Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
AMD has had a low profile in the 5G networks market to date, though as networks start to be virtualized, we could assume it will start to challenge Intel in the data centers that are optimized to support the vRAN’s centralized units (CU), and even the edge nodes that will support the distributed units (DUs). However, the acquisition of Xilinx, the largest maker of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), has catapulted AMD into a far more prominent position in the emerging 5G vRAN space, since Xilinx has taken a leading position in the radio unit (RU) end of the 5G RAN, while also developing FPGA-based accelerators that can offload intensive tasks such as beamforming from the central processor in a…
The last time Wireless Watch’s team visited Mobile World Congress in person, in February 2019, we commented extensively on the way the semiconductor industry was rising to the challenges and opportunities of the 5G RAN. Virtualization of the network, however futuristic for many operators, provides the entry point for merchant chipmakers to enter the formerly proprietary world of baseband processing. And the rising performance demands of 5G, especially in Standalone (SA) mode, offer new opportunities for specialist chip designers to differentiate their offerings in many areas from radio units to Layer 1 offload to AI-enhanced network analytics. The key trend in 2019 was for major chip providers such as Intel, Nvidia and Marvell to be putting together end-to-end and top-to-bottom…
Five years ago this week… Broadcom appeared to be filing a suit with the US International Trade Commission against MediaTek, Sigma Designs and LG, claiming that all three were breaching its patents in video decoding. It seemed as though Broadcom had forgotten lessons from its run-ins with Qualcomm, when Qualcomm filed basic H.264 patents against it and was ridiculed out of court for its trouble. The newer IP controversy had led Broadcom to block the import of competing chips linked to video streaming – a rather Trumpian move, just months after the President’s inauguration. — We are so tired of headlines basking in delusions of superior wisdom about Netflix not ruling out the possibility of advertising as a supplementary…
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 1 billion WiFi 6 and 6E chipset shipments, three years since launching its first next-generation WiFi technologies. What makes this milestone even sweeter, is that competitors have been basking in how Broadcom has lost its grip 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 1 billion shipments is below the target initially set out by the company back in 2017 when Broadcom started seriously talking about the possibilities of WiFi 6.…
Device management platform Radix is set for 50% growth among its video segment, with an operator deployment in the Middle East imminent. Speaking to the company’s CMO, Nadav Avni, at Mobile World Congress 2022, we heard that video devices are now seen as the catalyst for growth, even if that means supporting more troublesome operating systems and open source video software (cough, RDK, cough). Despite Radix’s wide-ranging client base, Avni recognizes the importance of prioritizing the telco market for growth, noting that CSPs are the largest deployers of CPE. At present, the company manages a footprint of around 10 million devices, 2 million of which are video-centric. However, this latter number is set to grow considerably, with a deal currently…
Part way through our day-one interview with NovelSat at last week’s Mobile World Congress, Aviv Ronai, VP Marketing and Product, had to excuse himself to grab the attention of a big fish, the CTO of Cellcom, Israel’s largest MNO, later explaining that NovelSat had just announced a pilot project to deploy its new edgy offering. From nowhere, two additional staffers appeared, to chew the fat, and while we cannot speak Hebrew, you could tell that the mood was high. Ronai cut back, explaining that the gist of the new approach is to shift CDN functions from the MNO’s core network out to the edge, and use NovelSat’s expertise in satellites to migrate traffic from the core into satellite feeds. Ronai…
Early morning meetings are always dicey affairs at tradeshows, and while our scheduled attendees were delayed, Dror Tal, Chief Revenue Officer, was on hand to introduce Faultline to CompiraLabs at Mobile World Congress 2022. The pitch is that CompiraLabs is the only company to use machine learning for the last mile of OTT delivery, and if its numbers are accurate, then video services should quickly take note. Tal argued that “there is lots of stuff at the cloud and client level, but not in the gap between the two.” This is the realm in which CompiraLabs’ software-only server-side stack is deployed, using an ML-powered algorithm, developed over eight years of academic research, right at the edge nodes of the CDN.…
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 $170 million 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,…
Limelight Networks’ acquisition of Edgecast from Yahoo this week has divided opinions unlike any video technology vendor M&A deal in recent memory. Cries of CDN consolidation have echoed out across the Faultline-sphere, followed by kneejerk descriptions of the merger as a combination of legacy technologies – akin to sticking two bricks together and hoping the joined unit floats. The truth is that this is a highly complementary – yet complex – deal set to generate tremendous efficiencies for numerous parties, including former Edgecast owner Verizon Communications and existing Yahoo owner Apollo Funds. Limelight and Edgecast will be merged and promptly rebranded as Edgio following the deal, in which the new Yahoo (in which Verizon still owns 10%) will jointly own…
Yet another record has been set for the size of a planned hydrogen hub. This week, US start-up Green Hydrogen International announced a 60 GW green hydrogen hub, to be powered by wind and solar in South Texas. The project would also have its own salt cavern for storage, with plans to produce clean rocket fuel for Elon Musk’s SpaceX. The first 2 GW phase of ‘Hydrogen City’ is set to begin operations in 2026, before it is scaled up to provide 2.5 million tons of green hydrogen per year. DESRI has signed a 200 MW solar, 400 MWh project development agreement with the Sacramento Municipal Utility District in California. IBC Solar will soon begin construction of two solar projects,…
Population: 60.4 million -(0.16% vs 2020) GDP Per Capita (PPP): $43,376 (+3.7% vs 2020) Debt to GDP: 154.2% (-1.6% vs 2020) Electricity Consumption per Capita: 4,687 kWh Highly dependent on imports for electricity and gas Italy has one of the worst positions in Europe for energy security. It has the Mediterranean instead of the North Sea for offshore wind, it has no nuclear capacity, it is one of the most gas dependent and Russia-dependent grids, and it is lagging in the energy transition. Of this 59 GW of thermal capacity (Gas plus coal), and there is also some oil – this is due to an overgenerous capacity payment, but it is also a historical legacy from past decades. Most…
Research casts doubt over 5G energy reduction promises The promise of 5G to reduce overall energy consumption rests on assumptions that have yet to be proven, according to a study from the Centre for Research into Energy Demand Solutions (CREDS). The report does not tell us much we did not already know or could readily surmise, making the point that while energy efficiency of mobile networks has increased with each new generation, so has the amount of data traffic being carried by mobile networks. The key lies in whether further optimization of network and measures at the system and network level will be sufficient to compensate for the proliferation in data generated to yield a net reduction in energy consumed.…
Mobile World Congress was full of announcements from radio vendors large and small, most with their eyes on 5G and the Open RAN opportunity. One of these was STL, which launched Firebird, a family of 5G radios compliant with O-RAN Alliance interfaces. STL Firebird offers multiband 4G/5G macro radio units (O-RUs), initially available for spectrum band 1 (2.1 GHz FDD), and three TDD bands – 40 (2.3 GHz), 41 (2.5 GHz) and 78 (3.5 GHz), with others to follow. Firebird will form part of STL’s Accellus O-RAN range. The launch follows STL’s announcement, earlier this year, of a partnership with Meta Connectivity to design and develop dual 4G and 5G radio products, specifically for the TDD bands 40 and 78.…
Many operators had interesting demonstrations, trials and breakthroughs in Barcelona, but we picked out AT&T for special focus because its activities epitomize the transition of many telcos – however painful it may be – towards a modern cloud-based world with new technologies and partners. AT&T’s ground-breaking deal to transfer its Network Cloud and 5G core to Microsoft Azure was announced months ago, but was a topic of discussion throughout MWC, as it sets a precedent that is exciting for some non-greenfield operators, threatening for others. Also, AT&T announced its own deal with Rakuten Symphony (see separate item on Symphony); and a partnership with Intel to develop ‘RAN pooling’ – a dynamic use of distributed unit resources within an Open RAN.…
Even before 5G has delivered much for two of its three major use cases, research on the supposed next sixth generation has intensified and attracted more interest at MWC 2022 than hitherto. This has been the case for previous generations, but one difference this time is that a lot of the interest is geopolitical rather than just technological and concerned with new use cases, as in the past. We have had fragmentation before, notably with 3G when there were separate versions in Europe and the Americas, with China then a more minor contributor than currently. Ironically, 4G was thought to have united the cellular world once and for all and initially this concord looked like being sustained under 5G, until…
Vodafone is one of the first MNOs to launch a blockchain-based trading platform for IoT systems complete with a proven demonstration for EV (electric vehicle) charging in Newbury, UK, where it is headquartered. This Digital Asset Broker (DAB) platform allows connected devices to engage in secure transactions without human intervention, orchestrated over a distributed ledger comprising data stored in linked blocks, with additions always being added in a new block at the end of the chain to provide an irreversible timeline protected against tampering by strong encryption. In the case of DAB, the network connects IoT devices that want to engage in a transaction on a temporary one to one basis for secure exchange of information, with money transferred recorded…
The RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) is perhaps the most original and potentially disruptive element of the O-RAN Alliance architecture, since it abstracts the management and control of the RAN from the base stations themselves and allows these hugely important functions to be supplied by third parties via an open platform supporting xApps and rApps from many providers. Some vendors, such as Juniper, aim to provide the platform, in order to establish themselves in a key seat of power in terms of RAN strategy. Other vendors, and some operators, such as BT, aim to develop xApps, arguing that the platform itself will be commoditized and the real innovation will happen in individual applications. Amdocs is one software vendor that was originally…
Wind River has signed Japan’s second MNO, KDDI, for its cloud-native telco cloud management platform, Wind River Studio. This enables an operator to deploy a distributed cloud deployment across its network and it also provides orchestration and automation tools for the cloud deployment, plus data analytics with AI/ML support to help with ongoing performance optimization. Randy Cox, head of product management for cloud and industry verticals, said: “A carrier may bring a basic off-the-shelf server into their environment. We will come and bring our cloud platform software along with orchestration analytics and enable the RAN provider to be deployed in the network and basically operate their base stations.” The RAN vendor’s software would run on top of Wind River’s Cloud-as-a-Service…
Open RAN was, predictably enough, one of the hottest topics of conversation at Mobile World Congress. There were plenty of announcements of products, trials and partnerships from those directly involved in the market, and plenty of commentary from those watching from the sidelines. In the past, the RAN has represented a huge proportion of mobile operator spending, but has been an increasingly closed world to all but a rarefied few vendors. Now, disaggregating and virtualizing the RAN, opening up the interfaces between the elements, and implementing the software on general purpose cloud infrastructure, all provide entry points for new players, whether giants from adjacent cloud and IT worlds, or start-ups in every layer from chips to applications. The operators see…
Vodafone continues to bolster its commitment to Open RAN, and to take the lead among the European majors in banging the drum for the technology. It has already claimed the first Open RAN deployment in Europe, in a rural site in the UK, and has pledged to support Open RAN in new deployments in the country, reaching about 20% of its base of sites by 2025. Now it has added commitments for its whole European footprint, saying that it plans to roll out Open RAN equipment across about 30,000 sites, reaching 30% of the total base of sites by 2030. As usual with Open RAN pledges there is limited detail on how much of the architecture will be supported –…