Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
British Telecom in the UK has announced yet another trial of G.fast, but this is one that is open to customers and extends its existing trial announced back in May, in that it will use all of the leading equipment vendors and chip-makers, rather than just some of them. The trial will take place across 2,000 homes in Huntingdon in Cambridgeshire and will be managed by BT Openreach. It is open to all communications providers on equal terms. That means people will have a choice of service provider and any technological developments will benefit the wider industry. The headline speed will be just 330 Mbps, which suggest to us that the loop lengths on this trial are a little outside…
Having recently joined the Open Interconnect Consortium (OIC), and also a member of the IIC, National Instruments (NI) has this week announced the launch of its latest embedded systems hardware for use in its LabView Reconfigurable I/O (RIO) architecture. The three new boards are powered by NI’s LabView software platform, and integrate Intel chips and Xilinx’s FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays). Aimed at engineers who want greater control over devices in the field, and the ability to reprogram silicon on the fly thanks to the FPGAs, the hardware is designed to enable fast data ingest and processing at the network edge, so that industrial systems are not subject to network-induced latency that can arise from architectures that make heavy use…
Intel used the Intel Developer Forum to remind the world of its IoT ambitions, and announced three prominent deals at the event to this end. First, we heard of a collaboration with Microchip to add the Intel Enhanced Privacy ID (EPID) into Microchip’s products. A second deal with Atmel does the same thing, and the third deal unveiled was a partnership with Google and its 3D mapping initiative Project Tango, which adds Intel’s RealSense technology to the platform. The EPID is a hardware technology that provides a root of trust and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) compatibility – to provide confirmation of identity when sending data from end-points. EPID has been shipping in many Intel platforms since 2011, and is currently…
Filament has received $5m in Series A funding, with contributions from Verizon, Haystack, and Samsung. The startup has paired the bitcoin-derived blockchain technology with its own mesh networking sensor hub to build an innovative data collection platform. Samsung’s participation is notable, and it follows a previous blockchain involvement, ADEPT, which was an IBM-led proof of concept design to use the blockchain as a secure public ledger for device identity management and message authorization. ADEPT (Autonomous Decentralized Peer-to-Peer Telemetry) uses the decentralized public ledger developed in bitcoin, used to track every transaction in the cryptocurrency, as a means of managing and tracking the identities of deployed IoT devices, and as a way of authorizing data pushed or pulled from them. Multiple…
The cable operators are stepping up their efforts to expand their WiFi footprint dramatically by harnessing homespots (residential gateways with a second SSID left open for public access). Liberty Global said in February that it intended to offer 10m hotspots and homespots, across its European territories, by the end of 2015, and now it is clear that its UK subsidiary, Virgin Media, will contribute a major proportion. Virgin has fired the first shot in a quad play war in the UK, which is likely to squeeze broadband and cellular prices further, in an already competitive market. It has confirmed to the UK’s Daily Telegraph that it will launch a campaign to attract customers to homespot WiFi sharing from its 4.5m…
Having beaten the Bluetooth SIG to the punch in launching a mesh implementation, Qualcomm-owned CSR has been tasked with heading up the SIG’s Smart Mesh Study Group, which will create a new Bluetooth profile in this area. In the meantime, just after its $2.4bn acquisition by Qualcomm was finalized, CSR has released sensor and actuator functionality for CSRmesh, to power its smart home ambitions – and it hinted that it could look at implementing the emerging Nest-backed Thread 802.15.4 mesh networking protocol over Bluetooth radios. The latest software release for the CSRmesh Home Automation platform adds sensor and actuator models to the original protocol’s lighting-focused framework. CSR says this makes it possible for developers to deliver HVAC, door lock and…
There are plenty of start-ups looking to ride the virtualization wave to penetrate the carrier space, but a recent stand-out has been Boston-based Rift.io, which came out of stealth mode with $16m in funding last week, promising an open source NFV platform by the end of this year. Its founders come from big names – Cisco, Starent, Juniper and 3Com- and the A round of financing is led by North Bridge Venture Partners, as well as various strategic investors. Its platform is called Rift.ware and the company hopes to use the open source route to achieve the kind of scale that could worry the larger NFV vendors. It will work with developers of virtual network functions (VNFs) to create an…
Google made only limited headway against the might of the MPEG LA licensing body when it pushed its no-royalty alternative to H.264, VP8. Now a new round of wars over video codec standards – which will be essential to future mobile content experiences – has broken out. HEVC or H.265, is in the incumbent position, but is being battled by an open source challenger, this time from Cisco. Cisco argues that HEVC has become too expensive, and too embroiled in a dangerous and costly patent war, to be the undisputed codec of choice for 4K and Ultra-HD video. As well as supporting those next generation video experiences on screens from large TVs to smartphones, HEVC technology will be important for…
The connected car rumor mill has been stoked into another frenzy this week with reports that Apple is looking to secure facilities at which to test a driverless automotive product. And in a more near term development – with far more details available – Nokia has finally completed its sale of its Here mapping division to a consortium of German automakers, comprised of Audi, BMW and Mercedes-Benz. The group beat out interest from other parties, the most likely competition coming from Chinese internet giant Baidu and Uber. There have been persistent rumors that Apple is planning on following Google into the self-driving car business, perhaps going as far as building its own car to achieve these ends. Wilder predictions cite…
US industrial giant GE continues on its march to control the underpinnings of the industrial internet of things (IoT). It is opening up its own Predix analytics platform, which it has used for years to monitor its products from aircraft to generators, to support cloud services direct to customers. This is the latest move to further two important goals for GE – to develop new revenues based on technology and services, in order to offset stagnation or rising competition in some of its traditional equipment markets; and to use Predix to place GE at the heart of a set of de facto standards for the heavy duty side of the IoT. For the latter, the company has been extending the…
Ericsson is intensifying its already close relationship with influential operator SK Telecom of Korea, hugely important ally in its quest to keep its carrier customers even as they transition to cloud platforms. SK Telecom will be an anchor partner in the further development of Ericsson’s Hyperscale Datacenter System (HDS) 8000, unveiled at Mobile World Congress in March, and will help drive it into key growth areas from cloud services to the internet of things (IoT). The two companies will work to make the HDS 8000 ready for commercial prime-time, testing it with live traffic and cooperating with partners – which will give SK valuable early insights, and the chance to influence the platform’s final specs. They will “establish software-defined data…
Nagra’s parent Kudelski Group grew half year revenues 6.2% to $440 million, and has upgraded its forecast to reach between $954 million and $974 million for the full year. Had it not been for currency fluctuations, it would have grown over 10% in revenue and has achieved almost the same in operating income. It’s a big turnaround from a few years ago when it was a disparate group of pure security businesses, but assets sales and shrewd acquisitions including buying Telenor’s Conax, have steadied the ship and the Swiss group seems to be going from strength to strength. Kudelski was comparing its first half with a 2014 half that included a one-time licensing payment from the Cisco in a patent…
The pay TV industry has really begun to change its habits, taking software updates more seriously and making them happen more often, and treating software development as a permanent process, rather than a deploy and forget system, like hardware. Most operators are deploying live software releases at least once a month, and some as often as once a week. For a pay TV operators to essentially become a software company, it requires a fundamental restructuring of how it approaches product development, testing and service introductions This comes from S3 Group’s latest white paper, entitled ‘TV Platforms 2015 Report’, and is centered around a survey of just 29 US and European pay TV operators and their suppliers, about efforts to become…
Cisco over the last week has pushed its codec prowess to the fore, suggesting that it can replace HEVC, which has become too expensive and embroiled in a dangerous and costly patent war. Cisco reckons it can sideline the standard patent with its own inventions which could be open source and at least as effective as HEVC, maybe even better. Suddenly after three years of HEVC (H.265) assuredly and slowly taking its rightful place as the codec of choice for 4K and UHD video, as well as providing capacity relief to both cellular and pay TV networks on existing Full HD delivery, its future is in doubt. History tells us that it faces a long and painful battle, and the…
IBM’s renowned Watson supercomputer is set for an interesting upgrade as the technology giant announced a $1bn deal to acquire Merge Health, a provider of medical imaging that addresses areas such as radiology, cardiology and orthopedics. The proposed plan is to incorporate Merge Health’s imaging management platform with IBM’s Watson data analytics tools, with the ultimate goal of giving Watson its very own “eyes” in medical imaging. The integration of technologies will provide Watson with the ability to assist medical professionals in the analysis of medical images such as X-rays, MRIs, ECGs and angiograms to pin-point anomalies. Watson would have the capabilities to support solid diagnoses and, as it evolves, advise on the most effective treatment methods or even help…
Having beaten the Bluetooth SIG to the punch with its own version of a Bluetooth-powered mesh network, CSR has been put to task heading up the SIG’s Smart Mesh Study Group, which will create a new Bluetooth profile for mesh networking. In the meantime, and having just finally acquired by Qualcomm for $2.4bn, CSR has released new CSRmesh sensor and actuator functionality to power its smart home ambitions – and hinted that it could look at implementing the emerging Nest-backed Thread 802.15.4 mesh networking protocol over Bluetooth radios, in an interview with Fortune. The latest software release for the CSRmesh Home Automation platform adds sensor and actuator models to the original protocol’s lighting-focused framework. CSR says this makes it possible…
Stream Technologies’ IoT-X platform has now added LoRaWAN to its list of connectivity options, joining satellite and cellular options in Stream’s end-to-end communications platform. In addition, the new connectivity will be delivered with Stream’s IoT-Xlerate partners Kerlink, Link Labs, MultiTech and Semtech – the company that owns the LoRa IP, and which will be getting royalties on the sale of those LoRa-compatible chips. IoT-X can be broadly explained as a way for a business to guarantee connectivity for one of its things – whether it’s a fixed asset like a smart meter, or a mobile asset like a shipping container. The central premise of IoT-X is to be able to provide the correct kind of connectivity to the device, so…
In a deal that has looked certain for a few weeks now, a consortium of German automakers last week acquired Nokia’s Here mapping division for €2.8bn, or roughly $3.05bn. The group, formed by Audi, BMW and Mercedes (Daimler), beat out interest from other parties, notably Chinese internet-giant Baidu and Uber, to buy the unit – which will likely form the basis of the consortium’s autonomous car ambitions. High quality maps are obviously very important for self-driving vehicles, and have an equally practical use as part of the regular navigation systems used by drivers today. By purchasing a well-regarded operation like Here, the consortium secures a service that is independent of Google’s maps – a company that also has self-driving car…
Just as we closed our last issue before our brief holiday, British Telecom, predictably did the only sensible thing in its dispute with US DSL specialist ASSIA (Adaptive Spectrum and Signal Alignment), and it settled the matter out of court. ASSIA often markets itself as the company that invented broadband, as its founder John Cioffi was instrumental in winning the first ADSL contracts in the US. The court proceedings in the UK, where the matter began in 2011, had gone definitively ASSIA’s way, and after BT lost the case and its appeal and was faced with paying out something $40 million, around 10% of rental revenue just to keep its Rambo (Rate Adaptive Management Box) switched on, if you include…
The summer launch of FreedomPop’s free mobile service offering in the UK has arrived this week, after much anticipation. After registering to the beta list, invitations to join the service will be sent out in the coming weeks to a select few. Founded in the US in 2011, FreedomPop has a stated goal to eliminate the digital divide and provide free wireless broadband internet access and mobile phone services to everyone, everywhere. In May FredomPop selected the UK as its first European target, operating as an MVNO on the network of UK operator Three. The basic plan includes 200 minutes, 200 texts and 200MB of data, available with the FreedomPop sim card or app. Also, in partnership with Jetsetter, it…