Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
One of the most immediate concerns at Integrated Systems Europe (ISE) 2023 in Barcelona this week was the role of physical cabling and networks, among the production specialists. This was most apparent when examining the number of Network Device Interface (NDI) mentions, complete with working demonstrations and products for purchase, versus the comparative absence of Reliable Internet Stream Transport (RIST) – another upstart contribution protocol that has struggled to make headway against archrival Secure Reliable Transport (SRT). Central to the surge in NDI has been Norwegian broadcast vendor Vizrt Group, which has been reorganized, to try and solve some of the tension between its open-ish NDI protocol and commercial divisions. For the top-tier broadcasters, Vizrt is the brand, but for…
Samsung is trying to get ahead of any sustainability criticisms, unveiling its life cycle assessment (LCA) on the carbon footprint of its semiconductor offerings. With its LCA established at the end of last year, Samsung plans to quantify the carbon footprints of chips manufactured across all its global manufacturing, testing and assembly locations in Korea, China, and the US. As defined by the ISO, “a life cycle assessment is the compilation and evaluation of the inputs, outputs and potential environmental impacts of a product system throughout its life cycle.” It is unclear exactly how long this will take, or what the resulting KPIs will be, while Faultline’s attempts to clarify this with Samsung have so far been unanswered. However, it…
Open Caching has a new operator win, with Japanese incumbent cableco Jupiter Communications (J:Com) deploying a system from US-based vendor Qwilt to boost network capacity and enhance video quality. As always with any PR around Open Caching, however, we aren’t convinced by the weak arguments in favor of quality improvements, which we do not see outweighing the cost-saving benefits of the technology. With the announcement highlighting improving the quality of live streaming, along with VoD content and other media applications delivered through the J:Com network, this latest client scalp is an attempt by Qwilt and the Streaming Video Technology Alliance to convince service providers that Open Caching can be a salve for live streaming too. Live peak audiences of major…
GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy (GEH), Ontario Power Generation, SNC-Lavalin and Aecon have signed a deal to deploy a BWRX-300, the small modular reactor design at OPG’s Darlington New Nuclear Project site in Canada. This could end up as the first commercial contract for a grid-scale SMR in North America and jumps in front of efforts from NuScale to achieve much the same, but in the US. The GEH design has previously been selected last August by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) which is still going through its licensing process, as is another installation announced in Poland through ORLEN Synthos Green Energy (OSGE) which plans to deploy a fleet of them. Other sites in Sweden, the US and the UK are…
GreenGo Energy, a project management company, and the Ringkøbing-Skjern Municipality have revealed plans to develop a green energy park which will house 4GW of wind and solar farms feeding 2GW worth of electrolyzers aimed at producing green hydrogen and derivatives. The short-term target is for the park to produce 1 million metric tons (MMT) of green hydrogen and derivatives (green fuels) per year by 2030. Denmark is no stranger to the Power-to-X (P2X) industry as plans for a 3GW P2X electrolysis plant in Western Denmark have been revealed by Ørsted a few months prior – Rethink covered the matter here. Megaton, as the project is called, will benefit from 4GW of dedicated onshore and offshore renewable energy made out of…
Europe’s 6G-IA boosts cooperation with ETSI Europe’s 6G Smart Networks and Services Industry Association (6G-IA) has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with ETSI to cooperate over 5G and ultimately 6G standardization and regulation. 6G-IA’s main objective is to promote European leadership in 5G and then evolution towards 6G. The organization represents the private side in both the 5G Public Private Partnership (5G-PPP) and the Smart Networks and Services Joint Undertaking (SNS JU). The European Commission itself represents the public side of both initiatives. “It is therefore very relevant that 6G-IA join forces with ETSI and be further involved in its Research, Innovation and Standards Ecosystem (RISE) group as well as the ETSI Technology Radar (ETR) activities mapping emerging technology…
Intel’s revenues nosedived in its fourth quarter, falling 32% year-on-year to $14bn amid macro-economic headwinds, challenges from the ARM-based community in key sectors, and decline in its core data center and PC businesses. Its Networks and Edge division was the least concerning, with a fall of only 1%. CEO Pat Gelsinger told the analyst call: “We readily admit these results are lower than what we expect for ourselves. We expect macro weakness at least through the first half of 2023 with the possibility of improvements in the second half … We have a long way to go to reach our financial expectations.” Analysts had predicted $14.4bn in revenue, but were even more disappointed about earnings per share, which came in…
The long-running saga of patent licensing for key video codec technologies continues – and the more video-centric mobile network usage becomes, the more important this saga is for the cellular ecosystem, and for the cost of devices. The latest news is that patent pool operator Velos Media is bailing on its pool for HEVC, one of the two main families of codec standards, with those patents now returning to their owners. Owner Marconi still claims some 400 assets, but this is down from some 5,700, and the Velos website no longer makes mention of BlackBerry, Ericsson, Panasonic, Qualcomm, Sharp or Sony. This is long overdue, and should significantly reduce the cost of licensing HEVC, as Velos was comically more expensive.…
Mobile operators have repeatedly tried to create open platforms to expose their application programming interfaces (APIs) in order to build broad developer communities to rival those of the Internet giants and improve their position in the online value chain. However, successive attempts, such as the ill-fated Wholesale Application Community (WAC) have had limited impact and have often fallen apart amidst conflicts of interest between operators. The GSMA has established some successful open APIs in specific applications but in general, operators have resorted to their own APIs, an approach that fragments the addressable market for applications developers, in stark contrast to the huge bases of Android, iOS or Amazon. But Andy Tiller, head of member products and services at TM Forum…
The growing momentum behind Cellular-V2X technology in the automotive sector might suggest it is now ready for large scale deployment to improve road safety and even enable autonomous driving. Yet C-V2X is still very much work in progress, as witnessed by the plethora of research being conducted and papers published on the subject, even as the technology has started being rolled out, especially in China. C-V2X is the cellular variant of V2X (vehicle-to-everything) technology that has emerged as the foundation for future automotive connectivity serving infotainment, navigation and control, essential for automated driver assistance (ADA) for road safety and ultimately self-driving. While expectations of fully automated driving up to Level 4 or Level 5, where human drivers can switch off…
A key promise of 5G Standalone (SA) and core is to enable full network slicing, including support for multiple service level agreements (SLAs), with varying bit-rates and latencies, within a single network. This capability has just been demonstrated in two trials involving top tier operators and vendors. , One, involving Samsung and Japanese operator KDDI took place in Q4 2022 and claimed success in demonstrating SLA assurance network slicing in Tokyo, Japan. The other trial featured Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson and Qualcomm at the former’s campus in Bonn, Germany, demonstrating how a priority scheduling mechanism enabled network slicing with variable QoS over a network combining millimeter wave and midband frequencies. The two trials therefore exhibited different aspects of network slicing-based assurance.…
As we also analyze in relation to Open RAN (see separate item), the USA’s potential renaissance in the cellular networks industry relies heavily on the innovations of its operators rather than its vendors. Both AT&T and Verizon have been influential in various bids to reset global network standards around open and software-defined platforms, and while their impact on the RAN, outside their own operations, remains to be seen, in edge compute and white box transport networks, their impact on industry-wide trends is already clear. AT&T has vague timetables for virtualizing its RAN, which it has always stated would be the final (and most high-risk) phase of its long journey towards cloud-native and software-defined networks. But it is already using disaggregated…
In its most recent analysis of the state of the RAN market, research firm Dell’Oro Group pointed to “stronger-than-expected O-RAN progress in North America”, which had boosted the company’s overall outlook for the technology. It now predicts that Open RAN will account for 15% to 20% of global RAN by 2027.” The big question is how far AT&T and Verizon, in particular, will assemble their own Open RAN platforms and ecosystems, with their own intellectual property, rather than adopting vanilla specifications. This would create a US-centric platform that would either distinguish US networks from others, or could be shared more broadly – commercially like Rakuten Symphony is doing, or via open alliances. Of course, new mobile entrant Dish Network is,…
India aims to capitalize on its accelerating 5G roll-out by achieving a long-held ambition of becoming a major exporter of wireless communications technology from 2024. This goal has been spelt out by the country’s telecom minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, who touched on plans to export some of its locally developed 5G technology within a year, as well as longer established 4G components. Vaishnaw emphasized the role of the country’s public/private partnership in developing 5G technology, which would be involved in the roll-out to between 50,000 and 70,000 towers across India over the rest of 2023. These statements are worth unpacking because they are slightly ambiguous, and are made in the context of the latest twist a long-running saga in India over…
Periodically, the wireless industry headlines are dominated by high profile patent licensing disputes, such as the recently settled one between Ericsson and Apple. Now, Nokia and Samsung are the latest to announce a deal (see below), this one concluded more amicably than their previous cross-licensing arrangement. These deals serve to remind us of the huge power that comes from large-scale ownership of intellectual property, especially of standards-essential patents (SEP). Ericsson’s most recent fiscal quarter was partially saved by the windfall from its Apple settlement (see Wireless Watch January 23 2023). Nokia may no longer be a major smartphone maker, but its Technologies division can still win significant revenues from licensing patents (and the Nokia brand). SEPs reflect the foundational definitions…
Five years ago this week… AT&T sneakily unveiled itself as an AirTies customer in a small blogpost promoting its new Smart WiFi extender for multi-AP set-ups, promising increases in coverage of 1,000 square feet and stronger speeds for client devices. AT&T alone offered more influence than the combined force of the other broadband providers in the US using AirTies technologies at the time – Atlantic Broadband, Frontier and Midco. It seemed that Quantenna and Broadcom were both already aware of the deal, which would have explained why they had licensed the proprietary mesh architecture of AirTies. Of course, Faultline had known about Airties’ AT&T coup long before 2018. — AT&T added 280,000 fiber broadband subscribers in Q4 2022, to…
Metaverse may be an overhyped term thrust upon the world by one vendor, but it has become a convenient rallying call for strategies and partnerships within the mobile world. A recent example covering Asia-Pacific is a memorandum of understanding (MoU) reached between Singaporean operator SingTel and South Korea’s SK Telecom (SKT), to expand in the region through services based on 5G under that banner. The two will begin this endeavor in Singapore where SingTel has already established a 5G network suitable for trials of some of the key technologies requiring high bandwidth and low latency. SKT will contribute its metaverse platform called ifland, which it launched in November 2022 to bring together some of the requisite technologies under the extended…
Velos Media is bailing on its HEVC patent pool program, with those patents now returning to their owners. Owner Marconi still claims some 400 assets, but this is down from some 5,700, and the Velos website no longer makes mention of BlackBerry, Ericsson, Panasonic, Qualcomm, Sharp, and Sony. This is long overdue, and should significantly reduce the cost of licensing HEVC, as Velos was comically more expensive. However, it is not clear what is going to happen to any existing Velos licensee agreements, and there is likely going to be a chaotic period of legal work in the meantime, as licenses get transferred and forms updated. Velos’ apparent departure still leaves the HEVC codec with two patent pools – the…
Video streaming as an industry is infinitely obsessed with quality – and few pockets personify this increasingly unhealthy addiction to quality more than the video compression camp. Pioneers of video encoding and transcoding have, for years, been heralded as bit-saving icons. But times are changing, video quality perceptions are changing, and now the Greening of Streaming (GoS) is changing its intensity. The non-profit industry initiative is in the fledgling stages of talking about plans to pressure the industry into benchmarking energy-optimized encoding over quality-optimized encoding. If anything else, the effort will not be without contention among the compression elite. Hot off the press from working group 6, GoS’s dedicated compression group, the energy-optimized encoding project must first figure out a…
The European Commission has opened its consultation into proposed electricity market reforms first announced during its State of the Union address last September. The consultation focuses on how exactly it should change the electricity market to better protect European consumers during episodes of volatile pricing on the TTF exchange caused by volatile natural gas prices. The consultation will remain open until February 13th and aims to be implemented within this quarter, EU countries and lawmakers will negotiate the final market reforms. The proposals include increasing the use of contracts for difference (CfD), long-term fixed-price contracts for energy procurement, and power purchase agreements (PPAs). Increasing the use of CfDs has already been called for by France and Spain for hydropower and…