Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Sequans announces Australian Cat 1 launch with Telstra, Skyworks partnership Aeris posts 52% growth, announces distributor deals with Avnet, Synex, Digikey Ingenu still set on world LPWAN domination Sierra Wireless eyes eSIM opportunity, adding 4G to offering, eyeing Cat M Stream secures India smart city deal with Gaia Nokia to buy Nakina, invests $350m in IoT Jasper’s growth made it Cisco target, up to million monthly additions Sigfox changes sales strategy to target channels Qualcomm talks smart cities but IoT presence minimal at MWC Sequans announces Australian Cat 1 launch with Telstra, Skyworks partnership: Sequans used MWC to announce a new trial deployment for its Cat 1 chipset in Australia, with Telstra, which will be exploring the commercial potential of…
Spanish low-power sensor and radio hardware vendor Libelium has had something of a pivot, and launched the IoT Marketplace. With plans to treat it like a separate business, Libelium will be opening up the web-market’s offerings to include third party apps and services – in packages aimed at specific verticals and needs. The initial kits are mostly centered around Libelium’s own hardware – it’s Meshlium radio gateways, Waspmote end-nodes, and Plug & Sense sensors that allow the Waspmotes to convey a vast array of potential sensor data back to a cloud platform via the Meshlium gateways. The first partners for the project include Element Blue, ESRI, IBM, Indra, IoTSens, Microsoft, Telefonica, ThingPlus, and ThingWorx – collectively bringing a healthy mix…
This weeks round up of OTT Video News Deals, Launches and Products Liberty Global’s Germany UnityMedia unit is now providing catch up free to air programming, themed as crime, passion and living from RTL Germany as part of its VoD service. The two signed a collaboration VoD agreement in November. US cableco Cox is shuttering its Flare family of digital entertainment services and will switch off FlareKids channels, and online gaming service FlarePlay and the digital storage service myFlare between now and the end of May. Cox has used the Flare brand to incubate new ideas for its mainstream services and it used to have big plans for it, but could not find a way to make money on the…
Both French middleware provider Expway and Canadian hosted media specialist Quickplay Media have unveiled mobile CDNs for LTE-Broadcast (LTE-B) at this year’s MWC. Both offerings are aimed at the same customers and operators, but neither company can decide if the other is a rival or not. Expway’s FastLane product focuses on optimizing the link from the network cell to devices using LTE-B, Multicast Dynamic Switching, and pre-emptive caching. It has already landed itself a big deal with chip giant Mediatek – integrating Expway middleware into MediaTek’s helio smartphone SoCs to support LTE-B video streams. Expway says FastLane delivers content to mobile devices while complementing third party CDNs such as Akamai – of which we were given a demo at the…
The drive towards the dream of network virtualization has gained momentum at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2016 with 23 Telcos and technology vendors signing up to create a multi-vendor open source software stack for service creation. These firms have joined the Open Source MANO (OSM) Community under the umbrella of ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute), whose current main focus is to develop standards for NFV (Network Functions Virtualization) and promote interoperability. OSM was founded by Telefónica, BT, Canonical, Intel, Mirantis, RIFT.io, Telekom Austria Group, and Telenor, along with vendors including Benu Networks, Brocade, Comptel, Dell, Indra, Korea Telecom, Metaswitch, RADWare, Red Hat, Sandvine, SK Telecom, Sprint, Telmex, xFlow and 6WIND. NFV is sometimes confused with SDN (Software Defined Networking),…
February has seen the likes of Phillips, Samsung, LG, and Sky all confess that 3D is dead, and as with CES last month, this year’s Mobile World Congress has seen virtual reality (VR) be a hugely hot topic – so is VR replacing 3D technology and will it pass the test of time? Earlier this month, three giants of the television world in Phillips, Samsung, and LG all announced that they would be cutting production of their 3D TVs, which came after Sky said it would be shutting down its 3D channel. Samsung will not be manufacturing 3D TVs in 2016, and LG will be reducing production from 40% in 2015, to 20% in 2016 – which only includes premium…
You could be excused, if you were following Vivendi lately, if you thought we had slipped back through a time warp and gone back to the swashbuckling days of Jean-Marie Messier, who took the company out of the water-supply market in the noughties into TV programming, pay TV, broadband and cellular. But the current leadership is merely reacting to a “series of unfortunate events” in its core businesses and is rebalancing the company with greater assets over a larger geographical region. Over the past few weeks’ French financial analysts are starting to see Vivendi as shifting from a conventional broadcaster towards becoming a new European Netflix, and perhaps going beyond that to include live OTT sports assets as well as…
Ericsson has been forced to take some calculated risks to atone for decline in revenues from its core mobile infrastructure business. The launch this week of its global unified delivery network can be seen in this context because it appears to break one of the group’s long held principles of not competing with its customers. By partnering with leading global service providers including Hutchison, Vodafone, Telstra and AIS of Thailand to construct this content delivery ecosystem aggregating regional service provider network capacity, Ericsson is in danger of antagonizing some of its other Telco customers. Some of them may compete with one or more of these partners. That however is now a lesser concern than the need to press ahead with…
THE FCC rulemaking on set tops, when it came, was less of a rulemaking and more of a consultation – the FCC desperately wants to get this right, and the industry desperately wants to resist all of its efforts. So the FCC played softly, softly making a handful of changes from the original draft and tentatively and apologetically saying that it would really like to make changes if everyone could agree on them. Never before has an FCC request for input rung so true. But whatever its intentions and its softly, softly approach, it intends to wipe out the set top as we know it and move innovation into the hands of device makers, quite simply because pay TV operators…
M&A, Strategies, Alliances The OIC has relaunched ad the Open Connectivity Foundation, with Qualcomm, Microsoft and Electrolux now joining the board and increasing its overlap with the AllSeen Alliance’s AllJoyn. The Bridge Alliance and the Global M2M Association have partnered to provide a joint Multi-Domestic Service offering in 77 markets, in the first alliance-to-alliance remote provisioning use case of an eUICC SIM. Private equity firm Apollo is buying Tyco spin-off ADT, paying $6.9bn (a 56% premium) for ADT and combining its operations with its recent $1.9bn Protection 1 buy to create a business with around $4.2bn in annual revenue. IBM is launching an blockchain-as-a-service offering as part of its IBM Cloud offering, and is donating 44,000 lines of code to…
IBM has announced that it has donated 44,000 lines of code to the Hyperledger Project, formerly called the Open Ledger Project, to help developers easily build secure distributed ledgers. More importantly, Big Blue is announcing a range of new products that aim to win new business from early blockchain adopters. IBM is trying to dominate this market before its potential customers wake up to the capabilities of blockchain tech. The first announcement is the addition of blockchain services on the IBM Cloud platform, which will allow customers to create and manage their own blockchain networks in combination with IBM’s plethora of business applications and tools, including its Bluemix app platform. The blockchain is derived from bitcoin, the distributed cryptocurrency that…
Semtech has announced that Digimondo, a new E.ON-backed startup, have partnered to rollout a LoRa network in Germany. Initially covering, Nuremburg, Hamburg, and Berlin, the new network will be aimed at asset tracking, advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), and air quality monitoring. Unsurprisingly, E.ON is Digimondo’s first major customer. Separately, Sigfox has announced that it is expanding into Germany, on the back of the country’s Industrie 4.0 initiative – a sort of cross-vertical industrial movement that is adding connectivity to business processes, which is pretty much analogous with Industrial IoT (IIoT). Sigfox says its German network will be complete by the end of 2017, and will be the 14th country the network caters for. Digimondo and Semtech said that the infrastructure…
We’re not sure how proud the European Commission will feel as it dawns on its senior technology executives that they may well have killed off their first incumbent telco in Europe – as the merger between Vodafone and Liberty Global begins to challenge KPN in the Netherlands in competition that looks terminal. The EC approved Liberty Global’s purchase of cableco Ziggo in October 2014, and now the merger between Vodafone Netherlands and Ziggo immediately puts KPN on the defensive. It will overnight increase both its capex and marketing spend and continue its revenue reduction at a rate which is likely to destabilize it and put it up for sale in the next couple of years. Right now KPN is riding…
This year’s US incentive auction of 600 MHz broadcast spectrum is unlikely to be the goldmine that analysts were expecting only a few months ago, and will almost certainly deliver far less revenue than 2014’s surprise hit, the AWS-3 sale. According to new estimates made by JP Morgan, the 600 MHz auction, which kicks off on March 29, is likely to fetch between $25bn and $35bn – not the $60bn or even more which Barclays, Kagan Media and Moody’s were forecasting last autumn. JP Morgan’s figure would equate to $1 to $2 per MHz/POP, a big comedown from $2.68 per MHz/POP for AWS-3, which ended up with $45bn in bids. This is partly because, despite much speculation last year that…
In last week’s edition, we looked at how the major OEMs will need to tread a careful balance, at this year’s Mobile World Congress, between being ahead of the pack on the 5G roadmap, and injecting plenty of life into that nearer term source of revenues, LTE-Advanced – in particular, the last full 3GPP 4G releases, 13 and 14, known as LTE-Advanced Pro. Huawei has been calling these ‘4.5G’ for some time, and for once this is not just a marketing slogan but a real summary of how the Chinese vendor – and much of the industry – sees LTE-A Pro. A stepping stone to 5G, yes, but one which will continue to evolve in parallel with the new generation,…
Mobile operators’ battle against over-the-top voice and messaging apps is a game of one step forward, five steps back. Ahead of the MNOs’ showcase in Barcelona next week, the portents were not good for the former bedrock of their business. In the face of OTT success, the South Korean operators were forced to shut down their Joyn services – based on the GSMA’s big hope for preserving cellco differentiation, RCS (Rich Communication Services). And if the Korean giants – which have embraced OTT themselves more effectively than most – can’t succeed, there’s little hope for many of their counterparts elsewhere. The other technology which, optimists say, can enable mobile operators to offer something distinct from the messaging apps, is VoLTE…
Later today the FCC will either have voted in a new set of set top leasing regulations or it will have been defeated, so anything we say will be overtaken by events. But it is worth making a few points, as many voices have been raised this week on both sides of the argument. If the FCC insists that MVPDs open their networks to pretty much any new device, there will be a legal push back. There are genuine issues of security, which these days goes right down to which security platforms are supported in silicon on Broadcom and other chips, and there is the potential for savage unintended consequences and legal actions galore. If you turn the US set…
We’re not sure how proud the European Commission will feel as it dawns on its senior technology executives that they may well have killed off their first incumbent telco in Europe – as the merger between Vodafone and Liberty Global begins to challenge KPN in the Netherlands in competition that looks terminal. We would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when this deal was announced at the European Commission, after its October 2014 approval of the Ziggo Liberty Global deal made it possible. A merger between Vodafone Netherlands and Ziggo immediately puts KPN on the defensive, will overnight increase both its capex and marketing spend and continue its revenue reduction at a rate likely to de-stabilize…
M&A, Strategies, Alliances Fleet connectivity startup Veniam has secured $22m in funding. The OIC has launched a new developer toolkit for those looking to adopt IoTivity. The consortium has now passed 150 members too. EuroTech has joined the LoRa Alliance. Harman has joined the Intelligent Car Coalition, joining AT&T and Verizon. IBM has launched the Quark open source developer tool for integrating sensor data with applications hosted in the IBM cloud. Business Insider is reporting on internal strife inside Nest, Google’s $3.2bn smart home purchase. Software C-Labs has launched a new IoT SDK for industrial and enterprise developers. Samsung has ported its Tizen OS 3.0 to the Raspberry Pi. The Bluetooth SIG has launched a gateway toolkit to link end-devices…
The web is awash with alarmist writing about the seemingly perpetual holes in IoT security, and rightly so – but this week could be a serious turning point for the industry as the GSMA has published its 200-page IoT security guidelines recommendations. The GSMA says its objective is to provide a central document for network operators, as well as IoT technology developers and services to identify risks associated with a specific component or aspect – and to evaluate these risks accordingly. However, the document makes it very clear that the guidelines are “not intended to accelerate the obsolescence of existing IoT Services.” The ‘GSMA IoT Security Guidelines’ report provides security guidelines spanning three main areas – The Service Ecosystem, The…