Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
If the Open RAN community ends 2022 on a rather disappointed note, it will be partly because the expectations set for the platform were always over-ambitious. Expecting operators to deploy a brand new architecture at rapid pace and broad scale, in their macro networks, would always have been very optimistic, even if that architecture would not also be a) their first foray into virtualized RAN; b) based on interfaces that were not, except in the case of Open Fronthaul, completed and hardened; and c) needing to coexist with ‘legacy’ networks that had sometimes only been rolled out 2-3 years before. To add unfamiliar and small-scale vendors into the mix too just added to the perceived risk. This is not to…
Dish Network has many challenges. It has to hit FCC-mandated 5G roll-out targets while taking share from the big US operators in both consumer and enterprise markets; proving out its ambitious wholesale model; starting to mitigate the decline of its core pay-TV business; and finding sufficient funds to do all of the above. However, at least Dish has not suffered from excessive caution. It has set out a clear vision of how it will build a fully sliceable virtualized RAN and core, which will enable it to provision differentiated virtual networks to support its own retail operations, led by Boost Mobile, and (it hopes) a large number of enterprise and private network wholesale customers too. It has taken a significant…
Regulators around the world have come under pressure from telcos and over-the-top service providers to relax network neutrality rules to allow the use of network slicing for allocation of differentiated services over 5G networks. This issue has been simmering for around six years, ever since the potential of dynamic slicing under 5G became clear, but has come to the boil as operators embark on serious trials or even early commercial deployments. This adds further complexity to the network neutrality issue, which itself has ebbed and flowed for over two decades, as many nations continually adjust their stances under lobbying from one side or the other. In the USA, it seems that net neutrality rules tend to follow presidential election cycles,…
Special Report: Will 2023 be different in 5G? There are two more issues of Rethink Wireless Watch still to come before the holiday break, so it’s a bit early to start on the annual sport of gazing into next year’s crystal ball. But the nearing of year-end inevitably brings reflection on what has taken place over the past 12 months, and whether the events represented transient trends or set the pattern for the years to come. There were certainly issues that received a huge amount of airtime in 2022, but many of these failed to live up to the (often) inflated expectations that were set at the start of the year. A combination of Open RAN, 5G Standalone, telco…
Since Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the company’s metaverse concept and branding in July 2021, mobile operators have been scrambling for position – even those in China, which is pursuing a parallel ‘verse’. There have been marked regional disparities in MNO response, with the greatest enthusiasm and activity coming from the hi-tech areas of Asia-Pacific and far less from Europe. This reflects distinct market dynamics, with Asian countries such as South Korea and Japan lacking the same exposure to the great American media giants and hyperscalers as the western regions, while also having large and powerful MNOs. As a result, some MNOs have been able to build platforms with the scale to compete in a field requiring high investment in…
Faultline’s probing on the roadmap for deliverable datasets was met with some clear milestones during a recent webinar from non-profit trade group Greening of Streaming, as a growing huddle of engineers and technicians try to make heads or tails of the energy consumption of streaming. Greening of Streaming’s Working Group 4 (Events and Energy Measurement) is currently recording the energy consumption of live events across streaming infrastructure. This data will then be passed internally to Working Group 9 (Academia and Industry Group Liaison), before going to UK-based start-up Humans Not Robots and academics at the University of Bristol to collate and sort the data in a bare bones fashion. The three key data points will be application of the device,…
The world’s largest soccer spectacle kicked off last week, and the ever-objective blog from SSIMWave – the Canadian perceptual quality specialist – has been on hand to pit the streaming providers of the FIFA World Cup 2022 against each other. While most headlines fantasize over soaring viewing figures from the Qatar-based tournament for streaming platforms the world over, to the surprise of absolutely no one, few have taken the time to scrutinize less than satisfactory user experiences. SSIMWave has compared YouTube TV with two anonymous providers – simply labeled Provider 2 and Provider 3 for this perceptual quality analysis. Anonymity can presumably only be afforded by way of being an existing SSIMWave customer – either that or a provider that…
DAZN has promoted Dutch content security specialist Irdeto to the rank of primary multi-DRM provider for the global sports streaming platform. Some might argue that DAZN has bigger technological problems on its plate right now than tackling piracy, although the security sector is increasingly emphasizing the direct correlation between pirated content and streaming quality issues – like latency – as well as rising streaming infrastructure costs. For Irdeto, the deal comes as a welcome financial salve as revenues continue to tumble, down 13% as of parent company Multichoice’s latest results. For DAZN, it brings Irdeto’s Anti-Piracy Services into the fold of the two companies’ existing contractual agreement – hardening DAZN’s protective shell against illicit streaming sites. For the broader industry,…
Twitter’s takeover has been tumultuous, and new CEO Elon Musk is now picking a fight with Apple. The core contention is the slice of revenue that Apple takes from all App Store transactions, as Musk desperately tries to find a way to generate the cash needed to pay off a finance package that is due around $1 billion annually in interest. Apple has been taken to task on this point before, and the lawsuit with Epic Games was perhaps that first domino in this particular chain to fall. When we first covered Epic’s baited trap, it looked like the iron-grips that Apple and Google enjoyed were about to be significantly loosened, but Epic’s momentum stalled, as it appeared its choice…
If Amazon were to acquire beleaguered French streaming platform Salto, it would be a move of high hypocrisy by stakeholders that would tear through the fabric of content integrity in France. Salto was created by broadcasters TF1 and M6 not only to compete against the might of US streaming insurgents of the Netflix and Amazon Prime Video variety, but as a long-term vehicle for local content production. This has been upheld by strict content laws in France that require any and all streaming services to invest between 20% to 25% of revenues accrued in France back into local French content production. The gray area is whether the acquisition of Salto by Amazon – or any US company for that matter…
Qualcomm has unveiled its Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC, for flagship smartphones, and the silicon finally supports AV1 decode in hardware. Qualcomm has been a laggard, and we have long suspected that IP concerns were to blame – but good luck extracting that confession. On this note, Dolby just saw one of its patents get revoked by the European Patent Office, which was apparently essential to both Access Advance’s HEVC pool and Sisvel’s AV1 pool. The writing had been on the wall for a while, as leaks of the Qualcomm design were spotted back in February. At the time, we said this somewhat set the stage for a sink or swim moment, as the point would mark the mainstreaming of…
When a press release came across the Faultline news desk a fortnight ago declaring that some little-known company had won a landmark deal as the exclusive video software packager supplier for the world’s largest SVoD platform, sparks of ‘too-good-to-be-true’ fired off in all directions. The celebrations of a Netflix triumph come from Motion Spell, a Paris-based firm which is not a start-up at all, as it might seem, but was actually founded 10 years ago as the IP licensing body behind the open source multimedia framework GPAC (Graphics Project on Advanced Content). Unlike other four-letter acronyms in the video industry, GPAC is not exactly ubiquitous, yet 20 years of open source development are only now beginning to change that perception…
The Dutch high-voltage grid operator, Tennet, has begun a market consultation to search for companies willing to “handle their supply and demand flexibly” in return for payment, to ease the burden on the grid in busy periods. EVs and batteries in general, stand to profit. According to the company the fast past of the energy transition is creating bottlenecks across the Netherlands’ high-voltage grid, with electrification and solar generation outstripping grid investments. Despite having a population of just 17.5 million, sub-par irradiation and low land availability, the Netherlands was the 12th largest solar market in the world in 2021, rivalling Australia for new installations on a per-capita basis. TenneT is the sole high-voltage grid operator in the Netherlands and serves…
It isn’t every day you get to see a piece of artillery outside of a glass cabinet, especially not one that exploded so recently. Enlit Europe’s keynote address was preceded by an emotional and impassioned address from DTEK’s energy storage lead Vadym Utkin, the largest Ukrainian utility company tasked with maintaining much of the country’s electricity grids despite frequent bombardment. DTEK employs 53,000 employees across 7 companies operating within Ukraine, and the company produced 27 TWh of electricity over the course of 2021. It also has a growing renewable energy presence with 1GW of operating capacity. The company serves 3.5 million customers with 5.6 million total connections. As the host introduced Utkin, he walked on stage holding a jagged and…
Dish Network has launched a website and a developer competition, under the brand ‘Level up your dev’, to encourage people to write applications for its 5G network. The competition will be staged alongside the AWS re:Invent show in Las Vegas this week. “We’re changing the game so you can innovate with complete control to develop the future of seamless wireless connectivity, distributed workloads and data-driven apps,” says the website. Developers will be able to test the network and work with other developers as well as Dish executives, including Brian Mengwasser, VP of the company’s MarketPlace and Apps Design, who is leading the project and the creation of the Dish portal. “A guiding principle at Dish is to open the network…
India has been one of the most active countries in seeking to build a homegrown 5G infrastructure industry with the help of emerging Open RAN platforms. Its two largest operators, Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel, both have experience of building their own local ecosystems and platforms and both have been active in open networking trials. In this context, it was initially surprising to see that Sterlite Technologies (STL), an Indian manufacturer and integrator, had ended its expansion into Open RAN and stopped investing in wireless. The company will return to focusing on its core fibre and network services businesses, and is seeking partners to take on its Access Solutions Business Unit and personnel. The unit was set up two years…
Since Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled his metaverse concept and branding in July 2021, mobile operators have been scrambling for position – even those in China, which is pursuing a parallel ‘verse’. There have been marked regional disparities in MNO response, with the greatest enthusiasm and activity coming from the hi-tech areas of Asia-Pacific and far less from Europe. This reflects distinct market dynamics, with Asian countries such as South Korea and Japan lacking the same exposure to the great American media giants and hyperscalers as the western regions, while also having large and powerful MNOs. As a result, some MNOs have been able to build platforms with the scale to compete in a field requiring high investment in advanced…
Arguably the biggest challenge in opening up the RAN will be in the semiconductor layer. Traditional RANs run on baseband processors designed by the proprietary equipment vendors specifically to perform RAN tasks. Ericsson sees the performance of these special-purpose chips as fundamental to its networks’ performance. Far from being ashamed of not adopting open processors, it has even adopted an ‘Ericsson Silicon’ brand, reminiscent of ‘Intel Inside’, to emphasize the differentiation. But the Open RAN vision is that every layer of the network, from chips to management and applications, should be based on common platforms and potentially multivendor. This has prompted a race by the merchant chip firms to develop baseband processors that can compete in performance with the Ericsson…
China is one of the world’s most advanced countries in deploying 5G to support large-scale enterprise and industrial services. There are many case studies of innovative solutions, based on 5G Standalone, being applied to factories, property developments, venues, smart cities and many more. The government says there are more than 4,000 enterprise 5G projects in China, and the operators are even more bullish, saying they are supporting 8,000 between them. However, by contrast with countries, such as Germany, that aim to accelerate the roll-out of 5G enterprise networks by allocating spectrum directly to industries, China’s ‘private networks’ have all been deployed by one of the three major MNOs, in MNO-owned spectrum. This makes a recent announcement in the country interesting.…
The European Union has a large number of projects focused on security and self-sufficiency in critical technology platforms, ranging from satellite (see separate item), to 5G Open RAN and sovereign cloud. Of course, reinforced security systems must be an integral part of all these infrastructure initiatives, in the light of current geopolitical tensions related to China, Russia and the Middle East, among others. The latest move by the European Commission is to invite companies, government agencies and others to submit proposals for “innovative cybersecurity solutions for 5G network infrastructure”. While 4G and its predecessors could be seen as luxuries rather than part of critical national infrastructure, the increased capabilities of 5G, and its inclusion in most national digital and industrial…