Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Vodafone and Three have been plotting their merger in the UK for at least a year, with intensive behind the scenes lobbying of the government, anti-trust agency CMA (Competition and Mergers Authority), and telco regulator Ofcom. This may still not be enough to allow the merger to pass without investigation since it reduces the number of mobile networks in the UK from four to three, often seen in the past as passing a red flag in major markets. The basic terms of the deal are much as has long been reported, for Vodafone to own 51% of the merged company, and Three’s owner, Hong Kong based conglomerate majoring on telecoms and infrastructure CK Hutchison, taking 49%, with capitalization around $18.6…
The US mobile market was shaken up last week by reports that Amazon wants to bundle low-cost cellular connectivity into its ever-growing Prime subscriber offering, a move that could intensify price wars in the mass market and diminish the brand relationship between operators and consumers. Amazon said there were no plans “at this time”, and Bloomberg, which reported the story, believes talks are in the early stages. But the idea is an interesting one, that could further deepen Amazon’s relationship with Dish Network. According to sources “familiar with the situation”, who spoke to Bloomberg, Amazon has held preliminary negotiations with all four national US operators – Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile and new mobile entrant Dish – about a scheme that would…
Nokia has had a tough time in the US RAN market since 2018, when problems with its initial 5G base station architecture led to the loss of a large chunk of its contracts with Verizon. It remains a large vendor to AT&T and T-Mobile, but is under pressure in all the operators from Samsung, which is seen as a useful counterweight to a Nordic duopoly, and has made the same Open RAN pledges as its Finnish competitor. So, winning the main 5G deals with the two largest cable operators will be welcome news in Helsinki. These may be tiny contracts compared to those awarded by the major MNOs, or even Dish, but they will be useful to showcase the credentials…
Five years ago this week… While a damning New York Times report accused Facebook of supplying user data to device manufacturers like Apple and Samsung, Apple CEO Tim Cook threw Zuckerberg’s company under the bus at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference. At the gathering, Apple revealed an update to its Safari browser designed to limit the ability for third parties like Facebook to track users, thus limiting the scope of the platform’s ads and striking directly at the social media website’s purse. — Two weeks since the divisive rebrand, Warner Bros Discovery has revealed that 70% of existing HBO Max subscribers have made the migration to Max. This is above expectations, although Discovery+, which has been merged into the new streaming…
Blockchain-based distribution vendor Eluvio has landed another gimmicky studio partnership, this time with Warner Bros Discovery’s Home Entertainment (WBHE) distribution arm. The studio’s 1978 Superman film is being released as a ‘multimedia living movie experience’, which is essentially a web3 take on the deleted scenes, bloopers and extras that one would come to expect on a DVD (WBHE’s bread-and-butter business about two decades ago). Alongside a 4K UHD stream of the film, customers can navigate through special features and image galleries via an interactive menu that is based on iconic sets from the Superman film, all of which is packaged into a multimedia NFT. It is important to note that these are not NFTs as we often think of them…
The Alliance for Open Media (AOM), the members group behind the AV1 video codec, recently issued a call for proposals for static polygonal mesh coding – a branch of encoding techniques that it is hoped will help foster the development of improved compression for volumetric video formats. The deadline for declaring an interest in making a submission was supposed to have passed in mid-May, but the arrival of a second call for proposals in the Faultline inbox this week suggests AOM has not yet received sufficient submissions, either in volume or quality. Proponents can still submit results up until early September 2023, before the best proposals are selected in late November. The establishment of the first version of the Volumetric…
Taiwan Mobile, a local operator with 522,000 cable TV subscribers and 7.5 million mobile customers, has jumped into bed with French CDN software specialist Broadpeak, for the services of improved multiscreen delivery for the 5G era. It is notable that, despite having over half a million pay TV subs, the announcement – emanating out of Singapore-based trade fair Broadcast Asia this week – does not mention Taiwan Mobile’s cable TV base even once. The reasoning is that this is a deal draped in efficiencies for video delivery over 5G networks, with Taiwan Mobile deploying Broadpeak’s BkS350 Origin Packager. The technology enables Taiwan Mobile to package and protect mobile-delivered ABR content – raising the bar for video quality, while reducing costs…
In 2017, Netflix’s Twitter account professed: “Love is sharing a password.” Those days of bliss have come and gone, as the streamer finally pulled the trigger on its delayed, long-dreaded global crackdown on password sharers. In over 100 countries worldwide, users will no longer be able to roam the platform for free on another household’s account. Faultline previously reported that Netflix expected to convert 20% to 30% of the 100 million users across the world logging in to a friend or family member’s account to stream the platform for free. We found that number optimistic, and consumers in the US think so too. A recent poll from Cordcutting.com, which surveyed 1,485 Netflix viewers, found that only 8% of those illicitly…
Haivision, the progenitor of the SRT contribution protocol and video platform slinger, has published its State of Technology Adoption in the Broadcast Industry report, and it does exactly what it says on the tin. The high-level takeaways from the report can be quickly rattled through. Of course, it’s good news for SRT, the open-source contribution protocol developed by Haivision. Some 68% of respondents currently use SRT for live video transport, and such internet-based feeds are now the most popular choice for video contribution as a whole. Some 84% said they used some sort of cloud-based technology in their workflows, however, 60% said this represented less than a quarter of their total workflows. This demonstrates that on-premises technologies are still the…
US Nickel Hydrogen battery maker EnerVenue, will supply High Caliber Energy, a Florida-based EPC which works in LNG and renewables, a 25 MWh order of Energy Storage Vessels (ESVs) for one of High Caliber’s clients. The delivery will be made in Q4 2024 and will support a project providing energy storage for residents in Florida. To us this looks like a trial for a much larger installation, which is perhaps why the High Caliber client is currently a secret. The EVS is the second generation battery model for EnerVenue, with a lifetime of 30 years offering 30,000 cycles, and is going into volume production shortly. Both Duke Energy and NextEra have utility operations in Florida, and if it was either…
Renewable Power Capital (RPC)and Greenfield have closed on an agreement to develop 500 MW of energy storage capacity in the UK. As part of the deal, RPC has acquired a combined 83 MW of energy storage capacity from Greenfield split across 2 projects. Impala Platinum (Implats) has acquired a controlling stake in competitor Royal Bafokeng Platinum (RBPlat) and it will now become a subsidiary of the company. A decision from Implats to acquire a further 9.6% of the company’s shares took its stake in the company up to 55.46%, giving it s controlling stake in the company. Fiat has released a new EV in Italy called the Fiat Topolino based on the Citroen Ami, the vehicle has a 5.5 kWh…
Oil company leaders clearly MUST be able to calculate how rapidly EVs are taking off and what this means to their future revenue and values and yet they persist in public documents suggesting that by 2050 60% of the oil used today will still be in use. These leaders MUST know that this is impossible from the uptake rate of battery electric vehicles, which essentially means that they are lying to their shareholders – one constituency that US law in particular is dead set against. If the conclusions of this article are correct, and play out as we state, then many oil leaders will risking imprisonment and huge corporate fines worth more than the value of their companies right now.…
Arm has unveiled its new Total Compute Solutions 2023 (TCS23) architecture, which houses its Cortex-X4 CPU and the new Immortalis-G715 GPU. The platform appears geared towards flagship gaming smartphones, which are currently a very China-centric market. Deutsche Telekom has announced support for the Polygon blockchain network, acting as a validator for the Ethereum Layer-2 platform. DT joins Q, Flow, Celo, Chainlink, and Ethereum itself, in the Proof-of-Stake (PoS, really) network. Vodafone has found that its Economy of Things initiative will have 88 million devices in 2024, growing to 3.29 billion in 2030, at a CAGR of 68%. Many of these devices will be ‘trading with each other,’ as part of the platform. Given recent troubles, this claim will be met…
Meta’s Facebook has opened talks with the thoroughly tarnished augmented and mixed reality (AR, MR) vendor Magic Leap. Since its delicious fall from grace, Magic Leap has been force-fed humble pie, and a path to redemption seems to be on the table – by way of a zealous Zuckerbergian obsession with building the Metaverse. Should Magic Leap become a key pillar of the metaverse, it would be quite the comeback. The current rumors point to a multi-year agreement, involving both intellectual property licensing and contract manufacturing for the required headsets. Magic Leap has been derided by Faultline in the past, but its most recent hope of salvation was an incredible $500 million funding round. This was secured to fund its…
Japan’s SoftBank has singled out emerging 5G applications in vertical sectors such as automotive and industrial, alongside virtualized RAN, as targets for new data centers – enhanced with the latest AI chips from Nvidia based on the Arm Neoverse 64-bit cores optimized for machine learning. The new network of data centers will offer 5G services to other operators on a multi-tenant server platform, aiming to reduce costs and energy consumption, according to SoftBank president and CEO Junichi Miyakawa. This collaboration with Nvidia will enable its infrastructure to achieve a significantly higher performance using AI, “including optimization of the RAN”, he insisted. The seeds were sown for this data center development in September 2022, when Arm unveiled additions to its Arm…
The operators of south-east Asia are generally seen as the world leaders in deploying the latest mobile technologies, and persuading their users to adopt them with an enthusiasm that western MNOs envy. But browsing through the 2023 marketing messages and strategic investor presentations from most of these operators, there is very limited reference to 5G. Other buzzwords are far more prominent, from XR to AI to mobile money. Yet, in another mature 5G market, North America, operators continue to place 5G at the center of their marketing to consumers, as well as their pitches to shareholders. The contrast relates to many factors. In general, the operators in markets such as South Korea, Japan and China have seen the early positive…
At this year’s Mobile World Congress, Telefónica took a leading role in the latest telecom operators’ project to open up their network APIs (application programming interfaces), in order to build a broad developer ecosystem and steal the digital services initiative back from the cloud and over-the-top giants. However, the attempt – supported by the GSMA’s Open API platform – is the latest in a long line of failed operator attempts to behave more like Internet companies. But, Telefónica claims it is putting many concrete programs in place, both internal and through alliances, to ensure it can monetize open APIs this time around. Telefónica aims to build a new API ecosystem as a foundation of its new digital strategy. It has…
Airties, the mesh WiFi pioneer turned management services platform, has released a whitepaper marketing the benefits of a hybrid cloud-edge architecture approach in service provider WiFi networks. With so many contrasting definitions of the edge, which can be located wherever your marketing department wants the edge to be on any given day, it might be helpful to start with how Airties defines the edge. In Airties’ case, the edge is the home gateway or a mesh extender. These are about as close as you can get to the edge before reaching the end device. Each CPE device then acts as a centralized controller to manage real-time WiFi adjustments for the home WiFi network – including steering, mesh topology optimization, and…
Chinese smart device giant SDMC is gearing up for Broadcast Asia, kicking off June 7, and the company touched base with Faultline this week on what to expect at the Singapore technology trade fair. Of the shiny new entertainment and networking hardware taking center stage, an eye-catching case is SDMC’s 2-in-1 device amalgamating an Android TV streaming box with a smart speaker, supporting AV1 decoding for OTT and IPTV deployments. SDMC’s 4K S905X4 Smart Speaker comes with far-field voice technology and hands-free TV control, and we initially suspected that SDMC’s hybrid smart speaker TV device is running Google TV, which brings more modern functionality over Android TV and improved integration with Google services. However, it appears this is in fact…
In November 2022, the FCC released the first location-based broadband map, marking a pivot from the previous census block-based data collection methodology. This week, the FCC has taken a stride further with an updated version based on feedback from consumers, states, localities and other stakeholders – to improve the map building process. The FCC’s latest broadband map has been tipped as a revolution in mapping for the US broadband marketplace. Service providers might not see it that way, however, as the updated map is designed to better highlight the digital divide and emphasize the demand for increased investments in high-speed broadband across the country. The latest map is designed to be much more granular, identifying 114 million locations where fixed…