Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
While major vendors are seeking to turn early products and partnerships into full-blown ecosystems for Open RAN (see separate item), Rakuten Symphony has leapt ahead of them all thanks to its own early experience as an Open RAN deployer in Japan. Last year, Rakuten Group set up a separate subsidiary, Symphony, to commercialize the integration and experience gained by its MNO unit’s cloud-native roll-out. It will package and pre-integrate solutions based on its own choice of suppliers and will expand these to include other options too, while offering paid-for integration, testing and deployment services. Symphony already counts as the second largest integrator of Open RANs (in a very early market), after one of its closest ecosystem partners, NEC. At Mobile…
As early trailblazers for Open RAN, Dish Wireless in the USA and Rakuten Mobile in Japan were always likely to run into significant teething problems, and they have indeed encountered some headwinds. The two operators have taken similar trajectories, both entering the mobile field to become the fourth MNO in their countries by building 5G networks based on Open RAN technology, in the hope of achieving eventual cost savings and greater flexibility with freedom to choose between multiple vendors for hardware and software. There are, though, some significant differences, with Rakuten building its network almost from scratch and continuing to incur enormous build-out costs, while Dish inherited a 4G network as part of the regulatory settlement allowing T-Mobile to merge…
The big four cellular infrastructure vendors differ significantly in their stance over Open RAN, with Nokia and Samsung the strongest advocates, while Huawei is the most antagonistic and Ericsson somewhere in the middle. They are all united, though, in being predictably dismissive of emerging Open RAN players on the grounds that they are failing to demonstrate interoperability among themselves. Certainly, that is Nokia’s line, as Tommi Uitto, head of the mobile business, accused leading Open RAN specialists of fakery in a interview at Mobile World Congress. As quoted in Light Reading, Uitto said: “We are trying to make it work but it is disappointing to see how slowly these Open RAN challengers have been able to get their act together.…
Special Report: Mobile World Congress 2022 (Part 2) MWC 2022: Eight key themes Here we offer a recap of the eight key topics that we identified at Mobile World Congress, from the point of view of the Wireless Watch universe. Some of these were covered in more detail in our first MWC special issue (published on March 3) and we delve into others in this edition. In all cases, we believe these themes will shape the fortunes of the mobile industry in 2022 and beyond, and we will revisit all of them on a regular basis to cover new developments and update our forecasts and analysis. Private 5G: There were scores of announcements, partnerships and demonstrations centered on private…
We have pointed out before that, while large operators talk up the benefits of introducing new suppliers to their RANs, the real power in the network rests with the core provider – and in tier 1 macro networks, 5G cores so far have largely stayed with the major equipment vendors. Open RAN proponents like Vodafone selected Ericsson or Nokia last year as they started to make decisions about their deployments of 5G Standalone, which requires its own 5G core. Now Orange has followed suit, unveiling its 5G SA core providers at MWC, and selecting Ericsson and Nokia, plus some elements from Oracle. Ericsson will supply the SA core for Orange’s operating companies in Belgium, Spain, Luxembourg and Poland, and Nokia…
Interest in LEO for IoT grows, new chipset integrates LPWAN with satellites The launch of a system-on-chip (SoC) enabling low power WAN networks to connect IoT devices over low earth orbit (LEO) satellites, by a little-known US start-up, does not by itself signify growth in this field. But combined with other developments involving Tier 1 operators, as well as persistent rumors that Apple will support LEO connectivity in future iPhones, it is clear there is at least a little fire behind the smoke. The new chip from Orca Systems does at least come integrated with an existing LEO constellation dedicated to IoT monitoring, from Totum, based in San Diego, California. This company has so far established a constellation of 18…
Japan’s KDDI has turned on its first commercial 5G Standalone (SA) Open RAN site using virtualized RAN equipment from Samsung and Massive MIMO radios from Fujitsu. The operator claims this to be first commercial deployment of 5G SA using fully Open RAN-compliant equipment from more than one vendor. The die was cast in December 2020 when Fujitsu announced its Open RAN-compatible 5G radio unit had been selected by KDDI for 5G SA commercial services in Japan, then scheduled for launch in the second half of KDDI’s 2021 financial year, ending on March 31 2022. Samsung has provided the equipment conforming to Open RAN standards for disaggregating the RAN so that different vendors’ equipment can be mixed and matched. The site…
Cisco, like many giants of the enterprise world, sees unprecedented opportunities to increase its mobile network business through emerging trends like open and virtualized networks, and private cellular. The company has some advantages here, including its long experience of selling and managing enterprise and carrier WiFi networks (a success it has repeatedly failed to apply in cellular RAN, however), and its presence in the packet core. Mobile World Congress saw Cisco make its most rounded announcement of an enterprise cellular strategy to date, and wisely it is not attempting to become a RAN vendor yet again, but is working with base station partners, initially Airspan and JMA Wireless. Cisco itself will focus on technologies and managed services to enable enterprises…
HPE and Cisco were going head-to-head at MWC with their private 5G announcements, and both majored on WiFi coexistence as differentiators. HPE’s unique selling points on this front fell into two main categories. One is a management interface that is more like those typically used for WiFi, giving enterprise IT managers efficient ways to carry out tasks such as user provisioning, without having the same level of control and depth that is needed by an MNO’s 5G core. The other is to enable interworking with WiFi, with support for features such as cross-network authentication and session handover, using the AirPass technology from HPE’s WiFi and edge division, Aruba. The private 5G software stack is available within an on-premise network-in-a-box, based…
One of the big changes we could identify since we were last in Barcelona was the position of Microsoft Azure in the telecoms market. In the past two years, Azure has greatly expanded and refined its value proposition for telcos, with its landmark agreement to run AT&T’s telco cloud and 5G core perhaps its signal achievement so far. It is taking a more collaborative approach to operators than Amazon AWS, apparently presenting a less significant threat that they would be squeezed into being bit-pipes; and it has greater enterprise scale and force than Google Cloud. We will say more about the evolution of its AT&T deal in the next issue, but Azure was in plenty of other announcements and demonstrations…
The eight stand-out topics, in our analysis, from the point of view of the Wireless Watch universe, are: Private 5G: There were scores of announcements, partnerships and demonstrations centered on private cellular networks, and particularly the migration to 5G. Private 5G is only one approach to enterprise cellular, and there was also plenty of interest in carrier-delivered B2B services enabled by 5G technologies like slicing – this was key to another of our themes, the Standalone core. There was also plenty of buzz around cellular IoT and the convergence of 5G with satellite to enable B2B services (see below). But private 5G is important for two reasons in particular. One, enterprise services are the chief way for operators to monetize…
Five years ago this week… Comcast brought YouTube aboard the Xfinity X1 set top in a move that was the tip of the iceberg of the operator’s long-term ambitions for aggregation and subsequent disruption with a slimmed down streaming bundle. Comcast had already converted 50% of its cable customers over to the X1 platform, with a target of 60% set for the end of 2017, while X1 voice remote deployments were at 13 million. Faultline felt at the time that the personalized content discovery offered by X1, drawn from a variety of sources, was a shining example of forward-thinking aggregation of OTT content. — The day has arrived sooner than expected. HBO Max has jumped into live sports streaming…
After getting blindsided by a very weird meeting in which a rather large cloud computing provider wanted nothing said to be on the record, Faultline was very relieved to find Red Hat’s Ian Hood, Chief Technologist for Global Service Providers, to be most ebullient, willing to dive into whether Red Hat Enterprise Linux might ever be deployed on CPE. Now owned by IBM, Hood sympathized with our recent frustration with operator outlooks on new technologies – that no one gets fired for investing in their access networks, but that this comes at the detriment of new technology adoption. This was observed by Rethink TV, our sister service, in its recent Multicast-ABR forecast. For Red Hat, this ingrained behavior is seen…
The EU and US political leadership want to sanction practically everything Russian, even against the advice of their own financial experts. But with coal and much nuclear decommissioned in recent years, Russia’s biggest export of all – natural gas – is something Europe can’t do without. The three ways to reduce imports of Russian gas are to import more LNG from elsewhere – expensively or to build out more renewable power, faster or to and to prolong the lifespan of coal and nuclear. In the long term only renewables is cost-effective but right now it’s LNG, coal and nuclear which can be ramped up in a matter of weeks. Germany’s Energy Minister Robert Habeck intends to expedite the passage of…
Brookfield Asset Management is preparing a hostile takeover bid for Australian energy company AGL Energy having a had a previous bid rejected. The proposed $3.6 billion deal would take the company private before up to $14 billion is invested in turning AGL Energy – one of Australia’s largest emitters through its coal business – into one of Australia’s largest clean energy retailers. The strategy, for example, would see the early closure of three coal fired power stations, which would be replaced with 8 GW of renewables energy plus storage capacity. AGL Energy currently has an annual revenue of $8 billion, servicing around 4.2 million customer contracts. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) in the US has opened its seabed…
Five years ago this week… Something fishy was going on in Austria, with government tenders for broadband development falling almost exclusively to the incumbent market leader, A1 Telekom Austria. Although it did not consistently offer the cheapest service, Telekom Austria had won 80% of the contracts from past government projects. Feeling cheated, The Austrian Association of Alternative Telecommunications Networks was pushing for a review on the management of government tenders, as well as an increase in regional tenders. — Discovery ended 2021 with 22 million paying D2C subscribers after adding 2 million in the fourth quarter – driving a 10% revenue increase for Q4 of $3.2 billion. Aside from Discovery’s ongoing mergers (WarnerMedia), joint ventures (BT Sport) and content…
The swing of Kudelski Group’s headcount reduction sword has made for tough viewing through the lens of our LinkedIn feed, yet the results of these measures provide much more pleasant reading from the pages of the Swiss digital security company’s full-year financial results. We have to applaud the recent recovery of its Nagra-driven digital TV division, reporting 2021 revenues of $363.4 million, some $10 million more than the segment made last year, and accounting for nearly 46% of the group’s total annual revenue of $778 million last year. However, we are wary not to be blindsided by this single annual snapshot. Tracking back through the archive, we can see that Kudelski has long been putting contingency plans in place to…
Verimatrix wanted to make one thing abundantly clear following the launch of its Secure Delivery Platform, that this does not signal intent from the US anti-piracy expert to become a “proper” platform player. By this, we mean the type of video platform that caters for an expansive suite of tools and services with so many partner integration options that it risks becoming a convoluted marketplace. Delusions of platform expansion grandeur are not clouding the Verimatrix cloud-based content protection push, as alluded to by Verimatrix’s SVP of Global Marketing, Jon Samsel, alongside Head of Product Management, Martin Bergenwall, who tag-teamed this week’s briefing with Faultline. Abbreviated affectionately as simply “The Platform,” we learned that the self-described “powerful cloud ecosystem” is the…
A week after LG Energy Solutions said it would go “all in “ on a combination of lithium ion batteries, healthcare and recycling, to push its revenue to $48 billion by 2030, has acquired one of the largest Japanese grid battery integrators – US-based NEC Energy Solutions – which had virtually closed down new business in the first half of 2020. The old NEC business was ostensibly shuttered for new business, to sit out the pandemic, so that NEC could focus on products in the 5G telecoms space in Japan, and it said at the time that the $200 million business would just complete some 20 odd projects it was engaged on and then revenues would slowly fall to a…
Population: 38.2 million (+0.5% vs 2020) Debt to GDP: 110% (-7.5% vs 2020) GDP per Capita (PPP): $47,050 (+2.6% vs 2020) Power Consumption per Capita: 14,447 kWh Canada slips under the radar more than it should for discussing energy – it is one of the world’s biggest power exporters. It’s the fourth biggest hydropower nation and exports much of that electricity to the US, it’s the fourth biggest oil producer, fourth biggest uranium miner, and fourth biggest gas producer. For the past thirty years little has changed in Canada’s own energy consumption. Oil grew only very slowly until the pandemic era, hydropower and nuclear remained static. Only in the past ten years have major shifts begun, with coal declining by…