Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Amid criticisms that the 5G process is excluding input from non-telecoms verticals (see separate article), the European Union has launched a consultation with a view to getting all verticals equally involved in 5G developments, rather than allowing this to be dominated by just the telecoms vertical. The EU has devised an online questionnaire, open until July 11, to seek the views of “any sector that perceives benefits from connectivity to improve its process, products or services”. The aim is to identify opportunities for a coordinated introduction of 5G networks in Europe, and to assess elements of a ‘5G Action Plan’ for 2020 and beyond. The result should be a manifesto with a list of priority actions to enable 5G implementation,…
Nokia has signed a one-year frame agreement to accelerate China Mobile’s plans to upgrade to a flexible cloud network infrastructure. The deal, valued at around $1.53bn, will deliver technologies to support IoT devices and eventually embrace 5G in the country. The world’s largest MNO has struggled to translate its colossal 833.8m-strong mobile subscriber base into impressive financial results, despite hefty investments in LTE technologies. It has looked to diversify its business by launching subsidiaries focused on new revenue opportunities, such as China Mobile Internet Company (CMIC) last year. And it has been an aggressive trailblazer of new network architectures which could support new services while transforming the economics of mobile data. It recently tapped ZTE to support its bid to…
The web giants rejoiced and the telcos regrouped angrily, as the US Appeals Court in Washington DC upheld the tough net neutrality clauses introduced in the FCC’s Open Internet ruling last year. The court said the FCC was right to reclassify broadband access services under the Title II regulations which insist on open access to the internet and that an operator cannot give priority to its own content and services, or those of partners. There are some special conditions for mobile operators, because of the capacity constraints of their spectrum, but far fewer than they believe to be necessary. The FCC ‘s Open Internet decision, agreed in February 2015, withdrew much of the ‘special treatment’ MNOs had won in the…
Huawei’s share of the global smarphone market has risen to 8.5% following its strongest launch ever, the P9. Samsung has announced the acquisition of cloud vendor Joyent to accelerate its push into mobile and IoT (Internet of Things) services. The two pieces of news, which emerged on the same day, are clearly part of the same picture. The smartphone market’s growth is slowing, but a few Chinese vendors are succeeding in bucking the trend and increasing their market share. Both trends are putting intense pressure on the established handset giants, notably Samsung, which is seeking growth elsewhere, by expanding into services, software and IoT devices. Samsung’s track record in software and services is far less impressive than in hardware and…
Apple has hardly been a frontrunner in the mobile world’s gallop towards artificial intelligence (AI), but it made an attempt to catch up on the first day of its WWDC developer conference. Siri, its voice-activated digital assistant, will sit at the heart of new services driven by AI, and will expand well beyond its current place in the iPhone, into the home, car and anywhere else Apple fans may want to connect. Though Siri was a highlight – and has been a technology where Apple, unusually, has blazed a trail rather than following – there was still a sense of ‘too little too late’. Siri was ahead of the game in smartphone virtual assistants, but Apple failed to build on…
The more important Ericsson announcements of the week relate to the greatest challenge for 5G networks, and their best (perhaps only) chance of delivering increased profitability to their operators. The consumer mobile broadband model is exhausted, and will be retained, in many cases, rather as cellular voice has been in a data-driven era – as a loss leader, a way to attract users, promote the brand and drive indirect revenues, especially from big data. But for a better chance of premium pricing, low churn, new revenue streams and clear differentiation, operators will turn to industrial and vertical market services, both mobile broadband (as enterprises go mobile-first) and IoT. Ericsson announced two major government-backed projects heavily geared to industrial 5G usage…
The significance of European standards institute ETSI in mobile history can scarcely be overstated, going right back to 1992 when it took over stewardship of GSM, establishing European leadership in cellular platforms and almost achieving a global unified standard. So it is an optimistic sign for the fledgling and fragmented LPWAN (low power wide area networks) sector that several candidate technologies are aligning with one another and with ETSI’s work in this area. The Weightless special interest group (SIG) is moving its Weightless-N technology into ETSI’s LTN (Low Throughput Network) initiative, which is already supported by Sigfox. Meanwhile, Telensa, which uses an UltraNarrowBand (UNB) technology developed by Plextek, is to join the Weightless SIG board. Others among the many flavors…
A cloudy Berlin welcomed us to the IoT Tech Expo, taking place in the Berlin Congress Center, and joined for a day by NXP’s IoT touring truck. A great, if quieter, companion to the London event we attended back in February, the Berlin event was a great way to meet some of the lesser-known players in the IoT. Here’s what RIoT saw. Kicking off with a panel that felt a little like it was preaching to the choir, the assembled masses were warned by Relayr that if you hadn’t started on IoT projects that you were already behind. Thibaut Rouffineau, Ubuntu’s Head of Devices Marketing, recalled an incident when the owner of a 1m-unit smart meter rollout saw the AWS…
Apple had a chance, two years ago, to launch the smart home vision of the future to consumers that were still enthralled by the potential of companies like Nest and SmartThings. But its botched half-launch of HomeKit has set it back, and the company is only now getting round to pitching the platform as a core part of iOS 10. But on the stage back in 2014, it seemed that the preceding month of rumors pointed to a grand unveiling of the new Apple TV – the device that would form the hub of an Apple smart home ecosystem, and wow consumers who hadn’t yet lost interest. Apple missed the zenith. The delay has been its own doing. It has…
Months after unleashing the containerized application functionality of its Snappy technology, Ubuntu has announced that Snaps have been ported to other Linux distributions – in a move that is good news for software developers looking at expansive IoT rollouts. Canonical’s founder, Mark Shuttleworth, said that he was in the weird position of gleefully announcing a way for developers to not use Ubuntu – which he says is the most widely deployed Linux distro, with about 1/3 of all Linux boxes exposed to the web using the OS. Shuttleworth noted that the announcement was all about Linux. In the few months since Ubuntu announced that snaps would be its platform moving forward, the developers have successfully ported the technology. He said…
US advertising decisioning engine Freewheel continues to try to break down doors across Europe, as shown by its recent acquisition of French video supply-side platform (SSP) company StickyAds.tv, and has published some interesting findings this week in its latest Video Monetization Report. While in the US Dish Network has signed another RTB (real time bidding) TV deal, since its surprise move to embrace it back in October, with partner ecosystem platform BidSwitch. FreeWheel’s Video Monetization Report for Q1 2016 reports that desktops and laptops are still the top devices for ad views across all devices with a 37% share in the US and 49% in Europe. However, this figure in the US is now at its lowest since Freewheel began collecting…
Movidius is emerging as a star of the VR trend, thanks to its close ties to Google. Last week, the neural networking specialist unveiled the Fathom Neural Compute Stick, a USB stick housing its Myriad 2 chip in a small power package. The chip powers the computer vision capabilities of the DJI Phantom 4 drone, but Movidius has ambitions for markets with far greater volumes. It has announced a deal with Lenovo, which will see the Motorola owner use Movidius’ hardware inside VR-centric products which should propel the technology into the mass consumer space. Google and Movidius signed a deal back in January, which will see the smaller firm’s chips used in Android devices. While smartphones are likely to form…
The outpouring of ignorance and prejudice this week, following an Appeal Court’s decision to back the FCC’s Open Internet ruling, has reached a level that even Faultline was not quite prepared for. We tip our hat to someone called Peter Von Nessi, who in comments beneath an editorial carried in the Wall Street Journal, added that, “Liberalism is a mental disease!” Whether this was actually meant as a criticism of the court or was purely tongue in cheek, it raises more than just political issues. Americans everywhere hate regulation, from both sides of the political divide, we know that, even when that intervention makes sense. But to us at Faultline the Courts have no alternative. The Wall Street Journal editorial…
Lenovo’s Phab2 Pro promises to herald the dawn of things to come for the consumer IoT, bringing physical eyes to a new breed of smartphone that can be used in both consumer and business applications. Infrared depth-sensing and a wide-angle lens augment the standard phone camera, and show the potential for this technology to bring new capabilities to the IoT. With a 6.4-inch QHD (1440p) screen, Lenovo is planning on selling the phone for $500 in August. Powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 652 SoC (not the MediaTek in the $199 Phab2 and $299 Phab2 Plus), the Pro model features a 16 megapixel camera with a special depth-sensing functions, which allows the smartphone to map the physical world. The camera is…
The Bluetooth SIG says it will announce Bluetooth 5.0 this week, with promises of twice the speed and four times the range for its low-power profiles, and an 8x improvement in its broadcast messaging capacity. Also in the works are the launch of its mesh networking implementation, which would finally see the SIG provide a protocol that is ideal for IoT developers The protocol itself is expected to make it to market towards the end of this year, or early next year, and will be forgoing the numerical naming scheme in favor of one that will provide simpler clues to consumers. The broadcast messaging function aims to provide a “connectionless IoT,” where a Bluetooth device doesn’t need to be paired…
Cisco and Ericsson have acknowledged that their broad-ranging partnership is taking longer than they had hoped to deliver big results, with 17 joint deals closed so far. However, short term impact on sales is only one of the goals in mind – the more important objective is to bring each company a full platform spanning cloud IT and all kinds of networks. The partnership approach is less disruptive to operations than a merger, but it will still take time to integrate the product offerings and the personnel. Had this alliance been formed a couple of years ago, Ericsson would have been very much the senior partner – it has been expanding rapidly into wireline and cloud services markets while Cisco…
Movidius is emerging as a star of the VR trend, thanks to its close ties to Google. Last week, the neural networking specialist unveiled the Fathom Neural Compute Stick, a USB stick housing its Myriad 2 chip in a small power package. The chip powers the computer vision capabilities of the DJI Phantom 4 drone, but Movidius has ambitions for markets with far greater volumes. It has announced a deal with Lenovo, which will see the Motorola owner use Movidius’ hardware inside VR-centric products which should propel the technology into the mass consumer space. Google and Movidius signed a deal back in January, which will see the smaller firm’s chips used in Android devices. While smartphones are likely to form…
After a whole year of the FCC outright refusing to debate changes to the bandwidth spectrum for Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) for V2V and V2X infrastructure, this week the regulatory body has finally caved to pressure to test prototypes allowing WiFi modems to also transmit on the spectrum. This represents a significant stumbling block for V2V and V2X industry plans in North America, and also signifies a move by the FCC which sees its stubborn façade slip following Congressional and computer industry lobbying. The FCC says it will now be reviewing the decision to open up bandwidth in the 5.9GHz band, allowing WiFi devices to use the 75MHz chunk – with the ultimate aim of increasing innovation to create…
Arris, Teleste, and Casa Systems were flaunting DOCSIS 3.1 capable products at this week’s Anga Com tradeshow in Cologne. All three companies have the difficult task of competing with the might of Cisco for contracts, which itself won a deal this week to use its CCAP (Converged Cable Access Platform) tech in a DOCSIS 3.1 field trial with Altice and SFR in France. CCAP is the combination of the network server which drives QAM TV with the CMTS (Cable Modem Termination System) which in turn drives DOCSIS connections. The technology is being used to upgrade existing cable systems to provide subscribers with ultra-fast broadband speeds to keep up with increasing demand for content in formats such as 4K, UHD and…