Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
One of the most immediate objectives of AT&T’s move towards SDN and virtualization is to expand its network as a service (NWaaS) activities. The more flexible a network is, the more it can be ‘sliced’ into separate virtual sections dedicated to a particular application, enterprise customer or service provider. Capacity in the slices can be dialled up or down as those users need it, and charged on an on-demand basis. The US carrier has made first steps towards this kind of platform – a pay-as-you-go approach once only envisaged by non-MNOs like Google. It says its SDN-enabled Network On Demand offering, which allows enterprise customers to dial bandwidth up and down as required in real time, has seen the fastest…
As virtualized networks scale up, and huge numbers of virtual network functions (VNFs) have to be managed, the role of the orchestration layer becomes more and more mission critical. No wonder, then, that there is a mighty power struggle in this area of the NFV space, a struggle which may wreck the dreams of a fully open, interoperable platform. The relatively quick convergence of the carrier industry around ETSI’s NFV specifications raised hopes that, in the teeth of telecoms history, we were entering a new era of unified foundations. But in the MANO (management and orchestration) stack, there are already two major open source efforts aiming to provide the glue for all the vendors’ offerings, and several major carriers are…
The holy grail of true multivendor networks is an important attraction of virtualization for many operators. But for most, the challenges of moving to a virtualized platform are daunting enough, without getting multiple suppliers involved, so early trials are generally being run by a single vendor. Except in Japan, where – as so often – NTT Docomo is taking the lead in showing the others what can be done. For operators for which ‘multivendor’ often meant no more than splitting a RAN roll-out into two separate regions, with one supplier apiece, the idea of being able to mix and match their partners, and swap kit in and out relatively easily, is appealing – but, of course, easier said than done.…
DishTV, one of India’s largest satellite operators with 26% market share, announced this week it has selected Wyplay to provide its Frog turnkey middleware for DishTV’s set tops. DishTV says the move is part of its plan of moving towards a more open future which will allow the industry to evolve, it claims to have created some sort of excitement in the Asian operator community with this view. What DishTV really means by this is that Wyplay’s Frog middleware is an HTML5-based open source project, which removes the need for any design involvement from hardware manufacturers or chipset vendors. Frog is written for Linux which allows pay TV operators to develop a graphical user interface in HTML5, create partnerships with…
At this week’s Connected TV Summit in London we were intrigued by the question of whether AI could one day write its very own TV show? It turns out that AI has already accomplished this. David Stiff, CEO of Israeli AI firm Vault, gave a presentation on Vault’s potentially huge and disruptive innovation. Despite recent breakthroughs and headline grabbing news, he claims that the finance industry has been using AI for over 30 years and is getting increasingly good at it – to the point where AI now makes over 50% of financial decisions, whereas AI in the world of media currently only makes less than 3% of decisions. There has already been some big news for AI during the…
M&A, Strategies, Alliances After porting its SQL Server to Linux, Microsoft is now joining the open source Eclipse Foundation, which provides a Java-based development environment. Kore is acquiring Wyless, uniting two of the M2M old-guard. No price has been given, but the pair the new business will be one of the six largest M2M providers, with 3,000 B2B customers and 350 staff. Dell is committed to expanding into the Industrial IoT, with ruggedized edge computing and gateways set to be a significant part of its portfolio. Bosch has launched its IoT Cloud platform, initially for its in-house projects but planning on opening it to other businesses in 2017. Software LambdaNative is targeting IoT expansion, making the open source functional programming…
The three German carmakers which now own Nokia’s former mapping business, Here, are keen to turn their new jewel into a broad industry platform which they control. Daimler, Audi and BMW, by acquiring Here, have a powerful weapon to build a de facto standard that is driven by the auto industry, not by Google, but that requires support from other car giants too. According to Daimler CEO Dieter Zetsche, Renault-Nissan is already in talks, as is telematics company Continental. Broadening the Here consortium would not only increase momentum but spread the costs of developing new software, in areas like driverless cars, and of continuing to enhance its digital mapping and navigation platform. He said Here is already discussing 5G developments…
Despite a recent summit meeting with the European Commission, Hutchison Whampoa still has a long road ahead to secure its acquisition of Telefonica O2 UK, to merge with its own UK arm, 3UK. The company said the hearing had given it “the opportunity to have another fruitful exchange with the Commission and the member states’ representatives”, but there was no news about possible conditions for approval of the £10.25bn deal, which the EC may oppose because it would reduce the number of MNOs in the UK market. Rival operators Vodafone and BT attended the meeting, according to Reuters, as did the main UK broadband providers, Sky, Liberty Global (owner of Virgin Media) and TalkTalk. Also present was France’s Iliad, which…
Having given the cause of ARM-based server chips a shot in the arm when it unveiled its first products late last year, Qualcomm is now turning to the software side of the platform. Creating a broad developer ecosystem is almost as big a challenge, when seeking to infiltrate Intel’s most strongly defended territory, as getting the processors right. Qualcomm has announced agreements with Red Hat and Linaro to ease this process. It is working with Red Hat to port a version of the software firm’s Enterprise Linux Server for ARM Development Preview, to the new Qualcomm chips, which do not currently have a firm shipment date but are being tested with potential customers and with cloud providers, reportedly including Google.…
In the homeland event of the cellular industry, it was hardly surprising that the emerging NB-IoT standard for machine-to-machine networking was welcomed with loud fanfares at last month’s Mobile World Congress. In public at least, last year’s technical split between Ericsson and Huawei was behind the vendors, and everyone was lining up behind the 3GPP’s upcoming specifications, which will be part of Release 13. That provided some ammunition for the cellular purists who argue that NB-IoT will make the current crop of low power wide area (LPWA) technologies, such as LoRa and Sigfox, redundant. But if they had looked around at the amount of WiFi involved in many of the mobile broadband exhibits, they would have seen that, in the…
A new sensor platform open standard was unveiled at Embedded World, which aims to push the M.2 connector and form factor. Formerly known as the Next Generation Form Factor (NGFF), the M.2 port is most commonly found in laptops and desktops, as an expansion slot for connecting high-speed storage to the motherboard. What the new group is proposing is to use the M.2 connector as a way of joining sensor hardware with the required processing power and connectivity – in a modular fashion that allows different combinations of SoCs and sensor boards to be joined by adopters. The founding members of the M2.COM group are Advantech (embedded computer designer), ARM (chip IP designer), Bosch Sensortec (Bosch’s consumer electronics and MEMS-focused…
Amazon has unveiled two new versions of its popular Echo smart home speaker. The new Echo Dot is a $90 hub that can be connected to existing home audio systems, replicating the functions of the original Echo but not including the speaker housed inside its tall cylindrical housing. The Amazon Tap is a $130 portable version of the Echo, battery-powered and requiring a push-to-talk button in order to query the Alexa assistant. The push-to-talk is the tradeoff for a decent battery life, as keeping the original Echo’s omnidirectional microphone array powered on and always listening is too power-intensive for a portable device – which has instead opted for a single microphone. While an always-on listening device like the other two…
Connected products platform Evrythng has announced the launch of ThngHub, a multi-protocol local cloud gateway, designed to live inside an already internet connected product to act as the bridge to the cloud for local IoT devices. Using the software, developers could turn their WiFi hubs or set tops into bridging devices, tying them into the lucrative emerging IoT services markets. Installable on any nearly Linux device with an internet connection, ThngHub hopes to handle the link between end-nodes and IoT sensors that need to send data to the cloud but which lack the direct IP link to the cloud servers. For many IoT devices, a cellular or WiFi link is unfeasible due to the higher power constraints relative to the…
This week we spoke to Opengear, a maker of remote network management appliances that is transitioning from the datacenter to the network edge. Selling hardware that will increasingly be used to control connected devices and infrastructure, we spoke to Derek Watkins, Opengear’s VP of Sales, to learn more about the impact that IoT is having on business. Founded eleven years ago Bob Waldie, a serial Australian entrepreneur, according to Watkins, who added that Opengear is essentially an amalgamation of previous ventures. With annual growth having never dipped below 50%, Opengear has been ticking along nicely and is still privately held. Opengear sees the IoT as a means of expanding out of its traditional business line – providing datacenter equipment that…
It has taken EchoStar 18-months to roll out its new Sage smart home platform since it was demoed at IBC 2014, and as far as we can see not much has changed – but it reopens the question of who does it better; technology companies or pay TV operators? When we met with EchoStar at IBC 2014, RIoT said it looked like a very simple system to operate; just the sort of thing that could be offered as a value-add product to service customers. Although it’s unclear for now if anything Drastic was changed during this long 18-month incubation, EchoStar told us at the time that Sage would launch in the first half of 2015 – so better late than…
This weeks round up of OTT Video news, deals, launches and products from Faultline. Global satellite services provider O3b has signed an agreement with Speedcast to provide improved connectivity to the 100,000 residents living on the islands of Kiribati in the Central Pacific. Speedcast provides very small aperture terminal (VSAT) satellite-based broadband access services, and will provide connectivity to consumers, businesses and government customers over the O3b satellite network. Kiribati’s remote location means laying undersea fiber cables would be unnecessarily expensive and time-consuming. O3b’s MEO satellites orbit at 8,062km and have a latency of less than 150 msec – 25% that of GEO satellites. Orange’s FilmBox Live VoD app is now available to mobile customers in Poland on any device…
Verizon has been fined $1.35 million by the FCC this week for violating privacy laws. While this penalty is barely a drop in the ocean for the US operator, this is part of a wider problem facing not just operators, publishers, and content providers, but also the technology vendors that work with them. The FCC deemed that Verizon’s ad targeting technology, or “supercookies”, had infringed its Open Internet Transparency Rule, as Verizon had been collecting customers’ data and sharing this with third parties without the consent of users, and with no option to opt out. Following the small fine, Verizon has now agreed to a three year FCC plan in which it is required to notify its customers about ad…
The US cable TV industry is once again in turmoil following the regulator FCC’s decision late February to allow public comments on a proposal from its chairman Tom Wheeler that would require pay TV operators to use set tops that conform to open standards. The move has wider ramifications in that it could herald the end of the set top as we know it. But more significantly it plays into the debate over how best to migrate to all-IP cloud based services, while ensuring that content rights are upheld and emerging security threats countered. Security is at the heart of the debate just as it was when the longest running saga in pay TV began exactly two decades ago in…
By Barbara Qualmann This week a computer finally managed to beat the top human exponent of the Japanese game of Go. It has been over 20 years since world champion Gary Kasparov lost a single game to a computer in 1996. A year later he lost an entire series. This week world champion Go player Lee Sedol lost his first game, the first of a series of 5, to the AlphaGo program running on Google DeepMind. Go is based on placing stones on a 19 by 19 grid, and so a board has 361 factorial moves possible, which amounts to infinitely more potential moves than chess. It has only been the resurgence of Artificial Intelligence, as a viable technology, and…
M&A, Strategies, Alliances Libelium’s Cooking-Hacks education-focused brand has kicked off its IoT Spartans challenge. Orbcomm has launched its CargoWatch Secure platform, for real-time tracking and monitoring shipping from origin to destination. The IIC might be aligning its Industrial Internet Reference Architecture with Platform Industrie 4.0’s own industrial-focused standards architecture. The ZigBee Alliance has passed the 1,500 products certified threshold, from over 200 manufacturers. The COM group has formed to create an open standard for sensor interfaces based on the M.2 (NGFF) form factor, with the end goal of creating adapters that bring processing and wireless links to sensor boards incorporating the M.2 port. Initial members include Advantech, ARM, Bosch, Sensortec, Sensirion, and Texas Instruments. Software Red Hat and Eurotech are…