Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Last week we debated whether or not to cover a white paper put out by the Boston Consulting Group on behalf of Liberty Global, and decided on balance not to rush out coverage – this needed time to digest, not something to get a headline out of on press day. In our experience the last two pieces of the TV food chain to ever “get” anything historically, have been cable companies and content businesses, and yet here was a company that is potentially a bit of both, underwriting a piece of research which is designed to “point the way” not to their internal management, but to the world at large. Faultline has often talked about being fascinated by disruptive innovation,…
Com Hem has just pulled off a move into fiber networks, which alongside its purchase of paid digital terrestrial service Boxer, will see it emerge as a full service telecoms operator across Sweden, able to trade blows with Telenor, Telia and MTG’s Viasat. Com Hem is known simply as a cable company, with around 594,000 broadband customers and 625,000 pay TV customers, but what is not widely known is that it relies almost entirely on delivering its cable services to people living in multi-dwelling units – this takes in some 2.6 million of the 4.6 million homes in Sweden. There are a further 2 million single dwelling units. So the company has embarked on a strategy where it starts to…
It’s hard to work out if the deal that Access announced this week at Anga.com is the first of its DRM deals or the only default option it is going to bother with. We suspect the latter. Access Twine has come to market as a full DLNA stack with new added functions and the Japanese browser maker has perhaps taken the humble HTML 5.0 browser and made it offer as much of a full OTT system as it possibly can. For instance, it is compatible with Vidipath, which is a DLNA approved standard, blessed by Cablelabs, which enables streaming of premium TV programming to any VidiPath certified device. Access takes this a step further and through the use of the…
This week has seen at least three announcements from software players looking to take control of IoT data and analytics at the network edge. It’s a vibrant market, that is slowly realizing that the volume of data generated by IoT devices can’t be backhauled to the cloud for analysis every time. By processing data at the edge, application latency could be vastly improved, as long as there is sufficient computational power to ingest the various data points and spit out the correct answer. Doing so would greatly reduce the volume of data that needs to be sent back to the cloud too – useful for applications in locations where a robust and fast enough internet connection is hard to come…
Qualcomm has launched a new wearable chip for its Snapdragon Wear family, but don’t place any bets on the silicon giant making any great portion of its future revenue from wearables. The consumer appetite for the devices seems to have stalled, and there’s not much the likes of Qualcomm appear to be able to do about it. As with the smart home, the wearables market is an IoT flagship market that has failed to deliver its predicted impact, so far at least. The devices are shipping in volume, but the enthusiasm for wearables has greatly diminished in the consumer press – a vehicle that should be a driver for consumer wearables. So Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon Wear 1100 processor is a…
The European Union aims to avoid some of the mistakes of the past with its allocation of 700 MHz spectrum for mobile broadband, and is moving to ensure harmonization of allocation schedules and of technical conditions at an early stage. The European Council has backed proposals, made in February, to set a deadline of June 30 2017 for each member state to provide a detailed plan for how it will allocate the band to mobile operators, under harmonized pan-EU rules. The deadline to adopt 700 MHz as a mobile band will be 2020. The Council has said EU countries must reassign the 700 MHz band (694-790 MHz) to enable wireless broadband services by June 30 2020, though there is some…
Europe’s ETSI has transformed itself in recent years from a sleepy organization to a genuine trailblazer in defining new network architectures. Its NFV (Network Functions Virtualization) project has created a widely accepted basis for carrier-grade virtualization and accelerated adoption to a surprising degree; its related MEC (Mobile Edge Computing) initiative is a key element in harnessing the convergence of telecoms and IT, and enabling new operator models based on the distributed cloud. The group is not standing still either. Both NFV and MEC prefigure key concepts which will underpin 5G, and the organization sees itself having a part to play in pushing the discussion on from academic R&D to deployable commercial solutions. It has helped to do that in NFV…
Virtual reality is the mobile industry’s great hope for developing brand new user experiences to inject new growth into smartphone adoption, and handsets are likely to dominate the VR mass market as that emerges. The technology has been a highlight at recent events from Google’s I/O conference to last week’s giant Computex trade show in Taiwan, where ARM announced its new Cortex-A73 CPU and Mali-G71 GPU designs, with a strong focus on their potential in mobile VR experiences. Virtual reality could be a strong driver for growth for the coming generations of smartphones because handsets are the easiest way for consumers to access VR content. With a cheap adapter, ranging from Samsung’s $99 Gear VR all the way down to…
Some operators and vendors insist that, once the 3GPP’s Narrowband-IoT standard is widely deployed, from late 2016, the specialized LPWA (low power wide area) networks will disappear into a niche. There will certainly be consolidation – there are too many platforms for all of them to survive in the public access mainstream, though some may hang on in private networks. But if the LPWA players can come together to support some common frameworks and allow interoperability, there is a strong possibility that some of the technologies which are being deployed now – LoRa, Sigfox, Telensa and so on – will have a long life, and perhaps gain a migration path into future 5G platforms. As in broadband data and even…
This will be remembered as the year when the smartphone bubble burst. Of course the market will remain one of the largest in terms of unit numbers among all consumer products, and in some regions and user bases there will be growth opportunities. But the market will be adjusting to being in slowdown mode, which will see consolidation, and some players either redirecting their efforts or exiting altogether. Growth is slowing – IDC cut its forecast for 2016 and believes the increase in shipments will barely top 3% worldwide. The squeeze on revenue and profits will be worse, with much of the remaining growth coming in the cost-competitive mid-market. The answer in mass consumer markets is for a few players…
Could 5G be more than 90% code from open source origins? The idea is shocking to the closed world of mobile technology, but it was posed by a research leader from no more subversive a company than Huawei. Peter Ashwood-Smith, leader of IP research at Huawei Canada and chair of the ITU’s fixed line 5G focus group, put the question to a public workshop at which the ITU and NGMN Alliance were exploring how the 5G standards process should embrace open source. That this discussion was being held at all shows how much the mobile landscape has shifted since 4G standards were being set. That does not mean that things will change dramatically in the world of 3GPP technologies, however.…
Smart Homes and Buildings Asus has unveiled the Zenbo robotic smart home assistant, which is able to follow people around the house, with similar functionality as Amazon’s Echo. Smarte has selected DSP’s ULE SoCs to power its smart home offering. Deutsche Telekom’s Huawei-built gateway has been ULE Alliance certified, which allows DT’s Qivicon system to leverage the smart home protocol in operator deployments. Carillion and SPICA Technologies have partnered on a Sigfox-based Legionella monitoring pilot in the UK, which Carillion will rollout to customers in Q3. Mesh has launched its DIY range of seven smart home tags, that can be linked to an application platform to trigger smart home functions. Wearables Microsoft has opened up Windows Holographic, the platform behind…
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) seems to be plucking numbers out of the air at random when it comes to issuing fines to drone pilots deemed to be breaking the rules – an illogical system that could be damaging for the future of the IoT, if it is a precedent for how governments deal with new technologies. Some 24 incidents of the FAA fining drone pilots have recently been obtained by Motherboard under the Freedom of Information Act, although the total figure could be significantly higher. The documents revealed that the harshness of penalties varies from around $400 to $5,500, with the exception of one monster $1.9 million corporate fine, but the wild fluctuations between these fines don’t seem to…
Software specialist VMware has announced the introduction of Liota, the Little IoT Agent that it hopes will act as the gateway software for IoT devices and data. Available on Github now, the open-source software is being pushed by VMware as a single-choice option for businesses looking to build a single application that is compatible across multiple gateways from multiple vendors. VMware CIO Bask Iyer said that with the launch, VMware took a first step in its IoT journey. “We are extremely excited to launch Liota, a vendor-neutral open source SDK for building secure IoT gateway data and control orchestration applications: where, when, and how to gather data from attached devices and transfer data to data center components. The SDK provides…
The streaming market has been flooded with upcoming internet TV services and web video broadcasting platforms as of late and BitTorrent has joined the crowd with the latest announcement of its BitTorrent Live app. The app will join the growing population of global video broadcasting platforms to compete with such as Amazon Video Direct, Facebook Live, YouTube’s live streaming, Twitter’s Periscope and Twitch, which Amazon also owns. The platform that launched last week for Apple TV is described by BitTorrent as a “multichannel, live and linear video streaming platform spanning news, sports, music, tech and youth culture.” Support for iOS and Android devices will come sometime this June. The company launched beta testing of BitTorrent Live back in 2013 as…
The aggressive pursuit of Gameloft by Vivendi has virtually been finalized this week as the French mass media firm received shareholders’ backing for it to control a 61.7% stake in the games company and 55.6% of votes, according to a preliminary statement from the French stock market regulator. The Vivendi gaming strategy is currently focused on Gameloft, but as it pushes to become a serious force in European gaming, it will begin to tighten its grip on Gameloft’s big brother, Ubisoft. The hostile takeover, ongoing since October last year, saw Vivendi acquire stock at $8.91 per share valuing Gameloft at $780 million – but there are still uncertainties about exactly what Chairman and billionaire Vincent Bollore plans to do with…
A report out this week from IHS claims that Apple is now in third place in the global set top market based on revenues in 2015. First and foremost, Apple TV devices are not set tops in the sense that you cannot watch traditional linear TV on the devices, and secondly, claims such as these made by research firms are simply desperate attempts at sucking up to the world’s largest company. IHS reports that Arris is way out in front at around $3.5 billion, followed by Technicolor with $2.5 billion for set top revenues in 2015, thanks to the acquired assets of Pace and Cisco, respectively. The two front runners are hardly surprising, but it claims that Apple recorded some…
French security player Inside Secure, known as much for transaction security as its downloadable DRM, says it has a tie up with the Cryptography Research Inc. subsidiary of Rambus over using Vidity technology. Vidity is a brand stamp that came out of an international standard for securing premium content on renewable storage like Flash memory or a disk drive, without it being copy-able. It relies on an encrypted key in a safe area of the storage device which is not readable by the operating system of the device or by anything else for that matter. We assume this is both a patent license plus the know how to link a given DRM, in this case DRM Fusion Agent, to the…
Qualcomm has launched a new wearable chip for its Snapdragon Wear family, but don’t place any bets on the silicon giant making any great portion of its future revenue from wearables. The consumer appetite for the devices seems to have stalled, and there’s not much the likes of Qualcomm appear to be able to do about it. As with the smart home, the wearables market is another IoT flagship that has failed to sail with any great impact. Sure, they are shipping in volume, but the enthusiasm for wearables has greatly diminished in the consumer press – a vehicle that should be a driver for consumer wearables. So Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon Wear 1100 processor is a sensible compliment to its…
Google has won its battle with Oracle over alleged copyright infringement related to Java code used in Android. The jury rejected Oracle’s claim that Google should have licensed a set of Java APIs, judging that these were covered by ‘fair use’ rules. This reverses the outcome of an earlier trial in the same court, which concluded that the Java APIs were eligible for copyright protection, and sets an important precedent for the wider open software business. Oracle may appeal, but for now has lost its chance of hefty damages – it was calling for over $9bn based on its calculation of the profits Google has made from Android, plus loss of Java revenue. Meanwhile, Huawei filed its first patent infringement…