Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
A key theme of the past couple of years has been the intensifying bid, by certain countries, to increase their self-sufficiency in critical technologies such as AI and 5G – increasing their global influence and their national security in a time of geopolitical tension. Some countries or regions have relied mainly on investments in high-tech firms, as seen in the Gulf states, but others are developing homegrown technology from scratch. India is in the forefront of such initiatives, and the technological projects, while backed by the government, are often led by private companies including the two large telcos, Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel. The latest example is that Jio is working on a homegrown AI model which would benefit its…
Vodafone Idea is in yet another painful chapter of debt restructuring, and the outlook does not good. With no knights in shining armor to rescue the Indian’s operator, this could be the death knell for Vodafone Idea (Vi), and the end of rock-bottom ARPUs in India. Vi has been struggling with financial difficulties for almost 3 years and was lent support by the government in late 2022 when it bought a 33% stake in the firm in exchange for paying off $1.95 billion debt. However, the government support only scratched the surface, repaying about 7% of Vi’s debt. At the end of 2023, Vi had gross debt of INR 2,093 billion ($25.2 billion), and new debt repayment deadlines looming. The…
On the surface, western Europe’s mobile industry seems to have had a turbulent time ever since the start of the century, and the huge sums paid for 3G spectrum in many markets. That inflated auction was a catalyst for change, including write-downs and mergers, but behind the headlines, the quarter-century that has elapsed since has actually been one of very limited transformation. This is mainly because the position of the former incumbent telcos has changed so little, and even as many of them struggle with debt and poor finances, governments are more likely to prop them up than initiate radical market change, especially in M&A regulation, that might help challengers to fill innovation and service gaps that the incumbents’ crises…
Five years ago this week… France introduced a “tech tax” on the largest giants in the industry known at the time under the GAFA initialism (Google, Amazon, Facebook—now Meta—and Apple), bringing in €591 million ($645 million) into the state’s coffers in 2022. Austria followed in Paris’ footsteps and began planning its own implementation of the levy, while the EU as a whole agreed in December 2022 to ensure a minimum global level of taxation of 15% for multinational groups with a parent or subsidiary located in the bloc making more than €750 million worldwide ($818 million). These laws came into effect this week, on January 1, 2024. A trio of tier 2/3 US cable TV operators – Ketchikan Public Utilities…
With CES 2024 opening its doors next week, US telco Lumen Technologies (the actor formerly known as CenturyLink) has announced it will showcase and launch a router with WiFi 7 capabilities for its Quantum Fiber customers, manufactured by Axon Networks. The unnamed device was first announced back in October 2023, and will be available to Quantum Fiber users across 16 states in early 2024, following a trial of the WiFi 7 device with a single customer in December (presumably at a small business rather than a single home). Lumen boasts that one device can cover up to 90% of a home based on square footage, reducing the need for extra nodes, while being able to support multiple users and gigabit…
Three years on from the initial divisive proposal, a revamp for the European Super League (ESL)—a dreamed up rival to fracture UEFA’s domination on European soccer with tournaments like the Champions League—are back, boosted by a ruling from the European Court of Justice against European and international soccer governing bodies. Playing devil’s advocate, for too long sports clubs and individual athletes have played to the tune of established sports leagues, which have thought themselves exempt from competition. Case in point is what Saudi Arabia‘s Public Investment Fund has attempted in the golfing world by launching LIV Golf, to the deep displeasure of PGA Tour, the golfing world’s incumbent. This culminated in merger talks to get rid of the problem caused…
Accedo has quietly crawled into the video quality of service (QoS) analytics space, pitching a new tool at clients that aims to meld infrastructure monitoring with QoS monitoring. Such a combination, the vendor claims, is not possible with existing OTT video monitoring tools on the market. Called Horizon, the new product remains officially unannounced and uncharted on the Swedish video software developer’s product portfolio, but was presented under cover of an exclusive press event in London just before the turn of the year. Accedo’s observation is that the current crop of QoS analytics outlets hand over a bunch of KPI data to clients and leave them hanging, with little to no battle plan. The idea with Horizon’s two-pronged hardware and…
Drowning in 2024 predictions? Us too. But, for the record, when Faultline makes a prediction, you can rest assured that it comes from a source which has something that most others don’t – true autonomy. We have no vested interests in the growth or decline of individual sectors or technologies. No investments in stocks and shares. No controlling parent company pulling the strings. Nothing clouds our judgment. This statement is pointed more at predictions from technology proprietors, not other news or analyst outlets. Now, with that foreword out of the way, another batch of predictions for the year ahead has caught our eye, offering a more structured and in-depth technical outlook than most LinkedIn prophesies. The source is Jason Thibeault,…
Faultline teased before the festive shutdown that the CDN Alliance was poised to communicate a message that it hopes will make streaming industry actors stand up and take notice of the non-profit group. A few weeks later, we have our reward. The result is an extension from the CDN Alliance’s focus on events and collaborations, to tangible working groups – revealing three separate projects formed in late 2023 designed to drive standards, interoperability and insights across the content delivery spectrum. These are Dictionary, Low Latency, and Traffic Radar. Faultline was pre-briefed on the three projects before the new year by CDN Alliance Chairman Mark de Jong, who was particularly enthused by the third working group – Traffic Radar. This is…
Text-to-video is the next revolution in generative artificial intelligence, with groundbreaking content production tools like Google’s new VideoPoet set to rock the content production world. It comes as OpenAI’s ChatGPT has passed its first birthday, since bursting onto the scene in November 2022 – triggering a gold rush of investments in generative pre-trained transformers, large language models (LLMs), and artificial intelligence. These technologies singlehandedly ground Hollywood to a halt in 2023 as actors and writers held the picket line for months, pushing back against content providers’ use of AI. All of a sudden, a LLM revolution was in full swing, where simple inputs could generate detailed responses in seconds – helping developers build apps, travelers make comprehensive travel plans, helping…
Olusegun Ogunsanya has resigned as the CEO of Airtel Africa, and will be replaced by Sunil Taldar, who joined Airtel Africa in October 2023 as Director of Transformation. Airtel has over 150 million subscribers in Africa and is active in 14 countries on the continent. Altice Portugal, still reeling from a corruption investigation, is being targeted by US private equity firm Warburg Pincus and former Credit Suisse chair Antonio Horta-Osorio, in a bid that is reportedly worth €6 billion. Altice has offloaded its French data center wing recently, and is mulling selling a stake in its French SFR operations. Neutral host provider Boldyn Networks has signed a deal to deploy 5G and Wi-Fi infrastructure across Rome to support its ‘smart-city’ ambitions. The project includes IoT sensors for…
NextWave Wireless has been a controversial name in the US cellular market for almost 30 years, and has been on a rollercoaster ride – including bankruptcy, changes of business model and leadership, and protracted legal battles with the FCC. There has been a common thread running through all its various commercial models, and that is to monetize its spectrum holdings. As such, it was natural that it would enter the increasingly crowded private wireless market with a spectrum-centric strategy, which it first unveiled last February. Along with other players such as Ligado, Globalstar and DenseAir, it touts its ownership of licensed airwaves as a key differentiator from private wireless providers that use shared spectrum or WiFi. But a status update…
BT is the latest telco to ramp up energy sustainability efforts across its whole supply and operations chain, in the wake of various studies that have identified a major gap between rhetoric and reality over 5G energy efficiency. This gap partly reflects teething troubles as 5G beds in, but also the complexion of electricity generation in different countries, with varying reliance on fossil fuels. Mobile will continue to depend heavily on electricity, irrespective of how energy efficient they become, with the RAN accounting for about 73% of the total energy usage, according to the GSMA. On top of that, mobile operations result in energy consumption across their supply chains, and within their operations, especially infrastructure maintenance. BT has set out…
SingTel became the latest in a string of major telcos to complete a trial of Reduced Capability (RedCap) technology on its 5G network in December 2023. This has laid foundations for an equally big slew of early commercial launches later in 2024 coinciding with arrival of 3GPP Release 18, the first associated with “5G Advanced”. The spate of RedCap trials during 2023 came about as operators upgraded their networks with 5G SA (Standalone). SA is required for this fourth 5G use case developed for IoT applications requiring higher performance than LPWAN technologies such as LoRa and the cellular NB-IoT can provide, or for that matter mMTC (massive Machine Type Communication), but not as much as full eMBB (Enhanced Mobile Broadband).…
With its significant rural population in areas poorly served by mobile or fixed networks, the USA has become a significant battleground for satellite broadband coverage. All three leading mobile operators have forged partnerships with different LEO (Low Earth Orbit) constellation providers, which are themselves competing for wholesale carriage business. The platform operators are also contending with their own direct to device services in some cases. Device makers constitute a third party. Apple made the early running a year ago in November 2022 when it invested $450 million in several US companies, mostly Globalstar, enabling iPhone users to send emergency text messages through the latter’s satellite network, at this stage free of extra charges. Soon afterwards, various Android smartphone makers including…
In a laboratory thrumming with electromagnetic activity, two enthusiastic engineers opened a metal box and showed Wireless Watch a Samsung Galaxy S22 mobile connected to the internet. The meeting was in late December, and fittingly so, as the two men were filled with the joy of young children opening Christmas stockings. We were in Parallel Wireless’ Bristol office, inspecting its latest 5G SA Open RAN technology in action. The cause of the excitement was a network with a distributed unit (DU) that could perform on a general purpose central processing unit (GP CPU), this was a promising breakthrough in the Open RAN community: a hardware-agnostic software stack. Parallel Wireless’ processor-agnostic RAN offering is adaptable for Intel’s x86, as well as…
Nokia’s exclusion from AT&T’s virtualized RAN contract last month does not mark the end of the Finnish firm’s business with the US carrier – but was another significant blow to its US prospects, following its ousting from new RAN deals at Verizon. With sales in China increasingly uncertain because of geopolitics and the slowdown in Chinese 5G build-out, Nokia urgently needs to generate growth outside the world’s top two RAN markets, and this may prompt a radical reorganization of its Mobile Networks business, and even a break-up of the company. Even without the AT&T blow, which saw a $14 billion modernization and vRAN contract go to Ericsson, Nokia’s mobile business has been suffering in recent years, after its first 5G…
Digi Belgium is an enthusiastic new entrant to the Belgian market, hungry to take some share in an expensive market for consumers. Wireless Watch spoke to the firm’s General Manager Jeroen Degadt to learn more about its plans to challenge the incumbents. Belgian’s newest operator has interesting DNA. It is a joint venture between Belgian B2B specialist City Mesh, and Romania’s Digi Communications. City Mesh was founded by a group of young friends building networks at campsites at the Belgian seaside. The firm matured to specialize in B2B services and was acquired by IT services provider Cegeka in December 2020. City Mesh is still run by founding member Mitch De Geest. City Mesh has been talking up its telco ambitions…
Accompanying our separate examination of NextWave (see standalone article), a number of additional private cellular challengers should be zoomed in – especially as 2024 starts to grapple with the changes made in the wake of the WRC-23 decision (see another separate article). Leveraging spectrum assets to support enterprise services is clearly an attractive route to improved monetization, not just for start-ups, but for major players like satellite provider Globalstar. The company is the latest to seek to span satellite and terrestrial services using hybrid spectrum, but both the value and the challenges of deploying in such bands were highlighted when the satellite firm appointed Paul Jacobs, former CEO of Qualcomm, to be its CEO last September. Globalstar will license key…
British Telecom (BT) has announced a “transformative” new back-end network technology called Multicast Assisted Unicast Delivery (MAUD). However, the cost savings appear miniscule, and amid a questionable rebranding to EE, the former state-owned incumbent is vulnerable. BT says that MAUD will allow content providers to treat it as a virtual CDN. BT will use its internal network caches as a host for third-party content, and then optimally point end-users to the nearest cache – delivering consumer streams as unicast, but caching everything in the first place via multicast. As such, there should be much less traffic entering BT’s network from these content providers, which should give BT much more control over its access network – for both fixed and mobile.…