Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
If you thought emerging from the other side of a two-year pandemic would result in some sort of humility among network operators and streaming services, think again. A gaggle of Tier 1 European telcos are throwing a collective tantrum, aiming to lobby the European Union to make it a legal requirement for over-the-top video providers to pay proportionately for taking up more and more precious telco network bandwidth. Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica and Vodafone claim that Europe’s telecoms market risks falling behind rivals. In an open letter penned in the Financial Times, the four operator CEOs (including Orange’s outgoing Stéphane Richard) have pounced on one particular comment made in the European Commission’s digital rights declaration made a month ago. This…
Ericsson has added seven products to its RAN portfolio ahead of Mobile World Congress next week, with a heavy focus on energy efficiency claims. A highlight of the launch was a new dual-band Radio 4490, which is the lightest Ericsson product in its class at 24 kilograms, and consumers 25% less power than its predecessor. The radio/antenna unit can be connected directly to an Ericsson Cloud-RAN via an evolved packet switched fronthaul, or to an existing Ericsson conventional baseband via either traditional or evolved fronthaul. Of course, Ericsson is not supporting Open RAN fronthaul so the radio would not connect to a non-Ericsson baseband. The 4T4R unit supports common combinations of midband spectrum such as 2.1 GHz, 1.8 GHz and…
Malaysia’s controversial plan to build a wholesale-only 5G network has been dogged with problems since it was first mooted in 2019, and the CEO of the company set up to implement it has hit out at the MNOs for their lack of support. The country’s national MNOs – Celcom, Digi.com, Maxis and U Mobile – have opposed the plan on the basis that it does not enable them to differentiate sufficiently. Ralph Marshall, head of the government-backed Digital Nasional Berhad (DNB), said the single wholesale network (SWN) had been “inordinately delayed” as a result of “posturing” by operators, which meant Malaysia’s 5G progress was now well behind that of neighbors such as Singapore or Thailand (both of which launched services…
Several vendors from the enterprise networking, OSS/BSS or data center fields are eyeing the RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) as an entry point to the 5G RAN. The experience of Cisco and others, that have attempted to break into the mobile RAN in the past, has warned most suppliers to leave base stations to the incumbents, or to specialized challengers, especially in the small cell field. But if the Open RAN community achieves its vision, the RIC will become the brain of the RAN, and will enable new entrants to the market via software alone. Juniper is one of the most advanced non-RAN players in developing a RIC that could greatly enhance its ability to complement its transport offerings for MNOs,…
Rakuten Symphony plans to brand its platform and marketplace as Symworld and expand the offering into Europe this year. Symphony is the company that was set up by the Japanese operator and cloud provider last year, to commercialize its Rakuten Communications Platform (RCP), providing product and integration services for operators. RCP elements were initially based on the hardware and software that Rakuten Mobile used in its own multivendor, open and cloud-native 5G/5G network in Japan. The new branding signifies moves to broaden the platform, and associated marketplace, and to drive a wider ecosystem. That, in turn, would amplify Rakuten’s influence over the fledgling Open RAN market, and the opportunities for Symphony to sell its services. Symphony plans to set up…
Qualcomm’s huge power in the mobile semiconductor world has been mainly concentrated on the device side, but just over a year ago, the firm said it would re-enter the infrastructure market for the first time since it sold its network chip business to Ericsson in 1999. Like many other firms from various sectors, it aims to ride on the Open RAN wave to penetrate the formerly closed world of the RAN, and has announced chips to power Open RAN distributed units (DUs) and radio units (RUs), as well as a strategic co-development with Vodafone Group. There is clearly strong potential for Qualcomm to shake up the market, and challenge the early movers in developing cloud-based DU processors and accelerators, such…
Mavenir is leaping into the increasingly congested IoT edge analytics field after involvement in pre-commercial deployments with Telefónica among others, aiming to match the impact it has made in cloud RAN and the 5G core as an emerging player from the middle ranks. There is the danger of overstretch for a $500m company, but Mavenir insists it is harnessing technologies on the AI front in particular that it has been developing for several years, in this case pitching particularly at actionable insights from video monitoring. The company has presented its new Intelligent IoT Platform (IIoTP) for deployment either independently or in conjunction with its Intelligent Video Application (IVA), for running on any cloud or on-premises hardware. The company has specified support…
Deutsche Telekom now has a firm stake in the ground of private enterprise 5G in its home country, after announcing its participation alongside German consumer appliance, tools and engineering conglomerate Bosch in CampusOS, a project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate Protection (BMWK) to the tune of €18.1m euros ($20.8m) over the next three years. The project is being coordinated by the Fraunhofer Institutes HHI and FOKUS, also involving other German industrial and academic partners, including Siemens and Rohde & Schwarz, aiming to build a modular ecosystem for 5G campus networks based on open radio technologies and interoperable network components. With 22 partners in all, a key objective is to evaluate and test multivendor deployments on…
Oracle has become a serious 5G core contender after landing a deal with Vodafone UK for capabilities that will enable the operator to prioritize low latency applications in edge networks. This is being achieved through a combination of Oracle’s 5G core policy control function (PCF) and policy and charging rules function (PCRF), which will allow Vodafone to test, deploy, and scale new 5G components and applications more quickly, while automating some policy decisions. Vodafone described the deployment as a key step in its migration to cloud-native architecture, which in turn will underpin many new capabilities and use cases. “Moving to cloud-native is a culture shift as much as it is a technology shift for a tech-comms company like Vodafone,” said…
Cisco is foremost among major corporations bursting for the limelight as they flock back to Mobile World Congress, which starts in Barcelona on Sunday, after two years of absence because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Cisco has set out its priorities clearly for the mobile industry It will be trumpeting its analytics capabilities and how these will be enhanced by the mobile edge for private 5G deployments. Wireless as a whole has come to the center of Cisco’s strategy, with an ambition to drive forward convergence between WiFi and 5G, another of its key themes at MWC 2022. These themes are currently somewhat overshadowed by speculation over its possible $20bn acquisition of analytics software company Splunk. This would be a lot…
Five years ago this week… Technicolor filed a patent infringement case against CPE rival Samsung, citing ten patents across video coding, communications and associated technologies. Samsung had been borrowing ideas from the innovative set top community for years without paying its patent dues, only to be invited into the market by operators like Liberty Global and Comcast. Technicolor had acquired Cisco’s set top business to compete with the scale that made Samsung an attractive vendor and now it was coming for the latter’s lunch. Settlements were reached, but Technicolor decided to dispose of its patent licensing business at the end of 2017. — Orange’s Q4 2021 takeover of Telekom Romania Communications resulted in the European operator’s biggest video subscriber influx…
Xilinx, the world’s favorite FPGA merchant, is to become known as the Adaptive and Embedded Computing Group (AECG) within the AMD wheelhouse, following completion of the deal initially valued at $35 billion and now thought to be in excess of $50 billion. It is apt that AMD’s acquisition should be signed and sealed just days after Arm’s $40 billion takeover by Nvidia unraveled in unsightly fashion, a deal which Arm would have used to counter AMD’s GPU resurgence. Yet what truly brings AMD and Xilinx together is a mutual hunger for the lunch of Intel and its own expansion into GPUs. An elephant in the room, however, is the power-guzzling reputation of FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays). Xilinx has looked…
If you thought emerging from the other side of a two-year pandemic would result in some sort of humility among network operators and streaming services, think again. A gaggle of tier 1 European telcos are throwing a tantrum aiming to be collectively noisy enough to torment the European Union into having little choice but to make it a legal requirement for OTT video providers to pay proportionately for taking up more and more of their precious bandwidth. In the eyes of Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica, and Vodafone, clearly the inflation of broadband prices across Europe, nor the numerous private investment injections, are providing ample funds for network expansion efforts – as the four giants attempt to pluck on a few…
Last week’s annual inflation analysis piece from Faultline did not paint Netflix in a good light when lined up against the inflation rates of pay TV, internet, and the Consumer Price Index (CPI) over a period of 12 years. Yet when placed in the context of contemporary streaming services, it is striking how much catch up the likes of Disney+ still have to play. Back in 2010, Netflix cost just $7.99 a month. In the years since, the SVoD has been struck with price hike after price hike, until reaching today’s almost unpalatable monthly subscription price of $15.99. Comparatively, the 2022 price for Disney+ is the same as Netflix’s 2010 price point of $7.99. The easy – and blinkered –…
A pair of reports recently crossed Faultline’s desk, which at first glance might provide ammunition for the recent wave of grievance-airing from operator CEOs. From Akamai, piracy is the main focus, while Sandvine’s report examined the growth of video and potential strain placed on operators. Both could be fuel for disingenuous fires, if willfully misinterpreted. Akamai points to a US Chamber of Commerce claim that piracy costs the US economy some $29.2 billion in lost revenue, but as with all such claims, there is scant information about the methodology used to reach that number. Very few pirates are going to get out their wallets if their illegal stream is shut down part way through a football match. They are a…
One of Bill Gates’ latest forays into the world of clean power could turn out to be anything but. Seattle-based Modern Electron’s heat-to-power system, while taking strong steps towards decentralization, must avoid reliance on natural gas’ diminishing role as a bridge fuel, if it is to secure a part of the future hydrogen economy. As part of its oversubscribed Series B funding round, Modern Electron has raised a total of $30 million. Funding will be dedicated towards deploying pilot projects for decentralized hydrogen production that “demonstrate affordable decarbonization of gas heating without any new infrastructure,” while also integrating its technologies into existing heating appliances. The company’s primary offering has been its small thermionic converter that captures waste heat from gas…
Would-be UK battery maker, Britishvolt has barely completed one round of £1.7 billion of funding, and it has announced what it calls an anchor investor in the form of Swiss-UK mining and minerals monster Glencore, one of Europe’s largest companies. This is the third deal it has done with Glencore, this time for a £40 million slice of its series C, £200 million, funding round. This comes a week or so after the two partnered on the recycling of lithium ion batteries. The UK has no major lithium ion cycling business as yet, and it allowed Glencore to rejuvenate an ailing subsidiary in the UK. Britishvolt has been instrumental in ensuring the UK had some presence in the lithium ion…
Population: 83.2 million (+0.0% vs 2020) Debt to GDP: 72.5% (+3.4% vs 2020) GDP Per Capita (PPP): $58,150 (+2.7% vs 2020) Germany occupies an ironic position in the energy transition. It has long remained Europe’s strongest solar power market by far, it is at the heart of the EU which strongly pushed the green agenda, and yet its own energy transition has been lacking. Coal is pretty much dead and buried across the rest of Western Europe, but in Germany it’s still a quarter of generation. With 12% of power coming from nuclear, which is going to be totally closed down this year, even the new Green coalition government can’t end coal until 2030 and gas will persist more than…
President Macron has promised fifty offshore wind farms in French waters by 2050 as part of a new push towards clean power and climate neutrality in the country. As the country gears up an industrial sector for equipment manufacture, this serves as a firing gun for the race to dominate the floating wind market. The target, unveiled at GE’s steam turbine factory for nuclear power plants in Belfort on Friday, is the first time France has set a capacity target for offshore wind by mid-century – a timeframe in which it is hoping to reach net zero emissions. The 40 GW outlined exceeds the expectations of nearly all offshore wind forecasts by 2050; even Rethink Energy’s own bullish predictions only…
Cisco ready to unveil private 5G strategy at MWC 2022 Cisco’s long-awaited entry to the 5G party will be made formally at Mobile World Congress 2022 with a pay-as-you go approach in line with its enterprise WiFi model. Cisco will unveil a service package comprising pre-sale network design consultancy and post-sale network management support, also disclosing the suppliers of RAN and core network components, perhaps inclining to inhouse development for the latter and established partners for the former. Cisco is entering an increasingly crowded field populated by the big MNOs, hyperscalers such as Google and Amazon, as well as a clutch of start-ups like Celona, in addition to the few established infrastructure players like Ericsson, Nokia, and Huawei. Cisco stresses…