Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Five years ago this week… Microsoft bent the knee to Spotify, announcing the closure of its Groove Music Pass service by the end of 2017, with all its subscribers migrating over to the Swedish streaming service. Microsoft had a decent but half-hearted stab at challenging the likes of Spotify and iTunes with the Windows Store, but its services were not revolutionary enough and never really stood a chance. Spotify was the natural choice of successor for Microsoft, so as not to lend its tech rivals – Apple, Google and Amazon – a helping hand. — Warner Bros Discovery is “absolutely not for sale,” according to CEO David Zaslav, responding to flaky reports coming out of Hollywood last week that a sale to Comcast was being plotted.…
“Watch out vendors!” was the cry from Elisabetta Romano, CEO of Telecom Italia’s international division, Sparkle, as she delivered a keynote speech at last week’s Digital Transformation World (DFW) conference in Copenhagen. She was referring to Jio Platforms, the ambitious division of Indian giant Reliance Industries, which houses disruptive MNO Reliance Jio, but also looks set to sell its systems and services to other operators round the world. This mirrors the expansion of Rakuten’s mobile interests from a one-country, if groundbreaking MNO (Rakuten Mobile), to an international supplier of mobile network platforms and services (Rakuten Symphony). Symphony and Jio Platforms are leveraging Open RAN, and the broader expansion of cloud-based and open architectures for RAN, core and orchestration/management. The virtualization…
While we have come to expect environmental issues to be sidelined at US events, we expected more from last week’s London-based Connected Britain 2022, where Faultline observed that sustainability was not one of the headline takeaways. Although positive progress can be gleaned from a sense that sustainability issues were subtly underpinning most discussions during the two-day conference, boding well for future iterations of Connected Britain. The primary talking point – fiber penetration statistics and how best to improve them – was occasionally peppered with talks of the environmental benefits of the technology, but this seemed to be more of a footnote than anything. TalkTalk CEO Tristia Harrison claimed that fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) reduces the emissions of fiber-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) by 80%, but…
Almost a quarter (24%) of streaming services are not satisfied with the level of flexibility to integrate with third-party technologies, while 39% are only somewhat satisfied. Third-party inflexibility ranks highest for dissatisfaction in the results of a survey by video platform provider Kaltura, ranking worse than feature breadth (22%), product (20%), ability to conduct A/B testing (16%), and time to launch (13%). This inflexibility could have potentially big implications for suppliers of components in the streaming media ecosystem. While we should recognize that 37% of respondents are very satisfied with the flexibility of third-party integrations, this clearly isn’t good enough. We hear a lot about larger vendors creating one-stop shops designed to save streaming services a small fortune during the…
For outsiders, easily the most enlightening part about SSIMwave being acquired by IMAX is that the Canadian perceptual quality specialist can finally talk about its customers – and three big ones at that with Disney, Paramount Global, and Warner Bros Discovery all onboard. Eagle-eyed Faultline readers will notice that we already knew about Disney, after we joined several dots back at NAB 2022, in a process largely borne out of pure frustration following years of SSIMwave’s executive team not giving us a single customer crumb to go on. It would now appear that IMAX has put a clause in its takeover contract that SSIMwave must terminate these three customer NDAs before any money exchanges hands – all $21 million of…
Hertz, one of the largest car rental firms in the world, says it has teamed up with BP Pulse to install a US national network of EV charging systems primarily for Hertz and its customers. Remember the days when you had to return your rental car with a full tank of petrol or they filled it at an extortionate rate? Could we now see this extended to charging? The two companies will build the system around the existing BP Pulse ‘Omega’ fleet charging and energy management software. This deal takes the form of a memorandum of understanding (MOU) and we believe there will be many more of this type of deal – all rental firms now see it as inevitable…
The IBC 2022 show, the largest in the broadcasting industry calendar, was a good bellwether for the spike in interest surrounding virtual and remote production that came with Covid-19. It seems that providing capabilities for both workflows is now essential for any vendor in the space, with more companies than ever looking to the Secure Reliable Transport (SRT) protocol to do the heavy lifting. Also evident at IBC was how the timing of Haivision’s SRTHub launch in April 2019, two years after the protocol was open-sourced by the SRT Alliance, was a masterstroke of timing. More than three years of phenomenal SRT uptake later, it’s as if we returned to brick-and-mortar events to see the SRT buzzword come of age…
Spectrum debates and disputes continue round the world as operators and other deployers grasp for airwaves to support 5G use cases. Nowhere are these debates more heated than in the USA, where the latest proposals concern the 12 GHz bands. Top officials in the USA’s Biden administration are working on a unified national spectrum strategy, which could be published within the next few months. One of its key objectives is to allocate more spectrum for 5G, but in a cohesive way that avoids further fragmentation of the airwaves. One of the strongest candidates for the next 5G spectrum release seems to be the 12.7 GHz to 13.25 GHz band, if agreements with existing federal users can be reached. This is…
The leading US cable operators have been a less disruptive force in mobile markets than many had expected, despite the close 5G technology cooperation between the two largest, Comcast and Charter. These two firms, along with Altice USA and Cox, have launched mobile services, mainly targeting bundled services for broadband and video subscribers, but these rely on MVNO deals with large operators, and extensive offload to the cablecos’ WiFi hotspot and homespot network. Plans to buy their own spectrum or build their own small cell networks have not materialized at any scale to concern AT&T and Verizon. Comcast, for instance, spent $1.7bn on 600 MHz spectrum in 2017, and $458m on CBRS licences in 3.5 GHz in 2020, but has…
T-Mobile USA has set out five vectors of growth for 5G services that may resonate with other MNOs, even though some are specific to its own market position, geography, and spectral assets. The fundamental point made by TMO’s CEO Mike Sievert is that all operators have the opportunity to gain market share if they tailor their strategy to their own strengths and also weaknesses. By identifying a few core lines of direction, or vectors, an operator can ride the industry tailwinds while dodging the headwinds, much as aircraft do during longhaul flights. Sievert delivered this wisdom at the recent Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference, where he indicated that the operator had reached a key fork in its journey, having…
Cybersecurity issues (see separate item) are just one set of challenges facing any new platform, but ones that the Open RAN initiative will need to address quickly and convincingly in order to build on its early momentum. Other challenges have been highlighted in recent weeks, related to the geopolitics of intellectual property, as well as the slow processes of brownfield operators (and even greenfield, in the case of 1&1 of Germany). Such difficulties are inevitable for any new approach, and particularly one with the daunting task of shaking up a long-established and powerful ecosystem at the same time as migrating a traditional architecture to the cloud. But the stakes are high, and Terje Jensen, head of network architecture at Telenor,…
Open RAN brings both threats and opportunities for cybersecurity, according to a paper just published jointly by the USA’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and National Security Agency (NSA). Published through the Enduring Security Framework (ESF), a public-private partnership set up by the NSA to address risks threatening critical infrastructure and national security in the country, the paper emphasizes that Open RAN will present MNOs with new issues relating to cybersecurity, even if some of these are positive. The paper examines security issues relating to O-RAN’s various technical aspects, including multivendor management, the open fronthaul connecting radios to base stations, and the new RAN application framework comprising rApps and xApps. It also looked at associated software developments, notably increased…
“Watch out vendors!” was the cry from Elisabetta Romano, CEO of Telecom Italia’s international division, Sparkle, as she delivered a keynote speech at last week’s Digital Transformation World (DFW) conference in Copenhagen. She was referring to Jio Platforms, the ambitious division of Indian giant Reliance Industries, which houses disruptive MNO Reliance Jio, but also looks set to sell its systems and services to other operators round the world. This mirrors the expansion of Rakuten’s mobile interests from a one-country, if groundbreaking MNO (Rakuten Mobile), to an international supplier of mobile network platforms and services (Rakuten Symphony). Symphony and Jio Platforms are leveraging Open RAN, and the broader expansion of cloud-based and open architectures for RAN, core and orchestration/management. The virtualisation…
Persistence may pay off for California’s Cohere Technologies as its OTFS modulation technique gains support for 6G, after being rejected for 5G standardization. Prospects of a more advanced modulation scheme, increasing wireless capacity and performance in a future 6G era, are improving. One of the companies working in this area is Californian start-up Cohere Technologies. The company had hoped that its orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) modulation technique would be adopted as part of the 3GPP 5G standards, in addition to orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). Some organizations involved in the 3GPP 5G work felt that some of the newer 5G use cases, such as ultra-low latency IoT, would benefit from a different modulation scheme, even while OFDM-based technologies continued…
“5G is a fixed network as much as a mobile one” – a statement made by a top Nokia executive several years ago. This pointed to the fact that advances in fibre technologies would be vital to support high capacity and low latency for fronthaul and backhaul, and to enable converged access so that operators could create a seamless pool of capacity and use that in the most efficient way possible rather than working in siloes of connectivity. This full, dynamic convergence has become something of a ‘6G’ vision, but stepping stones are being put in place, particularly by fixed-line and WiFi industry groups, that are now increasingly reaching out into the mobile world. The rise of cellular private networks…
The past few years have seen the US set ambitious targets to establish global leadership, and built a broad homegrown industry, around key strategic technologies. The bid was intensified by geopolitics, particularly trade and security tensions with China, which has been pouring resources into its own attempts to build self-sufficiency, and eventually leadership, in strategic technologies. In some areas, the US is already pre-eminent, including cloud and data center infrastructure, processors and services. In others, such as 5G and future 6G, it has significant holes in its armory – hence the national focus on Open RAN and the opportunity to recreate the American mobile network business of old. But so far, where vendors and operators are opening up significant new…
Described as the “final piece of the private CDN puzzle,” Varnish Software was showcasing a new version of its Traffic Router at IBC as part of its private CDN portfolio. The Swedish firm, now based in LA, claims that advanced load balancing and traffic routing tools make the update well-suited for data-heavy web content delivery, landing at optimal locations to ensure the best user experience for video providers. It comes with a new built-in intuitive world map displaying CDN deployments where clients can identify traffic load to easily spot where resources are most needed. Traffic Router comes baked into the Varnish Controller 5.0 administration console, where users can manage and control caching, configuration, monitoring, request routing, traffic and load balancing.…
IBC 2022 was a good bellwether for the spike in interest surrounding virtual and remote production that came with Covid-19. It seems that providing capabilities for both workflows is now essential for any vendor in the space, with more companies than ever looking to the SRT (Secure Reliable Transport) protocol to do the heavy lifting. What else became evident at the latest IBC Show is how the timing of Haivision’s SRTHub launch, at NAB in April 2019, two years after the protocol was open sourced by the SRT Alliance, was a masterstroke of timing. More than three years of phenomenal SRT uptake later, it’s as if we returned to brick-and-mortar events to see the SRT buzzword come of age –…
The saga of Ligado Networks’ bid to build a wholesale 5G network in mobile satellite spectrum continues, with the firm saying it no longer plans to launch 5G this month in parts of Virginia, where it had hoped to kick off its roll-out at long last. Ligado was formed from the remnants of LightSquared, a mobile satellite operator that gained FCC approval to run terrestrial 5G as well as satellite services in its L-band spectrum. However, it filed for bankruptcy protection in 2012 after two years of battling with the GPS sector, which claimed the 5G signals would interfere with their services. In 2015, the company exited bankruptcy with the new name of Ligado, but a similar plan to offer…
The first specification from the O-RAN Alliance has been adopted as a public standard by ETSI. The ‘O-RAN Fronthaul Control, User and Synchronizsation Plane Specification v7.02’ defines an open interface between the radio unit and baseband, and will be labelled as ETSI TS 103 859. In particular, it specifies the control plane, user plane and synchronization plane protocols used over the fronthaul interface, linking the O-DU (O-RAN distributed unit) and the O-RU (O-RAN radio unit) when implementing the lower layer functional splits (for O-RAN, mainly the 3GPP’s Split 7.2, which implements some, though not all, the Layer 1 network functions on the virtualized DU rather than the physical RU). Although open initiatives can be a valuable way to encourage rapid…