Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Last week’s visit to the USA by Indian prime minister Narendra Modi marked the announcement of a new cooperation between the two countries in hi-tech areas including 5G, 6G and AI. Modi and US president Joe Biden outlined more details of cooperation based on the Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology (iCET), signed in January 2023. However, the pledges of common cause bely the potential for very different agendas on the parts of the respective governments and their high-tech industries; highlighted by the fact that India has still not fallen into line with the USA on banning Chinese suppliers from its networks. After the meeting between Biden and Modi, the two countries highlighted six areas of cooperation: Strengthening semiconductor supply…
Was it a live event if there wasn’t a technical hitch? Wireless Watch’s latest webinar, a discussion on the progress of Open RAN, was beset by an absence of reminder emails (thanks Livestorm), but the speakers needed no audience encouragement to debate the lay of the land. Debating the topic was Gilles Garcia, Senior Director of the Wired and Wireless Group at AMD, John Baker, SVP of Ecosystem Business Development for Mavenir, and Timo Jokiaho, Chief Technologist at Red Hat’s Telecom, Media and Entertainment wing, covering EMEA. The slightly clickbait headline read ‘Why hasn’t Open RAN revolutionized the Radio Access Network,’ and while the recording has plenty more depth, it is worth pulling out the main threads of the discussion…
Latin America is proving happier hunting ground for mobile operators in the industrial 5G sector than some European countries, such as Germany, where major manufacturers have tended to seek other partners for their digitization and IoT strategies. This may partly reflect the greater homogenization of the Latin American telco scene, with more consolidation around a few large players such as Telefonica and America Movil which have sunk their teeth deeper into enterprise sectors. It also reflects the primacy of some vertical sectors conducive to 5G in the region, notably mining, energy, and ports, where some operators are already making hay. Telefonica has just announced what it calls a go-to-market deal for private LTE and 5G with Nokia, covering nine countries…
Orange’s exit from banking, six years after a much-heralded entry, has been greeted as evidence that such diversification by telcos is doomed to failure, raising questions over how they can seek new revenues to achieve ROI on 5G infrastructure investments. But such oversimplistic analysis ignores stark regional differences that are partly culturally based, with telco banking operations actually booming in some developing countries. The fate of Orange’s banking division reflects the situation in developed countries, as well as some particular mistakes in its case associated with costs, and failure to meet earlier bullish predictions of customer gain. Before launching the banking service in 2017 Orange had conducted customer surveys suggesting that a quarter of its mobile customer base in France…
The O-RAN Alliance claims to have addressed possibly the biggest barrier to at-scale adoption of Open RAN – its sub-optimal support for the Massive MIMO radios that are becoming key to many operators’ 5G capacity and coverage expansion plans. On June 20, the Alliance agreed to a new specification within its Open Fronthaul family, which organizes the RAN functions in a way that increases efficiency in processing the complex beamforming required by MIMO antenna arrays from 16T16R upwards. Significant compromise was required to achieve a spec that the Alliance could unite around. In fact, Next Generation Lower-Layer Split (NG LLS), as the new addition is called, has three implementation options, to accommodate different approaches proposed by Ericsson and Qualcomm respectively.…
HBO is in talks with Netflix, to license HBO titles to the Netflix service for the first time in the US. The deal would have been unthinkable in previous years, but under the new Zaslav regime, money talks and Netflix has deep pockets. Of course, HBO has licensed its library previously. The best-known deal is with Sky, allowing the Comcast-owned operator to fuel its premium channel bundles in Europe with HBO content – including its Now OTT service. Once that deal expires, in 2025, Warner Bros Discovery’s Max service will ramp up its European expansion significantly. Sky will have to scramble to replace that void, but has made strides in its own content production strategy. It can also, presumably, safely…
Brazilian broadcaster Globo is preparing to demonstrate SBTVD 3.0 (TV 3.0) capabilities for the 2024 summer Olympics Games hosted in Paris. The Brazilian bolt from the blue came from Globo’s Leonardo Chaves, Innovation Ecosystem Manager at the organization’s Mediatech Lab, during a recent webinar. The panel session was supposed to be positioned as a run-of-the-mill refresher on the World Cup soccer demonstrations based on the intermediary TV 2.5 in late 2022, but things took an unexpected turn as Chaves sent a rallying cry to Globo’s unwitting suppliers – with just 12 months’ notice. The Olympics proposal caught neighboring panelists off-guard, with V-Nova, InterDigital and MainConcept still bearing battle scars from the intense World Cup demonstrations for TV 2.5, the transitional…
AGL Energy’s Chief Operating Officer Markus Brokhof has argued in a speech to the Australian Energy Week conference that Australia should begin manufacturing wind and solar power components at home to dodge future supply chain delays. He painted a vision of Australia’s ports clogged with such imports. “Otherwise, all harbors will be fully booked in the future when it comes to this huge equipment which we have to move around the world, particularly when it comes to the large towers.” Brokhof also called for increased federal oversight and policy strategy, warning of a balkanization of energy policy over the last decade. Germany has launched an expression of interest call for 10 GW of solar manufacturing split down the supply chain,…
The UK’s Society for Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) has published a 5-point plan for the country’s political parties to adopt that would – in its eyes – see the UK automotive industry through this period of transition. The SMMT claims that the plan would create the conditions for the UK automotive industry to produce more than 750,000 electric vehicles (EVs) by 2030, creating £106 billion in opportunities within the country. It comes as two more major UK startups aiming to supply into the future EV industry throughout the value chain are facing potential bankruptcy as they face difficulty finding funding after the highly public Britishvolt fiasco. AMTE Power has plans for a 10 GWh battery gigafactory in the UK…
We first spoke with perovskite ink seller Solaires back in 2021, when it was just 15 months old. This time we spoke with Shima Alagha, Solaires’ Product Manager, who is working with select customers and partners to bring small-scale indoor device-integrated PV products into the market by next year. This small Canadian start-up’s strategy was to primarily address one segment of the future perovskite technology base – namely the formula, solvents, and additives used in the perovskite ink itself. Solaires is now also making cells and modules for indoor electronic devices – such as smart gadgets, consumer electronics and IoT devices- alongside its ink vendor role. Solaires is still operating with a 20- to 25-person staff, but now it has…
Iridium is a key catalyst that plays a huge role in increasing the efficiency of the PEM (Proton Exchange Membrane) electrolyzer but at the same time it is one of the scarcest elements mined from the Earth’s crust. According to our latest research, Iridium will have four years to solve its supply chain problems before the entire hydrogen industry will be placed under significant threat of undersupply, further fueling the demand for natural gas and coal. As the electrolyzer industry is set to ramp up significantly in a bid to support the imminent hydrogen industry that will decarbonize sectors like steel production, heavy-duty transportation, maritime shipping and aviation, more and more PGMs (Platinum Group Metals) will be required. The strain…
Update: BEREC’s representative has retrospectively confirmed that negotiations have been finalized, but there is still a formal vote required from the European Parliament before the publication of the revised directive in the official journal of the EU. The publication of the revised directive in the Official Journal of the EU will take place only after the formal vote of the Parliament and of the Council – both of them foreseen in July (first part of July for the Parliament, second half of July for the Council, if the agenda remains unchanged). — BEREC – the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications – has confirmed that the new obligation for data centers to publicly report energy consumption data has been…
Nokia has announced three new high-capacity products in its AirScale base station portfolio, which represent its most confident refresh of its flagship offering since disaster struck its initial 5G platform launch in 2018. Since then, Nokia has been seeking to rebuild confidence in its most important products, having lost key contracts (and a CEO) because of price/performance issues with its first base station chips. Its new offerings feature the latest iteration of its ReefShark system-on-chip, and the launch gained extra impact with the announcement of an expanded deal with UK operator Virgin Media O2 (VMO2), for the latest Habrok-based networks. Nokia has been steadily phasing out products based on the original 5G system-on-chip (SoC), in favor of the new architecture,…
Demand for convergence between 5G and Deterministic Ethernet is coming from a number of industrial, engineering and automotive use cases that require Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) over a combination of wired and wireless links. This is coming as the two halves of this convergence, 5G and Ethernet, are themselves embracing TSN technologies after what seems like quite a protracted process. After all, the term Deterministic Ethernet has been bandied about for years, and real time process control is hardly new to factories. What is new is the demand for higher level coordinated process control, and for the integration of wireless connectivity (increasingly 5G), with existing wired networks (often some form of Ethernet). There are many manufacturing processes involving repetitive robotic…
Five years ago this week… Sony Pictures Television Networks made its D2C OTT video entrance in Europe by promoting Film1 in the Netherlands from an outdated cable channel to a streaming service that combined over 300 first-run on-demand movie titles with a single live channel – itself a stream of Sony-owned Dutch premium linear TV channel Film1 Premiere. Film 1 was sold a year later in 2019 to SPI, an international FTA and pay TV operator based in the Netherlands, a subsidiary of the French Canal + Group, itself owned by Vivendi. Zoom has joined the Alliance for Open Media, the AV1 codec consortium. Many believed that video communication platforms like Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams would never…
Your Media Transformation, a consulting practice founded by former Harmonic executive and MPEG contributor Thierry Fautier, has produced its debut industry report. The subject matter is not a specific technology or trend, but rather a retrospective examination of NAB 2023, from a macro market consolidation perspective. Faultline has obtained a complimentary copy of the “unreport” exclusively for readers, to whom many of the observations will sound familiar from our own extensive reports from the ground in Las Vegas back in April. With Faultline’s NAB coverage being mostly time-sensitive, we could criticize the paper from Your Media Transformation for missing the boat, yet a benefit of producing commentary two months after a major industry event is that the dust has well…
Kudelski Group’s TVkey – the company’s hardware root of trust co-developed with Samsung that debuted back at CES 2017 – is still winning solid business, believe it or not. The Swiss content security specialist has announced a deployment at existing operator customer Claro Colombia – owned by LATAM behemoth América Móvil and buyer of multiple Nagra products over the years. Claro Colombia is therefore an example of Nagra’s ability to successfully upsell its content production portfolio. The latest deal itself is for the new Claro tv+ service, described as a direct-to-TV streaming offering. It is imperative that TVkey complies with Movielabs requirements for Enhanced Content Protection – including 4K UHD, HDR, and early release titles. Claro tv+ is using Nagra’s…
Update: BEREC’s representative has retrospectively confirmed that negotiations have been finalized, but there is still a formal vote required from the European Parliament before the publication of the revised directive in the official journal of the EU. The publication of the revised directive in the Official Journal of the EU will take place only after the formal vote of the Parliament and of the Council – both of them foreseen in July (first part of July for the Parliament, second half of July for the Council, if the agenda remains unchanged). — BEREC – the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications – has confirmed that the new obligation for data centers to publicly report energy consumption data has been…
Update: Just after publication, a 2021 Amlogic press release was unearthed, which stated that Sky Glass TVs would use its T962 SoC, and Hybrid Driver RDK Platform. Sky has still not confirmed what Entertainment OS actually is, but there is still a chance that the camera is running on RDK-C. The original article is follows. If the covid pandemic did not convince consumers that cameras in their TVs were a desirable feature, we are not sure what will. Sky has unveiled a plug-in camera system, to sit atop its Sky Glass OTT TVs, called Sky Live. Much delayed, the camera offering might help counter the initial poor reception of the TVs, but at $371 (£290), this is a tall order…
Faultline had the rare opportunity to be a fly on the wall during what should probably have been a closed doors members-only meeting, in the form of a Greening of Streaming event in Brussels this week. People talk a lot about the importance of transparency in the sustainability game, and it doesn’t scratch much more transparent than allowing the trade press to spy in on working group brainstorming sessions. We were not even there at all, really. We were invisible; be it for the occasional timed question so as not to disturb the rhythm of spit-balling streaming engineers. A fascinating day unraveled before our eyes – split between the four projects that have been distilled from stage 1 of the…