Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Qualcomm looks like a beleaguered company. Hardly a week goes by without another government probe, legal attack or other setback. In the past couple of weeks, it has paid a settlement fee to Qualcomm, continued to up the ante in its litigation with Apple (an important customer which may be slipping away to Intel and others), and faced possible challenges to its highly strategic acquisition of NXP. But amid all these difficulties, Qualcomm continues to hurl out the innovations. It is likely that it will be forced to make significant changes to its business models, its licensing practices and its scale of royalties in the coming few years. Those may lead to a Qualcomm with a very different level of…
Sigma Designs has joined the Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF) in a move that further opens up the Z-Wave low-power mesh protocol to smart home developers. Joining the OCF, which recently swallowed its AllSeen Alliance rival, Sigma is hoping to drive demand for Z-Wave chips – of which it is a major manufacturer. The OCF now manages both IoTivity and AllJoyn, two standards for defining device discovery and communication frameworks that sit above the radio-layers of the end-devices. As it stands, the OCF has direct partner relationships with Z-Wave and Thread, although certification and product adoption announcements have been slow to materialize. This is another step forward for smart home standards consolidation, and while the upper-layer frameworks have come together, there’s…
ARM has unveiled two new Cortex chips, designed for AI-based applications at the network-edge, and the first chips based on its new DynamIQ architecture. Fitting into the fog-computing and edge-analytics trend, the chips open up options for developers looking to move compute cycles from the cloud to the network edge – a tricky balancing act, when it comes to bandwidth and batteries. While AI is still the hottest technology buzzword, there are applications that are embracing the machine-learning, computer vision, and natural language improvements that have been enabled by modeling computer systems in the fashion of human brains. While we are still a long way from HAL or other science fiction AIs like the Culture’s Minds, the AI-based cloud software…
Verizon apparently did make a bid for Charter and it was rejected according to the almost entirely unreliable New York Post. Verizon’s $100 billion bid was considered too low. Reports add that Charter chairman John Malone may have turned down the offer due to tax implications and wants to allow time for Charter to digest its meal of Time Warner Cable first. At Faultline Online Reporter, we think it should be Charter buying Verizon. Austrian recommendation software company XroadMedia is supplying its Ncanto discovery product to Uruguayan cable TV operator Nuevo Siglo. Nuevo Siglo’s hybrid DVB-OTT service NSNOW, with a library of 8,000 titles and 160 linear TV channels, will use the Ncanto system to provide content recommendations based on…
Maltese operator Melita quietly rolled out its debut OTT video service this week; news that was completely overshadowed by the announcement that it is merging with Vodafone Malta to form a dominant fixed line force in the country – an island home to around 430,000 people. With the merger taking center stage, Melita didn’t even bother pushing out a press release covering the launch of its new NexTV multiscreen service, possibly to draw attention away from its month-long delay. Faultline Online Reporter took the opportunity to speak to Melita’s CEO, Harold Rösch, to pick his brain on Melita’s late entrance to the European OTT party. Rösch told us that Melita’s OTT strategy is partly an attempt to stifle the illegal…
A line up of major vendors in the cable industry once again used the Anga Com trade show in Cologne to announce tweaks to their DOCSIS 3.1 product lines this year. Usual suspects Arris, Cisco and Casa Systems all unveiled new offerings to accommodate the rising operator demand for DOCSIS 3.1 capable products – but a notable difference this year centered around new types of virtualized CCAP (Converged Cable Access Platform) technologies. Arris and Cisco unveiled new PHY offerings, while Casa Systems showcased its new passive optical network (PON) and IP network product lines, while smaller German player AVM launched its first product to support DOCSIS 3.1 – all claiming improved savings in cost, space and bandwidth. The biggest news…
In-flight WiFi in Europe is an elusive luxury today, reserved mainly for the high end airlines which charge top prices for the privilege, while WiFi on planes in the US is a much more common amenity. A report published this week claims that in-flight connectivity will be installed on two out of three commercial passenger aircraft by the end of 2026 – representing a $32bn revenue opportunity. The expectations of passengers that all forms of transportation should now provide reliable WiFi services is increasing rapidly, and the shift to deploy this at scale on aircraft will be met by the roll out of HTS (high-throughput satellites), according to Northern Sky Research’s (NSR) Aeronautical Satcom Markets 5th Edition report. Airlines are set…
Analysts from Wireless Watch’s sister service, Rethink IoT, attended the LPWA 2017 conference in London last week, soaking up the collective thinking of the ecosystem over two days of talks. The mindset of the LPWAN (low power wide area network) sector appears to have undergone changes in the past year. The key takeaways are that metering, industrial IoT and agriculture appear to still be the most compelling use cases; a $5 module for the cellular LPWA standard, NB-IoT, is now treated as a given; and more MNOs are pursuing NB-IoT than the earlier-stage 3GPP spec LTE-M (formerly Cat-M1). The two days saw a lot of new detail come to the fore, chronicling the shifts in the wider LPWAN ecosystem as…
The IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) is a classic example of a technology which spent many years desperately seeking an application. The promises of an IMS, supporting a huge range of IP services flexibly and dynamically, were discussed at length, but the complexity and cost of the platform deterred the majority of operators from investing. There were many use cases, but none compelling enough, until Voice over LTE became essential for many MNOs to roll out. Just as the need for migration to IP-based voice has driven mass adoption of IMS – plus cheaper, more manageable deployment options, including cloud-based services – the mobile services platform is shifting again in anticipation of 5G, and the IMS will have to be reinvented…
While mobile operators may look ahead to hyperdense 5G and smart cities smothered with connectivity, even relatively modest deployments of urban small cells will make little economic sense if key issues of cost and deployability are not addressed. The urban small cells themselves are considerably more expensive than WiFi access points, but that will change as scale rises at the commodity end. There is also rising interest in a class of cells which does not compete directly with WiFi in cost and simplicity, but is ‘macro-equivalent’. Nokia, for instance, offers units within its FlexiZone family which have higher power than most small cells, use the same software as its macrocells, and are designed to have the same range of functionality.…
One of the most hoped-for outcomes from the move towards 5G must be an overdue shake-up of patent royalties in the mobile industry. There is rising influence of open source, and of more collaborative approaches, like Google’s series of cross-licensing deals with major players (in effect, litigation truces). On the other hand, at the dawn of 4G, hopes of an end to the secretive bilateral deals which characterize mobile licensing were dashed. There are just too many companies with a deep investment in extracting royalties from their IPR in the old profitable way, whether those are major vendors or trolls. And while the settlement of Nokia’s litigation with Apple, which was announced last week, does indicate that some things are…
DJI has unveiled its latest drone, the rather small Spark. Powered by a Movidius Myriad 2 processor, Intel has quietly notched up another win for its machine-vision silicon – as its strategy of giving eyes to chips gathers pace, on the back of its recent Mobileye acquisition. Drones have huge Internet of Things potential, and while early days for the sector, offer a hugely transformative technology opportunity for enterprises. Drones are a key part of Intel’s diversification strategy, alongside automotive and AI-based technologies. Both feature machine-vision as a key requirement, using cameras to carry out object recognition for navigation tasks, and rely on advanced silicon to provide the performance needed to carry-out these functions in live environments – without the…
Riot attended LPWA 2017 in London, soaking up the collective thinking of the ecosystem through two days of talks. What follows is an account of this industry mindset, which appears to have undergone subtle changes in the past year. The key takeaways are that metering, industrial, and agriculture appear to still be the most compelling use cases, a $5 NB-IoT module is now expected and treated as a given, and more MNOs are pursuing NB-IoT than LTE-M (formerly Cat-M1). The two-days saw a lot of new detail come to the fore, chronicling the shifts in the wider low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) ecosystem as the licensed and unlicensed stakeholders bring their cattle to market. Notably, a change in the nomenclature sees…
It appears that Comcast is prepping for the 4K era finally on its pay TV network and is now listing something called the XB4 DVR on product support pages for X1. This is likely to be the Arris supplied XG1v4, a six-tuner 4K DVR, says Light Reading. Comcast has never been keen to arrive early at 4K due to the strain it may place on its cable network for little benefit but it may now be ready to launch its first 4K-capable DVR. Comcast has made limited number of on-demand titles available in 4K for X1 users using Samsung TVs. Comcast has always said that its 4K push, when it came, would include High Dynamic Range, so expect that too.…
In-flight WiFi in Europe is an elusive luxury today, reserved only for the high-end airlines which charge top prices for the privilege, while WiFi on planes in the US is a much more common amenity. A report published this week claims that in-flight connectivity will be installed on every 2 out of 3 commercial passenger aircraft by the end of 2026 – representing a $32 billion revenue opportunity. The expectations of passengers that all forms of transportation should now provide reliable WiFi services is increasing rapidly, and the shift to deploy this at scale on aircraft will be met by the roll out of HTS (high-throughput satellites), according to Northern Sky Research’s (NSR) Aeronautical Satcom Markets 5th Edition report. Airlines…
The excellent Connected TV World Summit 2017 held in London last week was subtitled “An industry transforms itself” and the session on advertising on the Thursday morning specifically gave you a feeling that slowly everyone was getting to grips with the way advertising is changing – finally. This is a slow world where culture can take precedent over technology and where habits die hard, but there is still a lot to do technically to reach that promised land, where two plus two equals five – and advertising as a market actually grows, on the back of programmatic and digital, rather than simply displaces, dollar for dollar, linear TV advertising. The biggest bold statement of the day was about measurement and…
The twists and turns of the US telecoms and media markets get ever more tangled. There has been discussion for several years about whether T-Mobile should merge with Sprint or a cableco – now the firm hints it might do both. Meanwhile, Amazon has long had the potential to move markets in the US, though its venture with satellite firm Globalstar was thwarted by regulatory opposition. Now it may be reviving the fortunes of another satellite player, Dish Network, with rumors that it will be the anchor tenant for a new wholesale network in Dish’s spectrum. Amazon has a king-maker role here, wishing that every Fire based device came bundled with its own connectivity for downloading content. This is something…
Traditional TV’s advertising model is experiencing significant shifts, and that trend was made no more clear than during Turner Broadcasting’s upfront presentation this year. Turner is hoping to drive more value for its US advertisers by pitching cross-screen “omnichannel” advertising opportunities with premium content and highly engaged audiences. “We’re no longer in the Nielsen, day part, CPM game,” said Turner Networks CEO and chairman, John Martin, speaking at the recent MoffettNathanson Media and Communications Summit in New York. “We’re in the fan-engagement business.” Turner and the other TV networks are feeling the effects of declining ratings and increased pressure from advertisers. While content consumption is on the rise across age demographics, viewers aged 18-49 are watching less linear TV each…
The European Parliament has approved a draft law that geo-blocking, the act of offering an online content service in one European Union (EU) country and that country alone, will be scrapped in the first half of next year. Coupled with the recent law to end mobile roaming charges in the EU as of next month, the OTT industry as a whole stands to flourish in Europe over the next few years. However, the losers here will be the content creators, which argue that the removal of geo-blocking will weaken the financial value of content, as well as the pay TV operators, as the ruling will trigger a small spate of cord cutting for consumers with two or more properties in…