Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Nokia supports private networks with its Cloud Packet Core: The vision for 5G is that it should be an architecture capable of supporting a huge variety of services with very different network behaviors and requirements. Even before the 5G era, however, several variations on LTE are being created to enable 4G networks to look beyond the mobile broadband for which they were designed, and support other types of services more effectively. Critical communications, automotive applications, broadcast/multicast and machine-to-machine connections are four examples, and each has its own LTE technology available or emerging, which can be supported on common infrastructure, but will behave optimally for the particular use case. Vendors and operators will hope to break down the perception, among vertical…
Will 5G bring Samsung the network infrastructure success which has largely eluded it outside of its home country? Samsung was part of a group of network equipment vendors – also including NEC and Motorola – which missed out on the W-CDMA 3G market, except in a few niches. All these companies had plans to seize share back from the 3G giants when 4G came along. Motorola and Samsung built on their strong CDMA bases and focused heavily on WiMAX, in the hope that – as in the 3G world – there would be a powerful alternative to the main 3GPP platform, which they could control. That failed when LTE asserted its dominance. Motorola faded back into its public safety comfort…
The security challenges of the future wireless network are daunting. More and more cells, in dense networks; more and more gateways and devices, in the Internet of Things; more data and intelligence distributed to the edge of the network with Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) architectures. These developments clearly lead to a world where the possible entry points for hackers are multiplied colossally. No surprise, then, that security is at the heart of the program for many industry bodies which are trying to establish common ground and best practice for the new networks. OneM2M, the SIMAlliance and the Small Cell Forum are all deeply concerned with networks in which huge numbers of elements may be connected, and will have to be…
M&A, Strategies, Alliances The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) has launched the Industrial Internet Security Forum, a public forum focused on securing the Industrial Internet. Linaro has launched a new working group focused on the IoT, called LITE, expanding on its Linux for ARM core focus and with the support of ARM, Canonical, and Red Hat. SAP has acquired Plat.One, an enterprise IoT management platform used by industrial applications and smart cities, as it promises to invest $2bn in the IoT. Nokia has launched a drone traffic testing facility in the Netherlands’ Twente airport. The Renault-Nissan Alliance and Microsoft have announced a development collaboration for automotive technologies powered by Microsoft’s Azure cloud. Allgon has acquired WSI, a Swedish design-house that specializes…
The apps-based set top device proposal from FCC chairman Tom Wheeler is reportedly undergoing some major changes to get the attention of programmers, according to several sources. The FCC will no longer be proposing to have an app licensing body review the agreements to ensure no anti-competitive factors are at play, and the body will instead review it after a couple of years and intervene if required. In order to give more time for the changes, the vote on it, which was to have been held later today, has been pulled, but will be kept on the FCC agenda. Apparently, he could not guarantee the 3 to 2 vote would go his way. Canadian cable TV company Eastlink has selected…
French encoder firm Ateme says that it has more business with Brazilian broadcaster Globo in 4K this time virtually running a second version of its January press release saying that it had won 4K encoding at Globo with its Titan encoding software – the only difference we can see 8 months on, is that it now includes High Dynamic Range content. Keen rival Elemental has had a number of wins at Globo and was responsible for much of its Olympics VoD coverage, and both companies seem to have some responsibility for delivering multiscreen encoding services for Globo’s OTT offering, Globo Play with Ateme landing the smaller, but more futuristic deal for 4K with HDR, and Elemental getting the larger slice…
British Telecom in the UK is likely to get a bill shortly from Sky for rather a lot of money, reclaiming overcharges on maintenance costs for its broadband lines. This conclusion is hidden in a 90 page Ofcom document which goes into just how it investigated the charging mechanisms of BT, and how it calculates just what re-charge levels are allowed. The practice has been going on since 2009, and Sky has some 5.3 million broadband lines. They fall into two categories, fully unbundled lines and wholesaled, with most of its original broadband lines being ULL, but more recently Sky signing up more wholesale. This is partly because vectored VDSL lines which offer service up to 100 Mbps, need a…
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,…
So we guessed right about how Dish India had allowed two separate security firms – Conax and Verimatix – to support its TV services – it used CryptoMedia from Rambus as the only independent security core added to most set top chips today. But a chat this week with Ole Hansvold, now at Rambus’s Cryptography Research, and previously a senior executive at Conax, told us more about why Dish had done this. Hansvold also presented these ideas at IBC a few weeks ago, and he says that it’s a part of a rising trend, as the piracy war moves from the smartcard to attempting to compromise the entire set top CPU, which is beginning to replace it. “If an operator…
At the start of this month, Faultline said Canadian SVoD service Shomi was failing to fulfill its duty as a Netflix killer, a task it was optimistically and unfairly assigned in the first place, and now we are seeing out the month by waving goodbye to Shomi. Its two parent companies, the native operators Rogers and Shaw Communications, have announced that the service will be shutting down as of November 30th this year, just after its second birthday. The decision to close Shomi was simply due to the lack of financial clout to compete with Netflix’s huge investments in original content, which is nothing new or surprising, but the acquisition of Shaw’s media arm by Corus Entertainment earlier this year…
Harmonic just made the virtual CCAP market far more interesting, cornering a big chunk of Comcast’s business in the sector and effectively saying that it has had Comcast’s help in designing its CableOS software defined CCAP product, taking the entire cable DOCSIS upgrade footing down to COTS (Commercial off the self) servers. The way Comcast signaled this, effectively making Harmonic a favorite supplier and by one analyst’s expectations guaranteeing around $20 million a quarter in CCAP orders, was to acquire warrants in the Harmonic stock. This has become Comcast’s new way of taking the sting out of new capex developments. It pays full dollar for a product, but it knows that if it grants favor to that particular company, the…
The UK’s BT has been one of the biggest flagwavers for using G.fast technology to boost broadband speeds and support mobile backhaul, without relying on fiber. Now the telco has announced its first suppliers, Huawei and Nokia, with the aim of bringing the ‘copper-on-steroids’ links to 10m premises. G.fast is being eyed by the mobile operators as a technology to ease the challenges of small cell backhaul and Cloud-RAN fronthaul, though this may raise new issues over BT’s wholesale arm, which is deploying the fast links – since BT’s acquisition of the UK’s biggest MNO, EE, there have been calls for a complete separation of Openreach to avoid any favoritism to BT’s own operator when it comes to fiber or…
The US government has effectively nationally endorsed self-driving cars, and called for the technology industry to lead the USA into a new automotive golden age of tech advances – if the NHTSA can persuade the automakers to play ball and share data. The new guidelines are a rulebook of sorts, which concern the testing, building, and selling of cars with autonomous functions – both semi and fully autonomous vehicles. The rules mean that the auto and tech companies have to share quite a lot of data with the regulators – which might not go done so well with some of those that view the data as a valuable asset or special sauce. Whether manufacturers are open to this data sharing remains to…
AT&T may be experimenting with innovative ways to build a more economic mobile network – from virtualization to millimeter wave to powerline (see separate item) – but it is also heavily focused on driving down costs in its conventional platform. Small cells, and better deals from macrosite owners, are the key. AT&T was once the most bullish of US carriers about small cells but has been more cautious recently about sharing firm figures. However, Bill Smith, its president of technology operations, told last week’s Pacific Crest technology leadership forum that small cells would be vital to AT&T’s strategy, especially as it moves into high frequency bands, which only support short range base stations. Smith said: “If you look at some…
It’s been a long journey for the host of start-ups which eagerly converged on the small cell backhaul opportunity five or more years ago. Those which survived the slower than expected roll-out of outdoor small cells are now looking at a belated, but real, windfall as operators pursue densification programs, putting real pressure on authorities to ease siting and other obstacles to deployment. And of course, many of the early pre-5G trials are focusing on high frequency bands, and so of necessity on small cells. One of the start-ups which devised wireless backhaul solutions for small base stations deployed close to the floor and the radio ‘clutter’ was Tarana Wireless, which has now gained a partnership with Nokia, a trial…
Massive MIMO has gone from being treated like something from Star Trek to being an accepted element of most companies’ 5G roadmaps. While the vendors are busily demonstrating huge antenna arrays to improve wireless capacity and efficiency, especially in a Cloud-RAN scenario, Softbank of Japan is among the select band of operators which is already planning a deployment. As so often in Japan, the operators pay the price of a non-standardized, hand-crafted and therefore expensive roll-out in order to push their networks to the limit and influence the whole ecosystem. Softbank and its affiliate company, Wireless City Planning, claim to be first off the blocks with commercial Massive MIMO and will deploy this initially across 100 macro base stations as…
The GSMA has been holding the Latin America leg of its Mobile 360 series of conferences this week in Mexico City. The focus was, predictably, on 5G, with the large vendors reiterating their usual messages about new business models and the need for security and massive connectivity. However, while the vendors focused on future visions, the operators are dealing with the here-and-now issues of huge market upheaval and a round of mergers and acquisitions. It is too early in the 5G process for there to be any particularly regional skews on the overall technologies and business models under discussion, but undoubtedly these will emerge as operators start to plan for the next generation. Latin America is a huge and diverse…
Last week’s Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) Congress in Munich showcased the significant progress the ETSI-driven platform has made since work on its specifications started in March 2015. And the group driving MEC has even changed its name to reflect its widening remit – it will now be called the ‘Multi-Access Edge Computing’ industry specification group (ISG) as its work extends from cellular to WiFi and fixed access links. The name change was announced at the Munich event and will take effect early next year, when the work on MEC specs moves into its second phase. The ISG was due to finish its work in March 2017 – all ETSI initiatives have a two-year life – but like ETSI’s other critical…
There are many interesting aspects to the announcement that Qualcomm, among others, is joining Ericsson’s Avanci patent pool scheme. Some of these appear contradictory. On the one hand, Avanci illustrates how the old patent structures of the mobile industry will no longer be fit for purpose for the Internet of Things (IoT). Closed, secretive systems which were stretched to breaking point by cheap handsets will be broken bybns of sensor modules and a wide range of industrial stakeholders. As if to ram home the point, Qualcomm, to whom patent pools are anathema, is to join this one. But if we were looking for a bright new dawn of open licensing deals and broad pools, we would be disappointed – after…
M&A, Strategies, Alliances McLaren has denied that it is discussions to be acquired by Apple, while Lit Motors has declined to comment on the potential acquisition of its two-wheeled specialties. Greenwave Systems acquires Predixion Software, adding the latter’s RIOT analytics software to Greenwave’s Axon managed services platform. Bosch and SAP have signed a deal to combine Bosch’s IoT Cloud manufacturing platform with SAP’s HANA cloud, and Bosch’s IoT services available to SAP customers. Intel and Telit have announced an expanded partnership to provide devices and software for Industrial IoT customers looking to quickly on-ramp devices to cloud platforms. The Renault-Nissan Alliance has acquired Sylpheo, a French software company, to advance its mobility services and autonomous car projects – aiming for…