Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
The Google-inspired Thread Group has released its first hardware reference testbed and compliant stacks, and while it is off-schedule for its consumer products, it is casting its reach beyond the smart home and into office buildings. With the rival, but similar, ZigBee Alliance also targeting the ‘Internet of Buildings’, this may provide an opportunity for the two groups to merge at last, an outcome Google and its subsidiary Nest have openly supported. That would create a single short range, low power wireless network protocol based on the 802.15.4 standard, and a combined front against the main alternative, Bluetooth Low Energy. The first companies to bring Thread-conforming stacks to market are ARM, NXP and Silicon Labs, supporting the Thread 1.1 specifications.…
BlackBerry cannot quite let go of the device market which made it great, promising another keyboard handset soon, despite its recent decision to offload all its smartphone activities to third parties. However, its real recovery prospects lie in software, including its QNX operating system. This may have failed to establish the company as a challenger to Android in smartphones and tablets, but it is powerful in the high-growth automotive space, where BlackBerry has signed a deal to work directly with Ford. BlackBerry will supply QNX directly to the auto maker as a Tier One partner. Ford currently uses QNX in its SYNC 3 IVI (in-vehicle infotainment) system, in modules that it buys from Panasonic Automotive. BlackBerry hopes that the new…
Ericsson, with perhaps more hope than expectation, believes 5G networks will start to be deployed in the second half of 2017. Of course, these will be pre-standard efforts like Verizon’s in fixed wireless, and can’t realistically be expected to generate much revenue for vendors, which traditionally fund most of the early roll-out. However, pre-5G trials are piling up, and even before 3GPP standardization, glimpses of the final architecture are getting clearer and more frequent. Arun Bansal, SVP of the network products business unit, believes 5G will be deployed “simultaneously” in China, Japan, South Korea and the US in 2020 and “initial deployments will start in the second half of next year” with Verizon and SK Telecom in the lead. He…
If 60 GHz WiFi (WiGig) ever takes off, Qualcomm will find itself in one hell of a lead. And Qualcomm talked up this possibility at a webinar held this week by WiFi supremo, Mark Grodzinsky, senior director of product management at Qualcomm Technologies. There has been little news since Qualcomm added a bunch of features in January this year, but the chip giant’s acquisition of WiGig start-up Wilocity remains highly strategic. Wilocity came out of what some described as a “science experiment”, but now has its chips in commercial products like the Netgear Nighthawk. Grodzinsky also pointed to initiatives such as one from operator du, in Duba, which has installed 60 GHz-capable WiFi in 300 hotspots as a trial. He…
Open source processes are moving from applications and IT software right into the heart of the network, driven by the rise of software-defined networking (SDN) for telcos, and by open hardware initiatives like Facebook’s Telecoms Infrastructure Project (see separate item). One of the most important efforts for operators – and one which may provide an alternative power base to the one Facebook is assembling – is M-CORD, which is focused on creating an open source central office/core network for 5G. The aim of CORD (Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter) – part of the ON.Lab initiative alongside ONOS – is to enable the telco central office to function as a data center in a distributed and virtualized environment. The mobile…
Fiber is becoming an increasingly valuable asset for mobile operators, supporting quad play services, small cell backhaul and Cloud-RAN fronthaul. Carriers, infrastructure owners and network-as-a-service (NWaaS) providers are racing to expand their networks and this is driving mergers and acquisitions in established and emerging markets, including a flurry of activity in the US where telcos need to strengthen their position against cablecos, both in access and in backhaul. Verizon acquired XO Communications earlier this year, gaining its fiber and access to valuable high frequency spectrum. Now CenturyLink has emerged as the surprise buyer of Level 3 Communications – which had been linked with AT&T and Comcast – while two fixed-line ISPs, Windstream and Earthlink, are to merge in a $1.1bn…
Nine months after announcing its Telecom Infrastructure Project (TIP), Facebook has held its first summit and unveiled new partners and a first concrete project, a white box transponder/router for fiber backhaul, called Voyager. This is an indication, if any were needed, that the social media giant was not just tub-thumping when it pledged, at this year’s Mobile World Congress, to shake up the traditional network infrastructure supply chain. The first TIP Summit was held earlier this month in Menlo Park, California. New operator members include Bell Canada, Middle Eastern carrier du, NBN and Telstra from Australia, Orange and the Nordics’ Telia. New vendor sign-ups came from Accenture, Amdocs, Canonical, HPE and Toyota InfoTechnology Center, among others. Founder members included Nokia,…
Attempting to distract people from the ongoing phone-inferno fiasco, Samsung Electronics has announced the acquisition of Harman – paying $8bn in cash (a 37% premium) for the IVI (in-vehicle infotainment) specialist and its connected car ambitions. The expansion for Samsung is a logical one, but whether Samsung can restore faith in its brand will be a major concern for investors. Harman is a big name in the automotive world, with a market cap of around $6.1bn and a presence in around 30m vehicles globally. Its latest quarterly results, for the period ending on September 30th, saw net sales up 8% to $1.8bn, with connected car sales up 6%. Operating income was listed as $151m, up 15%, and announcing $2bn in…
M&A, Strategies, Alliances Dialog Semiconductor and Energous announced a strategic partnership to accelerate wireless charging adoption, using Energous’ wireless RF charging tech – WattUp. The ZigBee and Fairhair Alliances have signed a liaison agreement to focus on standards unification in commercial buildings. Infiswift has acquired SRL, an energy analytics specialist that Infiswift says will expand its platform’s visualization capabilities. Tesla has acquired Grohman Engineering, an automated manufacturing specialist. Samsung Electronics has acquired Harman for $8bn, a leader in the connected car AV space, which has been on a bit of an acquisition spree itself of late. Digi International confirms that it has rejected an unsolicited acquisition offer from Belden, which currently has a market cap of around $302m. Forecasts, Reports,…
The ZigBee Alliance has announced a liaison agreement with the Fairhair Alliance, a group pushing for IPv6 in the “Internet of Buildings,” that will see the pair collaborate on standards unification in connected buildings. The move comes a week after the Thread Group announced its push into the commercial space, expanding beyond its initial smart home focus. ZigBee and Thread have a complex history, and on the face of it, this common strategic goal looks like a decent opportunity for the two groups to merge. With ZigBee offering an established low-power wireless mesh protocol, but Thread holding the marketing advantage of being the hot new thing (with the benefit of its Nest/Google/Alphabet backing), a merger like that seen with AllSeen…
YouTube has added support for high dynamic range (HDR) content on HDR-ready TV sets running Google’s new $69 4K Chromecast Ultra streaming dongle, ten months after it first announced it intended to do so. The higher range of color contrast will also soon be available for YouTube videos on Samsung SUHD and UHD TVs – the only difference is that the SUHD brand includes a 10-bit quantum dot display, but the actual resolution is the same as any other 4K display. Nielsen has confirmed that in the month of October alone, ESPN shed 621,000 subscribers, CNN lost 617,000 pay TV subs, Fox News was down 571,000, and MSNBC declined by 530,000. The methodology for Nielsen’s October Cable Plus report came…
If 60 GHz WiFi ever takes off, Qualcomm will find itself in one hell of a lead. And Qualcomm talked up this possibility at a webinar held this week by WiFi supremo, Mark Grodzinsky, Senior Director of Product Management at Qualcomm Technologies. There has been little news since Qualcomm added a bunch of features at CES in January of this year. Watching the 60 GHz market emerge has been like watching paint dry, and nothing definitive has happened since 2005 really. Wilocity came out of what some described as a “science experiment,” and has its antecedents when 60GHz was the only mantra wireless starts ups were still spouting after the Ultra-Wide Band standards war in the 2005/6 era, when 60…
We made it very clear in our October 20 review of DirecTV Now that no set top was going to be commissioned for the service and yet it would deliver to any TV, because it would use a digital media adapter such as Apple TV. So it wasn’t the biggest surprise we have come across when 3 weeks later another story ran, suggesting the devices could be given away. Variety claims this week that AT&T is planning to give either an Apple TV or Amazon Fire TV Stick away to consumers who sign up for its new streaming TV service. We don’t doubt that this is true and also point out that it’s nothing new. Now TV in the UK,…
The company which owns the world’s largest collection of recorded music has instigated an about turn in both music and video publishing, embracing OTT, where in the past it has moved cautiously into new published paradigms. It produced what appeared to be a mundane “business as usual” set of results Vivendi, but demonstrated a complete acceptance of the new digital reality which surrounds music and video services. Vivendi seems to have torn up the rulebook it has operated by for years, and accepted that streaming is the way forward. It will take on music streaming with its own global video streaming service – with a first trial launched in Brazil. Vivendi produced revenues up 1% and net income up 24.8%,…
Sigfox has unveiled new IoT silicon that it hopes will carry it forward in the LPWAN race, with manufacturing partners Wisol and InnoComm. With EMEA-ready modules expected to cost around $2, and the FCC and Asian modules coming in lower than $3, Sigfox is hoping to shift the discussion of costs from the connectivity to the hardware. In our conversation with Thomas Nicholls and Maxime Schacht (cut short by a fire drill in our offices …), it was clear that Sigfox thinks that the size of the LPWAN market depends on the cost of the silicon, rather than the price of connectivity – and that simplifying the silicon cost should make the total cost of ownership in the ecosystem lower.…
UK processor IP firm ARM, freshly acquired by Japan’s giant telco Softbank, unveiled two new products last week – a multi-codec video processor focused on the new standard codec, HEVC, and a GPU (graphics processing unit) to drive mobile augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) use cases. ARM is clearly confident that the popularity and prevalence of VR and AR applications in the mobile market will continue to soar, as the newly launched Mali-G51 chip aims to take hold of the mainstream smartphone space, building on the achievements of the Mali-G71 GPU in premium mobile devices. The Mali-G51 GPU is essentially a downgrade from the Mali-G71 GPU which it showed off at the Computex trade show in Taiwan earlier…
Canonical has unveiled the latest version of Ubuntu Core, its low footprint operating system aimed at Internet of Things (IoT) devices and data center equipment. Claiming great successes in networking infrastructure deployments, Canonical now has to manage the transition to IoT devices out in the field – and hopes that its developer-friendly approach will win out. Industrial gateways and IP networking infrastructure developers are easier sells than some of the emerging IoT applications in which Canonical would like to see Ubuntu deployed. A potentially lucrative market, in which the organization has already taken early steps, is telco-led consumer premises equipment (CPE), following its inclusion in a private cloud box from Nextcloud and Western Digital – which could form the basis of a…
With operators embarking on densification programs, and the Small Cell Forum initiating a new work stream focused on hyperdense networks, the challenges of deploying large numbers of small cells in close proximity need to be addressed urgently. Self-optimizing network (SON) technology is key to this, and SON specialist AirHop is trialling a solution which it says can boost data throughput by 75%. The company is working with Accelleran, a start-up which makes small cells, especially for TDD spectrum, and their joint offering is taking part in a US trial with an unnamed operator. The trial is using Accelleran’s E101 Outdoor Small Cell based on Cavium processors, and AirHop’s eSON system. Accelleran has a history of developing high capacity cells for…
Virtualization is assumed to be a critical element of 5G, underpinning the flexible core networks which will support dynamic on-demand provisioning of hundreds of different services, and the key justification for 5G, network slicing. So far, virtualized core demonstrations and those of ‘5G’ networks have largely remained separate, but a 5G R&D center in the UK is claiming to be bringing them together for the first time in a public demo. The 5G Innovation Centre (5GIC) at the University of Surrey has followed up its March white paper, which outlined its flat distributed cloud (FDC) architecture, with a demo, conducted with virtual packet core specialist Quortus, Cisco and Huawei. This shows the FDC running a ‘5G’ core, together with a…
Operators are getting impatient about virtualization. At the start of this year, ETSI’s NFV (Network Functions Virtualization) platform seemed to have become established as a near-standard in record time, sparking trials of virtualized network elements from packet core to IMS to RAN. But then disputes set in around the crucial area of MANO (management and orchestration) and fragmentation threatened. Operators are becoming publicly restive, looking for approaches which will enable them to achieve their goals of accelerated, agile service delivery and resource efficiency – rather than landing them in years of standards wars. The ability to deliver new services quickly is the top driver for network virtualization, according to new Heavy Reading research, while cutting capex and opex costs comes…