Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Intertrust Technologies and Samsung have entered a partnership to add Intertrust’s Marlin DRM to the Samsung HbbTV 2.0 Smart TVs in Italy. In Italy, the Multimedia Home Platform (MHP) has been the de facto DVB viewing standard since 2010, when Italy was one of the largest deployments of the open middleware system, along with Belgium, Poland and Korea. So as Italy adjusts to an OTT world and begins its road map towards HbbTV, Intertrust and Samsung will begin looking at how Marlin can infect countries where HbbTV is prolific, such as Germany and France, and try to replicate the success that Marlin DRM has achieved in Asia Pacific. The HbbTV 2.0 standard will roll out in early 2017 to video…
The Broadband World Forum was on this week and most broadband players arrange for major announcements to be timed to arrive around the show. Last week we previewed Sckipio and Broadcom with G.fast chips which supported Dynamic Time Allocation (DTA), and this theme continues along with GPON tech, with multiple announcements from Adtran, Nokia, Broadcom, Huawei and ADB. Adtran said that it now has a device which uses DTA in 212 MHz of spectrum which will double G.fast speeds, with upload and download speeds being dynamically adjustable in either direction. It did however talk about it being suitable for coaxial or single copper pair environments, which are low crosstalk, whereas Sckipio said that it had a partner product that could…
Netflix has done it again; silenced the financial analysts which condemned it to failure with a plague of overreactions following its minimal under achievements in the second quarter. The company smashed subscriber forecasts in the US and internationally, and recorded total revenues for the third quarter of $2.158 billion – the first time it has cracked the $2 billion mark in a three-month stint. Here at Faultline, however, we were as honest as ever in our opinion that Netflix’s Q2 results were just a minor blip in the road as it tried to find its feet in difficult new territories, after it launched in 130 new countries at the start of this year. We didn’t just highlight that international growth…
UPC Poland, the largest cable operator in the country and a subsidiary of Liberty Global, has agreed to acquire the cable business of third-placed Multimedia Polska for $760 million, as the John Malone stream train increasingly eyes the Central and Eastern European markets as key growth areas. Liberty Global’s Horizon TV service and set top has enjoyed a successful opening period in Poland since its full launch in January 2015, picking up 100,000 subscribers after the first year, rising to 200,000 at the end of June this year, of a total of 1.2 million video subscribers. That’s an impressive uptake of a premium TV and broadband package which costs $38.50 per month, with broadband speeds up to 120Mbps. Liberty’s strategy…
Anyone who has been around the OTT video industry will have repeatedly heard the term “Dev Ops” over the past 12 months – and one of the main reasons that AT&T has acquired Canada’s Quickplay has been so it can become agile, and offer the frequent updates and QoS guarantees that only a software company can offer. How many operators have actually thought this through and gone out and acquired a software team of a few hundred skilled proponents, simply to ensure that it had a reactive development team? So for that AT&T has to be given credit, but at the same time its purchase of DirecTV prior to it owning a software agency of the quality of Quickplay, might…
Following on from Comcast’s trials announcement earlier this month, LoRa has received another boost in the US, with Senet announcing new deployments in ten additional metropolitan areas this week. With the LPWAN market in the US heating up, we are about to see a war of attrition kick off between these rivals, as the enterprise and industrial markets wake up to the possibilities presented by LPWAN. Incumbent cellular MNOs Verizon and AT&T have been a lot of noise about their LTE Cat M1 and NB-IoT deployments, while on the non-3GPP side of things, Sigfox is still pushing ahead with its national roll-out, and Ingenu’s RPMA-based Machine Network remains on its aggressive build-out schedule. While Sigfox and Ingenu are both the…
The GSMA has heavily criticized The Netherlands’ newly minted net neutrality law, claiming it will put the European Union’s Digital Single Market “at risk”. The Netherlands has been in the vanguard of countries developing neutrality laws and finalized its first attempt in 2012, one of the first in the world. Now it has amended it to go beyond the EU directive on neutrality, suggesting that any operator which exempts the data of a particular service from monthly caps (zero rating) will be in contravention of the law. The GSMA criticized the Dutch Senate for going beyond the EU directive, which specifically omits that practice from censure. There is some deep irony in this move, according to analysis by Wireless Watch’s…
SpiderCloud Wireless says it has developed the first small cell that supports LTE in licensed spectrum and the US’s CBRS band in 3.5 GHz. This will join the company’s Enterprise-RAN portfolio, which also embraces LTE-Unlicensed, WiFi and 3G, and is resold by Cisco and NEC, among others. Since the 3.5 GHz band was opened up under the FCC’s innovative three-tier access system, it has been eyed as a potentially strong band for small cell expansion. Its relatively high frequency lends itself to indoor and short range deployments, and it has both unlicensed and licensed options. SpiderCloud said it has completed interoperability testing with Federated Wireless’ Spectrum Access System (SAS). Federated Wireless, along with Google, Nokia, Intel, Qualcomm and Ruckus Wireless,…
Linux major Red Hat has unveiled its Red Hat Mobile Application Platform, a containerized offering designed to run in any public or private cloud or on-premise infrastructure that supports its Enterprise Linux. When used alongside Red Hat’s existing SaaS (software-as-a-service) mobile app platform, enterprises gain a wider set of deployment options to integrate, manage, and scale their mobile app initiatives to meet their business objectives, said the company. The move to a fully containerized platform, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, based on Docker-format containers and Kubernetes, is the heart of the organization’s bid to provide a single, integrated platform for modern application development that ticks all the current enterprise developer boxes – cloud native, mobile-centric, microservices-based, and driven by APIs…
Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7 disaster has distracted attention recently from Apple’s challenges, but in fact any corporate schadenfreude it may be feeling over its handset rival’s setbacks is misdirected. The real danger to Apple’s ability to dominate the ‘everything connected’ experience in the same way it has defined the smartphone comes from the web players, and most urgently, at the moment, from Amazon. Hot on the heels of the surprise success of the Amazon Echo, which has forced both Apple and Google to respond with AI-enabled smart home controllers, the giant retailer has launched a music streaming service clearly designed to outdo Apple’s own service, which has been one of the most significant growth areas in its recent underwhelming quarters.…
Qualcomm has delivered an over-the-air (OTA) connection via its MuLTEfire system, for running LTE in unlicensed spectrum, using listen-before-talk (LBT) for the first time. Support for LBT is essential to operate in bands like 5 GHz in many parts of the world including Europe. The industry is well aware of the huge potential for disruption which could come with allowing LTE to work in unlicensed spectrum, by gifting LTE opportunities to companies without owning even the tiniest chunk of spectrum. But the significance of this week’s announcement is that the successful test with LBT means MuLTEfire could be used worldwide if regulators agree, and not just in the US, which does not require LBT, and where MuLTEfire has mainly been…
It has finally come to pass – the Open Connectivity Foundation and the AllSeen Alliance have agreed a merger, which sees their rather similar standards efforts combined inside the Linux Foundation. This is very big news for the device discovery and communication frameworks, which operate above the radio layers of the stack and hope to link IoT devices together in the wild. This is also good news for the IoT as a whole, as there were many stakeholders who suffered from moist brows with the prospect of entrenched and protracted standards wars. When the OIC first burst onto the scene, in the days before its rebranding to the OCF, the prevailing narrative was that the IoT’s fractured state wasn’t going…
Since the start of the 5G conversation there has been a broad assumption that the platform would embrace many access networks and provide a successor to unlicensed spectrum technologies, especially WiFi, as well as 3GPP standards. However while that will certainly happen at the higher layers of the network – WiFi and LTE are already increasingly intertwined in virtualized architectures and common management systems – the effects will be limited if there is not harmony at the radio level. That will require cooperation between the IEEE and 3GPP standards bodies, but despite plenty of talk there have been few signs of that materializing – until now. The chair of the IEEE 802 standards committee has written to the chair of…
Vodafone, Verizon and China Mobile formed a hugely influential triumvirate driving LTE standards in 4G’s early days, and a different trio is shaping up to write the rules for 5G. AT&T, Deutsche Telekom and SK Telecom are working together on an increasingly wide range of partnerships geared to different aspects of the new network, and these go beyond the two-way ‘strategic alliances’ which are ten-a-penny in the 5G arena. The latest joint initiative by this transcontinental group may be the most important, because it focuses on virtualization and software-defined networking (SDN), areas where lack of standards and interoperability is a significant deterrent for many operators. Indeed, it sets out an ambitious program to move away from proprietary networks, and looks…
M&A, Strategies, Alliances The OCF and the AllSeen Alliance have announced a merger, which will see the OCF absorb AllSeen and its AllJoyn standard – something that has seemed likely for some time. Hartford Steam Boiler (HSB) has acquired Meshify, an IIoT cloud platform that combines hardware and software to connect equipment to the internet. TTTech has acquired Flexibilis, to strengthen its industrial silicon portfolio and expand towards the smart grid market, via Flexibilis’ FPGA expertise. Infineon has acquired Innoluce, a Philips spin-off that specializes in automotive laser-based sensors (LiDAR). Forecasts, Reports, and Blue Sky Thinking The World Energy Council has published a report that says utilities will need to invest between $35tn and $43tn until 2060 in order to…
Nokia launched a number of G.fast options this week in time for Broadband World Forum, mostly new DPU configurations – one for an 8 port sealed device for MDUs, and line cards for deployments in a micro node. It name-dropped a list of customers in BT OpenReach, Chunghwa Telecom in Taiwan, A1 in Austria, and Latam based partner Energia Communications. That’s fairly poor fare for a company that said a year ago that it had landed Chunghwa Telecom and had trials with more than 30 operators worldwide, and there is a good chance it has shared BT with a rival supplied by Sckipio. The Marbridge Daily reports that Chinese internet company Baidu has formed an RMB 20bn fund ($2.7 billion)…
Two years ago when we started our own IoT publication RIoT, there was another framework popping up every day. It was always going to hinder, rather than help IoT getting off the ground, but vested interests need a chance to build perspective and work out what they can reasonably achieve on their platforms. It seems that today two of the largest IoT frameworks which focus on device discovery and communications have merged – the Open Connectivity Foundation and the AllSeen Alliance. You need these frameworks so that any type of device on any type of network can understand what has just been said by a remote device, so that it knows how to react. They were rather similar standards efforts…
In the US OTT video market, a single service of 20 channels is costing $20, so why should AT&Ts service of 100 channels not costs $50? Surely that’s half a dollar each, better value than the $20 services or the sub $10 SVoD market? Well it is and it isn’t and there are two major points that have to be made here. OTT Video is an experimental market and at present only a handful of people out of each 100 who try it, go on to cut the cord. So it is about additions to the video pie right now, not replacements. Sure, it will come to be about replacements, but not immediately. If you have a $150 ARPU pay…
South Asian OTT video service YuppTV has received a $50 million investment from Emerald Media, a pan-Asian investment fund, in return for an undisclosed significant minority stake. India is YuppTV’s primary market, and it has reportedly enjoyed a successful opening period in the region since its launch there in October 2015. It has achieved this by signing up a host of deals with content providers, including B4U!, one of the world’s largest Bollywood TV networks. This latest investment will allow YuppTV to invest further in bolstering its Asian content portfolio. Emerald Media’s parent company KKR (Kohlberg Kravis Roberts), the US private equity giant, has pockets deep enough to invest substantially more than $50 million, and will certainly be looking to…
We’re not too surprised that the GSMA has immediately come out against the new Dutch Net Neutrality law – it has always been against net neutrality laws. The Netherlands has been in the vanguard of countries developing such laws and began constructing its first in 2011, which it finalized in 2012, one of the first in the world. Now it has amended it to go beyond the EU directive on Net Neutrality, suggesting that any operator who waives the data a service uses from monthly data caps (zero rating), will be in contravention of the law. The GSMA came out immediately and blasted the Dutch Senate for going beyond the EU directive, which specifically omits that practice from censure. There…