Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Tata Motors – the parent company of Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) and subsidiary of India’s Tata Group – has committed £4 billion ($5.2 billion) to building a 40 GWh battery factory in Somerset, England. Production at the factory is slated to start in 2026. The deal involves significant subsidies from the UK’s central government, which is likely to include direct cash grants, permitting and infrastructure support, and discounts on the plant’s price of energy. The exact monetary value of the subsidies is unknown as of yet but is understood to be within the hundreds of millions of pounds. The biggest of these is likely to be a discount on the price of energy and guarantees for renewable energy access. This…
Operators appear as concerned as ever over timing and synchronization issues associated with 5G, despite technological progress and roll out of 3GPP standards. This partly reflects the field of 5G timing still being in a state of flux or development, with further enhancements over duplex communication and timing coming with the next 3GPP Release 18, and beyond. The main point is that both absolute timing and relative synchronization have become much more critical under 5G, driven by three fundamental developments. The first is the widespread deployment of Time Division Duplex (TDD) in addition to FDD (Frequency Division Duplex) for 5G communications, requiring more accurate synchronization to avoid self-interference. Secondly, the RAN has been disaggregated to prepare the ground for Open…
Dish Network, rather like its Open RAN counterpart Rakuten Mobile in Japan, symbolizes the gulf that can exist between vision and reality. Dish is building one of the most cloud-native and multivendor mobile networks ever seen, and is pursuing a creative monetization strategy focused on new-style dynamic wholesale services enabled by network slicing. But in reality, its first 5G services have been conventional, expanding the low-cost consumer offerings of its multiple MVNO subsidiaries, and it has been running into a succession of financial challenges. Some of these are the result of the decline in its core business in satellite pay-TV, and others can be blamed on the speed with which it is being forced, by the FCC, to roll out…
Open Caching has secured one of its largest non-US signatures to date, with Vodafone jumping on board to deploy pre-standard technology from Siamese content delivery twins Qwilt and Cisco. The exact parameters of Vodafone’s deployment are not disclosed, yet, with the announcement only mentioning that seven initial unspecified regions in Europe and Africa will receive a boost in quality and capacity related to Vodafone’s streaming delivery, for both fixed broadband and mobile subscribers. We know Italy is one, where the test project took place, leaving six territories to be named, and even fewer publisher partners. The roll-out of Open Caching services then plans to ramp up as Qwilt and Cisco bring in additional service providers worldwide, to create what stakeholders…
The growth of India’s population, and particularly its middle class, is putting the country on track to overtake China, and edge closer to the USA, in a number of mobile industry metrics such as smartphone ownership and the consequent usage of mobile services. 4G smartphone sales in India broke the 100 million barrier for the first time in May 2023. India is growing rapidly in other mobile directions, notably its bid to be increasingly self-sufficient in core technologies such as 5G, and to be a major global manufacturing hub for smartphones and other electronics. The news that local industrial giant Tata is to acquire the iPhone factory currently owned by Taiwan’s Wistron is symbolic of the shift of mobile manufacturing…
Five years ago this week… Deutsche Bank conducted research recommending the sale of stocks in French broadcaster TF1, Spain’s Mediaset and Atres Media and Germany’s RTL. The report said that outside the UK, ad spending was down across Europe, which knocked off about 10% from anticipated valuations. Most broadcasters felt powerless to respond to the increasingly video-based Google–Facebook advertising duopoly, and changes to their business, like the integration of online programmatic and addressable advertising, modern online UIs, or app analytics on the consumer device, were slow to come. Akamai has opened the doors on three new cloud computing sites (with two more to come later this quarter), marking the first major step in the CDN giant’s drive for distributed workloads.…
After learning last week that Swiss set top maker ADB Global was joining the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), Faultline, continuing to fulfil its pledge to cover more sustainability issues, was eager to learn more. We reached out to ADB and were told no one could be made available to interview, and a spokesperson answered our questions with: “we’re a private company and we don’t want to share detailed information publicly”. We were told to look through ADB’s corporate communications to find out more about their sustainability story. Isn’t transparency a key component of sustainability? Delivering a public announcement on something and then not wanting to discuss the information publicly is a rather contradicting message. Many corporations currently engaged in…
As French TV platform provider Netgem looks to offer its operator clients as much content as possible, cloud gaming has crept into its view via compatriot gaming service Gamestream. As we covered last week in an interview with Gamestream, the two companies are hoping to increase the stickiness of pay TV by enticing casual gamers into a Gamestream subscription, and now we get the exclusive view from the other half of the relationship. For Gamestream, Netgem jumpstarts its entry to the lucrative European market via its Netgem.tv platform, which boasts around 500,000 subscribers. As for Netgem, the main drive is increasing the value proposition (and stickiness) of its customers’ pay TV offerings – although we remain dubious that the gamification…
Celebrating a 12% increase in half-year revenues to $53.5 million, Ateme has iced the cake with a world-first claim. It strikes us as one of those records where you think “really – in 2023?” The big announcement from the French video processing and delivery vendor comes with Swisscom, lauding the world’s first large-scale cloud DVR in a public cloud. The Swiss tier 1 operator is migrating the entire cloud DVR architecture attached to its blue TV platform over to AWS cloud infrastructure – with a roadmap to achieving greater scalability, streamlining operations, and optimizing hardware. The devil is in the details. Despite the name, most large-scale cloud DVR libraries today are still stored on-premises, which is what allows Ateme to…
Open Caching has secured one of its largest non-US signatures to date this week, with Vodafone jumping on board to deploy pre-standard technology from Siamese content delivery twins Qwilt and Cisco. The exact parameters of Vodafone’s deployment are not disclosed, yet, with the announcement only mentioning that seven initial unspecified regions in Europe and Africa will receive a boost in quality and capacity related to Vodafone’s streaming delivery, for both fixed broadband and mobile subscribers. We know Italy is one, where the test project took place, leaving six territories to be named, and even fewer publisher partners. The roll-out of Open Caching services then plans to ramp up as Qwilt and Cisco bring in additional service providers worldwide, to create…
Avalon has announced that it has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Metso, to advance the development of Ontario, Canada’s, first lithium processing facility. The agreement will see the two parties develop a lithium hydroxide production facility, Avalon will license Metso’s technology to produce lithium hydroxide cathode materials to serve the EV market. Lotte Chemical plans to invest 3 trillion Korean Won (KRW) ($2.3 billion) to boost production of copper foil for EV batteries. The company has said that it completed the acquisition of electric foil manufacturer Iljin Materials in March for $2 billion and renamed the company Lotte Energy Materials, the company expects demand for copper foil to reach 2.2 million tones by 2030, up from 500,000 tons…
If, as we have said repeatedly, the solar industry is going to go through the most aggressive growth out of all of the renewable markets, then surely jobs growth will come with that, and rapidly overtake the 3 million people globally estimated to be working in solar now. Taking in data from our long term DER forecast, adjusting for different employment densities, both over time, and over different project sizes, and applying a slightly different learning curve to each sub-sector, we have come up with the employment graph below for solar employment to 2050. It is not the most sophisticated model we have built, and we are not claiming that the solar industry will employ precisely this number of people,…
Morse Micro has announced that its WiFi HaLow (802.11ah) SoC is being integrated into a module from AzureWave Technologies, for a low-power WiFi offering that is being pitched at IoT applications. The deal might be the start of renewed interest in the protocol, and the lack of momentum from rival protocols has not gone unnoticed. HaLow appears well behind schedule. The finished spec was published in 2017, as IEEE 802.11ah, and despite the wave of smart home hype it could have caught, the technology was largely ignored by the wireless IoT crowd. For long-range applications, the battle was still raging in the unlicensed LPWAN game, essentially between LoRa and Sigfox, with the cellular equivalents still not mature enough to capture…
The European Commission’s (EC) proposed Standards Essential Patents (SEPs) shakeup has not gone down well. The intellectual property (IP) realm is rather insular, but for those whose livelihoods depend on predictable outcomes, any potential change is cause for concern. Specifically, the EC is proposing a new framework to regulate disputes, in cases that involve SEPs and Fair Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory (FRAND) disputes. Given that companies under Wireless Watch’s remit have a habit of suing over such disagreements, it is worth examining the new framework and the reaction to it. In broad strokes, the EC is proposing creating a ‘competence center’ under the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO), which will evaluate and categorize a register of SEPs. These will be…
To anthropomorphize the MNOs, there is a distinct whiff of the late stages of a dying empire about them – scrambling to justify their positions, relying on governments to protect them rather than their consumer value, and wailing the minute an upstart threatens to innovate around them. It is hard to have any sympathy for these flailing tantrums, and perhaps the best example has been the FCC-FAA spat regarding the impact of 5G on altimeters that is apparently entirely confined to the US despite these planes flying globally. Ligado’s spectrum problems are another good example, of MNOs lobbying the FCC to regulate a rival out of existence, and just following the logic of protecting spectrum with exclusive licenses through to…
Five years ago this week… German public service broadcaster ZDF called out the nation’s competition regulator, asking for clarity on the conditions necessary to form a joint OTT platform. ZDF was seeking to avoid all roadblocks as it had started discussions with Discovery and ProSiebenSast.1, which had just launched a Hulu-esque service combining maxdome, Eurosport Player and the existing streaming service 7TV. ZDF was also planning a European revolt against Netflix with other public service broadcasters – France Televisions and Italy’s RAI. The three, seeking to sign content partnerships with four other European countries, formed a group aptly named The Alliance. — Mesh WiFi connoisseur Plume reports that it performed 20.9% more fast interference optimizations in Plume-powered homes in the…
With pay TV operators fighting to paper over the cracks of cord cutting, any add-on that can increase stickiness is worth considering. Casual gaming is one such strategy, but French cloud gaming vendor Gamestream has revealed to Faultline that its service penetrates between just 1.5% and 5% of an operator’s user base when averaged across its eight customers. While this is far from a sizeable segment of the total customer base, operators are clearly clutching at straws as they try to turn the tide. Following partnerships with tier 1 operators across Asia, Gamestream is looking to the European market as its next area for growth, bundling its service with French telco TV platform provider Netgem as a nifty means of expanding…
MENA mass media outlet OSN claims it has peaked – reaching the highest number of subscribers in the company’s short history, even higher than when OSN was formed through the merger of the two largest TV networks in the region, Orbit and Showtime, in 2009. OSN’s peak subscriber count (of an unconfirmed total) comes across a combination of streaming and pay TV platforms. Both have recently been rebranded, with OSN+ given a facelift on the streaming side and the pay TV platform OSNtv relaunched with a new internet-connected set top. Both rebrands are reportedly paying dividends, although the majority of new subscriber sign-ups are arriving through OSN+, which is apparently experiencing explosive growth in the 22 countries across the Middle…
BYD this week announced not one, not two, but three factories which are to be built in Northern Brazil in Bahia to make buses, cars and LFP batteries, at an estimated cost of $640 million. The LFP batteries are clearly aimed at the US as much as Latin America. The Chinese bus giant turned battery and car maker, is making up for time lost in the Pandemic, during which it mostly maintained an increasingly large presence in China. In 2023 BYD has gone from just having a bus factory in northwest Hungary, and a partnership with Scotland’s largest bus-builder Alexander Dennis, to promising factories all over the world – the latest in Thailand to make just 150 buses a year…
Qualcomm has tried to generate more traction for its Edgewise cloud-native RAN automation and orchestration suite, with what looks like a relaunch, since there are no apparent additional nuggets or nuances. This is not to criticize the technology, but rather the positioning of it, coming just a year after it came to the company through Qualcomm’s acquisition of Israeli firm Cellwize Wireless Technologies – in June 2022 for about $350 million. This was followed just five months later by the launch of the Edgewise Suite featuring Cellwize’s technology, which therefore suggests it was reshaped quickly under Qualcomm’s brand. in response to a perceived gap in the chip maker’s portfolio. That gap was plugged by the acquisition, but Qualcomm’s recent non-announcement…