Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
5G will need a wholly different approach to spectrum ownership and usage, if it is to succeed. That topic has been discussed relentlessly for the past few years, yet regulators in Europe and elsewhere are announcing ‘5G auctions’ run on the same old lines of exclusive, expensive, long-term licences, often involving relatively small amounts of spectrum. And one of the most anticipated US auctions ever – of 600 MHz broadcast spectrum which may well support 5G – has flopped. At the same time, the guardian of licensed spectrum technology, Qualcomm, has spawned a technology, MulteFire, which could allow organizations with no spectrum of their own at all to build cellular networks. Amazon plans to test its own devices in heartland…
In many ways, LTE was a bigger architectural and cultural leap for mobile operators than 5G will be. They had to move to a flat all-IP platform, for which HSPA had only partially laid the groundwork. The System Architecture Evolution (SAE) which accompanied the LTE radio standards defined a flat IP network around an evolved packet core (EPC). In theory at least, 5G should be just an extension of that fundamental shift away from circuit-switched, hierarchical networks of 2G and 3G. However, to fulfil its lofty objectives, 5G will need to be more than an enhancement to current 4G – otherwise, standards organizations and vendors could continue to squeeze more out of LTE for many years to come, with none…
LinkNYC has declared a milestone this week, announcing that its WiFi kiosks have reached a million registered WiFi users and 4m sessions across 547 kiosks in the city of New York, one year after deployment. This is only the tip of the iceberg for the smart city venture, with plans to grow this to a total of 7,500 kiosks. These kiosks provide a number of mod cons for the general public; free WiFi, charging stations, maps and a large, red emergency services button. But when companies like LinkNYC have such prominent commercial interests, their impact and influence over citizens and their cities needs to be a major consideration – or councils risk handing over the keys to their smart city…
We have a favorite trick here at Faultline, and we use it when addressing a room full of opinionated engineers, who are usually “certain” that one technical outcome and only one, is possible. We ask “Everyone who is a CFO, please raise your hands?” There is usually silence and a complete absence of hands going up – perhaps we just don’t move in the right circles. But it’s true, in a world of engineering (certainty) it is the Chief Finance Officer who provides uncertainty and decides whether or not a product or product line wins or fails. And CFOs seem to have just decided that HomePlug is just about ready to die. CFOs at both Qualcomm and Broadcom appear to…
AT&T’s freshly hatched DirecTV Now OTT streaming service is forecast by most industry analysts to hit around 1 million subscribers after one year, following its launch at the end of November, but here at Faultline Online Reporter we believe the service has the potential to take off on a much bigger scale – providing it can overcome some initial obstacles. The birthing process of DirecTV Now has not been straightforward. It has been burdened with technical difficulties resulting in a surge of user complaints since its launch, with users highlighting streaming hiccups, inaccessible features, and billing problems. To add insult to injury, AT&T has reportedly refused refunds to its disgruntled user base. A bombardment of technical issues is not at…
In the blaze of news that was the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Toyota and Ford launched a new industry consortium that aims to mitigate the incursions Apple and Google are planning into the automotive industry. The current key battleground is the in-vehicle infotainment system (IVI), and the technology being pushed as the answer to this threat is SmartDeviceLink (SDL). The automakers are painfully aware that tech giants want to encroach on their turf. With Apple and Google holding the keys to the consumer kingdom, thanks to their iron-fisted control over the smartphone ecosystem, a technology like SDL could allow the automakers to keep them at bay. The crux of the problem is that consumers currently interface with the IoT via…
Google’s holding company, Alphabet, has recently promoted its Waymo autonomous automotive arm, granting the business freedom from Alphabet’s mysterious X-Labs incubator where countless endeavors have been laid to rest. But with this honor comes the pressure of fending for itself in a market rife with risks – and Waymo better start paying the bills. Alphabet has nudged the newly spun-off company in the way of Honda for its first solo outing, with the pair in talks to include Waymo’s technology in Honda’s self-driving vehicles. Honda has reassured its fan club that its own self-driving technologies will not be put on the back burner, following the unveiling of its prototype car back in June last year. As part of the deal,…
A couple of weeks after several networking vendors tried to kickstart NFV with the formation of an interoperability testing initiative, NFV-ITI, ETSI has announced the first interoperability plugtests for the technology. These two moves indicate the vital importance of multivendor interoperability between different NFV (Network Functions Virtualization) platforms and associated VNFs (virtual network functions). Without this, operators will risk being locked into a single supplier’s approach and many of the hoped-for benefits in efficiency and flexibility will be compromised. Indeed, fears that industry bickering would derail openness and standards has been one factor behind a recent cooling in operator atttitudes to NFV, after significant support in the early days. Before most organizations will take the leap from small-scale tests and…
M&A, Strategies, Alliances ZTE has joined the 5G Automotive Association (5GAA). Accenture has acquired Altitude, a product design company from Boston, with plans to turn its offices into a hub to target the IoT scene in the city – which Accenture says is flourishing. Digi International has acquired Smart Temps, adding the company’s cold chain portfolio to its M2M and IoT offerings, targeting both food-based and healthcare customers. Fitbit has acquired Vector, a very young startup that has been targeted for its design and software talent, with its e-ink smartwach concept. SK Telecom has announced plans to invest up to $4.2bn in IoT and machine-learning. Ericsson and China Mobile have signed an IoT development partnership, with China Mobile expecting to…
Founders of LinkedIn and eBay have donated $10m each to the Ethics and Governance of AI Fund (EGAIF), a body that funds researchers contemplating the ethical problems that AI poses. Led by MIT’s Media Lab and Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, the group aims to inform businesses and governments about the ethical ramifications of AI-adoption. Smaller donations of $5m from the Knight Foundation, and $1m from the Flora Hewlett Foundation, and Raptor Group founder Jim Pallotta, round out the initial capital. Other groups with similar interests exist, with Amazon, IBM, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft founding the Partnership on AI back in September, as well as the OpenAI group that gained a lot of coverage thanks to the…
Google’s holding company, Alphabet, has recently promoted its Waymo autonomous automotive arm, granting the business freedom from Alphabet’s mysterious X-Labs incubator where countless endeavors have been laid to rest. But with this honor comes the pressure of fending for itself in a market rife with risks – and Waymo better start paying the bills. Alphabet has nudged the newly spun-off company in the way of Honda for its first solo outing, with the pair in talks to include Waymo’s technology in Honda’s self-driving vehicles. Honda has reassured its fan club that its own self-driving technologies will not be put on the back burner, following the unveiling of its prototype car back in June last year. As part of the deal,…
In the blaze of news that was CES, Toyota and Ford launched a new industry consortium that aims to mitigate the incursions Apple and Google are planning into the automotive industry. The current key battleground is the in-vehicle infotainment system (IVI), and the technology being pushed as the answer to this threat is SmartDeviceLink (SDL). The automakers are painfully aware that tech giants want to encroach on their turf. With Apple and Google holding the keys to the consumer kingdom, thanks to their iron-fisted control over the smartphone ecosystem, a technology like SDL could allow the automakers to keep them at bay. The crux of the problem is that consumers currently interface with the IoT via their smartphones, either through…
Right now, there is a lot of excitement in Virtual Reality, and CES had a section dedicated to it. But there is little excitement in this office, as we think it’s a damp squib. Everyone mistakes two ideas. Idea one is that it would be very cool to go and live in another reality for short periods of time, in order to experience things that we are unlikely to experience otherwise in our lives. Idea Two is that you can do this with a silly headset, built around a Smartphone, which not only makes you look odd and behave oddly, but like most other things that a smart phone offers, it makes you bump into things. It is this duality…
More than five years after Nokia defeated Apple in a long-running patents battle, the Finnish firm has returned to the fray, filing complaints in 11 countries that Apple is infringing on about 40 of its patents. The 2011 settlement demonstrated that, while Apple might be trouncing Nokia in the smartphone market, it was far from being a mobile technology powerhouse – nor was it invincible in the patents courts, at a time when it was hurling lawsuits at Android rivals. But while it licensed some of Nokia’s patents then, the Finnish firm claims it has subsequently refused to pay its dues for other technologies. Nokia is in a very different situation from that of 2011 itself, having sold its devices…
The ZigBee Alliance has unveiled its latest attempt to consolidate the fragmented state of the IoT market, to extend IoT interoperability beyond its familiar haunt in the network protocol. Called dotdot, the new specification is looking to enable existing ZigBee developers to get their claws into wider ecosystems that, potentially, opt to support dotdot, and hopefully unite the disparate IoT protocols under a common banner. dotdot is being positioned as a universal language for the IoT, which could be used by many other physical layers than just ZigBee – such as direct mesh networking rivals like Z-Wave and the 802.15.4 brother that is Thread, but also other low power PHYs that are less well-known, or even future evolutions of standards…
While WiFi and cellular technologies increasingly work together as part of a broader HetNet, the bodies defining their core radio standards remain very separate. The IEEE’s 802.11 group and the 3GPP have produced specifications, such as Hotspot 2.0 and TWAG (Trusted Wireless Access Gateway) respectively, to help the two platforms cooperate, and of course, there are many common members of both organizations. But there is very limited cross-fertilization when it comes to the base standards. There were hopes this might change in 5G and that the IEEE might have more direct input to the 3GPP’s New Radio deliberations. But there was no 802 or WiFi official representation at the kick-off of the 3GPP’s 5G process in autumn 2015. In reality,…
Networks virtualization seemed, in 2015, to have beaten the usual pattern of over-expectation followed by a backlash prompted by lack of standards. ETSI’s NFV (Network Functions Virtualization) proved the center of a surprisingly rapid and well-supported process of establishing baseline specifications, and there was real hope that these specs would drive confidence and accelerated uptake. However, while there are some flagship operators deploying NFV-based systems, in general the second half of 2016 saw a cooling of enthusiasm, with early, small-scale trials failing to convert into larger commercial implementations. As always with this kind of pattern, there are many reasons, from changing budget priorities to uncertainty over use cases, but a key factor has been the danger of fragmentation and incompatibility.…
The companies which acquired Here from Nokia – Audi, BMW and Daimler – have reduced their one-third stakes to 25% each, selling 15% of the total to Intel and another 10% to a group of Chinese companies (Tencent, NavInfo and GIC). With the Chinese transaction, Here is launching a strategic partnership with NavInfo (a location and mapping platform in China, essentially a rival to Here) and Tencent (an absolute monolith in the Chinese internet markets). The trio plans to develop best-in-class location services for the Chinese market. Here and NavInfo will form a 50:50 joint venture to target the Chinese industries, with Here extending its current portfolio of services (which includes the automotive stuff, as well as a growing presence…
So the stakes are high, and many companies are already playing hard. There were important announcements from two of the most established chip suppliers in the auto sector, NXP and Nvidia – the former particularly closely watched because it will soon be part of Qualcomm. Its launches reminded the industry how strategic an acquisition it will be, bringing significant depth and breadth to its new parent’s auto offering, surrounding the core Snapdragon modem/processor with many other car-related chips, and adding valuable connections with the car industry and its channels. The main CES launch by NXP was a software defined radio (SDR) solution for IVI systems called the SAF4000. This claims to be the world’s first one-chip system covering all global…
M&A, Strategies, Alliances The zigbee alliance (lowercase now, apparently) has unveiled dotdot, a universal language for the IoT that aims to consolidate the application layers of IoT devices. Intel is acquiring a 15% stake in Here, the mapping firm majority-owned by Audi, BMW and Daimler. It looks like the trio will offload 5% each, to reduce their individual stakes to 25%. Daimler has joined the Automotive Grade Linux foundation. Ford and Toyota have launched the SmartDeviceLink (SDL) Consortium, in an attempt to mitigate Apple and Google influence inside vehicle software. Other members include, Mazda, PSA Group, Fuji Heavy Industries, Suzuki, Elektrobit, Luxoft, and Xevo. Delphi has acquired Movimento, a specialist in OTA updates for the automotive sector. Novanta is acquiring…