Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
The heavy traffic loads and advanced capabilities that 5G supports require semiconductor numbers and performance that are unprecedented in mobile networks. And the slow but steady adoption of virtualized core and RAN architectures opens up the base station, for the first time, to merchant and even general-purpose processors, rather than running entirely on proprietary, special-purpose chips commissioned by the large vendors. In recent issues we have looked at the battles in the market for accelerator cards to offload the most demanding RAN tasks (at Layer 1 of the network) from the central processor. Last week we considered the start-up Accelercomm, one of a band of silicon IP providers that are targeting chips to optimize specific and critical aspects of 5G…
It has become something of a cliché to attend an industry trade fair or conference in North America and conclude that the topic of environmental sustainability was subdued. However, there is no shying away from the fact that the same observation was true of Streaming Media East 2023. The sparsely-attended Wednesday session on sustainability drew little fanfare, while the Friday panel on ‘Sustainability Beyond Greenwashing’– where Wireless Watch’s sister service Faultline took the moderator chair – was firmly in the graveyard shift. While we wait for the recordings of these sessions to be published, here is our take on some brief sustainability takeaways from last week’s get-together in Boston. An unfortunate tale was unveiled at Streaming Media East, one that…
The Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) has published a new reference architecture for operator-managed WiFi (OMWi). The standards organization hopes that the framework, which combines a number of standards, will make it easier for operators to adopt advanced managed WiFi features, to the benefit of consumers. The pitch is that multiple vendors have developed overlapping technologies, and so a common reference architecture can simplify vendor development roadmaps. Of course, for many vendors, those investments are meant to differentiate them from the pack, and so it seems unlikely that the likes of Plume will welcome OMWi with open arms – as they trade on offering such functions as a value-add service. However, Airties, a direct Plume rival, is in on the announcement,…
Japanese MNO KDDI’s Soracom subsidiary has continued its ambitious advance across global IoT, with the launch of a multicarrier service in the USA on the back of the three main mobile networks, targeting energy and other sectors where remote operations are common, demanding a variety of bandwidth and connectivity options. Its approach contrasts with that of some others with multinational presences, such as Everynet with its neutral host approach using the LoRa LPWAN protocol. Everynet’s network can then be shared on a wholesale basis by multiple operators, including MNOs and MVNOs, as well as other providers of private services, for IoT applications generating large numbers of low bitrate transactions. This includes smart metering, environmental monitoring, and some in agriculture. For…
Orange Spain continues its 5G Standalone (SA) commercial rollout, as many European operators stall in their deployments. Orange announced 5G SA commercially in February 2023, to show off at MWC 2023, but has now launched the service properly in Bilbao, Alicante, Sabadell, Hospitalet, Castellon and Valladolid. The operator stressed it wanted to be sure of providing extensive coverage in these cities before activating SA, which will be available in over 90% of those metropolitan areas. Ericsson and Nokia are sharing provision of the SA Core equipment, while Oracle has been chosen for 5G Core signaling and routing. This will enable those more advanced capabilities such as granular network slicing, massive machine support (mMTC), and ultra-low latency (URLLC). NSA (Non-Standalone) 5G…
This month saw the return of the annual TowerXchange European meet-up, which has turned into a fully-fledged conference in recent years. This event took place in the context of a few feverish years of M&A activity among Europe’s mobile operators and towercos. Most major operators have carved out or sold off at least a substantial portion of their towers and other site infrastructure; neutral hosts and the infrastructure investors and pension funds that back them have had a feeding frenzy in terms of new markets and expanded portfolios. Now, however, most of the giant deals have been done in this region, and inflation is depressing the appetite for M&A, even though the markets continue to favor infrastructure stocks (which usually…
Five years ago this week… Swisscom completed its MediaCloud project, which it claimed was the industry’s first IPTV virtualized video headend system, designed to cut opex and create operational simplicity. Ateme’s Titan suite was chosen as the transcoding platform for this NFV-based headend, knocking Cisco’s AnyRes encoders and AWS Elemental out of a job, while the leg-work was carried out by HPE, designing a core NFV workflow around unspecialized hardware so that all the jobs (ingest, transcoding, encryption and workflow management) could be implemented on interchangeable hardware which could overflow to the cloud. — Netflix’s password sharing clampdown has officially gone live in 100 countries, including the US and UK markets. Netflix has emailed all subscribers in these territories, requesting…
BT has announced plans to reduce its headcount by between 40,000 and 55,000 jobs, starting in 2028 and due to complete in 2030. Much of these are linked to the scheduled end of its fiber network deployment, but the mention of AI in the announcement has captured the limelight, leading to a bit of an overreaction in the press. To be clear, this is a very significant slimming down. BT currently has some 130,000 staff, so the maximum reduction would be 42.3% of total roles. BT clarified that this includes some 15,000 engineers building the fiber network, which is due for completion by the end of 2024, and some 10,000 engineers that maintain both copper and fiber infrastructure. “When we…
The Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) has published a new reference architecture for operator-managed WiFi (OMWi). The standards organization hopes that the framework, which combines a number of standards, will make it easier for operators to adopt advanced managed WiFi features, to the benefit of consumers. The pitch is that multiple vendors have developed overlapping technologies, and so a common reference architecture can simplify vendor development roadmaps. Of course, for many vendors, those investments are meant to differentiate them from the pack, and so it seems unlikely that the likes of Plume will welcome OMWi with open arms – as they trade on offering such functions as a value-add service. However, Airties, a direct Plume rival, is in on the announcement,…
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…
It has become something of a cliché to attend an industry trade fair or conference in North America and conclude that the topic of environmental sustainability was subdued. However, there is no shying away from the fact that the same observation was true of Streaming Media East 2023. The sparsely-attended Wednesday session on sustainability drew little fanfare, while the Friday panel on ‘Sustainability Beyond Greenwashing’– where Faultline took the moderator chair – was firmly in the graveyard shift. While we wait for the recordings of these sessions to be published, here is our take on some brief sustainability takeaways from last week’s get-together in Boston. An unfortunate tale was unveiled at Streaming Media East, one that uncovers an ominous truth…
In the same week that Warner Bros Discovery’s HBO Max morphed into Max, rival Comcast has fleshed out a new video streaming package targeted at Xfinity Internet subscribers and prospective pay TV churners – under the familiar branding of Now TV. Now TV marks a first tentative step for Comcast towards a fully IP-delivered pay TV package, as the eventual heir to the cable TV empire – taking a leaf from the book of its European subsidiary Sky which has been plowing a path to all-IP since 2017. This new streaming TV channel package is effectively Comcast attempting to define its own future, rather than putting the future of its video business in the hands of Google and vMVPDs –…
‘Multicast is dead – long live multicast’ reads the title of a session on the conference agenda at this year’s Connected Delivery Summit – one that draws nervous laughter from attendees during its introduction on stage in Boston. While this was only Faultline’s third appearance at a physical Streaming Media event, we imagine the existential question around multicast technology is one that has prevailed since the inaugural East and West coast events, way back in 2005. Panelists talked at length on the history of multicast, while touching briefly on what really matters – the future of multicast, if any. Save for Nokia’s Keith Chow, Senior Product Manager for IP Networks, who plucked some figures from the air claiming that the…
ESHAP, the media consultancy business founded by Evan Shapiro, was the headline act for day 2 of this year’s Streaming Media East conference in Boston. It did not disappoint. Shapiro has gained notoriety for animated and expletive-laden talks on the state of the media industry – gripping audiences with jazzy visualizations based on third-party data. The way in which of some of Shapiro’s creative data maps are presented could be considered dubious, and are clearly visually manipulated to align with ESHAP’s own apocalyptic industry agenda. That said, there is very little we disagree with in the former NBCUniversal executive’s pontificating. Here is a link (because embedded WordPress images are shitty and would not do it justice) to one of Shapiro’s…
The United States and Australia have signed a Climate, Critical minerals, and Clean Energy Compact which will enable enhanced cooperation within the two countries and make Australia only the second country after Canada to be considered a “domestic source” under the US Defense Production Act. Australia has significant deposits and active mines producing many of the minerals required for an effective energy transition, lithium, nickel, and cobalt for high-nickel cathode batteries. Rare-earth metals for permanent magnets used in electric vehicle motors and in other applications. Use of Australia’s mineral reserves as a means to accelerate the shift towards electrification, particularly servicing US markets, was increasingly on the table after the passing of the IRA. The agreement will create ministerial taskforces…
Somehow related to the previous story regarding the SOEC (Solid Oxide Electrolyzer Cell) gigafactory that’s being built by Topsoe, the Danish company has already found another customer for its product, albeit only a Memorandum of Understanding has been signed as of now. Four Danish companies, Copenhagen Atomics, Alfa Laval, Aalborg CSP and Topsoe, and two state-owned Indonesian companies, Pupuk Kaltim and Pertamina New & Renewable Energy have agreed to investigate the possibility of establishing a production line for pink ammonia in Indonesia. Pink ammonia is produced via the Haber-Bosch process, where atmospheric nitrogen is reacting with hydrogen – in this case pink hydrogen produced using energy from a nuclear plant. The problem with pink anything these days is the cost…
Nokia has delivered 70 Drone-in-a-Box units to Belgium’s Citymesh project. The Nokia Drone Networks platform will be used to control the drones, which house video and thermal cameras, which will be used to provide emergency services functions for the country. The project is branded as SENSE by Citymesh. Telit has dropped the antitrust lawsuit that it inherited when it acquired Thales’ cellular IoT products. The latter had alleged that Nokia and Thales were abusing their market position, related to component-level licensing for standards essential patents (SEPs). The case was filed in Munich. Mavenir has reportedly won an Open RAN deal with Bharti Airtel, covering up to 10,000 sites in rural locations. The country has deployed some 140,000 5G base stations…
UK-based chip technology start-up AccelerComm has raised $26.78 million (£21.5 million) in a second round of funding, that will enable it to expand the development and marketing of its RAN optimization intellectual property (IP). The B round of funding was led by Swisscom. This comes at an opportune time to tap into rising interest in the next wave of 5G technology, based on 5G-Advanced (5G-A). The first wave of 5G roll-outs, based largely on 5G Non-Standalone and the 4G core, have broadly aimed to boost speed and quality of experience for existing applications based on mobile broadband. But to increase the revenue and profit gains that will justify the 5G build-out, advanced operators know they need new sources of business,…
BT has announced plans to reduce its headcount by between 40,000 and 55,000 jobs, starting in 2028 and due to complete in 2030. Much of these are linked to the scheduled end of its fiber network deployment, but the mention of AI in the announcement has captured the limelight, leading to a bit of an overreaction in the press. To be clear, this is a very significant slimming down. BT currently has some 130,000 staff, so the maximum reduction would be 42.3% of total roles. BT clarified that this includes some 15,000 engineers building the fiber network, which is due for completion by the end of 2024, and some 10,000 engineers that maintain both copper and fiber infrastructure. “When we…
Calls for regulation of AI from within the industry have spread like wildfire, with Sam Altman, CEO of Microsoft-backed OpenAI, latest to call for regulation of advanced large language machine learning models – within the US initially. This came barely over a week after AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton resigned from Google, with an admission that he regretted some of his developments. Large language models employ deep neural networks with massive numbers of parameters for tweaking in training, over a trillion in modern cases, in fact 170 trillion for the latest Open AI GPT-4, almost 1000 times the 175 billion of its predecessor GPT-3, and almost 100,000 times more than GPT-2 before that. This exploits the immense computational power now able…