Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
ETSI has officially changed the name of its MEC ISG from Mobile to Multi-access Edge Computing, as it promised to do last year. As it embarked on phase two of the MEC ISG’s work last week, it significantly broadened the scope of the technology, which is becoming highly strategic to many organizations in the mobile, IoT and cloud worlds. It also announced a new management team, with Alex Reznik of HPE becoming the new chair, working with vice-chairs Pekka Kuure of Nokia, Sami Kekki of Huawei and Adrian Neal, from Vodafone. Reznik said: “In phase two, we are expanding our horizons and addressing challenges associated with the multiplicity of hosts and stakeholders. The goal is to enable a complete multi-access…
M&A, Strategies, Alliances Hytera is buying Norsat, for $62m, paying a 62% premium for the customized communications provider and its satellite expertise. Software AG is acquiring Cumulocity, an IoT-focused cloud and software provider, with plans on integrating the Cumulocity platform into Software AG’s offering. Progress has acquired DataRPM, adding its IIoT-based cognitive predictive maintenance expertise to Progress’ application development and deployment offerings. MaxLinear is acquiring Exar for $700m, buying up a rival analog semiconductor firm, citing its portfolio of power management, interface, and automotive silicon as targets. Forecasts, Surveys. Reports, and Blue Sky Thinking Global cellular IoT connections will hit 2.4bn in 2025, according to Strategy analytics, with the top three market (automotive, utilities, and security) accounting for 46% of…
Some of the biggest names in consumer technology have failed to make the smart home a thing, but this week, Ikea has waded into this apparent quagmire with its new smart home portfolio. With monstrous brand recognition, Ikea has already solved the distribution problem that the likes of Apple and Google have encountered – it already knows how to sell people things for their homes. For Ikea, it’s a case of home+tech, while for the smartphone platforms, tech+home is a lot trickier as consumers aren’t in the habit of buying homeware from them – or even making the kinds of routine and habitual visits to their stores. Ikea has marketed the notion of repeat trips, with each visit an opportunity…
Viaccess Orca had no big announcement at TV Connect, but Chem Assayag, EVP Marketing & Sales, was abundantly clear on the direction his company is headed in next – analytics. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Verimatrix, which managed the same transition in April 2015, launching its Verspective product line, will feel very flattered indeed. But Assayag immediately brushed that aside, suggesting that the Verimatrix effort was half-hearted. “We have had a certain amount of TV analytics in the cloud using some 3rd party offerings and some code of our own, but this is a more aggressive road map to collect far more data,” Assayag said. When we asked about the issue of Google insisting on issuing…
Altice, the France-based telecoms giant, has been expanding geographically, most recently with acquisitions in the US and Portugal. Now it is expanding its service reach too, following in the footsteps of other broadband and mobile operators which are adding content and media to their portfolios, to find new ways to monetize their networks. Altice announced last week that it is to pay $322m to acquire Teads, the rapidly growing digital video advertising firm that has wowed the online and mobile publishing world. Teads offers publishers a way to cash in on the video advertising revenue boom, without needing to create video content to run the ads against. Teads claims to have an audience of more than 1.2bn unique visitors, including…
There was a hint of schadenfreude among mobile operators last week when it emerged that Vodafone, probably the loudest exponent of the NB-IoT low power LTE standard, had missed some of its deployment deadlines for the technology, and now risks being overtaken by Deutsche Telekom in the important market of Germany. More serious than MNO build-out races, however, is the question of why Vodafone’s progress has been slower than expected – and more broadly, how many MNOs will actually manage to find a profitable business case for IoT networks. The operator’s own comments suggest it may not be seeing sufficient demand for low power wide area network (LPWAN) services such as wireless smart metering or smart city applications, to justify…
Facebook’s Telecom Infra Project (TIP) is just one aspect of a general, if slow, process of disintegration in the traditional mobile network equipment market. But it is certainly the most impactful, thanks to the high profile and deep funds of its initiator, which aims to remake this closed market in the image of the webscale sector; and the growing support of operators. There are other open source hardware and, of course, software projects in the mobile network world, other attempts to commoditize base stations and make them as easy to deploy as WiFi routers. But TIP is the one to which mobile operators are moving, however reluctantly – because they know they will just be swapping the lock-in of Ericsson,…
ARM has unveiled a serious upgrade to its multicore processor IP family, with the launch of DynamIQ, a new way of combining up to eight cores in flexible ways, according to the needs of a particular application. Pitching it at artificial intelligence and automotive developers, ARM is claiming a monumental shift in multicore micro-architectures, going well beyond its current core-combining approach, big.Little. Although many licensees use big.Little to balance power consumption and performance by combining different types of core, some architectural licensees, like Qualcomm, have devised their own approaches and claimed ARM’s is too limited. The Softbank-owned company will hope to silence such criticisms and incorporate DynamIQ in a large proportion of the 100bn chips it hopes to enable in…
Densification is a key trend in current operator thinking, but there are other scenarios where small cells, in increasingly diverse form factors, will be even more important and potentially disruptive. These scenarios include remote and temporary coverage, which have traditionally been addressed by specialist providers, if at all. Emerging small cell solutions could make a business case for universal coverage at last, but it may not be the MNOs which benefit. One of the biggest challenges for mobile network operators has always been to make a business case for ubiquitous coverage. Extending base station coverage and, worse, backhaul to sparsely populated areas, or those which are very hard to reach such as mines and oil rigs, is expensive and the…
Ericsson has set out a simple approach to 5G patent licensing, in a bid to avoid the litigation and high prices which have dogged the 4G era. The Swedish company, despite its stated aim of increasing its revenues from its significant store of IPR, is publicly setting out a 5G licensing price list, capping royalties at $5 per phone at the high end, down to $2.50 for cheaper models. This is certainly not the first attempt to place a ceiling on patent royalties, and it may well be just the latest in a string of failed bids to shake up the system of charging for mobile IPR. In the early days of LTE, there were high hopes that the new…
The past two years have been very difficult ones for major telecoms equipment vendors, with an almost global squeeze on operator capex. In some regions, such as the US, capex is expected to rise in 2017, though forecasts by IHS Markit, and other analyst firms, suggest that global telecoms spending will not get back to 2014 levels (about $353m across fixed and mobile) until 2020, or even then. So while 5G, and fiber upgrades and expansions, will inject some new cash into the value chain, the telcos will remain heavily focused on cost efficiency amid falling ARPUs and uncertain 5G revenue models. Technologies which use capacity more efficiently, and therefore reduce the need to upgrade and expand networks, will dominate…
M&A, Strategies, Alliances Murata’s Peregrine Semiconductor is acquiring Arctic Sand, an MIT spin-off that designs low-power DC-DC power conversion semiconductors. Fleet Complete has acquired BigRoad, an automotive hours-of-service and compliance provider, to integrate BigRoad’s tech into its fleet management and telematics platform. Laws, Regulation, and Lawsuits The FAA’s jurisdiction is still a confused mess, after the ‘Drone Slayer’ court case has seen the shotgun win-out again, in Kentucky. No compensation has been awarded for the dead drone, whose owner was arguing that only the FAA could legally control airspace. Forecasts, Surveys. Reports, and Blue Sky Thinking The 5G Network Infrastructure market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 70%, hitting $28bn in annual spending by 2025, according to…
Chinese network infrastructure vendor ZTE has revealed its IoT network game plan this week, with an array of announcements at the CeBIT tradeshow in Hanover – hoping to catch customer attention as the hype surrounding IoT networks grows. The announcements focused on NB-IoT and LoRaWAN. An NB IoT solutions launch is by no means a surprise, as nearly all mobile network infrastructure vendors have been making noises on this front for the past 6 months. ZTE committing to launch LoRa supported network infrastructure, on the other hand, is perhaps more surprising. Major network infrastructure vendors have, in general, shown less interest in unlicensed LPWAN technologies like LoRa. The likes of Orange and Bouygues in France, and SK Telecom in Korea,…
At Mobile World Congress this year, Huawei unveiled a demonstration with Kuka Robotics, as part of its X Labs R&D project, which was using a 5G-based system to coordinate two robotic arms playing an electronic drum kit. The demo followed a memorandum of understanding that the pair signed at the CeBIT 2016 show, to advance the kinds of low-latency wireless technology needed for Industrie 4.0 applications. The pair said that the MWC demo was a milestone, verifying that cellular-based real time control in smart manufacturing is achievable, with the live demonstration achieving latencies as low as one millisecond, with one microsecond clock synchronization, and 99.999% reliability. Those kinds of figures are going to be essential for industrial applications, as the…
AT&T and IBM have teamed up on an IoT analytics system to provide AT&T’s industrial customers with AI and machine-learning (ML) technologies – from which companies can apparently make immediate and crucial decisions, using the IBM Cloud and AT&T IoT analytics capabilities. IBM is renowned for bombarding the wires with announcements, but this week’s news could hold extra merit, considering that AT&T claims to have more than 30m connected devices on its network today – a number the operator says is growing rapidly. An integration deal between the two was first outlined last year and the joint capabilities are now available to customers in the pilot phase as of this week. It isn’t just IBM dominating the AI headlines, as…
Japanese chip designer ARM has unveiled a serious upgrade to its multi-core processor designs, with the launch of DynamIQ, a new way of combining up to 8 processor cores to best suit an application. Pitching it at AI and automotive developers, the new system is set to comprise a big chunk of the next 100bn chips that ARM is hoping to ship. Calling it a monumental shift in multi-core microarchitecture, ARM’s DynamIQ is essentially an evolution of its big.Little designs, which allowed a multi-core chip to be built with combinations of powerful and low-power cores, to better manage power consumption – with the big cores only spooling up when heavy-lifting was needed, and the low-power cores managing the ongoing activity.…
Comcast has admitted that it is delaying the deployment of 4K HDR set tops due to the pace of technological changes. The US operator wants to roll out 4K hardware with HDR as well as the 10-bit HEVC standard, but Comcast Innovation Labs’ Executive Director, Josh Seiden, said that there have been issues with acquiring the suitable decoders for this set top integration. This has slowed down the process but it had hoped to roll out 4K HDR set tops in time for the Summer 2016 Olympics. Interactive video technology firm Rapt Media and US OTT specialist Kaltura have announced an integration deal to provide enterprises and educational facilities with enhanced learning capabilities through more interactive and personalized video experiences.…
Adobe unveiled the Experience Cloud at its 2017 Summit in Las Vegas this week and announced the inking of a deal with Microsoft in the process, in what the company claims is more than a mere marketing campaign – despite recruiting a celebrity line up including actor Ryan Gosling and ex-NFL player Peyton Manning. The US software giant is combining its artificial intelligence (AI) powered system, Sensei, with Microsoft’s own AI-based digital assistant, Cortana, in which the two companies will share core libraries to develop standard data models for apps and services. Adobe says it will be able to tap into data from Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power BI and Microsoft Azure, to build more intelligent machine learning capabilities for…
Back in 2013 we put out a report which said, among many other things, that less and less TV channels would survive in the broadcast world. Faultline specifically forecast that 50% of all broadcasters would stop broadcasting by mid-2021. Perhaps we were unduly circumspect – as it may happen sooner. But while the transition to IP was accepted, many people phoned us up and complained that we were totally wrong about channel unbundling, and one lengthy conversation with a technical leader at Adobe springs to mind, whereby he just could not get his head around our logic. Just to reiterate that logic, we said that as linear moved to OTT as VoD, that poor content could not hide and that…
Our sister publication Wireless Watch, this week raised a very important point about the potential for a merger between Liberty Global and Vodafone in Europe – that it may not be the only deal on the table. Vodafone seems to think that it can outrun Brexit by selling off its UK operation – the country that spawned the business; while Liberty Global seems to be saying, our strongest mobile operator Virgin UK, needs its own network. Liberty Global is a tightly run financial ship, despite the weakness of the British pound against the Europe and the Euro against the dollar, and the fact that it does all of its business in those currencies and reports in dollars. It’s debt pile…