Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Altice, the European telecom giant, has entered the US market and is now looking to expand its advertising business. The company announced this week it’ll acquire Teads, the fast-growing digital video advertising firm that has wowed the publishing world. The news is the latest in a buying spree for Altice: it acquired a majority stake in US telco Suddenlink in 2015 and acquired cableco provider Cablevision in 2016. And like many other pay TV providers in the States, the company is now looking for new ways to monetize its expanding broadband footprint. It’s the latest in a string of ad tech acquisitions pursued by pay TV providers amid steady subscriber erosion. Late last year, AT&T announced it – along with…
Density and virtualization will both pose significant challenges for managing the telco network, involving huge numbers of cells, and many virtualized components which can be scaled up and down dynamically. Automation is the key, and some progress has already been made by the SON (self-optimizing network) industry. Now a group of operators and vendors want to accelerate progress with the ‘Zero Touch NSM’ (Network and Service Management) project. The operators spearheading the effort are Deutsche Telekom, China Mobile and Telefonica, which believe automation will be critical to the success of 5G. However, some results of their three-month project, running from March to June, will be relevant to 4G network transformation too. The aim is to provide a practical blueprint for…
As all kinds of vehicles become wirelessly connected, there are mounting tensions between the WiFi community and the industry stakeholders, from carmakers to train operators. The heritage of high walls between vertical industries’ own private networks and open public wireless is feeding into conflicting views on future standards, now that the telco and transport sectors are coming together. For instance, the US national rail operator Amtrak is asking the FCC for a waiver on certain conditions for the WiFi network it plans to build along its premium Northeast Corridor route. But WiFi players claim this might cause problems for other users, highlighting the stand-off between verticals’ need for connectivity that is optimized for their particular needs, and the requirement to…
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 last, small cell deployments are at the center of operators’ roadmaps as they look to add significant capacity and indoor coverage to their LTE networks even before they move towards 5G. That means that calls for more help in breaking down the barriers to acquiring and managing huge numbers of cell sites are growing louder. This trend is only in its very early days, and the patterns are regionally very varied. While a few markets, notably Japan and Korea, already have significant densification programs, the biggest growth will be seen in the US, India and China during 2017. No surprise, then, that the calls for streamlined siting processes and better cooperation between stakeholders are largest in those markets, especially…
Interoperability is not just an issue for the RAN of course. In the emerging world of virtualized carrier networks, based on ETSI’s NFV (Network Functions Virtualization), operators are determined to avoid a new breed of vendor lock-in, and to deploy systems which support virtual network functions (VNFs) from multiple vendors, and which can interoperate at each layer. In addition, they need optimized interworking between the virtualized core or transport networks, and the virtual or physical 5G RAN, if their emerging new revenue streams are to be fully supported. NFV has emerged in a 4G world, but is expected to reach its full potential with the aid of 5G – because of the faster radios with their greater spread of use…
One of the great dilemmas facing vendors in a standardized industry is how to maintain differentiation and margins while also supporting standards-based interoperability. As the mobile industry has matured, operators have placed multivendor interoperability higher and higher up their priority lists. So will they finally achieve full openness in the 5G era, free of the compromises with have dogged previous generations? In a recent survey of 68 Tier 1 MNOs by Rethink Technology Research, interoperability emerged as the third most important enabler of a successful 5G deployment model – 48% cited this as one of the three factors they considered essential to such a model, and it was outranked only by ‘lower total cost of ownership than 4G’ (72%) and…
M&A, Strategies, Alliances Intel is acquiring Mobileye for $15.3bn, an almost one-third premium on the Israeli automotive machine-vision specialist. It follows previous partnerships between the pair. Telit has announced promising annual results, with revenue up 11% and its IoT services deviceWISE platform up 36%. Intellifusion has announced an 8-figure investment round, giving the Yuntian Lifei brand a significant boost for its AI chips that it is pitching at video analytics applications. Daqri has acquired a team of researchers from Heat Engine, a physics think-tank, to work on its AR products, including Seamus Blackley – one of the developers of the Xbox. Honeywells’ $40m acquisition of Zonoff has collapsed, prompting Ring to acquire nearly all of Zonoff’s staff, with Zonoff sources…
UK regulators Ofcom and the CMA (Competition and Markets Authority) have been asked to examine the takeover bid of Sky by 21st Century Fox, as urged by the UK government’s Culture Secretary, Karen Bradley. The two bodies have until May 16th to prepare their reports for Rupert Murdoch’s proposed £11.7 billion ($14.35 billion) acquisition of the remaining 61% stake in Sky. Ateme has teamed up with Portuguese broadcast graphics software developer wTVision to demonstrate a fully hosted cloud playout system called ChannelMaker-in-the-cloud, based on AWS architecture. Ateme’s Kyrion CM5000 encodes and streams content and ChannelMaker sequences and plays out clips uploaded to Amazon Simple Storage Service, which are mixed with 3D graphics overlays. The Kyrion DR5000 handles decoding, which it…
Dish Network is to build a network based on the NB-IoT machine-to-machine technology, in order to fulfil FCC requirements to build out its spectrum. It is trying to bill its deployment as a 5G IoT system, and some commentators got excited about this being the first US 5G network from an operator with no existing cellular platform. In reality, though, it looks like a stopgap solution to give Dish breathing space to decide what to do with its airwaves, and perhaps to plot a real 5G strategy for the early 2020s. After it acquired its first batch of spectrum, from two bankrupt mobile satellite operators, Dish was going to deploy LTE-Advanced. But it long ago realized it had missed the…
The upfront advertising sales season is upon us and this year will be the most critical year of all – setting the scene for the inevitable collapse in upfronts that will be triggered by the growing proliferation of programmatic advertising, together with the snowballing fall from grace of TV ad ratings. Broadcast and cable networks saw an unexpected upswing last year, with ad sales increasing $800 million to $18.6 billion in the completion of summer 2016, but they fell the year prior to that. Although ad sales may continue to rise this year, in the next couple of years or so there will be another slump on a much more calamitous scale. The only thing really preventing a mass-migration to…
Faultline only wants to write about video, but the emergence of 5G will have a decisive impact on the video market, so it’s worth understanding what all the hot air and wrangling, which is going on in mobile, is all about. This is one of the reasons why we wrote the now infamous article “Why 5G can never happen.” Perhaps a better title would have been, “What precisely will 5G look like – a mess or a license to do anything you damn well please?” In essence, and simplified so our video audience does not get bogged down in complex technical issues – it is the latter. AT&T at Mobile World Congress, successfully convinced the 3GPP to create a standard…
Swedish operator Com Hem was voted the MSO with the least satisfied customers for three consecutive years – in 2007, 2008 and 2009. Today, it talks boastfully of its number one rankings in the ISP leader boards of Netflix and Google, and the operator puts this dramatic turnaround down to a key change in the way it went about its business – switching its focus on network-oriented metrics and KPIs, to customer-centric ones. According to Com Hem’s Chief Architect, Rasmus Aveskogh, speaking at Cable Congress in Brussels last week, the company’s successful customer satisfaction results of late can be attributed to a combination of data mining methods, based on machine learning capabilities, and visualization tools. Aveskogh stated in his presentation…
For the past few quarters, there has been some turmoil over the future of how to measure online video advertising, in a way that is perceived as being as accurate as broadcast measurement was once perceived. Operators and advertisers alike miss the certainty of knowing just what they are selling and receiving. We talk about perception here, because for a large part, there are problems at both the broadcast end and the online end. Broadcast advertising is valued in a virtual monopoly by Nielsen, and that has led to both frustration and a sense that Nielsen was always trying to say that everything is okay and nothing much has changed – at least until it was ready to respond to…
Client steering and mesh networking are technologies which can enhance in-home WiFi, which is otherwise choked by multiple video streams. One company moving into this space is XcellAir, a two-year old outfit spun out of InterDigital, which was talking up its cloud-based software at Cable Congress in Brussels last week, where it took part in CableLabs’ innovation showcase. XcellAir’s mesh networking technology combines different types of spectrum and technology to create an optimal capacity:cost ratio and support managed services. It can bring together WiFi, LTE in 5 GHz and small cells, in unlicensed, licensed or shared bands. XcellAir’s EVP of sales and marketing, Todd Mersch, explained that this type of technology is developing quickly to offer a network-as-a-service platform, uniting…
Microsoft has been showing off its Project Olympus server platform at the Open Compute Summit, and giving Intel headaches in the process. On show were ARM-based data center servers using Qualcomm and Cavium silicon, and AMD timed the unveil of its new Naples server chip accordingly. With the machine learning and AI markets increasingly focusing on GPU technology, rather than Intel’s optimized processor approach, the market leader is facing an unprecedented challenge to its huge dominance of the server processor space. It will be most vulnerable in new markets for servers, such as Cloud-RAN, where it does not have an established presence; and in the open source platforms on which traditional customers like Microsoft are focusing to reduce their costs.…
There will be far tighter integration between fixed and wireless connectivity in 5G than ever before. Dense virtualized networks will require huge numbers of high capacity fixed links; fixed broadband will be delivered over wireless as well as wireline; fixed/mobile convergence for content and service delivery will become table stakes; edge computing and the Internet of Things will be supported by a mish-mash of connection technologies (even ETSI’s Mobile Edge Computing has now been renamed Multi-access Edge Computing). This development will inform government policies on 5G. On the one hand, authorities will have to rethink M&A and antitrust policies. Consolidation, often to achieve a combined fixed and mobile infrastructure and multiplay service portfolio, will be the only way to survive…
Dish Network is to build a network based on the NB-IoT machine-to-machine technology, in order to fulfil FCC requirements to build out its spectrum. It is trying to bill its deployment as a 5G IoT system, and some commentators got excited about this being the first US 5G network from an operator with no existing cellular platform. In reality, though, it looks like a stopgap solution to give Dish breathing space to decide what to do with its airwaves, and perhaps to plot a real 5G strategy for the early 2020s. After it acquired its first batch of spectrum, from two bankrupt mobile satellite operators, Dish was going to deploy LTE-Advanced. But it long ago realized it had missed the…
There are disputes about almost every aspect of 5G, but one area of agreement – the cost of spectrum will have to go down to make most 5G business cases viable. Shared and unlicensed spectrum will play a far greater role than before, because while these are a double-edged sword for established MNOs, their need to keep costs under control will outweigh the threat of lowering barriers to entry for new rivals. Long before most will think about 5G, regulators and operators are already accelerating their work on new spectrum strategies to improve the economics of 4G and mobile data. At the recent Mobile World Congress, attention was certainly shifting from the whizzbang technologies and futuristic 5G use cases of…
M&A, Strategies, Alliances Toshiba is preparing to offload its smart metering business to Landis+Gyr for $2bn, according to Reuters, following its epic $6.3bn write-off in its US nuclear business. CPDQ and SUEZ are acquiring GE Water for $3.4bn, with CPDQ taking 30% and SUEZ the other 70%. The deal includes GE’s Digital Water division, the IoT-focused wing. Pacific and Borqs have announced a merger, which sees Borqs’ connected device software expertise valued at $303m by Pacific Special Acquisition Corp. Laws, Regulation, and Lawsuits Alphabet’s Waymo has filed a preliminary injunction against Uber’s self-driving cars, asking a court to block Uber from testing vehicles that Alphabet alleges are based on stolen IP. Forecasts, Surveys. Reports, and Blue Sky Thinking ABI says…