Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Commercial factors alone dictate that energy efficiency has become more critical than ever for mobile operators, with sustainability serving to turn the screw and requiring additional monitoring and reporting capabilities. While successive 3GPP releases have themselves delivered advancing energy saving capabilities, through more fine grained sleep modes and standards for coordination among components, with more to come under the banner of 5G Advanced, fine tuning is still required in the field – with the help of machine learning. This rather obvious point emerged at the recent Open RAN Global Forum where sustainability issues reined over the agenda. Coordination, optimization and automation are especially critical for Open RAN deployments, which provide opportunities for energy efficiency as well as challenges resulting from…
IBM has had a painful few years, as it has struggled to convince the market that its Watson AI services are actually useful. Healthcare looked like an easy win, but pre-covid, it was clear that there were major problems with the sales pitch even in that lucrative sector, which had plenty of cash to splash around. With watsonx, IBM used MWC Las Vegas as a launch vehicle for an operator-facing endeavor, but this is very much an uphill battle for the institution. Without seeing behind the curtain, it looks notable that IBM was not able to drum up one operator, from either the fixed or mobile world, to at least test the system since launch. It would have been a…
Deutsche Telekom has been hyperactive over 5G network slicing recently, demonstrating slice creation on demand and launching a 5G commercial service with national broadcaster RTL Deutschland, exploiting the capabilities. Both developments feature Open RAN pioneer Mavenir, which provided its Converged Packet Core with Open APIs, creating the foundation for virtualization and disaggregation. For Mavenir, such developments continue to put recent travails associated with lackluster growth of Open RAN behind it, suggesting that adoption rates will now pick up as those specialist vendors have banked on. Certainly, Deutsche Telekom is intent on advancing Open RAN despite having conceded recently that the technology was not yet quite ready for large scale commercial deployment. The main point of this recent trial and launch though…
Recent times have been turbulent for Dish Network, struggling to make an impact as the USA’s fourth national USA mobile service and bogged down by disputes over spectrum, as well as its ongoing re-merger with EchoStar. The operator has it all to do in terms of subscribers, standing at just 7.73 million as of Q2 2023, dwarfed by the big three with AT&T Mobility on 229.1 million, Verizon Wireless on 143.3 million and T-Mobile US at 116.7 million. Dish Network is therefore more comparable with US Cellular, the largest regional USA MNO and fifth biggest overall, on 4.66 million subscribers. Furthermore, that yawning chasm is widening slightly, with Dish Network losing network subscribers while the big three are consolidating theirs…
Greenfields often present low hanging fruit, and that is particularly true for Open RAN, where one or two operators, such as Japan’s Rakuten, have already made it work, while others burdened by legacy are struggling, or have put it on the back burner for now. Such discussions arose at the recent Open RAN Global Forum, alongside energy efficiency issues discussed in a separate article this week. Open RAN is a microcosm of 5G, in being deployed first while standards and best practices were still evolving. This has led inevitably to some disillusionment after the early flush of enthusiasm, but at least the field is now entering a more mature era, where key issues have been clarified and are being addressed,…
Ericsson’s latest ConsumerLab survey of mobile consumers and demand patterns finds that 20% of 5G smartphone users would be willing to pay a premium for high quality and “differentiated experiences”. The average amount they would be prepared to pay would be 11%, apparently, so that could potentially translate to 2.2% in extra revenues at the high end of an operator’s customer base. This would be a welcome boost in a market where 5G has rarely had a discernible impact on ARPU for more than a short period of time at launch. Early movers have gained some ARPU uptick in countries like the USA, but this has often been competed out once other MNOs have launched services. In South Korea, all…
Five years ago this week… Comcast sealed its victory in the battle for Sky, paying $15.3 billion for the 39% stake held by Disney-owned Fox. This triggered a bunch of trigger-happy financial analysts in the US to predict that Comcast was preparing to sell its one-third shareholding in Hulu to Disney, to fund the deal. They should have read the small print, because we are now three months away from Comcast almost certainly triggering a sale as per the January 2024 deadline, as the operator uses every trick in the book to inflate Hulu’s share price – valued by Disney at $27.5 billion, but north of $30 billion by Comcast. Loop Media, the free streaming TV provider for hospitality…
At IBC 2023, software codec provider VisualOn arrived on the show floor with a dubious claim for its new Optimizer product, branded as the world’s first universal content-adaptive encoding (CAE) product. After some pre-show digging, VisualOn confirmed to Faultline that “universal” was the key word here, as Optimizer can be deployed with any third-party encoder, flying in the face of any vendor lock-ins in the transcoding world. Following up with Faultline in Amsterdam, VisualOn’s President and CEO, Yang Cai, told us the Optimizer works by taking uncompressed video feeds and reviewing the constant rate factor (CRF) – the default quality setting for H.264 files. “CAE has traditionally been vertically integrated. The fact that the Optimizer is independent means that the…
TV app developer Yotta Media, which specializes in developing frameworks for simplifying Android TV Operator Tier and HbbTV applications, is working on a proof-of-concept (PoC) HbbTV app for targeted advertisements. This builds on Yotta Media’s successful demonstration back at NAB 2023 with Pearl TV, the consortium of US broadcasters, in a collaboration with Sony, Triveni Digital and Ateme showcasing the ability to replace ads in a live ATSC 3.0 broadcast, using the Run3TV Web TV Platform. Yotta Media’s Raj Patel, CEO and co-founder, explains to Faultline that the London-based vendor is using the DVB-TA standard for targeted advertising in the PoC, delivering specific ads through the internet to specific users or households. Speaking at the recent IBC show, Patel tells…
Tucked out of the way, not in its usual hall, Dolby was using IBC 2023 to show customers and leads how the company is assembling more and more of a video production and distribution workflow, on the back of recent acquisitions. However, attempts to pry into Dolby’s position in the codec sector were for naught. Faultline had gone into IBC expecting to see and hear more interest in AV1, but the alternative codec is absent from most vendors’ customer enquiries and viewed skeptically. Given Dolby’s now central role in the codec landscape, there were many stones to turn over at IBC, but Dan Coffey, Senior Product Manager at Dolby Labs, confirmed that the Hybrik wing is not currently offering AV1.…
While quizzing Qwilt on the recently announced Open Caching deployment with Vodafone, we found that the company is already exploring ways to combine its traffic-squeezing infrastructure with multicast ABR devices. Speaking to Faultline at IBC 2023, Mark Fisher, VP Marketing and Biz Dev, told us that Qwilt is currently engaged in conversations with customers around multicast ABR, and claims the technology is complementary, not competitive, to Open Caching. “Open caching collapses traffic in the core of the network, after which point, unicast streams go to each home. There are still redundancies left, but they are less critical – capacity is less of an issue,” he told us. However, the classic criticisms of multicast ABR, primarily its reliance on CPE, still…
Sustainability was a complicated issue at IBC. Nearly everyone was aware of the problem, but there was very little substantive action on the show floor. Vendors had plenty of anecdotes of customer interest, but it has not become a make-or-break issue for awarding contracts yet. Worse, the lack of clarifying data was a palpable frustration. This tension was present in the cloud debate too, as environmental friendliness was part of the sales pitch for moving on-prem installations into cloud computing environments. However, we understand that even when a client’s workload has been wound down, or shut off entirely, the cloud computing vendors are not in the habit of switching a rack off at the wall – as firing it back…
The Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) was forced to issue an emergency bulletin to members last week, to settle rising unrest in the organization triggered by the sudden suspension of LG’s 2024 line of ATSC 3.0 TV sets in the US market. As a core contributor to the development of ATSC 3.0 technology, LG’s decision has rocked the ATSC 3.0 community – casting fears that a wave of patent suits will further slow the roll-out of NextGen TV. But before we cast our attention to the US patent suit that led to LG’s remonstration, let us remind readers that another major TV manufacturer, Samsung, has already voiced vehement dissatisfaction about the adoption of ATSC 3.0 standards in India. Most US…
Ericsson has announced that it has ‘taken leadership in industrializing Open RAN,’ saying it will introduce support for open fronthaul across its Cloud RAN and radio portfolio in 2024. It claims that over 1 million Ericsson radios currently in the field are hardware-ready for open fronthaul, but the tone of the announcement is going to upset many who feel that Ericsson is laying the groundwork to hijack the trend. Nokia has launched Network as Code, a new platform that it claims will accelerate network programmability and monetization for users. This is another example of the trend of expressing network functions to customers as API-friendly processes, which can be integrated into other applications. Indian MNO Dish Wireless has signed an MoU,…
Portable and temporary mobile cells are being deployed in ever greater numbers and scenarios, to provide connectivity on demand. Referred to by two acronyms, CoW (Cells On Wheels) and NoW (Network on Wheels), the field has roots dating back to 2G, but only became a significant sector for the major equipment makers such as Huawei, Ericsson, and Nokia under 4G/LTE. Growth has accelerated further in the 5G era, as demand expands beyond the traditional sectors of venues, music events and construction sites to include emergency response to disasters such as earthquakes and wildfires, as well as playing a role in private networks where flexible connectivity is needed. CoWs are also being considered for roles in 5G densification in urban areas…
Sky Mobile resorted to the familiar excuse of disruption caused by its Huawei kit replacement for an earlier outage. This looks like a smokescreen, given that Sky Mobile has had three years to develop its rip and replace strategy and in any case as an MVNO relies largely on an MNO, in this case Virgin Media O2, for its network. This occurred earlier in 2023 and was reported by the UK’s Financial Times (FT) as the first a severe outage in the country since the UK government in 2020 imposed this requirement to replace Huawei equipment completely from UK public networks by 2027, and from core networks by December 2023. Customers complained widely on social media of the inability to access…
MWC Las Vegas always brooks comparison with the mothership event in Barcelona, and this time we could identify increasing fervor for Open RAN and network slicing. There is also more interest in the application of Generative AI (genAI), which is covered in a separate article this week. The event itself, from the outside, appears as quiet as ever, paling in attendance compared to the Spanish iteration. With a strong focus on the US market, and a little Canada and Latin American action, it seems a minor concern for operators outside the Americas. A broadly similar complaint can also be levied at MWC Shanghai, admittedly. Both Open RAN and network slicing were subdued at MWC Barcelona, as Wireless Watch reported at…
We are growing increasingly frustrated with the claims that operators of both fixed-line and wireless networks are being crushed under the weight of the internet traffic they serve, and the latest call for the source of this traffic to pay a ‘fair share’ towards its delivery comes from the GSMA. Unfortunately, historic views of the basics severely undermine this narrative. The headline figures are as follows. Using Ericsson’s Mobility Reports as the basis for traffic projections, mobile traffic has grown from around 32 EB per year in 2013 to some 1,856 in 2023, and is on track to reach 5,664 in 2028. Some of the recent and future growth is attributable to Fixed Wireless Access (FWA), but an examination of…
Five years ago this week… Facebook crowned itself the world’s poorest judge of timing, launching its Portal and Portal+ video communication devices right after the Cambridge Analytica scandal where private data from tens of millions of accounts was bought by the British data firm to build voter profiles. The devices, more akin to a smart speaker, would be powered by Amazon’s smart assistant Alexa. Ultimately, Facebook—since rebranded as Meta—discontinued the devices in November 2022, as it shifted to VR priorities. Consumer electronics giant LG has suspended sales of ATSC 3.0 compatible TV sets in the US market, after losing a patent infringement court case put against it by Constellation Designs. LG has lambasted Constellation Designs for not offering its ATSC…
IBC 2023 was host to plenty of the usual format wars. One that required a little digging was the battle between the open internet contribution protocols, which are used to transport the initial video feeds from the network edge back to a production environment. While the contribution sector has battled supply chain and energy efficiency hurdles, business has been good. Harjinder Sandhu, Zixi’s Director of Product Marketing, said it had been a big year for the company, the largest software vendor in this market, with lots of hiring and growth in the partner network. At IBC, Zixi launched its Multiviewer monitoring tool, to allow users of the Zen Master Control Plane tool to see what is being contributed. Sandhu is…