Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Past efforts to introduce new competitors to the Korean market have failed, but the latest attempt is different, since it is backed by China Mobile. The world’s largest operator has joined a consortium which wants to create a fourth player in the world’s most advanced mobile market. The Chinese giant is investing an initial sum of KRW320bn ($283m) to secure more than 40% of the KT Net group, which is bidding for a licence to compete with the well-established incumbents – SK Telecom, KT and LG U+. These have seen little change in their market shares – roughly 50%, 30% and 20% respectively – for more than a decade. The government has wanted to open the door to a fourth…
Ericsson’s latest foray into 5G research comes with the launch of the 5G Exchange (5GEx) project, one of several in which the Swedish vendor is engaged under the European Commission’s 5G Infrastructure Public Private Partnership (5G PPP) R&D program. Ericsson will lead the 5GEx initiative, which aims to enable a unified European 5G infrastructure service market that integrates multiple operators and technologies. Therefore its main areas of focus will be cross-domain service orchestration over multiple administrations, or multi-domain single administrations. Orchestration will be compatible with NFV specifications and software-defined networking (SDN) technologies, said Ericsson and will work across multivendor and heterogeneous environments. The aim is to support automated service provisioning with reduced time to market for operators and content providers;…
As the internet of things (IoT) gets closer to commercial reality, the solutions flooding into the market are increasingly targeted at a real world use case. Some of these are extremely specific – smart meters and smart streetlights are commonplace now, but start-up Helium Systems says its initial focus is on smart refrigeration. Helium does not mean the over-quoted ‘smart refrigerator’ which automatically replaces the milk, but a far more significant application aimed at the lucrative industrial side of the IoT – at the food, drink and healthcare sectors, specifically. More broadly, though, this application will be a proof of concept for its ambition to create a full IoT software platform with underlying wireless network. That is a very common…
As operators start to prepare their networks for significant increases in capacity demand and densification, they need more of everything – spectrum, equipment and of course sites. One of the most important considerations, as MNOs consider radical changes in network architecture, is how that will affect their cell sites. According to whether they place most emphasis on enhancing macrocells with techniques like Massive MIMO; on dense small cell networks; on distributed antenna systems (DAS); or on Cloud-RAN, they will have very different site requirements, some of them easier to achieve than others. The new architectures will make it necessary for operators to work with new partners, such as local authorities and utilities, as well as deciding whether to invest in…
It is clear that, the closer network and data processing can be to the end user, the more the operator can be aware of that user’s location and act accordingly. Linking position to other things that the operator may know about the customer – usage history, shopping habits and so on – can result in fully context-aware response. MNOs and web services providers alike are investing in complex and AI-driven engines to correlate and analyze all their sources of information about a user in order to deliver fully relevant information or promotions. If that processing takes place right at the edge of the network – in the mobile device itself – simple context awareness can evolve into fully conscious computing,…
The technology world goes through a repetitive in-out cycle. Processing of data and communications is centralized, then distributed, then centralized again. So we saw central mainframes giving way to PCs that had more local processing power than the largest server – but now they are starting to behave more like dumb terminals of old, with most of the content and intelligence in the cloud. The trouble with the pure cloud model is that it puts huge strain on the network, with the constant to and fro of data between the central resource and the user – and that issue is exacerbated when the network is wireless. Enter caching and increasingly PC-like mobile devices to ease the load – and the…
The problem of buying a company where John Malone is an investor, especially when you make some of the payments in shares, is that he may turn around with his large shareholding and insider knowledge of operations, and buy the enlarged company. This is pretty much what happened as we went to press last week, and Malone’s Liberty Global began looking at buying Cable & Wireless, only 11 months after it acquired Columbus, with Malone as a large shareholder. It’s hard to see clearly the benefits of this deal to Liberty Global, but having seen the conservative approach to running a business which Cable & Wireless has, it will be impossible for Malone not to make a large amount of…
M&A, Strategies, Alliances ON Semiconductor has acquired Axsem for an undisclosed price. Axsem makes RF ICs for Sigfox, EnOcean and Wireless M-BUS, and will expand ON’s IoT portfolio. Huawei showed off its IoT Connection Management Platform at its developer conference, with a focus on using open APIs but not developing apps itself. Verizon says its IoT revenues have hit $495m in the first 9 months of 2015. TV software company SoftAtHome has joined the AllSeen Alliance. Cisco is acquiring ParStream, a Big Data PaaS that specializes in network-edge processing and mass-volume ingest. Hardware ARM has announced that its new Mali-470 GPU is available for licensing. Aimed at wearables and IoT devices, it promises smartphone-quality graphics, with the first devices expected…
ARM has unveiled the latest iteration of its Mali graphics processing unit (GPU), aiming it at wearables, embedded and IoT devices. The British silicon designer says the new Mali-470 provides smartphone-quality graphics in a low-power package that halves the power consumption using the same geometry. The 32-bit and 64-bit compatible Mali-470 is available for immediate licensing, and ARM expects the first products to use the GPU to appear in late 2016. Citing smartwatches, home gateways, home appliances, industrial control panels and healthcare monitors as likely customers, ARM is positioning this as an IoT processor through and through. This is a market expansion for ARM, whose Mali family is currently found in more than a billion devices – which either use…
Network failures and internet blackouts are major issues for residents in areas vulnerable to natural disasters or those stricken by man-made tragedies – an issue that is seeing progress thanks to peer-to-peer mesh networking. The City of Artue, French Polynesia, has become the first city to trial this technology as a disaster relief solution, as Smart Tahiti Networks (STN) and the City of Artue have partnered with Open Garden to trial a mesh network based on its application FireChat – a Bluetooth powered smartphone application. The city sits on a system of 118 islands and is reportedly forecast to be exposed to some extreme elements by the end of this year, therefore providing the perfect environment for these trials –…
French developer Nemeus has announced the launch of what it says is the first RF module that combines both the LoRa and Sigfox LPWAN software stacks on one chip. The MM002-LS-EU might only ever find a niche market, but it is an interesting chip nonetheless. Founded by engineers from Renesas Mobile around twenty years ago, Nemeus has recently partnered with Bouygues Telecom, working on a French smart city project. Nemeus is also a member of the LoRa Alliance, the organization that is pushing LoRa adoption. Bouygues has announced plans to build out LoRa a national LoRa network in France, and was shortly followed by a similar announcement from Orange. France seems to be leading the way on both LPWAN development…
With the smartphone market under pressure, ARM has been investing heavily in technologies to broaden its market reach, both up and down the processor food chain. Last week saw the biggest endorsement so far of its shift into 64-bit infrastructure and servers, when Qualcomm unveiled its first chip for these markets, and ARM’s third quarter results were also buoyed up by the high end designs. But the UK firm probably has a less daunting path to its other major expansion market, the internet of things, where its existing prowess in low power consumption and embedded processors and controllers give it firmer foundations than it enjoys in Intel’s heartland. It has been hurling new designs at the IoT space all year,…
Well beyond the 600 MHz auction, or even the opening up of the 3.5 GHz band to tiered access, the US is hunting for new sources of spectrum for the difficult two-faced mobile model that is evolving, around ever-faster broadband combined with ever-lower latency machine-to-machine connections for the IoT. The FCC is engaged in projects focused on a range of options from satellite bands to drones to dynamic access to unlicensed or shared spectrum. And as always, the R&D labs of the vendors and operators are going several steps further than that. Google, of course, has been testing drones – as well as tethered balloons and other mechanisms – to support broader wireless broadband delivery. Earlier this year, it supported…
Digital video ad spend in the US grew by 42% over the past year, totaling $7.46 billion in 2015. Within the next four years, that number is expected to nearly double, reaching $13 billion by 2019. According to AOL’s state of the video industry report, 91% of brands and agencies are buying video programmatically and continue to make larger investments in the technology year on year. Some 88% of publishers claim they sell their video inventory programmatically, a noticeable 37% leap from 2014. Furthermore, Advertisers and agencies devote over 30% of their overall video budgets to branded video content. Brands intend to grow these investments 10% in the next year. US satellite radio company SiriusXM has reported yet another record…
A simple statement this week leaked to Bloomberg that T-Mobile Netherlands is about to be put up for sale, uncovers a wealth of potential intent from all quarters. Immediately everyone is guessing who might buy it, our question is what does this allow to happen after that sale has gone through? We have often given the opinion that poor old KPN is in such a poor state, one of the many “basket cases” of incumbent telcos around Europe, and the reason for this is the strength of cable, DTH and rival MNOs in what is a very small and special territory. It is “special” in the sense that it is a market where a population of 16.8 million wealth conscious…
Like most technology markets, the winners and losers in the Gbps fixed broadband market depend upon who you last spoke to, they are either Alcatel or Sckipio or neither as cable based DOCSIS 3.1 shows its hand. Fiber to the home is not really still in the equation, except in Russia and a handful of Green Field sites in Europe. This week we didn’t just ask, but attended Broadband World Forum and saw for ourselves some of the things which point to, perhaps not to a winner, but maybe the current leader, in the war for hearts and minds of the telco community in G.fast. Sckipio was quietly demonstrating in one of the two interop pavilions, two differently branded G.fast…
M&A, Strategies, Alliances Libre Wireless is moving into the IoT, with new wireless audio modules and an SDK aimed at smart home developers, as well as wider IoT apps. The Membrane-type Surface stress Sensor (MSS) Alliance has launched, with the goal of developing a de facto standard for odor sensors. Canon has announced an IoT strategy that will see it create a collection of smaller Canon companies that will cooperate in pushing the business’ imaging products in the market. Zebra and Renesas have partnered to combine the Zatar cloud with Renesas’ Synergy platform to provide embedded designers with what they say is an end-to-end development environment. The Open Interconnect Consortium has passed 100 members, with the addition of Accenture, Arris,…
The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) has announced an expansion of its liaison with the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP), to focus on developing technologies and testbeds that will help boost IoT adoption in the energy sector – from smart homes to utility-scale infrastructure. The move will make it easier for IIC members to participate in SGIP testbeds, and vice versa, and see the two commit to a formal review of each other’s energy ambitions. Separately, Germany utility RWE has submitted its Lemonbeat communications protocol to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for review, as part of its work in the Web of Things interest group. It hopes Lemonbeat will become the international standard for IoT networking, and RWE is already…
Hardly a month goes by without a new communications protocol staking its claim for a critical role in the IoT. These may be in the wide, local or personal area network, and each one usually, beneath the big vision statements, has quite particular strengths and target use cases. This makes efforts like OneM2M important, as they seek to create cross-platform protocols to allow these many networks to interwork, and to protect early adopters from technology dead ends. This defines an abstraction layer between applications and the various network protocols and was created as a joint effort between a bewildering array of standards bodies and industry alliances. Its idea was to accelerate its development by reusing elements from its stakeholders’ existing…
Philips has become one of the first public customers for Amazon’s newly launched AWS IoT cloud platform. As part of its wider strategy of opening its ecosystem up to new digital health solutions, Philips has announced that it will be expanding its HealthSuite IT infrastructure platform. Using the AWS IoT tools and applications, Philips is planning on making it easier to connect end-devices to the cloud platforms that provide added value. With these platforms, Philips can sell entire physical systems to hospitals and clinics, as well as the IT services that support them. Instead of just an MRI machine, Philips is able to sell entire wings to hospitals using its HealthSuite cloud, including the imaging software. In terms of the…