Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
The UK government has been a consistent supporter of the US line on Open RAN – the idea that the platform can be used to lower barriers to entry for challenger vendors, thereby diversifying the 5G supply chain, making it easier for operators to replace Huawei equipment, and potentially allowing the UK to build its own 5G industry. Though not quite matching the $1.5bn set aside by the USA for Open RAN (see separate items), the UK government has earmarked £25m ($30.5m) in R&D funds for vendors and universities, claiming this will “fire up innovation in 5G and 6G” to ensure that “mobile phone networks of the future will have more choice of technologies and suppliers, in the latest government…
Buried in the USA’s giant $280bn CHIPS and Science Act (see Key Issues) is provision for $1.5bn of funding for US companies that are developing Open RAN technology. The sum of $1.5bn is clearly a drop in the ocean in relation to US policy makers’ objective. They foresee Open RAN as a means to encourage diversity in the 5G networks supply chain, and therefore opportunities for challenger vendors to break into the closed world of Nokia, Ericsson and Huawei. This would not only make it easier and more cost-effective for operators to replace Chinese equipment, since they would have a wider choice of hardware and software at different price points, but could enable the USA to build a RAN industry…
TikTok parent ByteDance has confirmed that it will be designing its own chips, to be used in its video recommendations systems. Speaking to the Chinese press, the company further confirmed that it would later turn its attention to video codec and cloud inference acceleration, which will likely shake the market up considerably. So why are the big cloud players designing their own silicon? A very simplistic answer is that the compute requirements of the very largest companies have now become so specialized and secretive that they are better served by a bespoke design that cannot be provided by a mass market offering. To use an automotive analogy, you can only push the stock internals of an engine so far, before…
The US Senate last week voted to approve the massive US CHIPS Act, legislation that will inject $77bn into the US semiconductor industry to improve the country’s self-sufficiency in advanced technologies and to improve its competitiveness against China. The funds will include $53bn to support domestic chip production and around $24bn in tax incentives and other measures to encourage new fab build-out. This is part of the broader $280bn CHIPS and Science Act, which proposes a wide range of subsidies, grants and other funding mechanisms for many aspects of scientific and hi-tech R&D. The CHIPS and Science Act provides the funds necessary to act on 2021’s USA Telecommunications Act, which was passed to promote “the use of technology, including software,…
The USA has embarked on its latest 5G spectrum auction, Auction 108, which is the last currently tabled for this generation of mobile networks. However, it will not come with the fireworks, nor the large fees, commanded by previous auctions in the C-band or 600 MHz. This sale is of spectrum in 2.5 GHz, the band where T-Mobile USA already holds over 110 MHz in most markets courtesy of its merger with Sprint, and TMO is expected to be the only firm splashing significant amounts of cash, in order to consolidate its holdings in this band, even though there are 82 qualified bidders including the four national MNOs. There are 8,000 country-level licences available in the 2496 MHz–2690 MHz range,…
In some ways the USA is a very atypical wireless market. Its spectrum bands and plans are at odds with those widely adopted in Europe and Asia, and increasingly in Latin America. Its operators command higher ARPUs than those in almost any other country and account for the largest totals of mobile revenues and capex investment in the world, though the latter is periodically eclipsed by Chinese spending. Yet the USA has no tier one RAN vendor, something some policy makers hope to remedy via support for Open RAN, as we note in the coverage this week of the huge CHIPS Act. However, it is still worth examining the latest trends in the USA in detail from time to time,…
More than two and a half years after long-standing trade association Cable Europe announced plans to rebrand as GigaEurope, similar scenes of galvanizing a disheveled industry are taking place in the US. The National Cable Television Cooperative is leaping into the modern day by rebranding as the National Content and Technology Cooperative – while cannily keeping the same well-recognized NCTC brand acronym. The two regional organizations – NCTC and GigaEurope – are chalk and cheese really. We are making this comparison simply because NCTC’s post-rebrand plans actually have substance, unlike GigaEurope’s vague drive for fixed-mobile convergence with little mention of content. The refreshed identity for NCTC plans to help members unlock new revenue streams as well as cost-saving strategies. This…
TikiTok-parent ByteDance has confirmed that it will be designing its own chips, to be used in its video recommendations systems. Speaking to the Chinese press, the company further confirmed that it would later turn its attention to video codec and cloud inference acceleration, which will likely shake the market up considerably. So why are the big cloud players designing their own silicon? A very simplistic answer is that the compute requirements of the very largest companies have now become so specialized and secretive that they are better served by a bespoke design that cannot be provided by a mass market offering. To use an automotive analogy, you can only push the stock internals of an engine so far, before you…
Canada’s pirate-preventing outfit GeoComply has claimed an industry first, using a list of some 200 million compromised IP addresses to help video services cut down on piracy. Consumer virtual private networks (VPNs) have opened a door that hurriedly needs closing, and the streaming services must move swiftly before the looming recession ramps up the rate of piracy. Faultline approached incredulously, but GeoComply does appear to be the first vendor to offer this as a service – in a product which is essentially data. James Clark, GM for GeoComply’s Media and Entertainment wing, outlined the scope of the problem, and how the industry thinking has shifted in the year since Faultline first checked in on the company. The commercial launch of…
A flurry of IBC 2022 warm-up announcements have flown over the wires as the six-week countdown to Amsterdam commences. The first IBC show in three years is set to be a topical one for sustainability in media and broadcast technologies. We all recognize the irony of thousands of people from around the world all simultaneously boarding airplanes, but what we have learned over the past two and a half years is that certain pockets of the media and entertainment ecosystem cannot survive without physical contact. Others thrive without it. Ateme is one of the first through passport control, as the French video compression vendor prepares to prove how its high-density suite of technologies can slash the carbon footprint of video…
Russia will cut gas supplies though Nord Stream 1, its largest pipeline to Germany, to just 20% of its capacity. This comes at the latest part of Russia’s weaponization of its gas supply to Europe, threatening to leave the continent critically short of supplies this winter. With the pipeline already operating at 40% of its capacity in recent weeks, tension is rising across the bloc, as countries start to weigh up the consequences of the sanctions placed upon Russia. Ultimately, the consequences of refusing to stand it solidarity with Ukraine will be greater. In response to Russia cutting gas supplies to Europe, the EU has agreed to emergency regulations to curb their gas use this winter. The move will inevitably…
Rolls Royce told us this week it is in the final build stages for the largest aero-engine technology demonstrator, a native SAF engine that will be just about ready by which time it will need to be replaced with hydrogen. UltraFan will have ceramic composite components and a novel architectures and a better combustion system, and will squeeze 25% more effort out of SAF that existing engines. But is it worth developing at all? A new fan system, claiming the most powerful gearbox in aerospace will result in a higher bypass ratio (the key measure of how combustion efficient works in a fan engine) and in turn will generate 40% less NOx with 35% less noise all made to work…
The UK has pushed forward with plans to develop what it believes will be a world leading hydrogen industry. Despite strong strides to create the world’s first national hydrogen subsidy scheme, lines remain blurred between what counts as ‘clean’ hydrogen and what does not. The 20th of July marked the opening of a new subsidy scheme in the UK, which aims to fund an initial 1 GW of green hydrogen and 1 GW of blue hydrogen projects. Support through the new Hydrogen Business Model (HBM), as well as up to £240 million of grant funding from the Net Zero Hydrogen Fund (NZHF) comes as part of a broader goal for the country to have installed 10 GW of low-carbon hydrogen…
Vodafone has been talking a lot recently about its ambitious efforts to upgrade its ageing software platforms, digitalize manual operations, and hire a large inhouse workforce to do this. One step forward, announced last week, is to complete a software upgrade across its whole global transport network, spanning hundreds of millions of users in 28 countries and four continents. This network is crucial to Vodafone and its users, especially wholesale and enterprise customers that need to add new services and capacity on a global basis with just one action. It runs on optical fiber cables that are capable of carrying and directing up to 250Tbytes of data traffic at a time. It links tens of thousands of base stations across…
Full-duplex transmission has been held up as a shining hope for wireless network efficiency for a decade, and has been the subject of many academic and R&D projects, and several high profile start-ups such as Kumu Networks. Full-duplex supports the ability to send and receive on the same channel at the same time, which effectively almost doubles the capacity of given spectrum. However, it has been challenging to implement the technology in a standards-based and affordable way, so scale has been elusive. There have been trials by some large operators, such as Deutsche Telekom, but full-duplex has looked like a clever technology in search of a compelling use case – at least until 5G-Advanced or 6G architectures make it…
A WiFi 6 patent pool has been formed by Sisvel, the same licensing group that has upturned the apple cart for the AOmedia AV1 video codec, which had aimed to be royalty-free. The bottom line is that licensing WiFi technology is tricky. The Sisvel WiFi 6 patent pool has been two years in the making, inevitably adding the next-generation WiFi standard to Sisvel’s existing WiFi/W-LAN pool, which offers a one-stop shop to license all standard-essential patents (SEP) for WiFi-enabled devices. These include the IEEE standards 802.11-2007 and 802.11‐2012 (which define MAC and PHY specifications), as well as WiFi 4 (802.11n) and WiFi 5 (802.11ac). However, these standards all fall under the Joint Licensing Program, while WiFi 6 has its own…
India aims to become a hub for the next generation of hi-tech industries, including 5G networks and devices. Policy makers, manufacturers and some operators believe the time is right for the huge country to become a tier one player in the telecoms industry, despite its past failures to establish a significant equipment making business, despite its huge influence in software and services. India is a huge mobile market in its own right, the third biggest in terms of users after the USA and China, and while it has traditionally not been an advanced market in terms of its mobile services, its three main operators expect to start deploying 5G from late this year, following the upcoming auctions. There has been…
With India’s long-awaited and much-anticipated 5G auction underway, speculation has been mounting over which infrastructure and technology firms will benefit most from subsequent deployments, with the spotlight falling on Open RAN. This reflects the country’s promotion of Open RAN for diversifying its supply chain and encouraging local firms in the spirit of Make in India, an initiative launched in September 2014 to stimulate local hi-tech manufacturing. The focus on Open RAN has intensified as a result of the US actions against Chinese technology companies, particularly Huawei and to a lesser extent ZTE, which has led to India effectively barring them from participation in its 5G roll-out. While India did not explicitly ban the Chinese vendors, the country omitted them…
Telefónica is Ericsson’s latest partner in dynamic 5G slicing trials Network slicing is still over the horizon for almost all established operators, at least in the true 5G sense. This looks for a dynamic, application-driven and automated platform that carves out virtual slices of connectivity, from transport to core to multiple access networks, and provisions them to suit the requirements of particular applications, user groups or enterprises. A few operators have made some significant steps towards this vision, including greenfields Rakuten and Dish, and the Chinese and South Korean MNOs. But in the main, end-to-end 5G slicing (which includes slicing of the air interface and requires the 5G core), is still the focus of trials and lab tests rather than…
Special Report: Industrial 5G Network slicing has been held up as the ‘killer app’ for 5G since the first work on 5G standards began, yet it remains very challenging to define, let alone deploy. While operators grapple with the issues, in the meantime, enterprise players are moving ahead more quickly with other solutions, such as private cellular or WiFi 6/E. There are implementations of technologies that could be called slicing – fixed network slices; static pieces of transport or sometimes wireless access networks that are carved out for a particular customer; enhanced forms of virtual private networks. But the real vision of 5G slicing supports dynamic, automated creation of slices on the fly, their capabilities defined by the application calling…