Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
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, 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 TV purchasing intent and consequent revenue. The Accenture report was…
Apple’s six-month young music streaming service, Apple Music, has reportedly now reached 10 million paying subscribers – a figure that took global market leader Spotify six years to hit. Faultline last reported on Apple Music in November 2015 when the three-month free trial had ended, with Apple boasting 6.5 million paying subscribers remained on its service. We highlighted that a large chunk of those were probably consumers that simply forgot to cancel the free trial. Another three months on, and Apple says it has managed to gain an additional 3.5 million paying subscribers. It’s too soon for Spotify to be worrying about losing its top spot in the music streaming market, and has responded to Apple’s recently released figures, claiming…
The most far-reaching announcement at CES 2016 was held at a relatively late 7 PM session, on the night before CES officially started and in a small meeting room, and in front of a small audience. However, the announcement of a new industry standard for TVs will have a major impact on every maker of CE, broadband and home networking gear, on every content creator, all the major studio and content distributors, from OTT services to pay TV providers and on broadband service providers. The UHD Alliance, whose members include the most senior players in TVs, TV technology, content production and content distribution, announced that the members have agreed on a next generation standard that will specify the functions which…
A wave of patent reports has been doing the rounds at the start of this year, as legal experts from a range of industries attempt to summarize the sometimes complex field – from the myriad of patent disputes to the countless patents granted or declined. A patent dispute report from UnifiedPatents, which observes filings with both the US Patent and Trademark Office and disputes in federal district courts, found that overall patent disputes totaled 5,500 in 2015 – an increase of 13% compared to the previous year, and the highest ever recorded. By industry, UnifiedPatents reported that the majority of patent litigation in 2015 involved high-tech patents (patents covering technologies related to computing or consumer electronics) that were asserted against…
The Kudelski Group has added to its Indian successes of last year, by announcing its security subsidiary Nagra has been selected to launch a new digital cable and high-speed broadband service for MSO Venkata Sai Media (VSMPL), which it says is the largest cable TV provider in Southern India. Nagra never said whether or not Venkata used a different conditional access previously, or as is more likely, never had one before. As part of the deal, Nagra will provide its anyCast content protection and OpenTV middleware technologies to supply local cable operators in the state of Andrha Pradesh with digital TV access – including 276 SD and 24 HD channels. Under the name “Media Vision,” the service plans to upgrade…
Samsung Electronics firmed up its mHealth (mobile health) position last week, following the announcement that it is launching an all-in-one advanced system logic chip. Samsung calls this the Bio-Processor and its current focus is towards the wearables market for the quantified self. There are plenty of popular consumer products on the market that measure body functions such as pulse – like the Fitbit, Jawbone and Nike’s FuelBand, and of course many rather inaccurate ones too, at much cheaper price points. Samsung wants to take its Bio-Processor to the next level for the health-conscious consumer by measuring body fat, skeletal muscle mass, heart rate, skin temperature, and stress level (sweatiness). It’s likely that the Bio-Processor will be used in conjunction with…
Managed hotspot provider Boingo Wireless is leading the charge to bring virtualization to public WiFi networks, in order to reap the same benefits which mobile operators are targeting in their cellular platforms. Boingo says about 20% of its WiFi locations in US airports now support the NFV (Network Functions Virtualization) specifications, which are becoming a widely accepted standard. The company aims to expand NFV to most of its networks in US airports and large venues this year. Considering how new and largely untried NFV is, this represents rapid progress in an effort that started about a year ago, when Boingo announced a virtualization initiative with Procera Networks. Its aim is to reduce the need for hardware roll-out and upgrades, as…
The trend for major mobile players to sign patent truces is gathering pace, as companies seek to starve the patent trolls of oxygen and avert future litigation. Stung by the rising activity of trolls, and by the destructive saga of the Apple-led smartphone IPR wars of recent years, the industry is engaged in a series of cross-licensing deals. Ericsson has several in place already – including with Google, Cisco and Samsung – and its most recent are also its most significant – with arch-rival Huawei and with Apple. Ericsson and Huawei have renewed and extended cross-licensing deals covering standards-essential patents (SEP) for GSM, UMTS and LTE. These are held by both firms and, though Ericsson is one of the biggest…
MediaTek is setting ambitious goals for its 5G chip R&D project, aiming to leapfrog Qualcomm in the next generation of wireless technology. It says the architecture it is developing is targeting 1,000 times greater spectral efficiency than current mobile chipsets, 100 higher performance, 10 times lower power consumption and five times lower latency. These aggressive targets do, in fact, mirror some discussed by Qualcomm, but MediaTek is also aiming for a very low cost approach which would make the resulting products suitable for all kinds of connected objects in the Internet of Things. It is harnessing two important emerging elements of modern chip platforms. One is OpenCL (Open Computing Language), an important enabler of heterogeneous chips with a mixture of…
The heavy duty side of the Internet of Things – from connected vehicles to the Industrial Internet – is creating some strange bedfellows. As the value in big iron moves from the machines to the data they generate, the traditional manufacturers of cars, aircraft and heavy equipment are trying to turn into software houses, and they need all the help they can get. So Ford has announced close alliances with two arch-rivals in IoT big data field, IBM and the EMC/GE Pivotal technology. The car giant, which disappointed expectations that it would announce a self-driving car partnership with Google last week, did however unveil other key elements in its strategy to make its vehicles intelligent and connected. Among these was…
Rumors have circulated for years that Apple, Google and Microsoft would eventually bypass their operator partners by becoming MVNOs and offering their own SIM cards. Google and Apple have gone some way in that direction with embedded SIMs that allow users a free choice of MNO, and now Microsoft has taken its own step forward, offering its own-branded SIM card for selected Windows 10 devices. This will be offered via Transatel, the MVNE (mobile virtual network enabler), and the main target is to get more laptops and tablets connected to the cellular network. According to Transatel, only 5% of notebooks and 10% of tablets currently include a SIM and modem. Though some users get around that by buying dongles, most…
Although AT&T was an early flagwaver for small cells, its densification program has been one area that has gone more slowly than initially expected, the carrier’s CTO John Donovan told a recent conference (article HERE). However, the floodgates are now opening, and the main change is not about technology or even cost, but sites. Recent ‘fast shot clock’ initiatives at federal and local regulatory levels addressed this issue for the macro layer, speeding up cell site permits, and similar changes are needed for small cells, especially where these are deployed outdoors and involve city planning authorities. While the new cell tower rules may have postponed the need for aggressive densification by allowing US carriers to deploy large sites in new…
In virtualization, there are also issues of equipment and location, notably the investment required in data centers (inhouse or hosted cloud services) or ‘base station hotels’ built around switching centers. And both of these important trends could see new vendors moving to the top of the MNO supply chain. Small cell HetNets are giving new prominence to specialist suppliers like Airspan and ip.access, on the base station side, or Airhop in self-optimizing networks, among many others. Virtualization on this small cell layer – which for many MNOs will come long before any attempt to convert the main macro network to Cloud-RAN – is already fostering interesting new names, including Quortus and Parallel Wireless, and reviving older ones, like Airvana. But…
M&A, Strategies, Alliances The Augmented Reality for Enterprise Alliance has added 8 new members including Huawei, joining Atheer, Boeing, Bosch, DAQRI, EPRI, and the IEEE in the alliance. Harman has acquired Towersec Automotive Cyber Security, and also announced that it will be the first Google approved systems integrator for both Brillo and Weave, adding the Android OS and device interaction framework to its extensive home audio portfolio. Greenwave Systems has secured $60m in funding, to develop its IoT router and gateway software and services. Intel’s CES keynote saw it announce that its Curie sensor module will play a prominent role in the upcoming Winter X Games, demo fitness garments from Chromat, and announce a New Balance partnership to build a…
Mesh networking frontrunner ZigBee has announced a new collaboration with the energy harvesting EnOcean protocol, which will see the two alliances behind the protocols collaborate to further the goal of a self-powered IoT network that is far less dependent on batteries – where light switches can generate enough power from the button press to transmit to the bulb or a thermometer can harvest enough ambient thermal energy to report to a HVAC unit via ZigBee. The ZigBee Alliance and the EnOcean Alliance will work together to enmesh the EnOcean Equipment Profiles (EEPs) for sub-GHz networking with ZigBee 3.0 – the newest iteration of the ZigBee standard, which unites the previously disparate profiles, and adds support for batteryless designs. This week…
Last June, Qualcomm announced its MulteFire technology, which sets LTE free from licensed spectrum by allowing 4G small cells to run in the 5 GHz band. Unlike other approaches such as LTE-LAA (Licensed Assisted Access), also heavily backed by Qualcomm, MulteFire does not require an anchor network in a licensed band, and so could potentially be used by non-MNOs. Despite its gut instinct to defend the power of the mobile operators, Qualcomm seems to want to tap into the idea that, in future, a wider range of service providers will need to offer mobile connectivity, and many of these will not take on the expense of spectrum ownership or large-scale MVNO deals. Cable operators in the US and China are…
Huawei has announced the first manufacturers which will run its LiteOS lightweight operating system for the smart home, and has added a communications platform called HiLink. This could be an alternative to the current frontrunners in the race to standardize IoT device discovery and comms, AllJoyn and IoTivity, and it reflects the race by all major players, including Google, to create a top-to-bottom stack for the connected home. While Huawei will provide the communication framework for devices, the initial gadgets themselves will come from Chinese vendors Haier and Broadlink – with other suppliers apparently due to join the party soon. LiteOS, which comes under Huawei’s Honor brand, is an open source platform with software developers’ kit (SDK). When it unveiled…
Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) is one of the key concepts which is expected to underpin 5G, and ETSI is driving the work to create a solid set of specifications, in the same way that it is spearheading carrier virtualization with its NFV project. This reflects the growing influence of the European technology body, with a real world, practical approach that often delivers more rapid harmonization than a classic standards body process. MEC posits a cloud-based IT services environment at the edge of the mobile network, which provides benefits such as ultra-low latency, precise positional awareness and agile applications. By making the ‘dumb’ base station or gateway into an intelligent local hub for service creation and delivery, not only can throughput…
Orange’s proposed launch of a full blown mobile bank in France at the start of 2017 will be a major milestone in the evolution of online financial services and will bring a number of regulatory and competitive issues to a climax. It raises the question of whether such a dominant multiple play operator should be allowed unfettered access to the banking market, since this could distort competition in financial services. And it could act as a disincentive for consumers to move to rival services in either financial or communications services, although that argument already holds to an extent within existing multiplay packages combining pay-TV, broadband and mobile. Orange is currently negotiating with French banking and insurance player Groupama with a…
At the start of the year, Qualcomm announced patent licensing deals with three Chinese companies, hinting at a flood of such agreements and the unblocking of a significant bottleneck in the chip giant’s revenues. For much of last year, Qualcomm was suffering from the after-effects of a Chinese antitrust probe of its licensing practices. Many patent users in the country had withheld their payments, or refused to sign or renew deals, until the outcome of the investigation was known. Although Qualcomm came to a settlement with the Chinese authorities in February, it complained that it was still proving difficult to bring all the vendors into line. A major breakthrough came in December with the announcement of a patents pact with…