Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Parallel to the rise of generative AI, with capabilities to generate photorealistic images and videos, come growing concerns over distinguishing between genuine images and fabricated content. A remedy to that proposition has come with the C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity) an anti-falsification project that is picking up steam, as evidenced at IBC 2024. German systems integrator G&L is the sole European licensor for C2PA-based news and broadcast purposes, born from a fresh agreement with US-based Truepic, which has laid much of the standard’s technological foundations. At IBC, an integration with Bitmovin (other OVPs are supported) demonstrated how G&L supports broadcasters with integrating C2PA into production and publication workflows, via an SDK. Notably, we are told about an unnamed…
India’s New and Renewable Energy Minister Pralhad Joshi has announced that banks and financial institutions have announced funding commitments, which aggregate to $386 billion, to back India’s green energy transition. While the energy types discussed include wind and electrolysis, the biggest numbers being thrown around are for solar power – with a total 570 GW in clean energy generation capacity additions pledged by developers by 2030. What’s of broader interest is the announcements of manufacturing capacity – which so far come to 340 GW modules, 240 GW solar cells, 22 GW wind turbines, and 10 GW in electrolyzers. Moving forward, solar panels installed in India will all be made in India – with some to spare. That starts with the…
M&A, IP, Patents The European Commission has unconditionally cleared Swisscom’s planned acquisition of Vodafone Italia under the foreign subsidies regulation. Swisscom expects the deal to complete in the first quarter of 2025. The US Commerce Department is proposing a ban on key Chinese software and hardware in connected vehicles, according to Reuters. The software prohibitions would be effective in the 2027 model year and the hardware ban would take effect in the 2030 model year or January 2029. This would also force American and other major automakers in years ahead to remove key Chinese software and hardware from vehicles in the The European Commission (EC) has cleared UAE operator e&’s acquisition of a 50% stake in PPF Telecom Group. The…
Momentum is building in the WiFi HaLow world, with Morse Micro announcing a 16 km range record, and Edgecore Wi-Fi unveiling a new gateway with native Matter functionality. The low-power, sub-GHz, IoT-focused WiFi implementation has great potential, but is this the start of the hockey-stick growth curve? For Morse Micro, an Australian maker of WiFi chips, the 16 km test took place in Joshua Tree National Park, in California – a place rather devoid of wireless interference. At the theoretical maximum range of 15.9 km, with a receive signal strength of -94 dBM, the calculations suggested a throughput of some 4 Mbps. The line-of-sight connection provided a peak of 3.6 Mbps, with the average being 1.31 Mbps – although the…
A version of Open RAN is becoming popular in private networks. It is more flexible and claims to have sustainability benefits compared with traditional RAN, but is nothing like the large-scale Open RAN that global governments want to see. This geopolitical Open RAN will be a harder nut to crack, and for now it will continue to be dominated by large vendors. In his inaugural speech to the telecoms industry this month, at the Connected Britain event, the UK’s Minister of State for Data Protection and Telecoms, Chris Bryant, emphasized the government’s desire to increase the number of vendors in the supply chain. He referred to the government’s £250 million ‘Open Networks’ R&D Fund, and to a recent report from the Telecoms…
UK football club Crystal Palace FC has installed a 5G private network with a permanent vision enhancement system for fans with sight loss. The network claims to be the first in the world to use these permanent virtual reality headsets and for Shared Access, the firm that installed the network, this could be the new capability that will drive further adoption of private 5G in UK stadiums. Shared Access is a neutral host provider that typically extends coverage from UK public operators to indoor locations. The firm has a niche in providing connectivity in football stadiums, through its relationships with the England’s Football Association and the Football Association of Ireland. The firm started working with the Crystal Palace stadium in South London,…
Reliance Jio is on the verge of launching India’s first full commercial dynamic 5G network slicing capability after successful validation with Chinese smartphone maker OnePlus. This sets the stage for granular 5G network slicing at the device level, taking advantage of capabilities just coming on stream with the latest 3GPP Release 18 under the banner of 5G Advanced. The validation trial involved connection of Jio’s 5G Standalone (SA) network with the handset’s SoC, allowing independent virtual networks to coexist and serve different applications varying in their demand for speed, network capacity, security and reliability. This showed that the applications could access dedicated slices of the network simultaneously without interfering with each other. Reliance Jio said it was now ready for…
Faultline was not permitted access to Edgio’s private meeting suites at IBC 2024, for obvious reasons, which for the same reason is why Edgio was one of the standout themes of the Amsterdam show. One way or another, Edgio will influence the next wave of change in the CDN industry, whether the company’s Chapter 11 is a precursor to a fire sale, or not. One area of Edgio influence concerns British Telecom’s nascent MAUD (Multicast-Assisted Unicast Delivery) project, which is proving divisive – partly due to multicast cynics, but mostly regarding revenue projections. First and foremost, BT—which took squatter’s rights at Broadpeak’s IBC stand this year—reiterated to Faultline that the Edgio situation would cause no delays to the impending trials…
Emblematic of the shift from SDI to IP is the growing traction of the low-latency video coding system JPEG XS, as numerous new hardware integrations of the codec were on full display at IBC 2024. Notably, NBCUniversal used JPEG XS for productions of the 2024 Paris Olympics. The codec is a popular choice for stadium events, as the appetite for high-capacity networks supporting premium, multi-camera Full HD and even 4K levels of production requires improvements in live contribution, particularly for sports. The backers of JPEG XS point to efficiencies across local and wider networks, enabling workflows to be built simply on ethernet ports on any PC, and bringing scalable network capacity. It also drastically reduces bandwidth requirements, which are 10…
With the doors now closed on the second IBC since ChatGPT took the world by storm in November 2022, we can conclude that the tongue-in-cheek tag of an “AIBC” was more appropriate this year than last. The show even boasted a dedicated and novel 14th hall dedicated entirely to AI products. Although we confess to not spending much time in the new hall, its purpose remains somewhat dubious to us, given the volume of vendors using the hall as a location for a smaller second stand – reintroducing demonstrations already being showcased elsewhere. Tradeshow logistics aside, we saw on the technology front a continuation of what we noticed at NAB—a rationalization of the utilization of AI around a few key…
Faultline was critical about the weak showing for content protection and anti-piracy products at the NAB Show earlier this year, which was rectified at IBC 2024 by a joint demo from Microsoft and EZDRM on combatting CDN leeching. With the demo hot off the press at IBC, the EZDRM team are coy about strategic details. Nameless, the technology is not officially productized, known internally only as Project Juniper. The exact pricing model is still being figured out too, but will probably be charged per minute of stream time. What we are told is that a handful of attendees described the DRM demo as “game changing”. We will reserve comment until we see a live customer implementation of the technology. The…
A fresh report from Rethink Energy predicts that perovskite solar modules reach GW-scale manufacturing from 2028, taking over the entire industry by 2040. Today we see a constant stream of trial commercial shipments, and that tandem modules have reached parity with silicon on lifetime power output – with huge room for further upgrades on lifespan and efficiency. This means that solar’s price declines and quality improvements haven’t reached a plateau – the solar levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) is going to keep improving through 2040 and beyond. It will take many years of manufacturing expansions to catch up with the scale of the general solar industry – but specific market segments will be transformed or even created by perovskites, in…
It is all too easy for vendors to exaggerate the benefits already achieved by AI, or strictly machine learning, for RAN energy efficiency when these are very early days. China’s ZTE has fallen into this trap with its recent claim that commercial deployment of what it called native AI-based RAN computing had achieved a 15% improvement in user experience and a 5% increase in network traffic. The claim was made in the context of a deployment in Indonesia in partnership with MNO Smartfren, whose CTO and CIO Shurish Subbramaniam underlined the importance of integrating AI into mobile networks. But ZTE’s claims are far too vague and unsubstantiated at this stage to bear close scrutiny, although no doubt the company is…
Wireless Watch has long been skeptical of the claims that network APIs will unlock billions of dollars of new revenue for MNOs. The announcement from 12 MNOs and Ericsson that a new company has been jointly founded to bring the opportunity to market, has been tentatively received by the industry. It is really quite a headscratcher, and one that risks major anticompetitive interest. There is still no proven demand for this trend. Sure, it would be nice for a developer to be able to validate a user on a mobile network, facilitate payments, and tap into various security functions, but what are these MNOs bringing to the table that is new and not already provided by a healthy software development…
UK regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), has released a stinging review of the proposed merger between Vodafone UK and Three. But the famously tough watchdog has left the door open for approval of the £16.5 billion deal. Last week, the CMA released the initial findings of its in-depth review, saying that it will lead to price rises for customers and poor overall infrastructure investment. “The investigation has provisionally concluded that the merger would lead to price increases for tens of millions of mobile customers, or see customers get a reduced service, such as smaller data packages in their contracts,” the CMA said. “The CMA has particular concerns that higher bills, or reduced services, would negatively affect those customers least…
The recent Connected Britain event in London was a bustling forum for fiber and wireless folks to display their wares and share ideas. From the level of activity, you would be forgiven for thinking that business is absolutely booming, but the bustle and brightness of the event has more to do with the final heydays of the UK’s alternative network fiber broadband providers, or ‘altnets,’ than of overall telco industry activity. The tone at the event was an exuberant one. Delegates were enjoying the chance to catch up with peers and former colleagues but most agreed that the event was more of a social occasion than a chance to garner new business. The majority of attendees were vendors, most of…
Southeast Asia’s most valuable telco, Singtel, considers itself a leader in the region. Singapore’s unique geography as a city state allows the incumbent operator to swiftly roll out network developments. Singtel uses Singapore as a proving ground and shares its advancements with members of the Singtel Group – including India’s Bharti Airtel and Australia’s Optus. Singtel’s latest project is 5G SA app-based network slicing. Wireless Watch sat down with Singtel’s Head of Networks, Tay Yeow Lian, to discuss the revenue opportunities in 5G SA. Singapore has a unique, you might say peculiar, island resort at the southern tip of the city, overlooking the Singapore Straits. Sentosa Island is an adventure playground for residents. It was built from partly reclaimed land…
Just a few years ago, the open-source multimedia packaging framework GPAC (Graphics Project on Advanced Content) was not exactly ubiquitous, at least in the public eye. That was until Netflix made its use of GPAC public, bringing the 21-year-old technology into the light. To avoid any dwindling of this Netflix limelight, GPAC’s chief backer Motion Spell has released a 49-page whitepaper, just in time for IBC 2024, which is mostly a vanilla marketing exercise, offering little to no new updates. As well as signing an agreement with Netflix to integrate the framework into its global operations for packaging, streaming, inspecting and playing content, GPAC also flaunts use cases with Instagram and Synamedia— A cynical observer would note that GPAC’s big…
While the big news in the content delivery space this week concerns the fate of Edgio (see separate story), a handful of CDN partnerships and product updates have flown under the radar as some 45,000 video industry professionals fly into IBC 2024 (for the record and for green points, Faultline is travelling by train this year). As a primer, the past 12 months have been packed with disruptive change. We have witnessed private CDNs and ISP/content provider CDNs gain traction, as video service providers optimize costs by building directly on network infrastructure and layering in low-latency streaming services. Traditional CDN vendors have been battered by rising infrastructure costs and cut-throat competition from hyperscalers CDNs like Amazon CloudFront, while Akamai (an…
“We are absolutely not a hardware company,” reiterates Synamedia’s Nick Thexton, EVP of Cloud Media Services, while proudly presenting the TV technology company’s new palm-sized, aggressively-priced HDMI streaming device. Coined Senza, Synamedia evangelizes that it is rethinking the concept of thin clients by putting applications in the cloud where off-device GPU capabilities render user interfaces and graphical overlays, via simple HTML5. The UK-based software vendor claims Senza dramatically lowers the cost of app development – effectively democratizing high-quality TV applications and additional services for smaller service providers. Italian for ‘without’, Senza—both a product and a platform—is without many things. It is without a browser. It is without an OS. It is without an application ecosystem, and therefore without ecosystem taxes.…