Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Dutch solar installations of below 1 MW are to be grid-connected to the tune of only 50% of their rated capacity under the 2023 round of the SDE++ subsidy scheme, which has an $8.5 billion budget. This is according to a proposal still under consideration from regulators, but which is likely to be approved considering high electricity prices, high demand for solar, and limited space on the grid. China’s Autonomous Region of Inner Mongolia intends to install more than 25 GW of renewable energy capacity this year, and has installed 2,150 MW in January alone. The Region has a population of just 24 million but has immense industrial activity and is one of the wealthier Chinese provinces. A JMK Research…
Liberty Global denies rumors of Vodafone takeover but takes stake Liberty Global has acquired a 4.92% stake in the Vodafone Group but denies this is a step towards a full takeover bid. Instead, the move is an opportunistic investment, according to Mike Fries, Liberty Global CEO. “We believe, like many others, that Vodafone’s current share price does not reflect the underlying long-term value of their operating businesses, or their announced consolidation and infrastructure opportunities,” said Fries. This makes Liberty Global Vodafone’s third-largest shareholder after UAE-based telecoms company e& and USA investment group BlackRock. Vodafone, with market capitalization of $30.94bn at the time of the Liberty Global move, reported quarterly results below expectations earlier this month. This kept the share price…
Rakuten Mobile may not achieve its previous target of reaching break-even point by the end of 2023. That goal was not mentioned when the Japanese MNO’s parent group announced its 2022 financial results last week. The e-commerce and cloud giant said that the cost of building out the Rakuten Mobile 4G/5G network had weighted on profitability and the group reported non-GAAP operating losses of ¥325.6bn ($2.45bn) for fiscal year 2022. Excluding Mobile and investment businesses, non-GAAP operating income was up almost 10% year-on-year to ¥177.4bn ($1.33bn). The Mobile business reported revenue of ¥368.7bn ($2.77bn) for the full year, which was up 62% on 2021, with the final quarter showing MNO service revenue of ¥24.5bn ($180m). Operating losses for the year were…
Orange has set out its latest five-year plan, intensifying its focus on enterprise services and targeting “continued and sustainable growth”. Meanwhile, Telecom Italia (TIM) also set out an enterprise-focused strategy to kickstart new growth after several difficult years, even as it continues to pursue deleveraging of the business through a radical restructuring. Orange’s new plan, which follows previous five-year strategies labelled Essentials 2020 and Engage 2025, is called Lead the Future. Its main elements are to capitalize on its core business in countries where it is already active and with strong market share, while building growth in the Middle East and Africa regions, and transforming Orange Business Services (OBS). Orange Group CEO Christel Heydemann said: “The quality of our infrastructure,…
The underlying charging system is essential for liberating the new monetization sources service providers crave to recoup investments in 5G infrastructure and compensate for stalling growth in traditional consumer revenues. This was recognized from the start and a radical overhaul of charging came with the 3GPP Release 15, introduced in September 2018. But, as with other aspects of 5G infrastructure, the underlying standards provide just a blueprint for implementation and there are significant differences between vendor offerings, with plenty of scope for adding value. Under 5G, the charging mechanism has itself become an element of competitive differentiation and also more divorced from the rest of the infrastructure as a component that can be offered independently, even without deploying Open RAN.…
At a time of global recession for big tech, the energy-rich countries of the Gulf are attracting significant inward investment as their economies seek to wean themselves from fossil fuels. This was avidly demonstrated at the latest LEAP annual technology conference in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia earlier this month, where a number of major deals were announced. One involved Huawei pledging $400m investment over five years for cloud services across the region, to support consumers, enterprises, operators and the public sector. This has been in the offing for some time and is the culmination of several announcements over the past year. The first came in February 2022, at last year’s LEAP, when Huawei signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Saudi…
Germany’s nuanced approach to approval and use of Chinese 5G equipment continues with the granting of security certification to ZTE’s 5G base station (gNodeB) by the country’s Federal Office for Information Security (BSI). The German move raises the question of whether Huawei’s gNodeB will also be granted approval, which would attract even greater interest as the firm is larger than ZTE and has been the primary focus of increasingly punitive US actions, and of US pressure on European allies to follow suit. This is the latest in a series of developments in Germany’s relationship with the two primary Chinese vendors in the 5G context, involving tensions with both the USA and the European Union. Germany was reluctant to adopt a…
Cigarettes, neck tattoos, and expletive-laden anecdotes are not what we associate with B2B events in the media and entertainment industry – physical or virtual. Swapping blazers for baseball caps this week, Streaming Media’s events Chair, Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen, sat down to interview superstar music producer and DJ deadmau5 – and it did not disappoint. An early adopter of streaming technologies, deadmau5 – appearing via Zoom without iconic rodent headgear – spoke unflatteringly of the huge costs of setting up events a decade or so ago, burdened by massive fiber cables and satellite uplink vehicles. “It was clear from my end that streaming was just this shining ray of hope that I wouldn’t have to be on an airplane every single day.…
Integrated Systems Europe (ISE) was not short of equipment demos, with the adoption of Audio-Visual-over-IP (AVoIP) making it much easier to jump between vendor ecosystems. Thanks to its adoption, AVoIP was opening doors for broadcast vendors to target the professional audio-visual (ProAV) market, which has been somewhat isolated and untapped. With vendors reporting an apparent slowdown in broadcast segments, this new opportunity is alluring. To work out how large an opportunity ProAV is for Faultline’s more familiar vendors, we were on the ground at the recent ISE 2023 in Barcelona, where a first port of call was with AMD’s Rob Green and Ramesh Iyer, both involved with Pro AV inside the Adaptive and Embedded Computing Group. The two pondered the…
With the largest audience in six years, Super Bowl 57 (LVII) was a roaring success for Fox. However, SSIMwave’s quality analysis has found that the NFL final scored worse than Fox’s soccer World Cup semi-finals and final. Notably, Fox’s own Fox Sports App scored the best, but this does beg the question of what gets lost in translation? SSIMwave’s scoring system rated Fox’s app as 83.3 out of 100. An anonymous US cable operator’s feed scored the lowest of all broadcast and streaming services, at just 72.7. This is glaring, as Fox’s score was based on a 4K HDR stream, with the cable feed being standard HD. The aforementioned World Cup ratings reached as high as 88, but the gap…
Heading into a panel session on the state of codecs during this week’s Streaming Media Connect was not met with the fire and fury one has come to expect from video codec discussions. Despite a titillating line-up of representatives from Warner Bros Discovery, Netflix, AWS, and Bitmovin – each a competitor to another in some capacity – the conversation was a sterile one met mostly with platitudes. Agreement that H.264 is still the most ubiquitous codec. Agreement that HEVC adoption is growing but is marred by the shortage of hardware decoders. Agreement that no one is looking seriously at VVC before 2025. Agreement that LCEVC has promise. The only minor disagreement came when questioning whether AV1 support has been slower…
Sublime Systems is looking to disrupt the global cement industry by replacing the high-temperature kiln within cement production with its patented electrochemical processes, removing the need for industrial heat and in the future reducing energy requirements. In a past article and in our report looking at the global cement industry that you can find here as “Global cement makers looking in wrong direction for decarbonization,” we made the claim that Sublime’s process only really solved the industrial heat side of the question while leaving the production of CO2 for someone else to deal with, we have since been informed this is not the case. Despite our mistake Sublime kindly reached out and corrected us to say we’d missed that Sublime’s…
There are no end of round trip efficiency reminders to the UK government this week, on the news that it plans to push hydrogen into the existing gas pipelines by 2025. A newspaper item in the UK’s Telegraph has all the usual anti-hydrogen slurs as comments, including the famous “it’s against the laws of physics,” comment, but in truth what it plans is understandable if unworkable because the UK has a special gas problem. Some 85% of UK homes are connected to the gas mains, and most of these use the gas both for cooking and for home heat. Ambitious politicians have embraced a Hydrogen Strategy, which includes a variety of uses of hydrogen, but with only 10 MW of…
The European Commission has published its Delegated Act which clearly states the prerequisites that need to be achieved by hydrogen producers in order for their product to be considered renewable. With an eye on the European 2030 target of 10 million metric tons (MMT) of hydrogen or derivates, the commission needed an incentive to accelerate the development of wind and solar energy farms and so it introduced the “additionality” rule which outlines that in order for hydrogen to be considered renewable, it needs to come from newly built wind and solar farms, as opposed to connecting existing farms, that would have otherwise been used to feed the grid, to electrolysis hubs. Marrying the two industries – renewables and hydrogen –…
Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (CIP), a Danish renewable energy project developer and fund manager, has revealed plans to build a 2GW offshore wind farm called Nortada off Portugal’s Atlantic coast. Two weeks prior, the Portuguese Government had launched a public hearing regarding proposals for the delimitation of areas off the country’s Atlantic coast where wind farms can be built, with a 10GW target of offshore wind capacity by 2030 in mind. The Economy Minister, Antonio Costa e Silva, had a lot of praise about his government’s initiative and alluded to plenty of foreign investment opportunities lurking around the seas surrounding the Iberian Peninsula. With wind speeds averaging over 11 miles per hour and an impressive solar irradiance of up to 2000…
Ford has announced that it will be building a factory in Michigan with CATL to make lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries for the growing US EV market. The factory will come online in 2026 and is expected to cost $3.5 billion. Until then Ford will purchase LFP batteries from CATL so it can offer its Mach-E and F-150 Lightning vehicles with a cheaper base option with lower ranges. Ford has also laid off significant amounts of its workforce in the UK and Europe, showing further commitment towards its home market in North America, as it redistributes its resources in preparation for mass EV manufacturing. This deal raises some big questions about how exactly the inflation reduction act (IRA) will work…
Open RAN vendor Mavenir has unveiled its RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC), adding to a growing list of offerings in this strategic category, but also to some operators’ fears of fragmentation in the segment. Mavenir is providing both a non-real-time and near-real-time RIC implementation under its O-RIC banner, and claims to have two Tier 1 customers already as it pitches its software against RICs from Juniper, VMware, Nokia and others. Mavenir had the advantage over some Open RAN challengers of not being a pure start-up, since it had a legacy business in IMS and Rich Communications Services (RCS), to provide revenues while the newer RAN and core businesses were built up. CEO Pardeep Kohli hinted that this process may have to…
Advanced modulation specialist Cohere Technologies has an.nounced two new board members as it gears up for long-elusive commercial impact. They are Johan Wibergh, former group CTO at Vodafone, and industry veteran Amit Mital, founder of venture capital firm Kernel Labs Wibergh, who worked with Cohere on a Vodafone Open RAN trial, said the firm’s implementation of multiuser MIMO is a “game changer” that could double network capacity compared to conventional MIMO systems. Cohere is preparing for commercial launch of its 4G/5G Universal Spectrum Multiplier (USM) software, which will enable its OTFS (orthogonal time frequency and space) waveform to be implemented on multiple vendors’ equipment, hence the Open RAN context. The software was field-tested in June 2021 with Vodafone and several…
The major RAN vendors may not be feeling the pinch from Open RAN challengers just yet, but they will want to showcase their best new developments at this month’s Mobile World Congress to try to keep operators from being tempted away by new suppliers too soon. Ericsson kicked off, holding a pre-MWC event for analysts and media in London, where it discussed many aspects of its business, but inevitably placed new radios at front and center of its pitch. The Swedish firm bolstered its indoor wireless solutions, and added six families of macro radios based on its Ericsson Silicon platform. There was significant emphasis on the silicon innovations, as Ericsson seeks to convince operators of two important points. One, that…
In January, the O-RAN Alliance added new institutions in the USA and Japan to its list of Open Testing and Integration Centers (OTICs), which it has established to address one of the biggest challenges facing Open RAN adoption, the speed of certifying compliance with O-RAN standards. The two new centers are OTIC Japan and Cosmos in the USA. Cosmos is part of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) 5G-centric project, Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR). Such initiatives are important to the Open RAN community as it pursues its goals of enabling large-scale, best-of-breed multivendor networks through open interfaces, and so opening up the RAN supply chain. Various barriers have limited the impact, so far, of the fledgling Open RAN platforms,…