Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
All 50 US states have opted in to the FirstNet project for a public safety network operated by AT&T, to improve communication for first responders by supplying priority and preemption features on AT&T’s network during high-traffic or emergency situations. The US government will provide $7 billion in funding and access to 20 MHz of nationwide 700 MHz spectrum. Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands are also on board, while the number of regions served could increase still, as Guam, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands have until March to opt in. Online video vendor Brightcove has won a live streaming deal at Le Figaro, after the French news outlet initially tested Brightcove’s API-based system, Brightcove Live, for the…
Roku has made a move to defend itself from the rise of Voice Assistants everywhere, enhancing its Roku Connect and operating system and announcing its own Roku Entertainment Assistant, a voice system for smart speakers. Its vision for voice seems to be to continue to have a viable option purely for entertainment, rather than the grander vision of Amazon’s Alexa to extend voice control to every device in the home. Its vision is really about controlling what comes out of smart speakers, the TV and sound bars connected to the TV, using voice. It will show a product from TV partner China’s TCL at CES next week, the first to use this system. It’s a conservative, low level approach to…
One “livener” to wake up the markets in the past few days, is the idea that Apple will buy Netflix. It was put forward by Citigroup stock analysts Jim Suva and Asiya Merchant, who rate it at 40% likelihood. We were amazed. The habits of Apple would insist that Netflix was then limited to Apple devices. It is the way of Apple, its mantra if you like, Apple’s only way of doing business. Such a move would destroy about 50% of Netflix revenue and about 75% of its value. Buying it at $80 odd billion, would be like throwing away $60 billion. Why can’t stock analyst see that kind of thing. Even if it could be mitigated, for instance by…
The Universal Service burden that the UK government has placed on broadband from British Telecom this week, is effectively the political opposite of the US, which has cancelled its shift to Title II. But conditions in the UK are very different from the US, and it is a market where local loop unbundling was popular and had a good run, but this is changing as faster broadband speeds are being taken up BT OpenReach, which gives access to telephone wires, ducts, cabinets and exchanges, which is now maintaining most crosstalk cancellation for vectoring. Vectoring doesn’t work unless all lines in an exchange are connected to the same server for crosstalk cancellation. In future much of the broadband access from BT’s…
This week, Thread and ZigBee have announced that the two low-power mesh networking IoT alliances have successfully carried out another test that shows how nicely the two protocols play together – so why haven’t they merged yet? We’ve already seen a momentous IoT standards consolidation in the merger between the AllSeen Alliance and Open Computing Foundating (OCF). The latest joint announcements from the two bodies declare that members from both camps have carried out demonstrations of devices running ZigBee’s Universal Language (also known as the Cluster Library, which runs on top of the ZigBee Pro networking stack), and that the two organizations are on track to release a coordinated set of end-to-end product development solutions in 2017 for ZigBee-certified devices…
One of the most interesting aspects of the emerging new mobile network architecture -whether the radios are 4G or 5G – is the potential for non-MNOs to harness the capabilities of a cellular platform. This is not possible just through an MVNO deal, but in ways that give enterprises, government agencies or web services providers new levels of control, and new ways to monetize the connectivity. The two most important examples are options to run LTE in unlicensed or shared spectrum; and for a non-MNO to deploy its own localized and specialized mobile core. Until true 5G network slicing is widespread, these two developments are the most realistic ways to start to extend control and monetization beyond the MNO, if…
FCC chairman Tom Wheeler has announced he will be stepping down from the helm on January 20, the same day that president-elect Donald Trump will be inaugurated. Wheeler was appointed by current president Obama, and despite a sometimes fractious relationship, both men have followed a more pro-consumer model than many past administrations, and one which has been criticized by Trump. So Wheeler was widely expected to resign almost immediately the new chief took over, but his departure deals a big blow for consumers, particularly in areas like net neutrality and the open set-top initiative. His three years running the FCC will be remembered for several major initiatives, which have seen varying degrees of success. In wireless, these are headed by…
The UK’s National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) has blasted the level of coverage achieved with 4G and urged early action to deploy 5G more effectively. The organization’s report particularly highlighted the role small cells will play in providing good services in urban areas, and on roads and railways, where the NIC says cellular coverage is “frankly appalling”. It has also looked further ahead and suggested new approaches to 5G spectrum allocation and usage, in order to open the market to hundreds of new service providers, supporting localized or specialized services. If adopted, these proposals would create a far more open landscape for 5G – but these big ideas should not be allowed to obscure the fact that 5G is not necessary…
Verticals and a device comeback: Nokia fights to return to growth in 2017 Three years ago, end-of-year analyses heavily featured Microsoft’s decision to acquire Nokia’s devices business. As we picked over the corpse of Nokia’s smartphone failure, there was wistfulness for a world-beating business gone wrong, but also a recognition that the Finnish company had lived up to its century-old reputation for agility, getting out of a sector where it was failing, and leaving its rump company better equipped to be a mobile powerhouse still – in infrastructure and intellectual property if not in handsets. Nokia, we now know, certainly gambled more astutely than Microsoft. By mid-2015, a year after the deal was finalized, the US company had accepted the…
// M&A, Strategies, Alliances // Senet has sold off its EnerTrack tank monitoring assets, which have been acquired by Independent Technologies – marking an of an era for Senet, now committed to LoRa. Gemalto has rejected Atos’ $5.06bn bid, in a move to boost Atos’ technology consulting firm’s cybersecurity expertise – including Gemalto’s SIM and credit card chip business. Gemalto has accepted Thales’ $5.43bn acquisition bid, a 57% premium over the share price Atos used in its original bid. It gives Thales Gemalto’s SIM and security chip business. Xylem is acquiring Pure Technologies for $397m, with Xylem adding Pure’s water infrastructure diagnostic and analytics portfolio to its water utility offerings. Lear Corp is buying EXO Technologies, hoping to expand its…
Zigbee’s Dotdot application layer has been ported to the sort-of-rival Thread protocol this week, ahead of a CES that is expected to be rammed full of smart home device announcements. The two alliances say that running the Dotdot app-stack on top of Thread’s networking stack enables the first interoperable IoT language running over an IP-based network. Both Zigbee and Thread are IEEE 802.15.4-based mesh networking protocols. Zigbee has been in the market for some 15 years, and overhauled itself in the past couple of years to provide a more unified offering – of Zigbee 3.0 and its Zigbee Cluster Library (ZCL), rather than the handful of separate options that were available (Pro, GreenPower, RF4CE, etc). Thread is a much more…
European and North American utilities tripled their investments into distributed energy startups between 2010 and 2016, investing $2.9bn in 130 companies since 2009, according to GTM Research – with 2016 seeing $1bn invested alone. Utilities are eager to expand their cleantech portfolios, investing in a range of areas to support their energy transition – while at the same time investing as a defensive strategy, to protect their market share. Wind and solar costs now rival conventional fossil fuels, and are cheaper in some markets. Customers want renewables and greater control of their energy use, and utilities are transitioning to enable both trends. But transition creates new challenges that startups are in the perfect position to address. These issues often center…
Riot doesn’t go in for New Year predictions much, but we think Hajime will be a name on most security reporters’ lips at some point in 2018 – a more potent version of the Mirai malware that threatens to run rampant across the Internet of Many Unsecured Things. Mirai itself has made the news this week, because its apparent author has now plead guilty to such accusations, leveled against him by the FBI. However, this isn’t the end for the now open-sourced Mirai. Wired extensively covered the admission, which took place in a court in Anchorage – and profiles the interesting FBI investigation. The three accused, all Americans, have collectively confessed to unleashing Mirai on the world – but notably,…
The European Commission policy group DG Connect has just opened a 12-week consultation, to assess V2X communication in Europe. The consultation will likely be followed by a directive, which could define the standard that should be followed in Europe for V2X communication. However, the EU’s preference for neutrality could still win out on the issue – meaning it could take no further regulatory stance. The decision will affect the two significant camps in the V2X market; IEEE 802.11p-based DSRC backed by NXP, Denso, VW, Toyota, AutoTalks, and Commsigmia; and the C-V2X backed by Qualcomm, Nokia and several premium automakers. As it currently stands, these two V2X technologies cannot speak the same language, and even interfere with each other – so…
Nagra has won its first Android TV Operator Tier deployment this week with Euskaltel, securing the Spanish pay TV operator’s debut 4K set top. The deal aligns with the operator swing towards Android TV, which is a welcome trend for consumers, yet concerns for any vendor with dealings in the set top sector are mounting as Google’s OS dominance spreads from the handset to the TV. Adapting to an Android TV ecosystem has meant adopting Google’s Widevine DRM, which a few security players were late in doing, along with the other major DRMs and conditional access security systems for connected devices. The majority of video service providers are looking to Android TV to play a pivotal part of their future…
Shazam is arguably one of the world’s most popular song recognition apps, therefore serving as a powerful platform for Apple to push its music streaming ambitions to challenge the might of Spotify. Apple could have knocked up its own Shazam-rivaling software in a heartbeat, implying there is much more to the UK-based firm than meets the eye. Shazam creates acoustic fingerprints which are returned to the user once a song has been successfully recognized, and then offers up a window with different sources of where to listen to or buy the track, while the likes of Apple and Spotify pay Shazam for the privilege. This famous audio fingerprint technology is based on Gracenote data. The main question mark for the…
When immersive video and ultra HD are discussed, audio is sometimes almost an afterthought. This perhaps reflects priorities on the consumer electronics side, especially TV sets, where the quality of audio output actually got worse as the screens became thinner, because there was less room to accommodate a decent speaker system. This led to the evolution of sound bars, although increasingly users have needed external speaker arrangements or headphones to enjoy an audio experience in keeping with the higher quality video. Even then, audio quality has been constrained by lack of innovation on that front, until the industry belatedly added it into the equation for ultra HD alongside High Dynamic Range, Higher Frame Rate, Wide Color Gamut and high resolution…
A trio of announcements were made in the LPWAN (low power wide area network) industry last week, as it chases new lows in power consumption. The first came from Semtech, the owner of the LoRa technology, which announced what it said was the first disposable LoRa-enabled nanotag. The reference design is aimed at applications that require long range connectivity, and uses an “ultra-thin printed battery” that should enable it to be easily integrated into packaging designs, or simply fixed to an object. The target industries include logistics, shipping, healthcare, pharmaceutical, and asset tracking, as well as general purpose compliance. Semtech says it will be available in 2018, and is undergoing trials with LoRa Alliance members. It can be built using…
Deutsche Telekom has joined Orange in testing the newly open sourced OCast software, developed by the French telco. OCast is a transmission protocol for transforming smartphones and tablets into platforms for viewing and controlling content on the big screen, in much the same manner as Google Cast. Orange is eager to say that it is not positioning Ocast as a direct competitor to Google’s popular cast technology, which is pre-installed on Android phones and also compatible with iPhones, and so has become the go-to source for casting videos to TV sets. But despite claims that the OCast software is not attempting to challenge Google, the similarities are obvious. This may be yet another example of an MNO trying to go…
The city of Bristol, in the south west of the UK, is one of the country’s most advanced smart city projects with its Bristol is Open program. Its university is also at the heart of 5G developments, and a convergence of the two efforts should create an important UK 5G testbed. One of the steps towards that goal is the establishment of a live 5G proof of concept (PoC) to test smart city application in the city center, starting in March next year. This is part of a joint research initiative led by the university, incumbent telco BT and Nokia. At the announcement of the project, Cormac Whelan, CEO of Nokia UK and Ireland, said the PoC would help turn the…