Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
The UK has just seen a very impressive first, with National Grid and Reactive Technologies partnering to send data via the power lines that bring electricity to homes and businesses. This demonstration opens the door for grid-scale demand response projects, in which end-node usage can be dynamically adjusted to achieve better load balance. The trial saw the 50Hz electricity supply get modulated to send data, rather like how higher frequency waves are used to send data in cellular networks. Power line communication (PLC) is already well established in homes, with G.hn and HomePlug being the most notable technologies, but carrying this out over the grid is another thing entirely. The one-way communications can send information about usage or pricing to…
CEVA has unveiled a rather cool chip that aims to supply developers with silicon that can handle a plethora of IoT wireless standards, in a package that should cut costs by combining the DSP (digital signal processor) with the CPU. CEVA claims the design eliminates the need for a separate CPU core to handle the higher level stacks. The chip is called the CEVA-X1, and its inventor claims that it provides a unified platform for low-throughput cellular IoT standards – including LTE Cat M1, LTE NB-IoT, upcoming 5G specs, LoRa, Sigfox, and shorter range personal area networks (PAN) like Bluetooth, WiFi, ZigBee, and Thread. It also supports GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, and Beidou, for GNSS apps. Described as a multi-mode processing…
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 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 to get…
“The distinction between wired and wireless networks will disappear; in 10 years, we won’t talk about ‘wireless’ and ‘cable’ networks… there will simply be ‘the network.” This was the prediction in a recent research note from analysts at MoffettNathanson, and it neatly sums up the key drift of the industry – towards convergence and multiplay, and towards wireline players like cablecos eating some of the value the MNOs once had to themselves. These trends explain many of the dramatic developments which have overtaken UK incumbent BT – its acquisition of mobile operator EE, its aggressive moves into pay-TV, and its current disputes with regulators and competitors over its OpenReach wholesale broadband activity. BT narrowly escaped being forced to spin off…
Critics of the high reserve prices imposed for India’s largest ever spectrum auction have been justified. The sale ended after just five days with 40% of the airwaves unsold, and with the government netting only INR657.8bn ($9.8bn), rather than the targeted INR5.6 trillion ($83.9bn). Largely left on the shelf were the supposedly ‘beachfront’ 700 MHz licences, as well as 900 MHz spectrum. In a country of intense competition and rock-bottom ARPUs, the reserve prices proved too much for most operators, and the push for more Treasury income could, once again, deliver a setback to India’s hopes of significant mobile broadband progress. The huge auction was offering a total of 2,354 MHz of spectrum across the 700 MHz, 800 MHz, 900…
Facebook has run into so many problems with Indian net neutrality laws, in trying to introduce its ‘Free Basics’ program, that a US launch for the low cost service might seem a bridge too far. However, the social media giant is reported to be planning to bring Free Basics to the US, positioning it as a way to accelerate the extension of affordable internet access to rural and underserved populations. These underserved groups might be far smaller than in India, but they still represent a potential new user base for Facebook and its services. If it can establish its own brand as the primary one in new users’ minds, it can seize an advantage, when it comes to uptake and…
The lines between fronthaul and backhaul are blurring (Ericsson already talks about midhaul), and so are those between access and backhaul (multihaul is another buzz term). Using the same links for multiple purposes as required, and applying interoperable self-optimization across every link in the network chain, is a goal of 5G, as showcased in the 5G-Crosshaul project, one of the many activities under the EU-funded 5G PPP umbrella. The project has 21 participants, including Orange, Telecom Italia, Telefonica, Ericsson, Nokia and NEC. It aims to develop a system of flexible and unified management for 5G networks, integrating fronthaul, backhaul and access. A demonstration was recently held at the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute in Berlin using, among other elements, InterDigital’s EdgeLink…
Just a week after the formation of the 5G Automotive Association, another, more Europe-centric, body has been announced, the Automotive-Telecom Alliance. This aims to define a “pre-deployment project” by December, based on a European Commission-backed study of best and worst case scenarios for the 5G-enabled connected car market. The new alliance includes six trade associations (two from automotive, four from telecoms) as well as 37 companies, including operators, vendors, carmakers and other supply chain members. The goal is to promote wider deployment of connected and automated driving in Europe. The first step is the pre-deployment project which will test three major use case categories: Automated driving, including high density platoons, remotely controlled parking and high-definition maps Road safety and efficiency,…
As telco and cloud worlds collide, and the carrier network becomes an IT platform from the cloud to the edge, there will be significant realignments between vendors and operators from both sides of the fence. Radio specialists will need IT partners – and vice versa – to succeed in the converged market, while operators will have to learn to live in the cloud, in terms of running their networks and delivering new services. New rivalries will ensue, but so will new alliances, like those of Ericsson with Cisco and Samsung Networks with HPE. One of the most significant – for the US, but also as a template for other carriers – is the newly announced pact between AT&T and Amazon.…
One of the most critical issues facing the NFV (Network Functions Virtualization) community is the issue of a unified approach to management and orchestration (MANO). While consensus around ETSI’s NFV specifications has been remarkably swift and united, it is a different story when it comes to the higher layers, and how all those virtual network functions (VNFs) will actually be managed. There are two basic schools of thought, one driven by ETSI with its Open Source MANO (OSM) initiative, a follow-on activity for NFV which also has close ties to the standards body’s other key platform for the wireless world, Mobile Edge Computing (MEC). The other is centered on the OpenStack open source platform, which is generally agreed to be…
There was a distinct whiff of the retro about Google’s launch of its Pixel smartphone. Exclusives with selected large mobile operators; yet another attempt to create a unified Android experience; even the clear focus on Apple as the primary competition – all these should be issues of the past. “Premium is a very important category,” Hiroshi Lockheimer, head of Android, said in an interview. “It’s where Apple is also very strong. Is there room for another player there? We think so.” This is the wrong target in a world where the new web experiences are being driven by Facebook rather than Apple. Of course, Apple has huge smartphone power, but that is starting to wane, and the way to weaken…
M&A, Strategies, Alliances Silicon Labs has acquired Micrium, a specialist provider of IoT-focused RTOS software. France’s Leti and Taiwan’s Institute for Information Industry (III) have announced a working partnership for mutual exploration of 5G and IoT technologies. The Open Connectivity Foundation has opened six new certification labs, including Allion USA and Taiwan, DT&C, Kyrio, TTA, and UL. Kontrol Energy is acquiring Log-One for its energy management system (EMS) for connected buildings, in exchange for $250,000 cash and a million shares, plus future royalties. Samsung has acquired Viv Labs, an AI platform that is open to third-party developers. Forecasts, Reports, and Blue Sky Thinking The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) has released its ‘Future-proofing the Connected World’ report, aimed at helping developers…
We have always thought that the Here location database was worth far more than Nokia ever made out of it, and its new car maker owners have considerably strengthened its data platform by adding sensor date from all Audi, BMW and Mercedes cars, to the data Here already has. This week it unveiled an open platform to form an ecosystem to transform the daily lives of commuters and is a strong testament to a business model in which the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. At a show in Paris last week, Here unveiled four major services of its mapping and cloud system to set it on the path to creating a future where road safety is…
Sky in the UK has called in the assistance of British Newspaper “The Telegraph” to broadcast its plea from the rooftops, for the separation of Openreach, in the hope of recruiting consumer masses to voice their complaints to UK regulator Ofcom. Just 100,000 British consumers have been frustrated enough by the state of their internet to go the length of picking up the phone to Ofcom, so far – but Sky will be hoping that it can tug on the heart strings of The Telegraph’s burgeoning readership. The Telegraph has around 19 million monthly unique browsers located in the UK, around 60% of its entire online base. An article, titled ‘Openreach must be separated from BT to fix Britain’s lagging…
Smart city specialist Libelium has made something of a pivot this week, with the introduction of MySignals – a remote patient monitoring platform that brings Libelium’s experience with sensors and gateways to the medical arena. Also catching our eye this week is a pill-dispenser from PharmRight, powered by Zipit’s IoT connectivity platform. Libelium is best known for its Waspmote sensor nodes, which act as remote hubs that can support all manner of environmental testing sensors – including some very high-spec calibrated sensor units. These Waspmotes connect to Libelium’s Meshlium gateways, via a range of cellular and LPWAN protocols, which then plug into IoT platforms and ecosystems from the likes of IBM and Microsoft. That same Waspmote concept has been applied…
The GSMA’s standards group, the 3GPP, has completed its V2X spec for the next version of the LTE standard – Release 14. The spec aims to define how LTE will be used to connect vehicles to things, in an increasingly connected world. The news comes as Here has launched its Open Location Platform – a system to crowdsource data from vehicles about road conditions and share the wealth among participants. The 3GPP notes that the V2V communications are based on the older D2D (device to device) communications that were defined as part of the ProSe services in Releases 12 and 13. With D2D, the 3GPP defined the PC5 interface, which has now been enhanced for use in vehicular applications –…
Among the biggest consumer tech brands, Amazon appears to be some way out in front when it comes to smart home progress. With new models and new partner integrations, Amazon seems to be taking the lead on Apple and Google with the increasingly successful Echo, which is now being launched in the UK and Germany. After the debacle that was the Fire Phone, Amazon was essentially left with an AI-powered digital assistant called Alexa that it had developed to rival Apple’s Siri and Google Now. Somewhere inside Amazon’s Lab126 skunkworks, an engineer decided to chuck Alexa inside a device shaped like a Pringle’s can, and the rest is history. Amazon had almost accidentally tapped into a market that hadn’t been…
Thanks to the multi-platform, multi-device global media landscape, content owners today need to make and keep hundreds of different versions of the same movie or TV episode to be delivered to different devices and in different formats. To combat this, Netflix is taking a pure Silicon Valley approach to it experimenting with an Interoperable Master Format (IMF), to help streamline the production of these formats. It will help movement between studios and content distributors like Netflix. “As Netflix expanded into a global entertainment platform, our supply chain needed an efficient way to vault our masters in the cloud that didn’t require a different version for every territory in which we have our service,” said Netflix’s Chris Fetner and Brian Kenworthy,…
Like critical communications and city M2M networks (see above), vehicular connectivity is struggling to make use of standard or public networks. While mobile broadband to the car is not a particular challenge, since the car’s infotainment system behaves like a giant smartphone, there are very different issues when it comes to V2X (vehicle-to-infrastructure and vehicle-to-vehicle) communications. These will be increasingly important, and safety critical, amid moves towards autonomous vehicles and M2M applications like smart traffic management and congestion avoidance. As in public safety, the LTE ecosystem is working hard to adapt its technology for specialized needs for which it was never conceived. LTE-V is the strand of the standard targeted at V2X, and Vodafone Group – an enthusiastic triallist of…