Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
One of the most talked-about topics at the recent Mobile World Congress was a timely blog post published by Amazon AWS, providing more details about its groundbreaking deal with Dish to support parts of the new US MNO’s 5G RAN on its cloud. In a 3,100-word blog post on its website, five engineers describe many aspects of the deployment from cloud architecture to security to time-to-market. Dish will take a multi-layered approach to the cloud platforms to host its Open RAN baseband network functions. Some will run on its own edge cloud, implemented on Dell platforms, but a substantial portion will run on AWS’s public cloud. Together with Microsoft’s landmark agreement to take over AT&T’s mobile core and network cloud…
The French government has taken new steps to promote access to 5G for manufacturers and vertical sectors, aiming to accelerate deployment of industrial 5G use cases in the country. This entails a change in the French stance on industrial spectrum, which had been set against private allocations to non-MNOs. Now, local industrial firms can apply to access frequencies in the 3.8 GHz to 4.0 GHz band until the end of this year, after an announcement by regulator Arcep. As part of this initiative, businesses in sectors including manufacturing, logistics, energy, health and smart cities will each be able to make use of a 100 MHz block in this band for three years to trial different use cases. The regulator suggested…
The US operators have been engaged in a string of 5G-focused spectrum auctions, large and small, since the incentive auction of 600 MHz broadcast airwaves in 2017. There have been three millimeter wave sales, which attracted limited interest, plus three sales in the all-important midband spectrum, which AT&T and Verizon have lacked in the first years of 5G roll-out. That shortage severely limited their ability to offer the same strong balance of capacity and coverage that T-Mobile has achieved with its significant investment in 600 MHz licences, plus the huge swathe of 2.5 GHz assets it acquired with Sprint. The auction of CBRS priority access licences, followed by the showstopping C-band sale – which cost MNOs $95bn – and the…
Five years ago this week… Vodafone and Liberty Global were back in talks to merge more of themselves across Europe, with plans for the German fixed line business to go to Vodafone, while the UK mobile network would go to Liberty. This did not look troublesome in the UK, where both brands held less than a third of the market, but many were expecting that the German trade regulator Bundeskartellamt would hold on to its old habit of rejecting cable mergers. Both operators were hoping that the seemingly merger-hungry European Commission would be able to override the German regulator, following on from its push for cable mergers in the Netherlands to rival KPN. In 2019, the EU approved Vodafone’s $22…
Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) definitely feels like it played second fiddle at the recent Mobile World Congress 2022, but the broadband technology is enjoying something of a renaissance, thanks to the improvements brought about in millimeter-wave and the increased availability of spectrum. The most interesting FWA encounter Faultline had at MWC belonged to Intracom Telecom, a Greek firm that provides equipment and infrastructure for ISPs to deploy. Enrique Martín Novo, Presales Manager at the firm, talked us through the point-to-point (P2P) microwave offerings, which run the gamut from 6 GHz to 80 GHz and are used to provide up to 33 Gbps of backhaul for the point-to-multi-point (P2MP) equipment that provides the last-mile connection to the homes. These P2MP systems…
Nestled away in the French province of stands at Mobile World Congress 2022, Ateme was demonstrating how its technologies can be used to lower carbon emissions from video services. CTO Mickael Raulet opened his chat with Faultline by pointing to recent work with the UK’s 5G Vista project, for stadium experiences, and the Nested 5G consortium, before diving into more juicy talking points. For video workflows, Raulet stressed that Ateme is more interested in reducing the mess of choices that are available in the current market, than in simply selling more units – going as far as saying that it would not mind selling less if supporting it was much easier. In such simplifications, there should be much reduced support…
Arm’s place at the heart of the smartphone means it is a must for a MWC interview, and Paul Williamson, SVP and GM for Arm’s Client Line of Business, was on hand, to peel back a few layers of industry buzz and properly examine the guts of these video devices. Arm has not historically delved into video processor IP because of its focus on general purpose silicon designs, Williamson explains. Those are usually done in-house by the licensee, which can run software codec implementations across the two resources, or add dedicated video components to the design on top of the CPU and GPU. Arm had a demo that showed how its designs can offer scalable streaming experiences across all manner…
Faultline got a lot more than we bargained for from Synamedia’s press afternoon this week. A light touch of our trademark pot-stirring inadvertently turned the entire event into a healthy game of sibling rivalry as product teams jostled for the attention of CEO Paul Segre – giving rise to exclusive revelations about unspoken product releases and landmark contracts on which the ink is yet to dry. “I can reveal that just today we have signed our second customer for Iris,” declared Nick Thexton, Synamedia’s CTO, now nearly two years into his role. “This is a very significant tier 1.” Two customers for a product launched in August 2020 doesn’t exactly scream success story, does it? Yet Synamedia’s new-ish ad tech…
An afternoon excursion to Synamedia HQ found Faultline in the same room as CEO Paul Segre for the first time since his appointment nearly 18 months ago. His debut appearance in front of press as a video technology boss was modest, giving little away about the executive decisions made on his part since making the move from the US to UK. Any adulation was left down to his team, as we caught a tongue in cheek comment from a colleague lingering on the sideline, claiming that Segre works too hard to spend time speaking with folk like us. Fair enough. After all, Segre’s job is to spearhead Synamedia’s streaming era. With the surprise changing of the guard coming at a…
As we have said on various podcasts over the past few weeks, we are not experts in war, nor geopolitics and so we don’t want to spend too much time on the Ukraine conflict – it is better to get other, more expert, opinion on this. While we can only lend our unequivocal support to Ukraine, and question the sanity of Russian premier Vladimir Putin, from the energy point of view everyone has suddenly become an expert on energy security, and how best it can be achieved. This we should address. There really are only a few schools of thought on this, and while we cannot hazard any serious guess on the outcome of the war, only hope for its…
Ignion launches fast IoT antenna design platform Ignion, an IoT antenna company based in Barcelona, has launched a design and simulation platform on AWS designed to reduce component integration time. The company has made the bold claim that the platform’s ‘virtual antenna’ technology will cut time required for integration from days or weeks to minutes. The platform supports various cellular antennas, including 5G and cellular IoT based components, as well as antennas for alternative connectivity technologies, including non-cellular wide-area LoRaWAN, WiFi 6E, and short-range UWB. Called Antenna Intelligence Cloud, the platform works in effect as a digital twin tool, by enabling simulation of antenna design for rapid optimization and integration. The tool brings cloud computing and machine learning into the…
Global semiconductor shortage? Supply chain constraints? Not for Broadcom. The US chip giant is apparently immune to these market forces, boasting about reaching the milestone of one billion WiFi 6 and 6E chipset shipments, three years since launching its first next-generation WiFi technologies. What makes this milestone even sweeter for Broadcom is it comes at a time when it was being criticized for losing its group on the WiFi silicon market, with its global market share eroded by the rise of Mediatek. With the silicon industry struggling to keep up with demand, one might assume that Broadcom’s 1bn shipments are below the target initially set out by the company back in 2017 when Broadcom started seriously talking about the possibilities…
According to a new report by analysts at the Dell’Oro Group, vendors including Nokia, Cisco, CommScope, Ciena and Cambium are among the companies signaling that they plan to raise prices for telecom equipment, blaming supply chain disruption, global inflation and other factors. This is bad timing, given that operators are so keen to push for reduced prices and total cost of ownership, and often cite this as a key objective for deploying Open RAN. “Following 20 years of average macro base station price declines in the 5% to 10% range, we are now modeling RAN prices to increase, reflecting a wide range of factors,” report author Stefan Pongratz told Light Reading. “In addition to the changing vendor landscape and regional…
Mobile World Congress 2022 provided a perfect opportunity to get to grips with the state of WiFi 6E from two different standpoints. Speaking to both a pressure group and a CPE vendor, we learned that while consumer WiFi is crawling into the 6 GHz band with determination, the pace might be too slow for some, with many operators looking to jump straight to WiFi 7. Speaking to Zyxel’s VP of product in EMEA, James Harris, we heard that WiFi 6 adoption has been rapid among its customers. The company took around $170m in EMEA over 2021, 25% of which Harris says came from WiFi 6 CPE. This share of revenue is expected to grow to around 40% in 2022, while…
The rise in use of mobile networks in remote video broadcast production has been accelerated by roll out of 5G networks, and also by the Covid-19 pandemic with its enforcement of social distancing measures in many countries. The advent of 5G Standalone (SA) will give a further fillip by enabling the low latency transmission required for contribution of the highest quality content from the field and also interactive aspects such as instant replay of incidents during sporting events. The stage has been set over some years by replacement of traditional video transmission protocols with IP in the field, which now accounts for 99% of remote broadcast production. The intrusion of cellular into a field previously dominated by satellite with the…
Test and measurement (T&M) were feted as the unsung heroes of 5G at Mobile World Congress 2022, responsible for the rapid roll-out of infrastructure in some markets while also underpinning pivotal aspects such as virtualization and ultra-low latency. T&M is especially critical for Open RAN since this involves interoperability between different vendors at the radio as well as core level, on top of meeting objectives for performance and robustness. This requires being able to test rigorously against much tighter specifications for timing, synchronization and signal integrity, including being able to verify the measurement processes themselves. At least MWC 2022 showed that the key vendors have not been idle over the pandemic, with Germany’s Rohde & Schwarz and California-based Keysight Technologies,…
The role of multinational MNOs, mostly European, in the Russian invasion of Ukraine and subsequent humanitarian crisis, has largely been confined to oiling the wheels of communication and eliminating charges on voice or data calls to and from the country. For those telcos with operations or collaborations in Russia, there are more significant impacts, with Vodafone quick to end its 14-year partnership with Russian operator MTS after the initial invasion. This came just six weeks after Vodafone had extended that partnership to embrace procurement, marketing and network operations. MTS, just over 50%-owned by the vast Russian industrial conglomerate Sistema, is the country’s largest MNO with 86m subscribers. For Deutsche Telekom the implications are far more profound, since it has deep…
Among the chip start-ups that crowded the halls in Barcelona, many were focused on the promise of an open ecosystem enabled by the USA’s CBRS shared spectrum. This is being heavily adopted for private and enterprise services – often by alternatives to the spectrum-owning MNOs – which rely on small cells. That scenario, which may be replicated in other markets that push shared spectrum to boost new 5G deployers, provides significant opportunities to build a new ecosystem with openings for new suppliers. Picocom, a UK/China-based start-up focusing on Open RAN baseband chips, is targeting the CBRS opportunity, as well as other 5G Open RAN markets. In CBRS, it announced its first public customer, BLiNQ Networks, a US vendor of fixed…
CEVA is often described as the ARM of digital signal processors (DSPs), licensing its intellectual property to a large number of chip providers for use in many applications including mobile device basebands. The company used MWC 2022 to unveil its latest 5G baseband platform, PentaG2, which it says will streamline the design of radio modems for mobile broadband and IoT networks. CEVA says the second generation of the PentaG modem architecture will reduce the time to develop 5G systems-on-chip (SOCs) and will integrate low power DSPs with specialized programmable accelerators to deliver up to four times better power efficiency than the first generation. The platform is designed to power chipsets that can support many 5G use cases, including emerging 3GPP…
There were several partnerships announced at MWC 2022, related to the biggest challenge for vRAN and Open RAN, achieving a system-on-chip for the distributed unit (DU) – which handles near-real time Layer 1 and 2 functions – that can deliver the same performance as a specialized processor. Ericsson, which was branding its ‘Ericsson Silicon’ more clearly than ever in Barcelona, argues that there will inevitably be trade-offs from using merchant architectures for these highly specialized processes. But Marvell, Qualcomm, Nvidia and Intel, plus a host of start-ups, beg to differ. Marvell and Qualcomm have both unveiled accelerators for DU functions in recent months, planning their ‘inline acceleration’ approach is superior to the ‘look-aside’ technique favored by Intel. But Intel has…