Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Few faces at the Las Vegas Convention Center this week better visualized the state of video right now than V-Nova’s CEO Guido Meardi. Unusually relaxed for such a massive event, with an underlying hint of frustration. The mission for NAB 2022 was simple – reconnect with the ecosystem in preparation for the world being ready for low complexity enhancement video codec (LCEVC) technology. Long gone is the V-Nova branding, swapped for safety as a standard with MPEG-5 LCEVC adorning the stand – a move we think has been key to recent endorsements of the technology. With LCEVC being officially born just before the pandemic, it has a lot to prove in physical settings. LCEVC’s real-life capabilities are demonstrated by the…
Two things seemed surprisingly subdued at NAB this year. It was nice to not be bombarded by the metaverse, in whatever nascent stage it might have been, but the ATSC 3.0 media blitz that we had suspected was in place did not materialize. Still, the show will have been packed with meetings, to try and promote the NextGen TV offering to new markets. In the run up to NAB, the ATSC organization put out a teaser announcement, updating the world on its progress. The headline claim is that the NextGen TV coverage in the US has hit 50% population coverage – now available in almost 60 markets. Some 120 receivers (set tops and USB-based dongles) have been designed, and the…
A surprising proportion of the vendor community were relishing the triumphant return of NAB Show 2022 purely as a medium for reconnecting with the media and entertainment ecosystem – becoming reacquainted not just with people but also with the logistical processes of a major trade event. Others preferred to fully grab NAB by the horns, releasing some of the most significant technology updates in years. Wowza Video, for instance, ruffled a few feathers at the show. “We are trying to avoid the tyranny of choice,” CEO Dave Stubenvoll tells us, with little care for any disruption the new platform might cause the partner ecosystem. As we described in our pre-NAB coverage last week, the new integrated video platform comprises a…
Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners has joined forces with Portuguese developer Madoqua Renewables and Power2X to build a €1 billion project, which will use 500 MW of electrolyzers to produce 50,000 tones of green hydrogen and 500,000 tons of green ammonia per year. The project is set to be built by 2025, and comes as part of a flurry of 11.4 GW of green hydrogen production projects that have been announced in the Iberian Peninsula over the past four months alone. The Japanese government has awarded approved plans for the 17 MW Goto floating wind farm in the country. The project is being developed by a consortium of Toda Corporation, Eneos Corporation, Osaka Gas, Inpex Corporation, Kansai Electric Power and Chubu Electric…
The Price Department of China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) has stated that new solar and wind power projects will continue to be built on a parity basis in 2022 – parity with the coal power price benchmark – and that new projects will have the option of participating in the open market. This announcement may not cover residential solar, which wasn’t mentioned. Shares of power generating companies such as Star Power, Mindong Power, Huaying Power and Huadian International rose modestly with the news. China’s move to market-oriented electricity prices and a spot market has been on the cards since the country’s second power market reform began in 2015. The benchmark electricity price was allowed to “float” up by…
Tesla has been in the news more this week for the fact that Elon Musk personally acquired Twitter for $44 billion, rather than the Tesla results which were out just after we went to press last week, when Tesla produced 305,000 vehicles in the quarter and delivered 310,000, despite ongoing supply chain challenges and factory shutdowns. Most Musk watchers are this week trying to guess how Musk will re-direct Twitter, with many publications suggesting that Musk’s love of freedom of speech will have him open the platform more widely to right wing politicians, such as Donald Trump, and that his intervention will “spoil” the service, not improve it. Our feeling is that Musk rarely knowingly does anything to ruin investments.…
Russia has stopped providing gas to both Poland and Bulgaria from Wednesday 27th April, in retaliation to their refusal to pay for Russian gas supplies in roubles. While these countries have depended on Russia for more than half of their gas in the past, their success in rapidly finding alternative sources have rendered Putin’s attempts to weaponizing his energy sector increasingly redundant. Poland’s state-controlled gas group, PGNiG, confirmed the “complete suspension” of supplies under its ‘Yamal Contract’ on Tuesday, stating that Russia’s Gazprom had informed it that it would come into effect from 8am on April 27. Later that day, Bulgargaz, PGNiG’s Bulgarian counterpart, announced the same, claiming that it had already taken steps to find alternative imports for natural…
Nokia has announced a significant boost to its efforts to expand its business with data center operators and hyperscalers, and reduce its dependence on its traditional telco base. The Finnish firm has greatly expanded its existing partnership with Microsoft Azure to include its latest data center switching solutions. Nokia has been selected to supply its 7250 IXR chassis-based interconnect routers to support high-density 400GE applications in Microsoft’s ‘Tier 2’ network architecture. Nokia will also supply fixed-form factor platforms into other Microsoft network applications. The new agreement builds upon the companies’ collaboration in the open source SONiC initiative to develop chassis-based platforms for high capacity data centers. The 7250 IXR offers a range of chassis-based and fixed-form factor options for data…
Fujitsu joins Evenstar Open RAN program Fujitsu is joining the Evenstar Open RAN program, submitting its 5G Massive MIMO radio units (RUs), which will be tested, validated and listed on the TIP (Telecom Infra Project) Exchange Marketplace in the second half of 2022. Massive MIMO increases spectral efficiency and will liberate more network capacity, as well as extending coverage, but supporting it with Open RAN interfaces has been a key performance challenge. “Fujitsu will provide 3.5 GHz RUs that support O-RAN standardized interfaces. With 64T64R antennas, the Massive Multiuser MIMO radios will deliver higher spectral efficiency, better coverage and lower interference at the cell edge than traditional radios,” the company said. Evenstar is an initiative set up by TIP and…
Deutsche Telekom has spent the past year evaluating its various assets and whether to offload some of these, while increasing its hold on others. It sold off T-Mobile Netherlands last year, and its 12% stake in BT is said to be potentially up for grabs, as is the lossmaking T-Systems technical services arm. DT is already on the way to deciding the future of its towers business, having put GD Towers up for sale in early March. However, it reportedly plans to increase its stake in T-Mobile USA further this year. Although DT has been more cautious than other European majors such as Vodafone and Telefónica about carving out or selling its towers, it has now received bids for its…
Almost all makers of products containing electronic components, from smartphones to cars, have been suffering from supply chain constraints sparked by geopolitical tensions and exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic. The major mobile networks suppliers have all run into shortages under varying circumstances, in Huawei’s case related to being cut off from suppliers that are either of US origin or dependent on restricted American technology. The remedies differ too, in Huawei’s case being associated almost entirely with efforts to replicate its supply chain as far as possible in China. Huawei has spread its bets on numerous chip start-ups in China, up to 40, channeled through its venture arm Habo Technology Investment. This was set up in April 2019 in response to…
Many IT players see the RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) as their best point of entry to the RAN market, because it builds on skills in software and automation, where they have expertise already, but does not require them to take on alien skills in radio. Juniper has taken a lead in bringing a credible proposition to market, having acquired strong intellectual property from Argela/Netsia of Turkey. Now HPE has shown its hand, challenging Dell and Juniper, in particular, with the unveiling of its RAN Automation software suite, which has many goals in common with the new Nephio project (see separate item), including a focus on zero-touch management of 5G/edge networks, and some elements of open source. This will be offered,…
It is almost 1.5 years since the OpenRF Association was formed with the goal of creating an open 5G ecosystem for smartphones. It is devising specifications that would allow interoperability of hardware and software, across multiple RF front end (RFFE) and modem chipsets within devices. As with all open initiatives, the official aim is to drive down costs, spur innovation and lower barriers for smaller players, but there is also the unspoken but clear agenda of reducing Qualcomm’s dominance of handset modems, which has been expanding rapidly into the RFFE too, since the launch of its RF360 platform. The first specs were released late last year, and the group’s president, Kevin Schoenrock (who comes from RF chip supplier Qorvo), told…
The latest open source project to be kicked off under the auspices of the Linux Foundation is called Nephio, and it plays into many of the key concerns of operators considering advanced 5G deployments, particularly how to automate management and orchestration of cloud-based networks that are highly dense and distributed. The founding members’ list is well populated, with Google Cloud taking a prominent position alongside various operators and vendors. Collectively, they state their aim as being to “create cloud-native automation and management of 5G networks across multiple edge locations”. Although some US operators, primarily AT&T, have been active in open source projects in the past, none of them appears on the founders’ list, although two Canadian operators – Bell Canada…
The Open Networking Foundation has often distinguished itself from other open telecoms initiatives by boasting of its significant internal engineering team. That has enabled it to stay highly independent of individual vendors’ agendas because it is less reliant that many groups, such as the O-RAN Alliance, on time and engineering effort contributed by its members. However, it is now changing its position, releasing all its internally developed platforms into full open source and transferring its development team en masse to Intel. The ONF will now follow a member-driven model, closer to other industry technology groups, and will just retain a core team of 11 engineers, while more than 40 have transferred to Intel. This highlights the chip giant’s increasing interest…
Special Report: Open platforms in 5G We have commented before on how far the move towards open platforms within mobile networks will also introduce open source models to the previously closed world of cellular infrastructure. To some extent, this debate is skewed by the market focus on the open RAN – understandable, given that the RAN is by far the largest element of mobile expenditure, but not always representative of developments in other areas of investment. So far, open source models have made limited impact on the RAN. The O-RAN Alliance does have an open source strand, called O-RAN Software Community, which has some projects that are additional to the main program (including work on Split 6, which has…
Five years ago this week… Nokia appeared reborn, with the company pinning a core part of its future business strategy on emerging VR technologies in the run-up to NAB 2017. Nokia announced that launch of the OZO Reality suite – a set of technologies for supporting the delivery, creation and end UX of VR content, including the $40,000 OZO camera, the OZO+ camera streaming and audio system and the OZO Player SDK. However, much like Oculus, OZO crumbled in the years following, with the brand yet to make a striking comeback into the consumer sector. — HBO Max has added 12.8 million subscribers year to date, hitting a global audience of 76.8 million, according to AT&T’s latest filing. Of these,…
Verizon has grabbed a 9.9% ownership stake in Casa Systems for $40 million, in the process awarding the US network infrastructure supplier a multi-year contract for Mobile Edge Compute (MEC) technology, more often referred to as Multiaccess Edge Computing. In the last two to three years, Casa Systems has somewhat slipped off Faultline’s radar, as the vendor’s priorities seem to have swayed from the fixed network portfolio and great promise of distributed access architecture (DAA), towards 5G riches. This is a direct result of the strong convergence trend between fixed-wireless networks. However, Casa Systems is still a force to be reckoned with in the fixed broadband battleground – and now a tier 1 US operator has one tenth of the…
Following a first quarter where the traditional Q1 blockbuster TV events are all back to their usual post-pandemic scheduling, attribution firm iSpot.tv has a perfect opportunity to flex its measurement muscles. The findings of its latest TV Ad Rundown report demonstrate that streaming figures are now essential for measurement currency, while life in the media sphere seems largely ‘back to normal’. With the Super Bowl, Winter Olympics and NCAA March Madness all back on track, it is of little surprise that national ad spend in the US was at $9.74 billion for the quarter, up 36.9% year on year (YoY). Overall impressions for the quarter were at 699.6 billion, marking a smaller increase of 8.83% YoY. However, this means that…
FIFA, the world soccer governing body, has announced a free streaming service, called FIFA+, which it claims will provide 40,000 live soccer matches a year. A company called Eleven is powering the service, and has not cropped up on Faultline’s radar before – although whoever named the company did it no favors with regard to its SEO. Eleven Group is headquartered in London, and has announced that it will be adding live matches from FIFA Member Associations into FIFA+. The launch says that Eleven will be adding an “unprecedented volume of live football from around the world,” and that thousands of games have already been secured – using a collection of technologies and capabilities that its parent Aser Ventures has…