Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
WiFi has so often been seen as a weapon for disruptive organizations to up-end the wireless services status quo, only to be hijacked by the mobile operators and telcos after all. That happened most famously in the municipal WiFi craze of a decade ago, which started with telcos taking city authorities to court for building networks to deliver low cost connectivity, and ended with the same operators using WiFi to deliver their own services and to offload data from cellular networks. Is the same about to happen with WiFi-first mobile services? These were announced by a number of MVNOs, especially in the US, and seemed to present a serious challenge to the cellular players with their low cost tariffs. These…
It is not just CK Hutchison which is on tenterhooks, to see whether the European Commission green-lights its plan to acquire Telefonica’s O2 UK arm – and what the conditions may be. The UK’s broadband players, particularly Sky and TalkTalk, as well as potential new entrant Iliad of France, are also watching the situation closely, hoping that the terms of approval may throw them the opportunity to up their game in mobile and quad play services. The latest twist in the saga came this week with an open letter opposing the planned deal, written by the head of the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), Alex Chisholm, to the EC competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager. He said the merger should be…
It was March 2013 when we first heard a cable company talk about WiFi homespots and their potential for cellular offload, and a month later when Comcast chimed in and said that it would build out WiFi to look into that opportunity and partner with Liberty Global from across the Atlantic, in Europe. And yet today there remains no clear service addition at Comcast nor a date on the near horizon for its launch. We know that it built out its network to establish AAA servers that will allow authentication to any dual mode WiFi-LTE partner network, by installing mostly Alcatel equipment and software. The goal is for the network to work all the time, every time, by adding things…
Facebook’s attempts to supplant Google as the dominant player driving mobile connectivity and web experience have failed so far, but at its F8 developer conference this week, it showed the latest results in two key areas which could make it the mobile pace-setter for the next decade. On the one hand, it is further expanding Messenger – transformed at last year’s event into a full platform – with artificial intelligence; on the other, it is showing off prototype networking gear designed to transform the economics of wireless infrastructure and connect the rest of the world. The social media giant may arguably have grasped the monetization of rising mobile traffic more rapidly than its rival, but several attempts to build a…
Mobile communications may inherently ignore national borders, but there is still plenty of political competition between the major mobile regions to be seen as 5G leaders. Japan and South Korea, by virtue of their track record, huge R&D investments and handily timed Olympic Games events, hardly have to prove themselves in this respect, but the US and European Union are both eager to be in the front rank of 5G developments. In the US, FCC chairman Tom Wheeler has made many comments on the importance of 5G leadership, and initiated a study of potential new spectrum options at high frequencies. This week he went further in a speech to the Policy Summit held by INCOMPAS (formerly Comptel), the trade association…
The Kudelski Group is no stranger to patent infringement court cases, and this week its OpenTV subsidiary has returned fire against Yahoo by filing ten US patent infringements, following Yahoo’s complaint for a declaratory judgement against the middleware company back in January. The alleged infringements comprise the products and services Yahoo Smart TV, Yahoo Connected TV, Yahoo TV, Yahoo interactive video advertisements, Yahoo fantasy gaming, and Yahoo Screen – details on specific technologies have not yet been disclosed. This certainly comes at an inconvenient period for Yahoo amid reports of frantic bidding for assets from the likes of Verizon, Google, and the Daily Mail (see separate story this week). The Kudelski Group has gained quite a reputation in patent litigation…
Like Spain with high speed rail, Italy is hoping that investment in broadband infrastructure can help the country climb out of the economic doldrums in the longer term. In the short term though, it looks likely that its grand plan for broadband everywhere could have a negative economic impact because of its knock on effect on incumbent Telco Telecom Italia. It looks like the government and especially prime minister Matteo Renzi have decided to sacrifice the Telco to the cause of cost effective broadband development exploiting the existing electricity distribution infrastructure. The government has calculated that this will reduce the cost of fiber deployment by around 35% by avoiding the need to build new ducting. But by providing an effectively…
Media technology giant Technicolor and one of the world’s largest multiplatform video services platform providers Vubiquity have formed a partnership this week to fast-track the roll out of HDR content to consumers. HDR – the process of providing whiter whites and darker blacks, independent of 4K – is currently limited to just a handful of items in the content libraries of a select few OTT services such as Netflix and Amazon. The collaboration between Technicolor and Vubiquity aims to change this by incorporating Technicolor’s technologies to offer an “in-network” HDR up-conversion and delivery service to network service providers and content owners – in what the two companies say is an industry first. This means Vubiquity’s customers across the world will…
Sometimes more can be less in the world of TV standards and there are signs of that being the case for Ultra HD. With the UHD Alliance already established eyebrows were raised when the Ultra HD Forum was launched as a separate body at IBC 2015 in Amsterdam, especially as both had one or two common members, such as Dolby. Besides, the whole area of UHD had become inflated to embrace everything associated with what might loosely be called next generation TV, which meant that the field was already cluttered with standards bodies such as the ITU, EBU, DVB, SMPTE, MPEG and more recently the Streaming Video Alliance and the Alliance for IP Media Solution. But the point was precisely…
A decade ago we raised the specter (to pay TV services and broadcasters) that broadband had the potential to replace legacy TV viewing. The advent of DVRs, TV Everywhere and pay TV’s VoD offerings have only delayed the inevitable. Broadband delivered videos via the internet are better than linear TV in every way – such as watch anywhere, at any time and on any device. For some time, it was thought that pay and broadcast TV would always hold a monopoly on live performances such as sports, news and weather. Led by Periscope, that illusion has been shattered and Facebook, Google, Twitter and others are giving thought to the crown jewels of live TV – professional football/soccer games in North…
It was March 2013 when we first heard a cable company talk about WiFi Homespots and their potential for cellular offload, and a month later when Comcast chimed in and said that it would build out WiFi to look into that opportunity and partner with Liberty Global from across the Atlantic, in Europe. And yet today there remains no clear service addition at Comcast nor a date on the near horizon for its launch. We know that it built out its network to establish AAA servers that will allow authentication to any dual mode WiFi-LTE partner network, by installing mostly Alcatel equipment and software. The goal is for the network to work all the time, every time, by adding things…
M&A, Strategies, Alliances Nest is having another bad week, after the spotlight has been put on its quiet announcement back in February that it will be shutting down the Revolv hub servers in May – with some pointing to the move as emblematic of the problems of IoT, and an anonymous Reddit post from someone claiming to be a Nest engineer saying the company is on deathwatch. Intel is acquiring Yogitech, an Italian company specializing in safety application semiconductors, like automotive ADAS or industrial fail-safes. Amazon and Microsoft are set to take minority stakes in mapping company Here. Amazon appears to have acquired Orbeus, a deep learning startup. The ZigBee Alliance has signed a deal with the Global Market Development…
Operators are desperate for new spectrum as capacity demands mushroom, but certainly cannot afford to pay traditional prices for their entire store. This is bringing new options into play, including unlicensed and shared bands, and as capacity takes over from coverage as the primary driver of LTE expansion, higher frequencies are also in the limelight. That is raising the profile of the unpaired spectrum bands around 2.3 GHz-2.6 GHz and 3.5 GHz, whose last day in the sun was during the WiMAX bubble a decade ago. Several regulators and operators are paying close attention to reviving these bands, some of which are lying fallow or being used for legacy fixed wireless services. While 2.5/2.6 GHz is a major band for…
As one European MNO merger plan fails, another hangs in the balance. CK Hutchison is making more concessions in a last-ditch attempt to win European Commission approval for its acquisition of Telefonica’s O2 UK arm, while in France, Orange and Bouygues have reverted to Plan A after they failed to agree terms for a marriage. According to UK media reports, 3UK parent Hutchison has agreed deals with the Sky and Virgin Media – the main UK triple play competitors to BT – to take capacity on a merged O2/3UK network. Sky is said to have agreed a £2bn arrangement which would give it access to 20% of the merged network’s capacity for 10 years, provided the acquisition, which is under…
It has been a difficult week for Google’s Nest smart home division, with anger over its decision to stop supporting the Revolv home hub, reports of unimpressive revenues from Nest’s connected devices, and tales of rows between executives. Google acquired Revolv two years ago and it has been living under the Alphabet holding firm along with other IoT-related activities such as Nest. However, it has discontinued the connected hub and now says it will withdraw support and cloud services from May 15. “The Revolv app won’t open and the hub won’t work,” said the firm, which said all data would be deleted. When Revolv was acquired, it said it would stop working on its own hubs and that its efforts…
Amazon has acquired artificial intelligence start-up Orbeus and is reportedly in talks to take a stake in the mapping platform Here, both of which would be part of a broader effort to define the next generation user experience for connected devices. If Google set the rules for search, Amazon did the same for shopping, but as the web platform evolves, the two giants are overlapping more and more, in areas like content consumption, payments and mobile applications. Both need to be in the driving seat when it comes to developing user experiences that will drive new revenues. Those will inevitably be increasingly mobile in nature, and while Google managed to take ownership of the mobile web with Android, Amazon has…
As telecom operators become IT and cloud players, their traditional suppliers have to transform themselves to keep their customers and fend off HPE and others from the data center space. Ericsson has been very active in this regard, with significant investments in infrastructure for operators which are moving to cloud services and even Cloud-RAN. Its latest acquisition, NodePrime, is designed to boost its offerings in data center and software-defined networking (SDN) technologies. NodePrime bills its offering as the “brain of the SDI (software defined infrastructure)”. It specializes in infrastructure management, with a command and control platform that covers all the components of a data center, automatically detecting and configuring new hardware. By automating many previously manual processes, it becomes quicker…
Pity poor Juniper. The networking company’s alliance with Ruckus Wireless last summer raised hopes that it would strike it third time lucky in the WiFi market, filling the gaping wireless gap in its platform. Now Brocade has snatched carrier WiFi leader Ruckus from under its rival’s nose with a $1.2bn acquisition, the latest in a series of deals which could make Brocade a more dangerous challenger to Cisco in the service provider space than Juniper itself. The acquisition makes Brocade look far more like Cisco in the wireless operator space – in its statement, it said the key aim was to address “critical networking requirements from the data center to the wireless network edge”. As enterprise networks and data centers…
Pity poor Juniper. The networking company’s alliance with Ruckus Wireless last summer raised hopes that it would strike it third time lucky in the WiFi market, filling the gaping wireless gap in its platform. Now Brocade has snatched carrier WiFi leader Ruckus from under its rival’s nose with a $1.2bn acquisition, the latest in a series of deals which could make Brocade a more dangerous challenger to Cisco in the service provider space than Juniper itself. The acquisition makes Brocade look far more like Cisco in the wireless operator space – in its statement, it said the key aim was to address “critical networking requirements from the data center to the wireless network edge”. As enterprise networks and data centers…
About a week ago the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US bought the first chip from IBM Research which it is calling a neurosynaptic or Neuromophic computer chip meaning it is one which mimics human architectures. It is being sold as TrueNorth – and is just out. This is said to emulate human neurons and this deal involves a configuration which is the equivalent of 16 million neurons and 4 billion synapses, but it only consumes the energy equivalent of a tablet – a mere 2.5 watts of power. This is the result of 200 collaborators working together since 2008, and IBM says that it can be installed just as easily in a smartphone as a supercomputer in the…