Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
While most of the media world have set sights on the future of home entertainment looking more like Netflix than Comcast – including Comcast itself – Layer3 TV is hoping to breathe new life into the dying pay TV package. The company is launching a streaming TV service that it calls the “next generation of cable.” The service consists of a large bundle of streaming pay TV channels, in either 1080p HD or UHD resolutions, available to watch on a connected TV set. Layer3 TV has built an updated streaming pay TV service, with a wireless set top that can be placed in any room in the house, a DVR, and live streaming access to hundreds of pay TV channels…
Mirriad Advertising, the UK digital product placement people, have been on our doorstep for the last 4 years and we have never got around to speaking to them before. But memories of the decade old in-game advertising market, which we remember fondly, and the feeling that global OTT markets are getting larger and larger, tempted us to meet CEO Mark Popkiewicz at IBC, and although we ended up missing each other, we talked this week after the show. In a word the company seems to have gone about product placement in the OTT world in just the right way, but perhaps more importantly, at just the right time, although it has been open for business since around 2012. We both…
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…
In the progress towards 5G, fixed technologies have to be considered alongside mobile standards, far more than in previous generations. Nokia is providing hints of a converged future with two announcements, a demonstration in the 4.5 GHz band with Telia’s Finnish subsidiary Sonera; and more futuristically, a test of optical technology by its Bell Labs R&D unit, which approached the Shannon’s limit. In Finland, Nokia and Sonera unified fixed and mobile technologies to reach peak data throughput speeds of 4.5Gbps. The trial, at the operator’s Helsinki base, used commercial Nokia AirScale base stations with a customized core. The data rate and low latency of the network enabled the triallists to label it ‘5G’. Among the tests was transmission of high…
AT&T has scored its first major success in its bid to establish ECOMP, its software-defined network (SDN) platform, as a de facto standard among mobile operators. Orange is testing the platform, building on existing partnerships with AT&T in open source technologies for SDN and NFV (network functions virtualization). There is a real danger of fragmentation in the critical area of orchestration for virtual network functions (VNFs) in an SDN environment. AT&T is taking a leaf out of Google’s book by placing its inhouse technologies into open source, which could spark wide-scale adoption and give it an important role at the heart of a de facto standard ecosystem. In SDN and also in 5G, AT&T aims to rally other MNOs to…
The European Union announced its 5G Action Plan last week, and president Jean-Claude Juncker set out some ambitious connectivity goals in his State of the Union address. These include promises to enable free WiFi in public spaces in every town and village in the EU states, and to achieve “full deployment” of 5G by 2025 (including railways). As an interim goal, it repeated the goal of having commercial 5G in at least one town or city per EU country by 2020. This will only be possible if other EC plans come to fruition, including planned reforms to spectrum policy and the Electronic Communications Code. Juncker said: “The Commission is proposing a reform for our European telecommunications markets. We want to…
The MEC Congress starts this week as the technology reaches almost as great a peak of enthusiasm (or hype) as its ETSI stablemate, and close ally, NFV. Rather like the 5G community – full of hopes and dreams about slicing and massive IoT, but in fact pursuing mobile and even fixed broadband use cases – MEC has tended, in real life, to leave behind its more radical possibilities and focus on a few low hanging fruits such as video caching. Yet a group of start-ups have been demonstrating a bigger vision for edge-based computing for several years now, and several of them will gather at the Congress to provide tantalizing insights into the potential of this technology. In particular, we…
M&A, Strategies, Alliances Luxoft has acquired Pelagicore, a Swedish software and services provider, in a move to expand its HMI and IVI portfolio as it targets Tier 1 and automotive OEMs. Verizon has acquired Sensity Systems, a smart city and lighting company, with no terms disclosed. Renesas is acquiring Intersil for $3.2bn, to expand its IoT-focused embedded silicon portfolio. August has launched a Pro division, aimed at serving system integrators and security dealers, expanding from its consumer-focused smart locks. Ericsson’s Avanci patent licensing marketplace has added Qualcomm, ZTE, InterDigital and KPN, looking to offer a single license to cover 2G. 3G, and 4G patent usage. Forecasts, Reports, and Blue Sky Thinking Vehicular IVI and M2M systems will account for 98%…
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 – after stumbling onto 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…
Well the FCC has wasted no time and has gone ahead and amended its proposal for unlocking the box, and naturally a whole host of people who had previously suggested that they should support apps have now said the FCC’s proposal, which supports apps, is crazy. This time the Proposed Rulemaking will get through a vote, but we’re not sure how this will work in practice – mostly because of the inherently insecure nature of apps. The FCC is saying that all the functions of pay TV as they are delivered today in a set top, must be delivered by an App, be that on a smartphone, iOS or Android, on Android TV, on Roku boxes, on Windows and smart…
Canadian UI software house Youi.TV said this week that it has just landed a new investor in the form of Time Warner, in a $12 million Series-B funding round. Scott Levine, Managing Director, Time Warner Investments, will join the You.i TV Board. Youi.TV came to light when it put together the Shomi OTT SVoD service for Rogers and Shaw in the US, which went live for the first time in August 2014, and a year later it has gone out to a wider audience rather than just their existing pay TV customers. We have it at around 250,000 viewers so far. Youi.TVs claim to fame is that it has bypassed all the SDKs of the popular portable platforms like iOS,…
Leading global set top manufacturer Arris kicked off last week’s IBC show by announcing a five-year deal with Telefonica to provide set tops across the operator’s entire footprint in Spain and Latin America. The project, called Proteus, comprises HD, UHD, DTH, cable and IPTV set tops, with an expected roll out some time in 2017. Arris’ VIP1113 set tops are already deployed in Spain, which are used to deliver Telefonica’s next generation IPTV service to some 4 million Movistar customers, including HDTV, TV Everywhere, on-demand, and OTT services. The announcement comes at a time when Telefonica is expanding the footprint of its OTT service MovistarPlay, and Arris confirmed to Faultline that its IPTV set tops will support this in all…
Murata has launched a new battery unit for wireless sensor nodes powered by energy harvesting technologies, called the UMAL and UMAC. The cylindrical UMAC was first revealed last year, but the flatter UMAL has been targeted at devices needing thinner designs. With the new batteries, Murata is aiming to supply developers looking for IoT designs that can harness sources of energy in their surrounding environment to operate. The quick charge times and long storage capabilities mean that devices using such batteries would be able to turn kinetic, solar, or RF energy into battery reserves, to enable more powerful or higher levels of wireless communication than a pure-battery solution. The IoT end-nodes require a remote means of gathering energy, either as…
The Weightless SIG (special interest group) has had limited success in establishing its technology as a de facto standard for low power wide area networks (LPWANs). But it continues to push on multiple fronts for a significant role in the Internet of Things (IoT) and was vocal at last week’s CTIA show, announcing commercial products based on its newest specification, Weightless-P, which it claims can address a far wider range of LPWA use cases than the cellular solutions. This push involves two of its three platforms (the first has been almost shelved as it focused on white space spectrum, which is not available in many countries). The other two are Weightless-N, an ultranarrowband (UNB) implementation based on technology from Nwave.…
Sigfox and LoRa are the best known alternatives to LTE for lower power wide area network (LPWAN) connectivity, but there are many other contenders, including Weightless (see separate item) and Ingenu Networks’ RPMA. Ingenu CEO John Horn was bullish about his technology at the recent Mobile World Live show, saying it would be the only survivor alongside the NB-IoT 3GPP standard. “There’s plenty of room for NB-IoT and RPMA,” he said in a pre-show interview, citing his firm’s presence in 38 networks in over 20 countries (though these are private networks – Ingenu only started to address public access last year). He thinks RPMA has a headstart, after seven years in the market. “What’s been standardized in NB-IoT are the press…
The term C-RAN is being used almost as broadly as 5G, and several operators already claim to have ‘centralized RANs’ or ‘virtualized RANs’. Now SK Telecom of Korea, one of the companies which has been boasting about C-RAN for a couple of years, is claiming the world’s first true Cloud-RAN, and says it is ushering in the era of “All-IT”, to take the “All-IP” network towards 5G. As in 5G, there is a hefty dose of semantics as operators look to outdo one another, but SK is also moving the terms of the C-RAN debate forward. There have been several major trials and even deployments of virtualized base stations, enabling a cluster of cell sites to be managed by a…
The G.fast copper technology is becoming increasingly important to mobile operators as a potential alternative to fiber for high speed backhaul and fronthaul to make new architectures, such as Cloud-RAN and hyperdense HetNets, financially viable. The latest specifications from the Broadband Forum boost G.fast’s potential to deliver fiber-like speeds over existing copper networks, a huge economic boost both for home broadband access and for small cell backhaul. The key to enabling copper wires to deliver fiber-like speeds are the distribution points (DPs), where fiber from the central office meets the existing copper wires that connect residences or cell sites. G.fast chips are on the DPU’s circuit boards, which connect one fiber optic cable to multiple copper wires. Telcos welcome any…
San Francisco-based Juvo came out of stealth mode last week, with a bold claim that it can make “invisible” prepaid customers visible to mobile operators, increasing their ability to monetize pay-as-you-go subscribers. Juvo’s iOS or Android app enables prepaid users to build up what is effectively a credit score, by analysing their behavior and generating a rating for the MNO. Juvo calls this an “identity score” and users can boost that rating by interacting with the app and sharing data about themselves and their habits. For the MNO, the score can be used to enable new services for prepaid subscribers (a growing percentage for many operators), including direct financial services, or (more commonly) loans of voice, data and SMS credit.…
Intel continues with its major reorganization as it tries to create a unified framework around its diverse business unit. Venkata Renduchintala, right-hand man to CEO Brian Krzanich and the executive charged with the restructuring, has already axed mobile processors and other struggling activities, and the latest move is to offload a controlling stake in the McAfee security business, which will regain its original brand under private equity firm TPG, which will take a 51% stake. But this looks like throwing the baby out with the bathwater, since security is so essential to everything Intel is trying to do. Renduchintala – whose official title is president of the Client and IoT Businesses and Systems Architecture Group – is doubling down on…
Intel has made a highly strategic acquisition, greatly enhancing its position in the race to dominate vision processing chips, a key element in the hot area of mobile VR (virtual reality) driven by AI (artificial intelligence). It has snapped up Google’s close partner Movidius, which has developed an ultra-low power vision processor which can be incorporated into small devices. This will strengthen some key Intel developments such as its RealSense depth sensing technology, which it has managed to incorporate into mobile devices and drones. In turn, this will boost Intel’s hand against arch-rival Qualcomm, which is also highly active in this field, and should deepen its ties to Google. All the chip giants, also including Nvidia, are chasing key markets…