Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
It’s a clear sign that the holiday season is looming, when M&A speculation goes into overdrive around mobile operators. But the European MNOs at the center of the current rumors were all keen to deny reports of impending deals. Across the pond, Sprint’s talks with T-Mobile are off of course, but there is still likely to be further consolidation next year, with Dish, TMO and certain cablecos in the frame. In Europe, MNOs, telcos and cablecos are also realigning themselves to address a consumer market that is driven by fixed/mobile convergence and video multiplays rather than mobile services alone. Indeed, consolidation that is geared to multiplay business models are often more likely to survive competition authorities’ scrutiny than MNO-only deals…
Trials and deployment plans in the 26 GHz, 28 GHz and 39 GHz bands are piling up, but some mobile players believe even higher frequency spectrum must be harnessed to maximize the capacity of future 5G networks, and their potential to enable new services and experiences. Nokia is one of the founders of the new mmWave Coalition, which will lobby US agencies such as the FCC, international regulators and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), to open up bands above 95 GHz. They will try to build the same momentum behind these very high frequencies that is now seen below 40 GHz, ahead of the ITU’s World Radio Conference 2019, which will decide on global spectrum allocations for 5G. Other founders…
Live video streaming is increasingly done over mobile devices, causing many strains on the network and on the user’s quality of experience. The fuss over Verizon’s updated deal with the US NFL (National Football League) highlights the importance of this type of content to consumers and their service providers. But behind the scenes of these big negotiations, carriers are also racing to improve the efficiency of delivering live video, and may find a new open source protocol called Secure Reliable Transport (SRT). As for Verizon, the operator is reported to have paid more than $2bn for the rights to distribute live professional football games to mobile apps, on Monday, Thursday and Sunday nights, as well as post-season and Sunday afternoon…
Sprint and Verizon have both been providing more details about the practicalities of their densification programs, while piling pressure on US municipal authorities to make it easier for operators to access sites and infrastructure for 4G or 5G small cells. Tarek Robbiati, Sprint’s CFO, has been one of the most vocal wireless executives about the need to make outdoor small cell deployment easier, cheaper and more scalable. He has argued that local authorities can help lower barriers by opening up their sites and removing the red tape that currently surrounds permits and approvals for those locations, and for mobile equipment installation. But despite enthusiasm for smart city programs in many parts of the US, some states have proved hostile to…
Qualcomm has unveiled its latest flagship system-on-chip (SoC), the Snapdragon 845, focusing on enhanced performance for ‘extended reality’ (XR) and for on-device artificial intelligence (AI), as well as a new Secure Processing Unit (SPU) for “vault-like” security features. The SoC is being linked to the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S9, and Qualcomm will hope to reinforce its reputation of industry leading performance, as it battles to fend off Apple’s lawsuits and Broadcom’s hostile takeover attempts. To support its claims to be creating a full AI platform, the chip supplier also announced a strategic alliance with Chinese search engine Baidu, to create an AI voice solution based on the new Snapdragon combined with Baidu’s DuerOS conversational AI system. The technologies will be…
Charlie Ergen, head of Dish Networks, has stepped down from his CEO role in order to build up the US satellite TV provider’s wireless business. It will be no coincidence that this move comes just weeks after Sprint’s latest attempt to agree a merger with T-Mobile USA fell apart. The failure of those talks opens the way for Dish and Sprint to resurrect their own on-off courtship dance, and agree a spectrum and network hosting deal that could significantly improve the chances of wireless success for both companies. There are many reasons why Dish and Sprint should get closer – though certainly stop short of a full merger, since both bring significant baggage. Dish has an ailing TV business; while…
The mobile web giants – Google, Apple and Facebook – may reign supreme over the user experience in the western markets, but they have had far tougher challenges in the countries which are now the world’s two largest mobile user bases, China and India. Google has mounted its latest attempt to assert itself in emerging markets, with a particular focus on India, but with the regulator, TRAI, reaffirming its commitment to the tough net neutrality rules which wrongfooted Facebook Basics, will it have better fortune this time? In China, Google has been thwarted by restrictions on operating its services there, and by the strength of the homegrown operators and handset makers. Android has considerable market share, but the local MNOs…
Google’s AI-building AI-based program, AutoML, has created its own AI offspring, which can outperform a human-built AI system in video recognition tasks. Using a technique called reinforcement learning, AutoML (human-built) would tell NASNet when it struck gold, in a fully automated process. It’s a big step forward for machine-learning optimization, but still a long way from Skynet. If this process can be expanded to other machine-learning systems, then Google will have solved one of the biggest problems with building these AI systems – the huge amount of human intervention needed to tweak them until they produce a satisfactory output. It’s a very complex process, and one that needs a lot of tinkering, but if the AutoML approach can be ported…
Qualcomm has unveiled its latest flagship SoC, the Snapdragon 845, with claims of improved Extended Reality (XR) and on-device AI performance, and a new Secure Processing Unit (SPU) for ‘vault-like’ security features. TLAs aside, the SoC is being linked to the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S9, and Qualcomm will hope to reinforce its reputation of industry-leading performance, as it battles to fend off Apple’s lawsuits and Broadcom’s hostile takeover attempts. But those two issues are not the only short-term problems that Qualcomm faces. In the IoT arena, Qualcomm has yet to really carve out a niche for itself – despite attempts to position its processors as ideal for new devices. Cameras, gateways, drones, and smart home devices are all promising new…
A trio of announcements have shaken the LPWAN industry this week, as it races towards new lows in power consumption capabilities. It comes after a handful of outlets began decrying the departure of Sigfox staff from the startup, after the culmination of an apparent power struggle between founders – although it’s very much worth emphasizing that there’s a case to be made for Sigfox being one of the better performers in the LPWAN market. Light Reading ran with the headline ‘Sigfox in Peril as Senior Execs Exit,’ and didn’t reveal its sources for the angle. Staff depart startups pretty routinely, and power struggles are also pretty commonplace in nascent companies. Growing to some $32m in revenue for 2016 from the…
Evidence is rolling in now that Single Sign On (SSO) boosts online viewing for pay TV operators by making it easier for subscribers to access content on connected devices without having to keep re-entering credentials. It is almost 30 years since SSO entered enterprise IT as a mechanism for giving staff access to all authorized services, applications and data wherever they were, as remote access over corporate wide area networks increased. In the case of broadcasting and pay TV it should have emerged with the first online extensions to legacy pay TV services, or TV Everywhere as it was called, but has taken a while to get going. As it happens it has taken a few of the big tech…
Deustche Telekom is the first operator aside from Orange to be 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 – although Orange told Faultline Online Reporter that OCast is not positioned as a direct competitor. With Google’s popular cast technology pre-installed on Android phones and also compatible with iPhones, it has become the go-to source for casting videos to TV sets, and despite claims that the OCast software is not attempting to challenge Google, the similarities are obvious, and it will prove tricky to unhinge the tech…
Providers of OTT live services are certainly not struck for choice over streaming protocols, but they may find that few, if any, so far combine the low latency and high quality they want without any buffering. One protocol called Secure Reliable Transport (SRT) has emerged as a promising candidate for many live streaming services, which is why it is gaining growing support from key technology vendors in the OTT arena, such as Harmonic, Limelight, Kaltura and Brightcove, as well as founder members of the alliance promoting it, Haivision and Wowza. Other big players are pursuing different avenues but given the growing concern over latency for live online delivery, SRT has a good chance of becoming dominant. Of course to succeed…
Disney has reignited its interest in buying a large bulk of 21st Century Fox, with reports again surfacing that Disney is targeting Fox’s studio assets to power its OTT plans – but the two media giants both own a top 6 US movie studio meaning any studio deal surely could not swerve antitrust laws. With AT&T poised to swallow the world’s largest movie studio with Warner Brothers Pictures, the Department of Justice will have its hands full if Disney pursues a bid for the studio side of Fox, as reported by sources close to Rupert Murdoch’s own Wall Street Journal. Comcast and Verizon are also reported to be circling around 21st Century Fox, so with a deal looking increasingly likely,…
Mapping provider Here has acquired Advanced Telematics Systems (ATS), hoping to augment its Open Location Platform (OLP) with the German software company – which specializes in over-the-air (OTA) updates for automotive applications. This news came hard on the heels of announcing a partnership with Fujitsu, which will act as a system integrator for Here in automotive and smart city projects; as well as a smaller installation win with Hyundai. But the big news for Here is the initial launch of version 1.0 of the OLP, to select customers. Here has been leading the market for mapping platforms for cars, although has been having to fend off advances from chief rival TomTom. Here is pursuing a diversification strategy of sorts, providing…
Open source initiatives kicked off by AT&T are gaining significant influence in the industry, from ONAP (Open Network Automation Protocol) in the virtualized network orchestration space; to the newly announced dNOS operating system for telco white boxes; to xRAN, which seeks to define a “software-based, extensible RAN and to standardize critical elements of the x-RAN architecture”. If these succeed in becoming de facto standards, they could help AT&T drive the transformation of its own networks and cost base, and those of the telco sector as a whole, while retaining control of the value chain at the expense of proprietary vendors on one hand, and web players on the other. Now, xRAN.org is preparing its first specifications, hard on the heels…
Amazon Web Services (AWS) used its re:Invent conference as a platform to launch five new machine learning services, and unveil a partnership with Intel to create AWS DeepLens – a wireless video camera with machine learning features. This comes a week after AWS threw its weight behind the Open Neural Network Exchange, an open source AI project that brings it closer to Facebook and Microsoft. The event also saw the cloud giant announcing the latest element in an increasingly multi-faceted alliance with AT&T, an LTE-M button somewhat like the Dash buttons AWS’s parent firm sells to consumers – but this one is for enterprises to order supplies or issue service requests with a single click. On the machine learning (ML)…
One by one, Apple is squeezing long term partners out of its supply chain, threatening to leave a trail of corpses. But could Qualcomm be one of them? Reports indicate that Dialog Semiconductor may face a similar existential crisis to that of Imagination Technologies, if Apple is developing its own power management chips inhouse (see below). That would see the iPhone maker extending its control over the components – and bill of materials – of its mobile devices. But even Apple cannot start from scratch in the modem area. While it is appears to be trying to cut its ties with Qualcomm, by working with Intel and possibly MediaTek, and by hurling lawsuits (see below), it may shoot itself in…
Scottish and Southern Electric (SSE) and Northern Powergrid, two British electricity distribution network operators (DNOs), have announced proposals to explore a transition in their business models towards becoming what they’re calling ‘distributed system operators,’ (DSO) in an effort to better integrate distributed energy resources (DERs) using smart grid technologies. This sort of transition could become an increasingly common strategy for utilities, which have collectively had their core markets disrupted by the rise of cheap renewable energy. DERs present challenges and opportunities to the DNOs, but could mean dramatic saving for the operators and a cleaner grid, if properly utilized. The DSO model is focused on enabling customers, as cheaply as possible, to buy and sell services from solar panels, electric…
Amazon Web Services has used its re:Invent conference as a platform to launch five new AWS machine-learning services, and unveil a partnership with Intel to create AWS DeepLens – a wireless video camera with machine-learning features. It comes a week after AWS threw its weight behind the Open Neural Network Exchange, an open source AI project that brings it closer to Facebook and Microsoft. The Intel partnership has resulted in what we believe is the first piece of AWS-branded hardware – a camera that looks a bit like someone has stuck a webcam on top of the iconic MacBook charger. Housing an unspecified Intel Atom CPU with Gen9 graphics, 8GB of RAM, 16GB of storage, and running Ubuntu 16.04, the…