Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Private networks are becoming an important revenue generator for mobile operators in India, even more than elsewhere, in a country stuck with chronically low ARPUs. This is even more true than ever now as the country’s 5G infrastructure deployment gets underway following the spectrum auctions completed in early August 2022. That is why the operators have been lobbying hard to prevent enterprises being granted their own spectrum after regulator TRAI had proposed allowing them to set up their own private 5G networks. That was shortly before the auction and prompted mobile operators to argue this could seriously jeopardize their 5G business case given the amount they would have to spend on 5G spectrum, as they did. The government though was…
Following a week of speculation and rumors, the European Commission (EC) last week formally unveiled its new multi-orbit satellite constellation plan, IRIS². IRIS² was conceived almost two years ago, first proposed by Thierry Breton, former Orange CEO and French finance minister, and now EU Commissioner for Internal Market. While the announcement contained essentially no details on the network architecture, and public information on the project exists only in rough strokes, it has a set of clearly defined goals and objectives. Current projections place the constellation’s cost at around €6bn, with €2.4bn to come from EU, and €3.6bn from the European Space Agency (ESA) and private funds, though these cost estimates date from late 2020 and are almost certain to be…
Special Report: National 5G objective For now at least, the era of globalization is coming to an end, hastened on its way by the pandemic, by wars in various arenas, by supply chain and skill shortages with associated inflation, by environmental concerns, and by the new geopolitics. National and pan-regional governments are retreating behind their borders, allying with geographical neighbors and seeking to assert firm control of their own security, data and value chains. No industry is more inherently globalized than telecoms, and hi-tech in general. But just as connectivity and compute underpin global chains of communication and trade, so they also enable new kinds of security attack on a worldwide scale. Technology, especially 5G, satellite and cloud platforms, have…
Picocom wins Open RAN RU deal with SOLiD Picocom, the UK-based developer of Open RAN baseband chips for small cells, has announced a design win with SOLiD, a supplier of in-building systems. SOLiD will use the Picocom PC802 product and related software to power its next generation of 5G Open RAN radio units. “Partnering with Picocom to purchase PC802 devices and license its 5G NR O-RU software gives us the confidence that SOLiD will maintain the edge over our competition. This agreement will enable us to be competitive in the ever-evolving Open RAN market with our next-generation O-RUs,” said SOLiD VP HyunChae Kim. PC802 supports Open RAN RUs, distributed units and integrated small cells for 4G and 5G. FWA…
The USA’s three-tiered scheme for the CBRS band around 3.5 GHz has set many interesting precedents for how occupied spectrum can be flexible licensed and shared to maximize usage and allow both telecoms operators and other service providers to build networks. It provides three levels of priority – the top one for incumbent federal users; the second for companies that have acquired licences (which were planned to be accessible to a relatively wide range of users rather than just large operators); and the third for general authorized access (GAA), which is unlicensed but with a spectrum access system (SAS) ensuring that it is not a free-for-all like 2.4 GHz, thus improving quality of experience. After years of wrangling over the…
ARM, the dominant force in mobile processor intellectual property, is in a particularly strange phase of its history. The planned IPO of the firm by Japanese parent Softbank seems to have been delayed by the economic crisis, beyond the first quarter of 2023. And it is engaged in a legal battle with one of its biggest licensee customers, Qualcomm. The latest twist came last week, in the middle of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii, at which the US chip giant launched the latest flagship in its processor range, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. This, of course, is based on cores designed by ARM, though Qualcomm has a rare and expensive architectural licence, that enables it to build its own enhancements…
Two years ago, five leading European operators – Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telecom Italia (TIM), Telefónica and Vodafone – signed a memorandum of understanding to cooperate in developing a Europe-centric Open RAN platform and ecosystem. Now, the same group is collaborating on another project that could increase regional strength in a strategic technology area – R&D for a telco cloud stack for Europe. The work will be carried out under the auspices of open source body Linux Foundation Europe. Like Open RAN, the telco cloud is essential to many national and EU government objectives related to regional leadership in key technologies and reduced reliance on Chinese equipment. It will also relate to objectives for greater control of privacy, data sovereignty, security…
There is plenty of life left in 4G even in the most developed nations, with Japan’s Rakuten Mobile latest to announce significant further expansion in coverage and especially bast station numbers. If anything, availability of low-band spectrum reclaimed from sunsetting existing 3G or 2G services has given 4G a late shot in the arm in some countries. Rakuten Mobile has just announced plans to extend its 4G network by almost 20% in base station terms, using spectrum liberated in the 800/900 MHz range (sometimes called the Platinum Band), starting in March 2024. This will entail increasing the base station count from 50,400 to 60,000 in preparation for this coverage extension by the end of 2023, reaching 99% of the country’s…
Coexistence between WiFi and cellular has been on the table almost as long as the wireless technologies themselves, and has had many false dawns. With 5G sometimes billed as an invader on WiFi’s traditional turf it is well worth pointing out a growing synergy between them at the application and service level that has been lacking in previous iterations of coexistence. Not surprisingly, vendors with feet in both camps are best placed and certainly motivated to make the most of convergence, and among those Sierra Wireless has recently been promoting opportunities for synergy between the latest generations of each standards family – 5G and WiFi 6/6E. The company argues that WiFi 6 is the first generation to deliver bandwidth, latency…
Five years ago this week… Backed with $25 million from big media, Philo launched its skinny streaming bundle, which grabbed attention due to a lack of sports channels and its small $16 a month price tag. Up until this point, Philo was a minnow known primarily for its college dorm streaming service Tivli, but this pivot to an ad-hoc collection of streaming linear TV channels was being seen as a litmus test for sports-free TV. — Shaka Player, the open source Javascript library for adaptive media content using HLS and DASH, has added support for LCEVC decoding in its latest release. The MPEG-5 Part 2 compression enhancement technology, founded by V-Nova, is deployed with just a single line of code. ProSiebenSat.1 has…
AMD has unveiled its fourth generation Epyc CPUs, designed for data center workloads. With a 96-core design, the debut of DDR5 and 12-channel memory configurations, there is a lot of horsepower to hand. While much of the AMD announcement focused on High Performance Computing (HPC), two video software vendors – iSize Technologies and Synamedia – have been quick to proclaim the benefits of the new designs for video workloads. AMD has been on a tear in recent years, clawing market share from its incumbent rival Intel. Faultline could not bait iSize’s CTO, Yiannis Andreopoulos, into a direct comparison between AMD and Intel CPUs, but the pre-encoder enhancement provider has already published some tests that show the generational improvement of the…
Varnish Software is promising a sustainability breakthrough around the turn of 2023. The Swedish CDN software specialist is close to crunching CDN power consumption down to 1GB per Watt, a huge saving over the company’s current average claim of 386MB per Watt. This comes following Faultline’s quizzing of Varnish Software’s CTO Frank Miller at Streaming Media West this week, one of very few takeaways from an otherwise toothless panel on reducing power consumption in media and entertainment. Miller assures us Varnish Software is “well beyond” the Netflix benchmarks. Even as a founding member of Greening of Streaming, we must stay skeptical of Varnish’s claims, when comparing price performance and power consumption. We understand that a framework for creating a CO2…
One of Streaming Media West’s most contentious presentations came from a retired broadcast engineer – someone that cannot let sleeping dogs lie when the video streaming industry is getting so many things wrong. “VoD is an avoidable and epically wasteful consumer of bandwidth,” declared Ted Staros, Executive Director of an initiative coined imediat and formerly of Harris Corporation and GatesAir. While Staros succeeded in raising eyebrows with this opening gambit, there was no shortage of eye rolling too, as the talk at times bordered on directionless rant – personifying the virtually insurmountable mission to save the media and entertainment industry $billions through fixing the inefficiencies in video delivery. Unicast is the source of this waste, Staros summizes, and multicast is…
Yet another Western wind turbine maker in the form of Germany’s Nordex reported this week, with sales of €3.9 billion for the three quarters so far, down only 4%, with its order book increasing somewhat. It made a loss of €200 million, twice that of this time last year. Quarterly sales were €1.7 billion, on the rise. The market has seen GE make layoffs in the US and Vestas missing its revenue target substantially, as Siemens Gamesa grew revenues to just $3.4 billion for the quarter, but registered restructuring costs of some €375 million. Nordex increased its order backlog €9.7 billion and released its N175/6.X turbine for locations with lighter and more moderate winds. Airly announced that it has raised…
Lithium companies big and small suffered almost unanimous losses Tuesday as Goldman Sachs revised its lithium forecasts for the years ahead and lithium spot prices fell slightly from marginally slowing Chinese EV demand. The response has been utterly disproportionate, established lithium-focused companies like Albemarle, Pilbara Minerals, and Core Lithium suffered losses between 5% and 15% on the day before, all because EV sales slowed slightly earlier than expected as Chinese EV subsidies approach completion and it clearly doesn’t understand the extent of commodity mining delays. Goldman’s last prediction covering battery mineral prices in May of this year was effectively laughed out of the room by lithium analysts, where it claimed that a surge in investor capital into supply had created…
So far COP 27 has been a lot of talking without enough concrete action, but over the last week there have been some significant decisions that could have lasting consequences. Mexico has increased its nationally defined contribution (NDC) to reducing its emissions from 22% up to 35% relative to a business-as-usual scenario by 2030. The country plans on doing this by investing $40 billion into 40GW of renewable generation sources including solar generation in the Sonoran Desert. This is something the country is in dire need of considering its reliance on oil and natural gas for its electricity generation. 2021 saw Mexico generating nearly 90% of its electricity from fossil fuel consumption. Following on from earlier discussion at the event…
The MPEG Licensing Association (MPEG LA), which runs one of the two current patent pools for the VVC (H.266) video codec – critical to efficient mobile video experiences – has announced tweaks to its licensing program, which it says are to bring the pool into conformity with market realities. It appears that the MPEG LA is climbing down from its position of VVC software royalties, and removing those royalties for companies that contribute their VVC patents to the pool. Because we do not know how many companies were on the hook for both the $8m software-only cap and at least $22m in hardware-based royalties, it is not really possible to gauge the scale of the shift. The first adjustment is…
German ISP United Internet belongs to the select band of companies, along with Rakuten and Dish, that are planning greenfield national mobile networks to expand their core businesses. There has been much focus recently on delays to the build-out by the firm’s mobile subsidiary 1&1, which it has blamed on tower partner Vantage Towers, rather than its plan to use an Open RAN platform provided by Rakuten Symphony. But in United Internet’s recent earnings call, CFO Martin Mildner was focusing on what he says is an undersung positive in the 1&1 mobile business case – synergies with its fixed broadband sister company, 1&1 Versatel. Versatel focuses on B2B customers and is “one of the most hidden champions in our group”,…
Rakuten Symphony has chosen Juniper Networks’ RAN Intelligent controller (RIC) as the exclusive choice within its Symworld Platform for Open RAN. Juniper and Rakuten have worked together on the latter’s mobile network build-out in Japan, though not for the RIC – there, the MNO embedded Juniper’s virtual, cloud-native routing stack in its distributed unit (DU). Rakuten Mobile CEO Tareq Amin recently announced that the Symphony RIC would be offered for free, as long as customers paid for at least one application to run on top of the platform. It is likely that Juniper has agreed a revenue-sharing deal with Rakuten, though having its RIC effectively anointed as the only choice within the Symphony platform will also greatly increase the US…
Many Open RAN-supporting operators are concerned that, even if they break the lock-in of major base station vendors with open interfaces, there will be a new layer of lock-in at the chip level. In the macro network, Intel has achieved a significant headstart in virtualized and Open RAN trials and deployments because its FlexRAN reference platform had a near-monopoly of early efforts. It has added accelerators and new software to make its platform better suited to high performance vRAN elements such as distributed units that need to support Massive MIMO. But competitors such as Marvell and Qualcomm are pushing into the Open RAN macro network space, encouraged by operators – notably Vodafone, with its major O-RAN chipset initiatives – that…