Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Five years ago this week… The Federal Telecommunications Institute (IFT) of Mexico told Telmex that it must separate out the wholesale and the retail sides of the business, to promote local loop unbundling. Telmex held something close to a 60% market share of fixed line broadband in Mexico, at the time, offering some of the most expensive broadband across Latin America. Faultline compared local loop unbundling to socialism – depending on where you are from it is either a) the only answer or b) has never achieved any good – but it was a proven tool to enable rivals to invest in broadband, create competition and bring prices down, having worked in France, the UK, Hong Kong and a few…
US broadband analytics outfit OpenVault has been granted a patent with potential to throw down the gauntlet to rivals in the WiFi diagnostics and optimization space. The US patent (no. 11,477,072) describes a “system and method for prescriptive diagnostics and optimization of client networks” – which OpenVault says provides operators with a full view of elements that contribute to the end user experience. This includes subscriber networks, connected devices, CPE, access networks, and services, to enable proactive operational optimization. The patent is effectively a method of automatically remediating issues in subscriber WiFi and Ethernet networks to reduce truck roll for operators. The figure attached shows a block diagram depicting an implementation of an environment for managing subscriber networks using a prescriptive…
With fragmentation comes demand for federation. Where once live sports could be conveniently found by flicking through the abundance of channels lining a bloated cable TV package, these same events are now dispersed among OTT video services – increasing competition but confusing consumers. Against this backdrop, Disney-owned ESPN wants to steal a march as the go-to portal for live sports action, with plans to create a portal that will direct users to the dedicated streaming platform hosting their match of choice. Even, crucially, to ESPN’s direct competitors in the US marketplace, which are on the rise. This is not a masterstroke. It isn’t even an original idea. But it could prove to be a valuable tool for consumers. Monetizing it,…
The Faultline Podcast is proving to be the perfect teasing ground for video technology vendors, with Pierre Donath, CPO/CMO at 3 Screen Solutions (3SS), being the latest guest to dangle a customer carrot. Luckily, the German multiscreen software specialist has come good, unveiling Canadian operator Telus this week as a new Android TV front-end client. With Telus also recently swinging in content recommendations algorithms from ThinkAnalytics, deployed behind the 3Ready Product Framework from 3SS, packaged into a 4K UHD Jade set top from Vantiva (Technicolor) supporting AV1 decode, this is something of a Europe-led Android TV revolution for Telus. In turn, that bids au revoir to Telus’ legacy Mediaroom-based IPTV platform. The long-surviving Optik TV platform will now become Telus…
Canadian vendor Netskrt has been plugging away in the rail and aviation content distribution markets for some time. However, a new product launch targeting rural and remote ISP installations has seen US operator Nikola Broadband sign up as the first customer. Speaking to Faultline, Steve Miller-Jones, VP Product Strategy at Netskrt, outlined the need for the edge CDN product. “Traditional CDNs do a really good job for well-connected homes, but in rural and remote locations, while the connectivity to the homes may well be quite good, the upstream of the backhaul traffic is the usual limitation.” “Congestion can happen in the access network, but also outside the ISP’s boundaries, as they have to go up to the nearest decent carrier…
The Avanci patent program – part of Dallas-based patent licensing group Marconi – has launched Avanci Broadcast, a new patent pool targeting the ATSC 3.0 broadcast technology. With a claimed 70% to 75% of the necessary patents, Avanci Broadcast is offering significant discounts to those that sign up early, and hoping to create a single pool for the oft-delayed next-generation television broadcasting standard. However, the MPEG LA was first to launch a pool, yet there has been little activity from it. Our understanding is that the agreement for the MPEG LA pool members is not exclusive, and given that the Avanci Broadcast program has already announced customers, the news sounds like something of a death knell for the MPEG ATSC…
As the race for sub $1.5/kg green hydrogen price is well underway, Kazakhstan and India are both making the news this week with individual giga-scale wind farm deals as the Asian countries are churning the wheels on their respective hydrogen industries. ACWA Power, a Saudi developer and investor, has announced a partnership agreement with the Republic of Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Energy and Samruk-Kazyna, the sovereign wealth fund of Kazakhstan, to lead and develop a 1GW wind and battery storage project within the Central Asian country. The project marks ACWA Power’s entry into Kazakhstan, and with an initial investment of $1.5 billion, it aims to support national climate action, renewables integration, and sustainable development efforts through innovation and technology integration. The investment…
Cohere Technologies used the big stage at MWC Barcelona to announce a new partnership with defense and aerospace company Lockheed Martin. Cohere and Lockheed’s respective CEOs Ray Dolan and James Taiclet outlined their vision to create a unified communications platform for the defense community in a joint keynote “The Evolution of Innovation”. Cohere’s Orthogonal Frequency Time Space (OTFS) waveform was at the center of the proposition and has been at the core of Cohere’s products for the past decade. Compared to other modulation techniques such as Time Division Duplexing (TDD), or Frequency Division Duplexing (FDD), OTFS is based on the delay-doppler rather than the time-frequency domain. This domain is typically in use in radar systems and affords superior wireless channel…
IoT has struggled to emerge as a coherent sector and this was still evident at Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2023, with numerous successful deployments and products on show, but still not much harmony between the multiple vertical sectors on parade. Telcos seemed notably more strident and confident than many major vendors, with Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom and SingTel among more bullish tier 1s on the subject. A number of major IoT technology or platform vendors were forced into rearguard defensive mode over IoT, after having divested or shrunk operations in the sector, examples being Ericsson and French electronics and defense conglomerate Thales. IoT is too big a sector for any single vendor, platform or technology to be relevant for all cases,…
Battle of the accelerators breaks out as chip giants target vRAN Time and again at MWC 2023, in conversations about open virtualized RAN, the same mighty barriers to adoption were cited by operators and vendors. These were the cost and complexity of systems integration, and the performance trade-offs incurred when deploying high-performance base stations, especially those with Massive MIMO antenna arrays. Many organizations with an interest in pushing an open, multivendor version of vRAN have turned their attention and innovation to at least one of these huge issues of cost/performance. The new solutions for the latter challenge were particularly prominent in Barcelona, creating a battle of the accelerators on the show floors. One of the most demanding workloads known to…
The Mobile World Congress (MWC) experience tends to go in waves, as Wireless Watch has observed over two decades of attendance (starting with 3GSM in Cannes, France). There are the visionary MWCs, in which the hottest discussions and demonstrations are future-looking. These set out agendas and stir up hype for a coming technology, as in the shows preceding 5G deployment, when all the talk was of holographic interactions and remote surgery. There are shows that are dominated by a particular product launch or piece of news. Then come the shows that focus on practical challenges of implementation and monetisation. These are more sober and perhaps less fun, but address the real issues for operators and vendors. At MWC 2023, we…
Five years ago this week… Sky unexpectedly caved into pressure from streaming giants, adding Netflix and Spotify to its Sky Q set top and Now TV box. Both streaming services were a means of pressuring people onto the Sky Q set top, which offered WiFi mesh connectivity, with alternative backhaul over powerline, UHD content, Kids mode and voice TV remote. Sky had shown a genuine resistance to onboarding anything alien onto its set tops, but had come to realize that Virgin Media’s pioneering approach of treating Netflix like any other channel was the only rational move forward. — Brazilian broadcaster Globo tested an LCEVC-enhanced live stream for the recent Carnival 2023 in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. The…
The largest gathering of mobile operators and vendors has taken place this week, and one of the open keynotes set the stage for a contentious topic of debate at Mobile World Congress (MWC) Barcelona. Typically, the cellular-centric show features some proclamation from a senior politician, teeing up a new legislative effort, which is leapt upon by MNOs that will attempt to convince enthusiastic audiences that they are intrinsically valuable parts of modern life. This year seemed no different, but a spicy riposte from Netflix was most welcome. The European Union’s Internal Markets Commissioner, Thierry Breton, took to the stage, announcing that “we will need to find a financing model for the huge investments needed that respects and preserves the fundamental…
US pay TV behemoth Comcast has, in a roundabout way, announced the acquisition of a 30% stake in Showmax, the South African SVoD platform operated by MultiChoice Group. Except, the announcement itself makes no mention of an acquisition at all, nor of any money changing hands for that matter. Instead, we have a press release heralding the launch of a “new” Showmax group that will be 30% owned by Comcast’s NBCUniversal and 70% owned by MultiChoice. Initially, we assumed Comcast had acquired the 20.1% stake in Showmax held by French pay TV operator Canal+, along with a 9.9% slice of MultiChoice’s existing stake, to make up the 30% share. That was until a representative from MultiChoice confirmed with Faultline that…
This week a third US utility – American Electric Power – decided to sell of its unregulated renewables portfolio in order to get cash ready so that it can take advantage of the Inflation Reduction Act, whereby it can either build transmission or new renewables projects which will be even more profitable. The AEP renewables will go to a consortium called IRP Acquisition Holdings, led by Invenergy and backed by funds from Blackstone. The deal is worth around $1.5 billion. The 14 projects are a mix of wind and solar totaling just under 1.4 GW of unregulated, contracted renewables The sale should close in Q2 and the net payment to AEP will be around $1.2 billion after costs and taxation.…
The difference in outcome between the UK’s Britishvolt and Freyr Battery of Norway could not be further apart. Freyr this week said its’ factory was ready to start making battery cells and deliver them to its Customer Qualification Plant (CQP) bang on schedule. It comes fresh from getting away a second equity offering, and has the confidence of its financial markets where it raised $264.5 million, and has expanded into the US, having bought a 368-acre site for a factory to open in 2025 in Coweta County, Georgia which will eventually output 34 GWh of cells. It has convinced state and local investors to offer $410 million of incentives over the life of the project. By comparison the remnants of…
A joint venture between Transitional Energy Group and UK-based renewable developer, Hive Energy, will develop a 3GW green ammonia project in Tierra del Fuego, Chile. Tierra del Fuego is the famous archipelago right at the bottom of the South American continent, located along the Magellan Straits. The Gente Grande Project will thus benefit from an exceptional wind climate – wind speeds of up to 25 meters per second – with a large area of uninhabited flat land, deepwater port facilities, and quayside areas for production and storage facilities – overall a prime location for wind farms and centralized hydrogen and derivates production and export. Mirgor SACIFIA, a local company also plans to invest $200 million in some of the local…
Local news reports suggest that the German government is pushing ahead with plans to merge its four high-voltage Transmission System Operators (TSOs) – namely TenneT, 50Hertz, TransNet BW, and Amprion, by purchasing stakes in each company. In the case of TenneT, the payment for its German subsidiary may come to $21 billion. The Economy Ministry has openly acknowledged that discussions are underway with TenneT and TransnetBW. Germany bought a 20% stake in 50Hertz in 2018 while EnBW has offered to sell a 49.9% stake in TransnetBW, which it owns. Bloomberg this week cited anonymous sources saying that Amprion stakeholders support the merger. This reunification of the grid will substantively revert former Angela Merkel’s privatization of the grid, which is blamed…
GSMA urges India to allocate 6 GHz to 5G The GSMA has repeated calls for India to adopt 6 GHz spectrum for 5G in place of satellite operations – some of that spectrum is currently allocated to the Indian Space Research Organization, and in other parts of the world, such as the USA, much of the 6 GHz band has been freed-up for WiFi 6E. In a letter to India’s communications minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, the GSMA urged: “The 6 GHz range is the primary midband spectrum to meet the needs for 5G expansion and its timely availability will drive cost-efficient network deployment, help lower the broadband usage gap and support digital inclusion.” This follows a call last month in January…
Red Hat, the IBM-owned cloud software firm, is staking a claim to be the industry’s top Kubernetes platform provider. That is taking it increasingly deeply into 5G networks and into media segments like video. French video compression provider Ateme announced last week that its live video encoding and delivery suite had been validated for running cloud-native network functions (CNFs) on Red Hat OpenShift. Any service provider using any cloud with Red Hat OpenShift can now deploy Ateme’s complete suite, including encoders and content delivery networks, following testing across public and private on-premise cloud environments. This shows how the OpenShift-managed Kubernetes platform is starting to expand not just to 5G networks but the services they support. It is no coincidence that…