Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Broadcom’s controversial $117bn bid to acquire Qualcomm is hanging by a thread after US authorities ordered a postponement of a critical shareholder meeting. Qualcomm investors were to have made a crucial vote today (March 6), after weeks of rancorous disputes between the two chip giants. They were to have voted on Broadcom’s nominations for six replacement Qualcomm board members – if successful, the predator would have gained a potential majority on the 11-person board, paving the way for acceptance of its bid. But that meeting will now be delayed by at least a month, at the order of the powerful Committee on Foreign Investment in the US (CFIUS), which initiated an investigation in to the proposed deal. With the San…
Regulators in the US and UK both made strides towards a new regulatory environment for 5G last week, with the US FCC planning a millimeter wave spectrum auction in November, and the UK’s Ofcom seeing two new entrants engaging in its own midband spectrum sale. The FCC chair, Ajit Pai, said during his keynote speech at Mobile World Congress that he plans to hold an auction for 28 GHz spectrum in November, followed immediately by another for 24 GHz – though he must get the approval of Congress, by May 13, to implement his plan. If it goes ahead, it will be one of the first sales of millimeter wave spectrum in the world, and will set precedents for regulations…
Just over two years after Cisco and Ericsson announced a far-reaching strategic alliance, there have been very few concrete indications of its progress – and now Cisco appears to be trampling over its remnants by moving into its Swedish partner’s most central market, the RAN. The alliance, which led many to speculate that a full merger would follow, was supposed to generate an additional $1bn for each partner and allow them to address markets that had previously been closed. Cisco would be able to offer mobile RAN and end-to-end networks to cities, vertical industries and other key markets; Ericsson would have a full enterprise wireless platform and better access to corporate and IoT opportunities. But despite repeated insistence that the…
One of the interesting aspects of the rising influence of open source groups in telco networks, even down in the RAN, is how they will intersect (or compete with) the Telecom Infra Project (TIP). For instance, Vodafone’s Luke Ibbetson said the operator was not part of the new ORAN Alliance (see below) because it was putting all its efforts behind the OpenRAN effort within TIP. Kicked off by Facebook as a telco follow-up to its Open Compute Project, TIP has gained significant momentum in the past year, with operators such as BT, Orange, Deutsche Telekom and SK Telecom setting up TIP incubators to support start-ups which look to introduce new architectures and economics – based around commoditized base stations and…
AT&T is setting a strong pattern of developing disruptive technology for virtualized networks inhouse and then placing it into an open source initiative. Its ECOMP management and orchestration (MANO) technology ended up as the major portion of ONAP (Open Network Automation Protocol). Its dNOS network operating system for white boxes has become a Linux Foundation project. Now its XRAN development of a disaggregated, virtualized RAN, which had already been open sourced, is to merge with the C-RAN Alliance to provide a cross-industry platform that particularly aims to support 5G slicing and vertical market applications. The motivations are the same in all three – to accelerate progress in breaking down the traditional supply chains, and cost bases, of the telco network;…
The new network architecture will be more significant than the 5G radio itself in transforming the economics of the mobile operator, in terms of cost efficiency and of support for a wide range of new revenue streams. Only with a virtualized platform will MNOs secure the new cost base and flexibility they need; and 5G’s most important contribution may be to make it more achievable to support a fully virtualized RAN, and to use that as a platform for end-to-end, multivendor, multi-operator network slicing. The most prominent announcement was of yet another AT&T-inspired open industry initiative, ORAN (see separate item), which brings together the US telco’s XRAN effort with the Cloud-RAN Alliance for a concerted attempt to bring white box…
With World Radio Conference 2019 – where the first globally and regionally harmonized 5G spectrum allocations will be decided – looming, spectrum issues were high on the MWC agenda this year. Some regulators are already prompting interesting and creative debates about plans for 5G spectrum – not just band plans, but regulatory environments, with a greater emphasis on sharing and dynamic access than in the past. The FCC, India’s TRAI and the UK’s Ofcom have all contributed to the discussion with new plans in the past week (see separate item). Vendors, too, are working hard to ensure that the spectrum famine of the early 4G era does not return. In 4G, it was averted by opening up higher, capacity-oriented bands…
Mobile World Congress, given its location, might traditionally be dominated by the European operators, but even European giants like Nokia were acknowledging that 5G will be driven, in its early years, by other regions, notably the USA, China and south east Asia. In the wake of the Winter Olympics in South Korea, KT was able to claim the prize for the first commercial 5G service, even if it was limited in time and space to a single event and was pre-standard, and came with some very mixed reports about actual performance in Pyeongchang. Nevertheless, KT claimed its system, which consisted of 22 5G links over 10 sites, delivered 3,800 terabytes of data during the two-week games, and reached peak speeds…
The ready availability of strong encryption providing cover for terrorists has been well publicized, in the context of Facebook’s WhatsApp for example, but it is also being exploited across the wider cybercrime community to hinder protection against a wide variety of attacks. This was a key finding of Cisco’s 2018 Annual Cybersecurity Report, which also identified “noise” associated with a variety of commonly used internet utilities such as drop boxes as a cover for various attacks, because they make it harder for defenses to separate real threats from all the background activity. Cisco’s report almost coincided with Akamai’s Q4 2017 State of the Internet Security survey, with at first sight surprisingly little overlap between them. Cisco’s combined data and analysis…
Below are Riot’s key takeaways from our MWC meetings, presented in our traditional round-up format – to give you a comprehensive taste of the trends on show. This year, we noticed a lot of concern around the potential use and regulation of the CBRS and C-band spectrum, which has a lot of potential in the IoT – if regulators open it up to other operators besides licensed or satellite. The following companies are covered here: Dali Wireless, CBNL, Libelium, Cobham Wireless, Cambium Networks, b<>com, Mimosa, Telensa, Ruckus, PoLTE, Thingstream, Zinwave, Cisco Jasper Dali Wireless – in-building DAS, wireless as the ‘fourth utility’ A provider of in-building wireless connectivity, and wide-area public safety networks, Dali Wireless has been in business since…
Below are Riot’s key takeaways from our MWC meetings, presented in our traditional round-up format – to give you a comprehensive taste of the trends on show. As expected, cloud software had a very strong presence at MWC, but network-edge offerings have grown increasingly prominent at the show. The following companies are covered here: Teoco, VMware, Virtuosys, Greenwave, Vasona, Avira, Mycom OSI. Teoco – Service Assurance, and calls for new IoT network authentication Telecom software provider Teoco is hoping to become the leader in IoT Service Assurance, with a focus on monitoring the ‘thing’ and not just the network. EVP’s Rob Roy and Hemant Minocha, and VP Service Assurance Solutions Dima Alkin explained that the focus was now moving from…
Below are Riot’s key takeaways from our MWC meetings, presented in our traditional round-up format– to give you a comprehensive taste of the trends on show. Power concerns were central to nearly all, Intel was feeling a squeeze on many sides, as alternative compute and network architectures make progress. The following companies are covered here: Napatech, Vuzix, CEVA, Cavium, Ossia, Altair Napatech – FPGA-based data center acceleration Napatech CMO Jarrod Siket was on hand to talk us through the new SmartCard offering, a PCI-based FPGA expansion card for general purpose servers – in the same vein as Napatech’s SmartNIC cards, aimed at networking applications. Noting that Napatech’s expertise lies in the FPGA software running on its cards, our conversation turned…
While at Faultline Online Reporter we have assiduously followed in-home WiFi and hotspots, we have perhaps neglected the application of WiFi in the enterprise. When we last looked (ten years ago) we continued to see enterprise WiFi built around on campus controllers which cost extra and had to be tuned. But a 3 year old start up called Mist claims to be changing all of that, by moving far more of the logic to the cloud, using open source big data tools to collect and shift millions of data points and machine learning apps in the cloud which can then retune an enterprise or campus WiFi environment automagically. We talked to Jeff Aaron, VP Marketing at Mist, just as they…
Facebook overhauled its video strategy during the second half of 2017, but it was already working quite well if we can believe various surveys that show it has been closing the gap on YouTube for mobile views. The latest survey, admittedly without any indication over methodology, from Openwave Mobility, a provider of traffic management software for MNOs, suggests Facebook is posed to overtake YouTube worldwide for mobile views and has already done so in many developing countries. This highlights the success of Facebook’s mobile app and also the first stage of its video strategy which began in earnest in 2014, focused on engagement around very short form video mostly published in its News feed. The aim was both to increase…
Enrique Rodriguez held his first results conference as the CEO of TiVo and decided to shake up the image of the company among shareholders, by announcing a search for “strategic alternatives” – either more acquisitions, or a sale, or taking the company private – to change how the company is viewed. Rodriguez is clearly a shoe salesman, you know the one from the joke. One shoe salesman was sent to a desert island and called home, “It’s terrible, no-one here wears shoes.” But another salesman (Rodriguez) calls home next from another island and says “Boss, I cannot thank you enough, this is a great market because no-one here has any shoes yet.” Rodriguez attitude is so positive and as he…
In absence of any official announcements, WiFi chip manufacturer Quantenna Communications took the opportunity at Mobile World Congress to finally put substance behind the rumors that Comcast is indeed the “mystery MSO” influencing its books. The reason: “Comcast doesn’t like putting out press releases on chips, it’s really a media company after all,” said Quantenna’s Senior Director of Product Marketing James Chen, speaking to Faultline Online Reporter. The rather convoluted issue here is Qualcomm has been in the Comcast account for some time, despite Comcast having its own in-house Plume WiFi technology for multiple APs in a mesh which use Qualcomm Atheros chips. Separately Quantenna has a mesh licensing deal in play with Turkey’s AirTies. Clearing up the confusion, Chen…
ARM has unveiled Project Trillium, an initiative that aims to add new processor designs that cater for AI and machine learning (ML) applications. Supported by new software tools, the two designs, ML and OD (Object Detection), are being pushed as a way of adding advanced AI capabilities to mobile devices. Of course, ARM has rivals in this wave of ML-focused silicon. Google has its TPU, Intel is developing chips based on its Nervana acquisition, and CEVA and Ambarella launched new products before this year’s Consumer Electronics Show. A host of smaller start-ups will hope to pile on the pressure – including Cerebras, DeePhi, Graphcore, Horizon robotics, and Mythic. ARM ML is the first new processor design, and boasts two main features –…
Mariya Gabriel, European Commissioner for the Digital Economy and Society, gave a speech this week at the Berlin Film Festival about the future of making movies in Europe. As befits someone so young (a full Commissioner at 37) her aims are noble and altruistic, if somewhat protectionist, but the law of unintended consequences is almost certain to show its hand. Her rambling reverential speech about the beauty of film, touched on the cold war (she was in Berlin after all) and then on she went to the current economic climate (positive) – focusing on media’s role in strengthening competition and its openness shining a light on intolerance, inequality and racism – which was high praise indeed for an industry currently…
MPEG chair and co-founder Leonardo Chiariglione has courted the limelight lately by posting two dramatic and despairing blogs warning that success of the Alliance for Open Media’s (AOMedia) royalty free codec model would be a disaster not just for his organization but the video industry as a whole. It would destroy incentives for technology companies to develop and contribute intellectual property (IP) for the common good of the industry and its users, he contended. He accused “Non-Practicing Entities”, or NPEs, which are patent license holders with interest in extracting money from their IP, but no intention of developing products from it, of dragging down the whole MPEG movement. They had become increasingly aggressive in extracting value from their IP and…
It is easy to see why the UK government chose an algorithm from London-based ASI Data Science as its recommended tool for lesser social media platforms to use in identifying and removing Islamic State (IS) propaganda. But the UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd has also indicated that the government may enforce the use of this tool for smaller online media platforms – that don’t have the resources to develop effective ways of identifying content deemed objectionable themselves, like YouTube and Facebook. But they are employing a variety of methods designed to provide layers of defense against infringing content and it is a mistake for the UK government to place over-reliance on any one tool – which could also help stoke…