Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
When the mobile network became a vehicle for internet services, not just cellular voice and text, its evolution became closely entwined with that of Internet standards including IP itself. Not closely entwined enough, according to some architects, which have voiced fears that work on future 5G platforms is not sufficiently integrated with the evolution of the Internet. One of those voices came from Andy Sutton, principal network architect at the UK’s largest mobile operator, EE. Sutton is helping to bridge the divide, playing a major role both in the UK’s primary 5G initiative, the 5G Innovation Center at the University of Surrey, and now chairing the latest ETSI Industry Specification Group (ISG), which will work on next generation protocols, potentially…
In 2014, software-defined networking (SDN) experts from the Universities of Berkeley and Stanford in California founded ON.Labs, with the aim of creating an SDN platform that was driven by the needs of carriers, rather than vendors or enterprises, and which would enable more radical change than the more established OpenDaylight. The resulting platform, ONOS, has received an important new endorsement from Verizon, which has just signed up for the ONOS Project, joining AT&T, China Mobile, NTT and SK Telecom, among others. Echoing the views of other supporters – including the Open Networking Foundation – a Verizon technologist said the operator’s main interest in ONOS was its promise to allow for more rapid transformation of the network. This perhaps reflects impatience…
The vast cost of keeping up with demand for mobile data is intensifying the pressure on mobile operators’ capex budgets and accelerating their moves to improve their infrastructure cost base. Major agreements to share passive and active cell site equipment are becoming commonplace as regulators ease up on previous restrictions, accepting that, in the age of the MVNO, a common network need not reduce consumer choice at the services and pricing level. The need to reduce network costs is also driving operators to outsource their towers or their whole RANs, and to seek new mechanisms to acquire and manage sites – a trend now extending from macrocells to small cells amid the move towards densification, as Sprint’s new site leasing…
European pay TV giant Sky, controlled by 21st Century Fox, has invested $10 million in DataXu, a Boston based provider of marketing analytics and data management software for programmatic advertising. The aims is to boost reach and accelerate take up, of its emerging AdVance cross platform advertising system. Sky says the move also fits its strategy of investing in companies which provide core elements of its technology, to get more closely involved in development, while at the same time looking for long term financial gains. It follows a variety of other such investments, including $4 million in software encoding vendor Elemental Technologies, as well as OTT video company TV4 Entertainment, online video aggregator Pluto TV, online sports network Whistle Sports,…
The holiday season is always kind to Apple, and the last three months of 2015 allowed the company to post a record Q1 profit of $18.4 billion through revenues of $75.9 billion. But given the apparent troubles with demand for its new iPhones, Apple might be at something of a turning point – reflected in a revised Q2 revenue forecast of $50 billion to $53 billion, which is well off the $58 billion it recorded in Q2 2015. For Apple, if it happens, that would be the first year-on-year revenue decline posted in thirteen years, but the company counters that “currency headwinds” have cost it around 15% in earnings over the past 18-months. It says that on “constant currency” measures,…
Bulent Celebi, the ebullient chairman of AirTies Wireless Networks, has been talking to us about proprietary mesh networks and powerline as a spare backhaul option in WiFi for so long, that it’s hard to imagine that we have never written about it. But it has taken this long for someone to buy into the concept and for the product to be completed for a live implementation and readied for launch. The fact that the someone is Sky, one of the two largest pay TV operators in Europe, will make everyone want to understand just what it has achieved and how this system works on its new Sky Q set top. The significance is that when you add client steering, a…
The American broadband industry had better get used to it, Charter will win the hand of Time Warner Cable (TWC) and Bright House Networks, and get both the blessing of the Justice Department and the FCC and there are very clear reasons for this. During the campaign that mounted around Comcast, and its failed attempt to buy TWC, the weight of voices that were raised in opposition were too loud for the US regulators to argue that the public interest was served by the merger, and Comcast’s track record in obeying edicts it had agreed to when buying NBC Universal, was so bad, that it was a company that could not be trusted to stick to its word. Firstly, there…
The Open Interconnect Consortium (OIC) and the oneM2M initiative used the recent Consumer Electronics Show to unveil a demo that paired the cellular-backed oneM2M ‘super-standard’ with the OIC’s IoTivity device discovery and control framework. For oneM2M, the smart home demo adds to the its success in the smart city, following its adoption in a Telecom Italia-backed smart city project in Turin. The OIC leadership is comprised of Cisco, Intel, Samsung, GE, Arris, and CableLabs, with other leading members including Atmel, IBM, MediaTek and Dell. It is the main rival to the Qualcomm-backed AllSeen Alliance and its AllJoyn protocol, which counts Microsoft, Philips, Sony, and LG amongst its premier members, with a few names cropping up on both lists. While AllJoyn…
While Google didn’t make any major announcements at its Ubiquity IoT Developer Summit this week, the search engine giant did highlight its intention to further the development of open source IoT applications – where its open version of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons took center stage. Google has invested substantially into research and development of outdoor geolocation for over ten years now, with the aim of building application program interfaces (APIs) that assist developers using GPS, WiFi, and cell towers to build apps for implementations such as navigation. Eddystone is Google’s very own beacon platform, which has a rather notable advantage over other beacon environments in that Eddystone can broadcast messages to smartphones through the Google Chrome browser without the…
Non-Android smartphone shipments in China climbed by 33% in the the fourth quarter of 2015 to 24.3m units, according to figures from the country’s Academy of Telecommunications Research. The vast majority of those shipments were Apple products, and China now accounts for the largest market outside of the US for Apple. However, with 457m smartphones shipped, up 18% from 2014, China remains an Android stronghold – with 388m handsets running the OS. The news is contrary to the prevailing investor sentiment that iPhone sales have been disappointing in China. Apple has recently, according to rumors, cut back on component orders for its new iPhones, which impacted the share price of suppliers Hon Hai, Largan Precision, Catcher Technology and Samsung too…
Carrier network virtualization is one of the few technologies in the history of the telecoms industry which has become ‘real’ more quickly than expected. On the mobile side, the typical pattern is to proclaim the ‘year of’ an emerging standard at least three years running, before it actually becomes mainstream – the kind of approach which feeds the Gartner hype cycle. However, while virtualization of data centers and some enterprise network elements is well established, applying that approach to a carrier network appeared to be a massive mountain to climb when it was first mooted. Yet, with ETSI’s NFV (Network Functions Virtualization) initiative as the catalyst and a rare point of near-consensus, this architecture is actually becoming real. It is…
Qualcomm, free from the looming shadow of its strategic review, has wasted no time in gathering its weapons for a major attack on new markets in 2016. The Consumer Electronics Show saw it unveiling its connected home and car efforts, and this week it has followed up with a Chinese joint venture to boost its nascent efforts in the server market. This also reflects the rising importance of China in its strategy, not just as a huge and competitive market, but a source of new partnerships such as this new one with Guizhou Province, or its strategic alliance with foundry SMIC. Diversifying its foundries in order to guarantee supply of key components and harness the most advanced processes is critical…
Arxan Technologies’ State of Application Security report paints a rather shocking portrait of mobile application security – with big implications for the IoT. Expletives don’t quite do the findings justice, unearthed by a survey carried out by the US software security company. The report interviewed 1,083 respondents from the US, UK, Germany and Japan. Some 268 were IT executives with security oversight or insight into the mobile health and or finance apps that they produce. The other 815 were consumers that used mobile health or mobile finance apps. On the perception of security, 87% of execs and 83% of users felt that the apps were adequately secure, but that joint opinion diverges sharply when it comes to whether they believe…
Intel has unveiled the Intel Retail Sensor Platform, which is aimed at retailers looking to create new technologically driven shopping experiences. The new platform is the first vertical solution built on Intel’s IoT Platform, which includes sensors, gateways, and the cloud management and analytics that tie the offering together. The impetus behind Intel’s expansion from its PC and server business is largely found in its failure to break into mobile. The transition from computers into smartphone and tablet silicon (both application processors as well as the radio modules that would connect them to the internet) was meant to shore up the portfolio in the face of dwindling PC sales – but Intel famously failed in its mobile endeavours. But the…
A summary of OTT Video News – Deals, Launches and products. US encoder supplier Harmonic says that AsiaSat a leading satellite operator, will launch a UHD version of its HVN channel on AsiaSat 4 at 122 degrees East for the Asia-Pacific region, across 50 countries from New Zealand to Pakistan. HVN will use Harmonic’s MediaGrid shared storage system, its Polaris playout management suite and its Spectrum X server system, as well as its Electra X3 UHD media processor. Satellite provider O3b Networks and local satellite specialist SpeedCast have launched internet service from the O3b satellite network for Christmas Island, in Australian territory in the Indian Ocean. The island has just 2100 people and it has never had the internet before.…
Faultline stumbled across something on an investor’s website this week that caught our eye, but for some reason failed to do the rounds in all the usual publications. It was regarding Comcast’s in-house CDN, which it recently expanded by launching its commercial CDN in May 2015 for large enterprises and governments, and then adding a new live linear streaming service to support OTT video. The new platform, which launched at IBC 2015, is augmented by technology from ThePlatform which Comcast acquired in 2006, providing core content management and online video platform (OVP) cloud engine for live and VoD. This has sparked concerns that Comcast’s investments into its in-house CDN could be bad news for Akamai, amid fresh rumors that it has…
M&A, Strategies, Alliances Visteon is acquiring AllGo Systems, adding the Indian embedded multimedia and connectivity supplier to its automotive cockpit portfolio. Qualcomm and TDK are partnering on a joint venture, rumored to be worth $1.2bn and named RF360, to build radio chipsets. There are some regulatory concerns. Telit is acquiring BLE and NFC hardware and software assets from Stollman, along with 35 staff from the German company. Atmel’s board of directors has announced that Microchip’s acquisition bid is superior to Dialog Semiconductor’s initial bid. Dialog is not upping its offer. The Linux Foundation is expanding its Dronecode project, the platform on which projects like Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Flight is built, with new members and three new working groups. Zebra and Atmel…
The Open Interconnect Consortium (OIC) and the oneM2M initiative used CES to unveil a demo that paired the cellular-backed oneM2M “super-standard” with the OIC’s IoTivity device discovery and control framework. For oneM2M, the smart home demo adds to the its success in the smart city, following its adoption in a Telecom Italia-backed smart city project in Turin. The Open Interconnect Consortium leadership is comprised of Cisco, Intel, Samsung, GE, Arris, and CableLabs, with other leading members including Atmel, IBM, MediaTek and Dell. It is the main rival to the AllSeen Alliance and its AllJoyn protocol, and has been quickly catching up on the Qualcomm offshoot in the past year – which counts Microsoft, Philips, Sony, and LG amongst its premier…
While neither company is in the habit of announcing products or platforms outside of their own events, both Google and Apple have looked poised to make significant smart home announcements for the past six months. With CES, a prime candidate for such an announcement, now out of the way, we have to ask when the Google and Apple smart homes will arrive. A likely reason for the slow progress suggested by a recent Accenture report (see separate article), which found that consumer enthusiasm for tech had significantly waned in the past year, and that the small growth of IoT devices is nowhere near enough to compensate for the falls in smartphone, laptops and TVs purchasing intent and consequent revenue. The…
While Google didn’t exactly make any major announcements at its Ubiquity IoT Developer Summit this week, the search engine giant did highlight its intentions to further the development of open source IoT applications – where its open version of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons took center stage. Google has invested substantially into research and development of outdoor geolocation for over ten years now, with the aim of building application program interfaces (APIs) that assist developers using GPS, WiFi, and cell towers to build apps for implementations such as navigation. Eddystone is Google’s very own beacon platform, which has a rather notable advantage over other beacon environments in that Eddystone can broadcast messages to smartphones through the Google Chrome browser without…