Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
So Apple has joined the Wireless Power Consortium (WPC), which has sent the press into a rush of speculation concerning the next iPhone’s potential inclusion of the WPC’s Qi charging tech. It should be noted that it was heavily rumored that the iPhone 7 would include wireless charging tech, and that did not come to pass, but should Apple opt for Qi, it would likely continue its habit of setting de facto standards for smartphones and laptops. Whether you believe Apple has earned this reputation from its sage wisdom and always backing the right horse, or because its competitors are beholden to Apple’s marketing clout and ape it to retain consumer interest, this move looks like a win for Qi…
Over the course of the past few weeks, Riot has been particularly interested in the state of the emerging solar and storage markets, and their potential impact on utilities. Last week we spoke to the US branches of battery storage vendors Sonnen & Orison. What emerged from these two conversations were two very distinct narratives about the future of the battery storage sector. The key difference we observed in our conversations was in the future of manufacturing costs – with established German battery storage company Sonnen optimistic that scale would bring about savings, and startup Orison thinking that pricing is going to remain pretty static, regardless of scale. The other main difference we observed was in the business approaches of…
Tesla’s year-end financial report and conference call made for interesting reading, as the company readies itself for a turbulent year – where it tries to turn the Model 3 dream into a reality, and hopefully some fat profits. There was little talk of the recent SolarCity acquisition, which has worried Wall Street analysts, and Tesla’s stock has fallen slightly since the announcement. Its execs appear confident in the IoT-leaning elements of their business, and are threatening to step on the toes of the insurance industry, promising that if insurers don’t reflect the company’s high autopilot safety in the price of their customer insurance contracts, the company would begin selling its own insurance products more widely. As for the results themselves,…
Qwilt, often seen as the poster child for Open Caching technology, says that Amazon is on the verge of joining the Streaming Video Alliance, perhaps showing that the technology is finally coming of age. OTT video has caused significant growth in the CDN industry in recent years, and with the advent of Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) and 4K formats, networks require newer and more dense CDN requirements to relieve increasingly overwhelming pressure on networks. As companies transition to the cloud, companies like Qwilt are picking up more and more business for tier 1 customers. Qwilt’s VP of Marketing Mark Fisher explained to Faultline Online Reporter this week that the efficient delivery of VR content requires less than 20…
LTE Broadcast divides people as much as new US president Donald Trump. You either love it or you have long since discarded it as a technology. Whenever you find someone who loves it, they are prepared to forgive an extraordinary amount in order to see it as the promised land. Talking this week to Claude Seyrat, CMO of French firm Expway, known for its sophisticated video software stack, we found some of that blind religious fervor that some companies reserve for their favorite technology, with Seyrat clearly showing a vested interest, and he says he has progress to announce at next week’s Mobile World Congress. We hope it’s a concrete deal for Expway’s sake. The only change in LTE-B status…
Japanese company NEC may never have secured a significant share of the wireless access network business, but its close relationship with operators in its homeland still make it influential on emerging wireless platforms and it is particularly prominent in cutting edge antenna designs. So while the firm’s MWC presence will mainly center on its virtualization, backhaul and smart city activities, as well as its new telco AI technology, its RAN initiatives are still closely watched. This week, the company has announced the results of trials of 5G Massive MIMO, conducted with Japan’s leading MNO, NTT Docomo, one of the most advanced operators in pushing towards next generation architectures. The partners said their 5G base station verification tests showed spectral efficiency…
SK Telecom, Deutsche Telekom and Ericsson have jointly built and demonstrated the first intercontinental 5G trial network, showing off a roaming particular application of the much-vaunted technology of slicing – which allows the network to be segmented into slices, on-demand, for individual services as defined by an enterprise or service provider. This demo applied the virtualized technique to international roaming, making the two operators’ network slices available in one another’s footprint so that roaming end users would have the exact same experience in South Korea and in Germany. It was based on Ericsson’s new 5G Core, which uses SDN/NFV techniques to enable slicing and other capabilities (see lead article). The demo is an interesting one, since roaming is always a…
Huawei aims to help operators to build a “skyscraper on a soft beach” with its telco cloud platforms, virtualized networks and flexible spectrum systems, the Chinese company promised as it briefed analysts ahead of Mobile World Congress next week. Of the three largest equipment vendors, Huawei revealed the least in terms of actual new products – most of that is still to come in Barcelona, where at least seven new offerings will be unveiled – but it was the most consistent in its messaging, building on themes of ‘cloudification’ and 4.5G which it has been evolving for several years now. While both those terms reek of marketing buzzwords, Huawei is increasingly building a real and logical story behind the less-than-elegant…
M&A, Strategies, Alliances The Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) has approved v1.0 of its Lightweight M2M (LWM2M) device management specification, graduating it from candidate status. F-Secure has acquired Inverse Path, an industrial cybersecurity company that supplies software and consulting services to avionics, automotive, and industrial customers. Verizon has acquired Skyward, a drone operations specialist, which will be added to Verizon’s IoT offerings – which the company said approached $1bn in 2016. Scintel has acquired Deep Blue, a machine-learning and analytics company best known for its Prophesy platform. No details are given, and Deep Blue was founded in 2012. Atos has acquired zData, a big data and consulting provider that Atos plans to add to its digital services offerings. No price was…
The worldwide pay TV channel RTL International is closing its doors, as owner Mediengruppe RTL Deutschland, a German media company, has decided that the channel cannot compete against illegal streaming sites. RTL International only launched in January last year for German speaking audiences in regions such as the US, Canada, Africa, Australia, and more, showing shows from RTL, Vox, RTL Nitro and n-tv. UK regulator Ofcom has determined that there are reasonable grounds to believe that Plusnet, part of British Telecom, has been overcharging customers for broadband and telephony services, following an investigation. This relates to services between March 2008 and September 2015, and includes allegations that it continued to charge some consumers after they had canceled its services. NorDig,…
8i, a New Zealand based company has just landed a large B funding round, which reads like a who’s who in the Virtual reality world. Its’ aim is to bring holograms to the masses. This doesn’t actually mean what it says, but it’s still pretty cool. To most of us a hologram is something that stands in front of us, created in the thin-air, which behaves like a person, animal or thing and is viewable in 3D. It is a photographic recording of a light field, usually created using a laser and can be viewed from any angle like a real object. If holograms were easy to make, and could work in any lighting situation, they would become the main…
New content will help bolster the growth in virtual reality device sales and shipments, but it’s still unclear how big the market for VR will grow beyond gaming. Google announced this week it’ll bring VR support to the newest version of its Chrome browser, and promises that in doing so Google will be enabling users to access a new world of immersive content. The VR Chrome update is designed to make surfing around the Web easier for users with Google’s Daydream mobile VR headset strapped to their heads: “Just browse to a VR experience you want to view, choose to enter VR, and put the phone in your Daydream View headset,” Google’s Megan Lindsay wrote in a blogpost last week.…
Linear TV saw an impressive triple digit increase in ad spend in the last year, and it’s all thanks to improvements made to targeting more granular audiences. Linear TV ad spend jumped 273%, and programmatic linear TV impressions jumped 840% in the last twelve months, according to a report released last week from Videology. “With the growth in advanced TV capabilities, marketers are embracing solutions that go beyond age and gender to find linear TV programs, networks or dayparts that index highest for their strategic audience,” the report stated. “As demand for advanced TV solutions grows, more TV supply sources are opening inventory to be bought and sold programmatically.” Programmatic ad buying for linear TV has experienced bouts of growth…
Comcast’s move this week to put its entire cable TV bouquet into an app – could mean it is within a hairs breadth of moving beyond its broadband footprint, and taking on an entirely new business model for video. This first step is to offer an “X1-like experience” outside of the home – not just on mobile devices and laptops, but on the road, so potentially when customers are on non-Comcast broadband lines. This represents Comcast hammering another nail into the coffin of traditional cable TV in the US market – partially accepting the premise that the only value left in cable is broadband, not video – but it wants to hang on to its video customers and even attract…
The OpenFog Consortium has unveiled its Reference Architecture design, aimed at providing a universal framework to support emerging IoT, 5G and artificial intelligence applications, which will increasingly rely on distributing cloud capabilities throughout the network and right to the edge. Its document sums up the intentions of fog computing, to turn data into actionable wisdom. It coins a whole new acronym, DIKW, which it explains thus: “Data gathered becomes Information when stored, and retrievable [information] becomes Knowledge. Knowledge enables Wisdom for autonomous IoT.” OpenFog wants to establish its technology, originated by Cisco, as a de facto standard to allow these multi-faceted applications to exchange data – though success will rely on broad industry support, and probably cooperation with other alliances…
Huawei is the latest vendor to secure a central role in Telefonica’s huge Unica virtualization project. The Chinese vendor will work with the operator to build a wide-ranging virtual EPC (evolved packet core), which will be deployed in 13 European and Latin American markets. The vEPC will be based on Huawei’s CloudEPC platform and will support LTE voice and data service delivery in Spain, Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. This sees Telefonica following a common pattern among mobile operators – to adopt the EPC as the first candidate for virtualization. Unlike some other network elements, like the RAN, the packet core is often fairly discrete and can be migrated from…
Verizon and AT&T continue to pile up the tests in millimeter wave spectrum, aiming to steal a march in 5G capacity, at least for fixed wireless services. Their efforts must also be taking place with half an eye on the big threat of 5G – that its more flexible architectures and expanded spectrum will enable new entrants, and rob the telcos of their stranglehold on mobile services. In the responses to the FCC’s Spectrum Frontiers recommendations for high band 5G airwaves, the tensions were clear. Many bighitters are calling for mmWave bands to be licence-exempt, as 60 GHz already is – claiming that it is the IEEE, and the WiFi Alliance with its WiGig certifications in 60 GHz, which are…
Some are talking about 3.5 GHz as a 5G band, but Hutchison’s deal to acquire UK Broadband to bolster its 3UK arm is all about the good old fight for LTE spectrum. This deal shows that it is not just the US’s opening of its 3.5 GHz band, via its CBRS scheme, that has thrust this spectrum into the limelight. In many parts of the world, airwaves between 3.4 GHz and 3.9 GHz are more simply available than in the US, and are finally being appreciated for their potential to add capacity to wireless networks without waiting for 5G’s high bands, or trusting to the wild west of completely unlicensed spectrum. One of the promises of 5G is that it…
Nokia’s virtualized EPC (evolved packet core) is a crucial element of WING, and its broader IoT services strategy, as it can be adapted to support the specific requirements of each vertical. The biggest element of the Finnish company’s series of pre-MWC launches was an upgrade to the managed version of its Cloud Packet Core, and this will be at the heart of the M2M Core which will be the brains of WING. Nokia said its enterprise and operator customers will be supported on a multi-tenanted basis, with each of them gaining access to their own segment of the virtualized core. That will enable those groups to support their users and devices as they move around the federated wireless grid. The…
Last week it was IMPACT, now it’s WING – Nokia is rolling out the platforms, and the acronyms, which it hopes will deliver it a controlling role in the Internet of Things (IoT), however that evolves. While IMPACT, which Nokia extended last week, enables enterprises and service providers to manage their own IoT networks and services, WING allows them to outsource that to Nokia itself. Billing it as a “worldwide IoT network grid”, the Finnish firm is making its most aggressive move to fulfil its promise to move into business ‘adjacencies’, to restart growth and offset tough pressures in its core network equipment business. That entails becoming a company driven by software and services, and it is very clear that…