Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
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…
The elephant in the room around the US solar industry is the new investigation by the Commerce Department into a circumvention case against imports of solar goods from Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. The US Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) a trade body that is exceptionally vocal around solar policy, says that in a survey of its members 90% of them have had severe or devastating impacts on their bottom line and 74% say that PV module shipments have been either delayed or canceled resulting in about 78% of total module orders being canceled. Given that the Department of Commerce only introduced this investigation – effectively looking into whether or not modules assembled outside of China are avoiding import tariffs…
US cable operator WideOpenWest (WOW) is up for sale, to the surprise of absolutely no one who has glanced over the numbers anytime in the last few years. In 2017, WOW was the country’s ninth-placed pay TV operator with around 433,000 subscribers at the time. As of the end of 2021, WOW had withered to just 150,000 pay TV subscribers, slumping to eleventh in the rankings of traditional cable and satellite TV providers. WOW had been churning out some 30,000 subscribers a year up until 2021, which was a particularly catastrophic year as more than half its entire TV base cancelled in the period of just twelve months. The alarming churn rate prompted WOW to open up about the struggles…
Five years ago this week… Leading French FTA channel TF1 became the exception to the rule in Europe by introducing retransmission fees for pay TV networks. In what seemed to be an American-influenced position, Bouygues-owned TF1 was threatening to pull its signals from Orange, SFR and Vivendi services unless the broadcasters agreed to pay retransmission fees. The game of chicken eventually swung in TF1’s favor, with OTT platform Molotov most recently ordered to pay $9.2 million to TF1 for retransmission of its channels in January 2022. — CNN+, the news streaming service that is barely a fortnight old, has crawled out of the gates, according to CNBC. The rival outlet claims CNN+ has picked up just 10,000 daily users…
The new British Energy Security Strategy, unveiled this week, has highlighted the sheer confusion within UK policymaking. In a bid to tackle two frontiers of climate change and eliminating Russian imports, the country’s plan is paradoxical in that its pledges will not bear fruit until long-after the current crisis is over, and until we have left it too late to reach net zero emissions by 2050. This strategy must be reevaluated to place more attention on energy efficiency and onshore wind, if the UK is to have anything of an impact of the immediate crisis it faces. The strategy comes at a crucial time for the UK’s energy sector. Without Covid-19 restrictions for the first time since March 2020, the…
Once again there is a strong fossil fuel story doing the rounds, which is primarily being tagged as a “green” way to harness CO2 – put out by NREL , the National Renewable Energy Laboratory this week, the idea of using depleted oil wells and in particular hydraulically fractured, or “fracked,” wells, as a form of storage space, for compressed natural gas. There are a lot of fracked wells, and there is no telling just how the fossil fuel industry will feel about the proposal – but to date they have shown little interest in doing anything with old oil wells, except re-open them to make more money from oil and gas, as prices rise. The key to the idea…
For many people in the energy market, and in many others for that matter, if a company operates almost entirely in China, it has little bearing on how they run their own energy company. But in energy, as in everything else, China has a plan and it would be wise to stay aware of it. That’s the point of a centrally planned economy, five year plan after five year plan, centrally coordinated so that China can achieve its key aims – which are essentially to dominate all markets, become the largest economy in the world, and eventually take over global control of currency markets from the US. Right now we may find the idea of no real voting for politicians…
A perfect storm could be brewing which will see the western wind sector shaken down by Chinese turbine OEMs. While the historic leaders wrestle with dwindling margins and supply chain shortages, Eastern competitors, off the back record installations in their home market, are now looking hungry to repeat the success of their solar compatriots in overseas markets. On the surface, it could be said that little has changed. Even in a year where China accounted for more than half of the 92.5 GW of wind power that was installed worldwide, Denmark’s Vestas took the podium for turbine makers, accounting for 15.2 GW of capacity. With General Electric taking the crown in 2020, and a Western OEM holding the title every…
Vodafone Portugal selects Mavenir for 5G Standalone packet core Vodafone Portugal will deploy Mavenir’s 5G Converged Packet Core in its 5G Standalone (SA) build-out, after a year’s joint development and testing. Part of Mavenir’s MAVcore platform, the packet core was designed for all common access types, embracing mobile and wireline. Vodafone UK and Mavenir have also recently collaborated to complete a Voice over LTE (VoLTE call) over a containerized Open RAN network in a lab environment. The pair are using Open RAN systems to expand in-building 4G coverage for larger enterprises. MGA Technologies engages Nokia and Edzcom for private 5G network in France MGA Technologies, a maker of customized machines, has recruited Finland-based industrial networking firm Edzcom, a subsidiary of European tower…
The Indian mobile operators are rarely in full harmony with the country’s regulator or Department of Telecom (DoT) and their latest disputes focus on homegrown equipment procurement, and on spectrum for private networks. Successive government initiatives, the latest being ‘Make in India’, have encouraged or even mandated operators to buy a rising percentage of their equipment from local suppliers, or at least international vendors that manufacture in India. These rules have resulted in investment, by various Indian industrial firms, in homegrown telecoms gear, though this has not yet resulted in a local ecosystem on anywhere close to the scale government ministers want. The most recent move has come from Tejas Networks, part of the huge Tata Group and a prominent…
The latest vendor to join Rakuten Symphony’s open networks ecosystem is F5, which will make cloud-native network functions (CNFs) for wireless security and networking available via the Japanese company’s platform. Several organizations are seeking to build Open RAN vendor ecosystems around common platforms that allow for pre-integration. The aim is to simplify deployment of multivendor systems by operators, and so drive confidence and scale into the market, particularly for smaller or new vendors. But there are fears that, if Symphony (or an alternative vendor or operator platform) becomes too successful, it will be able to dictate which solutions are available to deployers and so compromise the dream of an open ecosystem in which any innovator can make its mark. F5…
The partial or total exclusion of Huawei from many 5G infrastructure contracts, as well as from some established 4G networks, was not just a boon to its immediate rivals – Ericsson, Nokia and Samsung – but also to equipment vendors of varying sizes seeking entry to the cellular field, both the RAN and core. A pack of vendors led by Cisco has been targeting opportunities in the mobile networks market through partnerships and internal developments, seeking to take an enhanced role in the 5G infrastructure value chain by harnessing Open RAN standards. Operators concerned over lack of choice in 5G network equipment have welcomed such overtures and, in some cases, collaborated with emerging players. The deepening partnership between Cisco and…
The semiconductors that underpin telecoms infrastructure are sometimes forgotten in discussion about open and multivendor networks, but they are a crucial aspect. In traditional networks, each vendor had its own proprietary chips to power and differentiate their equipment, leading to one of the barriers to interoperability and open ecosystems. That situation has persisted in macro base stations until the advent of Open RAN, while in other network domains there has been a gradual shift from proprietary to merchant chips, driving telecoms success for firms like Broadcom. But this is not a simple picture. Merchant chips do not necessarily lead to openness. As the history of the PC and server sectors demonstrate, if one company (in that case Intel) gains a…
‘Open intelligence’ is the buzzphrase to accompany the launch of the O-RAN Alliance’s second major release of specifications. Other important areas of focus include acceleration in the physical layer (a key challenge in virtualized Open RAN), and security testing. In total, 40 new specs have been published, the result of work by 11 working groups. Release 2.0 sees the Alliance deepening its work on orchestration and network control, which will help make its platform more appropriate for large-scale and complex networks that need to support very high performance, low latency functions from a cloud-based platform. This should set the stage for real-world Open RANs (outside of rare greenfield deployments like Rakuten’s) to adopt some of the advanced elements of the…
Special Report: Open networks Amid the deluge of Open RAN-related news and chatter that has characterized the mobile industry for the past couple of years, it is easy to forget that, while the RAN may indeed be the biggest element of mobile operator spending, it does not make an open network on its own. At its most basic, Open RAN provides interfaces that allow operators to choose radio/antenna units from multiple suppliers, none of them necessarily also providing the baseband. But while that would certainly be a valuable development for operators, fulfilling the hopes that were initially invested in CPRI, it would not go far to achieving an end-to-end, cloud-based network, as modelled by new MNO entrants Rakuten Mobile…
QoE video analytics vendor NPAW has been talking about its mythical CDN Balancer as an industry-altering standard for a whole year – claiming that current methods of CDN balancing are not as reactive and are more prone to errors. Now the Spanish firm is using NAB 2022, kicking off exactly 16 days from now, as an excuse to officially launch the product as if it were hot off the production line. After more than twelve months of tweaking and feedback from customers, NPAW is now prepared to officially unwrap its CDN Balancer, although it’s propensity to talk openly about the product has somewhat taken the edge off the ribbon cutting. Luckily, it happens that Faultline was on the ground at…
The first time Faultline wrote about Videon, circa 2008, we described it as a Blu-ray middleware specialist. The last time we wrote about Videon, in 2020, we were heralding the contribution of its encoders to a project that allowed the Taiwan National Opera House to transform a cancelled sell-out show into a monetizable live streamed 4K extravaganza. Today, the Pennsylvania-based company is calling itself a leader in edge computing for video, following the announcement that a swathe of prominent TV technology vendors are deploying its edge apps to simplify on-premise-to-cloud workflows. It boasts signatures with Faultline regulars including Synamedia, V-Nova, Net Insight, Theo Technologies, Zixi, Livepeer, Red5 Pro, EZDRM, and Techex – all using Videon’s LiveEdge Compute technology. With every…
Riding on the coattails of the metaverse hype bubble, volumetric video – video streams that allow users to move around the subject from all angles – is fast becoming a similarly buzzy phrase. The technology made up some of our most memorable demos at Mobile World Congress 2022, as operators looked to show off the potential of 5G. One of the leading vendors feeding this frenzy is LA-based 8i, which serves all parts of the pipeline, offering technologies for capture, transformation, and distribution of volumetric video. Although largely focused on the “human performance component” of content, 8i can capture static objects and build immersive worlds if needed. Conscious that everyone claims to have done volumetric video first, the company’s CEO,…
Oneflix has launched its streaming aggregation offering, combining user accounts into a single user interface, to give them access to all the content available them, for a better search and discovery experience. This brought to mind Struum, the credit-based streaming aggregator, and the topic of whether the streaming route to market could ever be disrupted in wholesale fashion? Struum has been plugging away, signing up 60 content partners. Part-owned by Firstlight Media, Struum’s business model involves users receiving a number of credits that can be spent on watching titles from the aggregated library. If Struum sees users watching enough content from one source, the user is encouraged to purchase a full subscription – with Struum presumably getting a kickback. This…
Vestas has secured a 295 MW order to supply turbine’s for CSC and CIP’s Zhong Neng offshore wind project in Taiwan. The project will feature thirty-one Vestas V174-9.5 MW turbines, with commissioning expected in 2024. GreenIT and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (CIP) have teamed up to develop two offshore wind farms in Italy, with a total 750MW capacity. The first project in Sicily, off the coast of Marsala, will consist of 21 turbines with a power of around 12 MW each for a total capacity of around 250 MW. The second is to be developed off the coast of Sardinia, consisting of 42 wind turbines with a power of around 12 MW each for a total capacity of more than 500…