Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
The second half of 2022 saw many Open RAN challenger vendors having to make staff cuts as the nascent market failed to deliver large-scale revenues in the short term. Mavenir was among them, though its layoffs were less severe than at rivals such as Parallel Wireless, but the US core, IMS and Open RAN supplier now appears to have made some further cutbacks. These came to light when Ryan Salm, director of strategic marketing and business development, posted on LinkedIn that he would be looking for a new role amid layoffs. Mavenir’s CEO Pardeep Kohli told Fierce Wireless: “In 2023, as other technology companies are doing, given the current market concerns about the economy and geopolitical challenges, Mavenir is streamlining…
Dish Network’s repeated claims to be building a very low-cost 5G network have been cast into doubt on several occasions over the past year, when the operator has been forced to seek new funds. Most recently, Dish finalized a $2bn debt offering in November, and now it is planning another one, this one involving about $500m of its senior secured notes. Much of the proceeds are expected to go towards further build-out of its greenfield, cloud-native 5G network, and the notes will be secured by Dish assets, probably its spectrum. According to financial analysts at Raymond James, in a client note: “As we wait for the pricing of these notes, we think Dish will need to raise additional money later this…
While many operators are focused on securing more spectrum in capacity bands around 3.5 GHz, some are starting to lobby for bigger allowances in the sub-GHz coverage bands, often to improve the economics of deploying 5G Standalone (SA), which needs to achieve broad coverage without being able to rely on the 4G anchor network, as Non-Standalone mode does. It is not coincidence that T-Mobile USA, the first major carrier in the world to deploy 5G SA at scale, had taken a coverage-driven approach to 5G even in the NSA phase, leveraging its substantial investment in 600 MHz spectrum. More typically, operators have deployed 5G to add capacity, using midband frequencies, and relied on 4G for coverage. If they are 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…
The latest effort to shore up security for 5G network slicing at Canada’s University of Waterloo does not at first sight seem of great note globally with its modest funding of CAD1.5m ($1.11m), but is of interest for its primary focus on defense. It is also notable for its focus on vulnerabilities arising from the automation and orchestration enabled by software-defined networking (SDN) that makes it possible to slice networks in the first place. The University of Waterloo is part of a consortium called ‘5G and beyond’, set up by Canada’s Department of National Defense (DND) to develop secure 5G network slices for military deployment. The group is funded by the Department of National Defense (DND) through its Innovation for…
There is no shortage of ideas for generating revenues from 5G services in both the consumer and business spheres, but it is still hard to find too many concrete examples of resounding success in achieving rapid return on investment on infrastructure. This partly reflects a continuing focus on data within consumer 5G plans and partly a best effort approach taken to service delivery where the performance users obtain is highly dependent on location and on traffic levels in densely occupied areas. Remedies include further roll-out of 5G over midbands to increase coverage at high data rates, and judicious use of millimeter wave spectrum with its higher bandwidths to guarantee performance in public areas that are sometimes highly congested, such as…
Ericsson last week announced the addition of Cradlepoint’s NetCloud Private solution to its enterprise portfolio. There, it will join “Ericsson Private 5G (EP5G), the company’s private networks workhorse, but the new solution will target customers that require a relatively simple solution. NetCloud Private is a subscription-based solution that claims to offer the simplicity of an end-to-end, plug-and-play approach. As such, it is aimed primarily at ‘IT-lean’ customers, particularly in logistics, light manufacturing, government, retail, hospitality and healthcare. The offering provides a low-complexity alternative to Ericsson’s EP5G solution. Its ease of operation and convenience are key selling points – it comes complete with a planning tool to aid with antenna set-up and promises a WiFi-like experience with features such as…
Since the 5G standards were split into Non-Standalone (NSA) and Standalone (SA) strands in 2017, it was assumed that NSA, which could be deployed with the existing 4G core, would provide a way for operators to move to 5G quickly and relatively simply, but that they would quickly upgrade to ‘true 5G’ – supported by SA and the cloud-native 5G core. This would happen because they would need the additional capabilities of the SA core to enable new use cases and revenue streams, particularly in enterprise, where performance requirements would be far more diverse and demanding than in the 4G+, mobile broadband world addressed by NSA. In fact, only 39 operators have started deploying 5G SA in public networks, according…
If 5G Standalone (SA), based on a cloud-native 5G core, was supposed to introduce ‘true 5G’, remarkably few operators have seen the need to reach this milestone. Only 39 worldwide, according to new estimates from dell’Oro, have deployed 5G SA commercially. Since the main commercial justification for the challenging migration to SA revolve around enterprise services, it is clear that a better business case needs to be established, and operators need improved confidence that a cloud-native platform, capable of supporting slicing and 5G-Advanced capabilities as they emerge, really will deliver new revenues and profit margins. Meanwhile, it’s that stage in the lifecycle of a mobile network generation when the operators start to question the validity of the 3GPP’s standards process.…
Five years ago this week… An evaluation team set up by MPEG and the ITU’s Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) proposed a successor to HEVC. Slated for arrival in 2020, JEM (Joint Exploration Mode) was said to offer significant performance gains in compression compared to HEVC. JEM was architecturally similar to HEVC, but MPEG’s decision to proceed with a successor while it was still wrangling over IP spats seemed tantamount to an admission that its performance improvement over H.264 had been unable to meet the rising demand for ultra HD, OTT content and 5G applications. — Ahead of Dish Network’s official Q4 2022 results filing, the US satellite operator has disclosed in a preliminary 8K that net pay TV subscriber losses reached 268,000…
When a report with the garbled and uninviting headline ‘Green Future Networks Telco Supply Chain Sustainability’ drifted through the wires before settling in the Faultline inbox, our first instinct was to ignore it as irrelevant and poorly written. Yet something stopped us – an instinct that the video delivery chain has much to learn about supply chain sustainability from the mobile space. When we think supply chain, we think scope 3 – the indirect emissions produced from a company’s supply chain. When we think scope 3, we also think greenwashing. That fast and furious leap has unfortunately been ingrained in thought processes by big tech firms such as Apple, from which Faultline is still trying to procure an answer about…
Swiss anti-piracy outfit Nagra made a noticeable splash at CES 2023, and Faultline wanted to find out why. Is a B2B technology supplier like the Kudelski division not better off holding back its marketing and events budget for a bigger yet more focused push at NAB – at the opposite end of Q1? “Different horses for different courses,” quips Nagra’s Tim Pearson, Senior Director of Product Marketing, via video call with Faultline this week. Pearson reels off several highlights from Nagra’s CES showcase, where the vendor’s core content protection arsenal was being padded out by Kudelski-level products – covering IoT, home automation, and web3 – to dazzle the CES crowd. The Nagra team clearly relished the change of tone at…
It seems that you cannot move for mention of the ChatGPT AI-based text spitter-outer this week, and the online narrative has taken a weird course. Initially recognized as a neat way to generate background text for copywriting jobs, many evangelists have now proclaimed that ChatGPT is a synthesizer of all crawlable human knowledge. The initial results are surprising, as the tool from owner OpenAI does seem to have practical uses. Coders are able to paste snippets into the tool, which will then iterate on them and provide a fleshed-out expansion or error corrections. Cursory conversations can be had with the tool, and simple requests such as ‘write me a marketing email for a cordless drill’ will be met with success.…
Varnish Software, the Swedish private CDN slinger, has secured a new customer with multimedia outfit Future. The two parties have subtly celebrated the contract on social media, rather than pushing out an official press release through the wires – so it’s a good job Faultline is all eyes. Future is a firm with frightening scale. It boasts reaching 1 in 3 adults in the US and 1 in 2 adults in the UK, through its many online magazine brands including Tech Radar, Tom’s Guide, PC Gamer, Digital Camera, Cinema Blend, Go Compare, Guitar World, and more. This is a major client coup for Varnish Software not only in terms of sheer eyeballs, but also for Varnish’s API and Web Acceleration…
Stop the press. 2023 has an acquisition. Building on a strong 2021 and a stellar 2022, JW Player – a SaaS video platform provider – has swung in the new year with the purchase of InPlayer, a supplier of subscription and identity management technology. This particular dose of video vendor M&A interests us more than most because New York-based JW Player has a track record for having its finger on the pulse. Where JW Player has made dealings in the past, rivals have soon followed. Where JW Player has previously identified holes in competitors’ portfolios, hole-plugging has been spotted. The InPlayer video platform is known for its monetization flair, with a wealth of capabilities to monetize subscription-based business for content…
Utility Dive reports that the California Public Utilities Commission has approved projects with San Diego Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison which will add 800 MW of new solar and storage to the Caiso grid. The SDG&E deals are one solar+storage project, by June and two energy storage battery projects for mid-2024. The SCE’s deals are four energy storage projects. Hydrostor, Canada’s Advanced Compressed Air Energy Storage specialist has signed a 25 year PPA for 200 MW capacity and 1,600 MWh output from its Willow Rock Energy Storage Center. This contract is worth almost $1 billion over the 25 years and provides up to 8 hours of energy storage to Central Coast Community Energy. The Greenko Group said this…
Graphite (or crystalline carbon) is the dominant anode material used in the manufacturing of lithium-ion batteries and is both naturally mined and produced synthetically. In 2021, China exported nearly 200,000 tons of natural graphite, by far the largest single exporter of the material with Germany a distant second exporting just 17,000 tons. Interestingly, Turkey is considered to have the most significant reserves of the material despite exporting just 2,500 tons of natural graphite in 2021. Natural graphite is the preferred feedstock for graphite anodes in terms of specification, as it results in higher capacity batteries and is cheaper than its synthetic counterpart, but synthetic anodes perform better when considering deterioration, charging speeds and electrolyte compatibility. It’s arguably the case that…
The majority of Britishvolt’s 300 staff have been informed of their immediate redundancy as of Tuesday 17th of January, following the collapse of an internal buyout that was pursued over the weekend. We’ve been concerned about Britishvolt for a good while now, even taking the occasional drive past the development site last February and September to see what exactly was going on – or more accurately – what wasn’t. The site looked broadly similar even after a 7-month gap, which at the time was explained to us as the result of delays. Evidently it seems to have been about a bit more than that. What should have tipped us off that something company-ending was about to happen was Tata Group’s…
This week the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen used a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos to promise investments from the EU very similar to the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) act passed by the US. Von der Leyen said she will bring in new legislation, adding a new Green Deal Industrial Plan, to go with Europe’s original European Green Deal, the Just Transition Fund, and its NextGenerationEU and REPowerEU energy security pieces of legislation. The Green Deal Industrial Plan is a sort of stand-off and it is framed as either a parallel island of investment which can co-exist with the IRA or a direct rival to it, to incentivize European companies to stay at home and…
The Small Cell Forum has released a new addition to its FAPI (Functional API) family of interfaces, which is designed to provision Layer 1 system-on-chip (SoCs) with management plane capabilities for Open Fronthaul, the initial specification devised by the O-RAN Alliance. The new spec provides some bridging between the two organizations’ preferred 3GPP functional splits (which define how MAC and PHY layer functions are split across the radio unit and the virtualized baseband in a vRAN). SCF has mainly focused on Split 6, in which Layer 1 functions are deployed on the RU, and O-RAN Alliance on Split 7.2, which divides Layer 1 between the RU and the baseband. The spec is officially called SCF229 FAPI operations, administration and maintenance…