Ethernet switch-chips as Broadcom – indeed, one of its possible consolation prizes in the wake of its Qualcomm bid being blocked could be to bid for another Ethernet player such…
The US has become increasingly sensitive over the past decade, about the threatened loss of its hi-tech leadership to China. In the mobile industry, where Motorola and Lucent long ago lost out to European and Chinese vendors, the battle is already over – with the shining exception being Qualcomm. So when a hostile bid for the US’s biggest mobile star converged with the Trump administration’s elevated levels of security and trade paranoia about China, the outcome was hardly surprising. The president intervened to block Broadcom’s proposed takeover of Qualcomm, even though the former is shortly to become an American company. This was unprecedented action before a shareholder vote had even been held on the deal. (Only five takeovers of US…
As outlined in the previous article, some of the most critical decisions mobile operators will be making as they prepare for the 5G era concern the edge. • How reliant will their business model be on services that are focused on edge-enabled capabilities, such as very low latency or personalization? • Will they invest in edge cloud infrastructure themselves or use a third party’s? • How far should edge nodes be integrated or collocated with network elements like base stations or central offices? • How can they build up a developer ecosystem, and will this involve cooperation or competition with webscale companies like Amazon, or with content providers with their edge-oriented CDNs (content-driven networks)? Initially, the clearest case for making…
The initial excitement around Cloud-RAN, which bubbled up when China Mobile hurled its disruptive concept at the industry five years ago, has largely worn off. SK Telecom, Orange and T-Mobile all expressed scepticism about its advantages at the recent Mobile World Congress, at least in the short to medium term. Initially, operators were excited at the prospect of slashing the cost of ownership of new networks by sharing resources flexibly among cell sites and replacing proprietary, specialized hardware with white boxes running virtual network functions (VNFs). But of course, C-RAN proved far harder than most had hoped. For operators which saw it mainly as a way to slash operating expenditure, the costs of VNFs and white boxes remain unclear and…
Intertrust Technologies said this week that it has a deal for its Personagraph private data market with Yengage. It will use the Personagraph consumer data platform to power its digital advertising operations. Yengage is a subsidiary of Japan’s D.A.Consortium and is one of the largest media buying companies in Japan. Intertrust anonymizes and protects identity data, while still allowing advertising companies to use it. Yengage will use Personagraph to target ads to its portfolio of apps in the US and Asian markets. Korean media technology provider Alticast has renewed its intellectual property licensing deal with TiVo, accessing the Rovi patent portfolio to bring advanced video features to IPTV, cable and DTH providers in Korea, where Alticast has a huge market…
Japan’s Softbank, and its maverick chairman Masayoshi Son, has been interested in adding a US cableco to its growing wireless empire for some time, either to combine with its existing US subsidiary, Sprint, or to replace it. There have been various reports over the past year, of talks with major cable operators as well as T-Mobile USA and Dish Network. Now, the reports are concentrated on a possible $100 billion bid for the second largest cableco, Charter. The issue here is that the only way a merger between Charter and Sprint can prosper, is if current Charter CEO Tom Rutledge is put in charge. The aim, it seems, would be to create a fixed/mobile giant to compete with Verizon and…
Netgem’s evolution from a set top manufacturer to pure video software supplier has been a public ambition of the French vendor for some time, but is the company’s mixed set of full year results a sign of the initial cloud migration having a negative impact on business? More importantly, can vendors preparing to embark on a similar transition learn from Netgem’s story so far – in its mid-transition state? Netgem declared that before the close of 2018, its transformation to a full TV-as-a-service provider will be completed. We first learned of Netgem becoming a serious software player when it won a deployment at ZTE in May 2017 for Mexican ISP TotalPlay – its debut software licensing deal on third party…
Audio fingerprinting has been widely employed in content recognition for some years, especially in the mobile advertising sector, but audio watermarking has been much slower to gain traction. Use cases were less clear and cost of deployment was greater, with challenges in exploiting the technology for deriving meaningful insights. That has been gradually changing as the big audience measurements groups, particularly Nielsen and WPP’s Kantar Media, have recognized the technology’s longer-term potential and incorporated it within their core platforms. The latest endorsement comes from transcoding vendor Hybrik, which has just announced its cloud-based media processing now supports the embedding of Nielsen audio watermarks in on-demand content. The growing interest in audio watermarking can be explained by its applicability to tracking…
Asserting further confidence that its Time Warner merger will get the green light, AT&T is preparing to fund the $85 billion price tag by filing for a potential US IPO of a minority stake in DirecTV Latin America – a precursor to heavier divestitures perhaps. Reducing its presence in the region opens opportunities for existing incumbents like America Movil, as well as possibilities for the newly formed Liberty Latin America business to recover recent TV losses. AT&T’s assets in Latin America and the Caribbean are valued at over $10 billion and DirecTV has around 13.6 million subscribers across its footprint in eleven countries, through holding company Vrio. AT&T estimates up to $100 million will come its way from the IPO,…
Swedish senior-friendly smartphone flinger Doro has announced a new elderly care offering, centered around in-home hardware that can monitor a resident’s wellbeing and call for help if needed. Called SmartCare, the system is supported by new Alarm Receiving Centers (ARC) that Doro is building in the UK and Irish launch markets – and is due for commercial launch in early 2019. The automatic alarms and notifications should ensure that falls or accidents in the home can be treated more quickly, which has obvious benefits to the person but also wider benefits to their supporting healthcare services – as quicker responses typically result in better outcomes, which usually helps keep costs of care down too. But Doro isn’t only pushing the…
At its heart, the IoT relies on networks to carry its data from point to point, getting those valuable data packets back to applications that can turn them into some sort of valuable business outcome. As such, any potential new networking technology is sure to prick up our ears, but MWC was a mixed bag when it came to enthusiasm for the new opportunities – based on our conversations. There were concerns that the new spectrum opportunity could simply be swallowed up by the incumbent MNOs, leaving the smaller players and their innovative IoT approaches squeezed out of the market – especially if expensive usage licenses are lobbied for. Crucially, the two bands lie within the 2.4GHz and 5.8GHz ISM…
One story that skipped through our filters last week and never quite made it into Faultline was the sale of Technicolor’s IPR assets to InterDigital, which itself has larger patent royalties than any other revenue stream. InterDigital paid $150 million upfront in a deal that values the patents at $475 million and it allows Technicolor to focus on its operational businesses. It will keep on doing R&D, but also pay InterDigital for individual funded research projects to the tune of at least $5 million a year. All the patents will continue to be granted back to Technicolor. News Corp and Telstra in Australia reached a deal whereby Foxtel and Fox Sports will merge leaving News Corp with a 65% stake…
Cable Congress began with the usual release of numbers for the industry in Europe, always painfully focusing on the positive, and virtually ignoring the fall away in pay TV subscribers – this year’s highlight was that revenue is up 2.4% to €23.43 billion but it failed to give out figures for pay TV falls. The numbers are put together by IHS for Cable Europe and were released at the opening of Cable Congress in Dublin. If these were Netflix numbers you would not see Reed Hastings boasting about such low growth figures – he’d be apologizing. But the first graph in the presentation shows how cable is focused on past glories, not the immediate future in Europe, trying to set…
Mobile payment software outfit RGK Mobile assured Faultline Online Reporter a huge deal with Malaysian operator Axiata was prepped to hit the wires last week at Mobile World Congress. A poorly timed delay meant RGK Mobile’s moment in the limelight in Barcelona wasn’t to be, but the company was allowed to unveil the deal this week, revealing Axiata Group subsidiary Axiata Digital has integrated the Spanish start-up’s cloud-based technology to launch new services for XL in Indonesia and Dialog in Sri Lanka. The deployment signals the rapid rise of RGK Mobile in under 4 years, as the company gave us an insight into the explosive mobile market in Asia. Saturated markets mean telcos are investigating innovations in various guises, while…
Artificial Intelligence came up in virtually every single conversation at Cable Congress this week. The difference from last year’s show was that companies are beginning to put some clout behind their AI claims and operators are progressing in applying algorithms into their content businesses. Telenet’s Director of Market & Consumer Insights, Kim Smets, gave the example of an algorithm built in-house by Liberty Global’s Belgian subsidiary, allowing it to see if pay TV subscribers who have begun watching a series on catch-up, will have enough time to finish watching the full series before episodes are pulled from the catalog. The AI system then pushes a notification saying there are only so many days remaining, do you want to watch this…
“We have been debating rebranding,” was not an opening statement we expected at Cable Congress 2018, considering last year’s event was all about sugar coating cord cutting. Yet Manuel Kohnstamm, President of Cable Europe and Chief Corporate Affairs Officer at Liberty Global, took an open approach to introducing the show in Dublin, talking about adapting in order to rebuild consumer faith in aging cable brands and legacy technologies, as fiber and mobile networks slide in. He called for more innovation in the cable industry, increased partnerships and for private investors to get on board, instead of complaining about the growing threat from internet giants. Regulations were of course a key topic, with Kohnstamm seeking an end to the backwards way…
Wherever you look in the world of operators, where there is good competition there is a healthy market and the result of an unhealthy market invariably leads to higher prices, due to market dominance. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in Mexican broadband, where Telmex holds something close to a 60% market share of fixed line broadband and some of the most expensive broadband across Latin America. Which is why the regulator there, the Federal Telecommunications Institute (IFT) has told Carlos Slim, the billionaire owner of Telmex that he must separate out the wholesale and the retail sides of the business, to promote local loop unbundling. Local loop unbundling is a bit like socialism – depending on where you are…
“Cisco, NDS and SeaChange were all good at the time, but how good are they now?” asked Liberty Global’s Chief Product Officer Doron Hacmon. It turns out that Liberty Global currently has 85 different set tops deployed in subscriber homes, as he described his company’s splintered TV ecosystem as a “mess” and declaring the need for just one set top, pointing towards a future we know cable operators are heading in – unifying the video experience in a single multiscreen platform. He was speaking at Cable Congress 2018 in Dublin and was one of many Liberty Global executives to address the issue. Hacman spoke emphatically about causing disruption by finding efficiencies in inefficiencies, using the famous Einstein quote, “If you…
Against the backdrop of its ongoing buyout dispute with Broadcom, Qualcomm has unveiled the Snapdragon 820E, the latest addition to its embedded computing range of systems-on-chip. The new platform is aimed at premium devices and applications, which need more powerful hardware than its 400 and 600 Series. Qualcomm is pitching the new platform at computer vision, AI and immersive multimedia developers, for virtual reality, digital signage, connected retail and robotics. The Snapdragon 820E houses a 64-bit ARMv8 quad-core CPU, the Qualcomm Kryo in this case, as well as an Adreno 530 GPU and a Hexagon 680 DSP. 802.11ac WiFi and Bluetooth 4.2 are also included, as well as satellite location support, for GNS, GLONASS, BeiDou, Gallileao, QZSS and SBAS. Broadly,…
In enterprise WiFi, a three-year old start-up called Mist claims to shaking up the economics of planning and optimizing corporate WLANs, in the same way that others are doing for cellular networks. Its approach moves the bulk of the network logic to the cloud, then uses open source big data tools to collect and analyze millions of data points, applying machine learning too. All this can then retune an enterprise or campus WiFi environment automatically and on the fly. We talked to Jeff Aaron, VP of marketing at Mist, just as they opened for business in Europe last week, having landed some key accounts in the 18 months since they first went commercial in the US. Those US accounts include…