Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Intel has announced a $1bn investment fund to support technology developments that could be integrated into its foundry services in future, including an intensified focus on the RISC-V open source processor architecture. Intel is already spending $20bn to build two chip factories in Ohio as it bids to become a major foundry to compete with TSMC and Samsung. Intel Foundry Services (IFS) will support multiple processor architectures including its own x86, ARM and RISC-V. It seems keen to steal a march on its more established rivals in the nascent RISC-V sector so this will be a major focus of the new innovation fund, which will be jointly run by Intel Capital and IFS. It will invest in companies that will…
Speaking at the recent Fierce WiFi Summit, Bill McFarland, CTO of US WiFi specialist Plume, said that the firm’s journey from cloud-based WiFi management system into a fully-fledged services platform is well underway. This was evidenced by the demands of existing customers Liberty Global and Breezeline (née Atlantic Broadband until rebranding one month ago). Plume has provided an entry point into modern multi-access point WiFi management for Liberty and Breezeline, but the next step for these two service providers is all about open source. Specifically OpenSync, which was developed by Plume Design under the PML image in 2015, before being provided to RDK Management in 2018 and carved out that same year as fully open sourced software. Since then, interest…
It has become quite common for 5G private network collaborations to launch with a customer already in tow and that is the case with the non-exclusive partnership just announced between Nokia and Comcast Business, the enterprise deployment subsidiary of the Comcast telco and media conglomerate. That showcase is set up to go live later in the first quarter of 2022 at the Wells Fargo Center, a multi-sports arena in Philadelphia, using Nokia’s Digital Automation Cloud (DAC)platform for private wireless technology and digitalization, with Comcast Business providing project management and systems integration. The network will be used to offer services in the ground for fans of the various sports, as well as improving health and safety and security, according to the…
The European Union is the latest region to announce plans to increase its self-sufficiency in advanced semiconductor technology while boosting local production. The European Commission (EC) has an ambitious target to double its share of global chip production to 20% by 2030, despite Europe’s chip majors having old-generation foundries. It will need to lure global players, such as TSMC and Intel, to establish advanced factories in the region, while avoiding infringements of EU state aid laws. The EC has identified €43bn of potential public and private investments in the local chip sector and has proposed a European Chips Act to unlock those funds. It claims such investments will make the region more resilient against the kind of supply chain disruptions…
Nvidia’s dream of acquiring ARM may be the latest semiconductor mega-merger to fall through, but some major deals are gaining approval, and AMD’s purchase of Xilinx has finally been confirmed. It took longer than planned to clear all the regulatory hurdles, but that has now happened and AMD completed the $53bn deal on February 14. This presents Intel with a significantly enhanced challenge from AMD in several strategic markets, including 5G infrastructure, since both processor makers now own a designer of advanced FPGA (field programmable gate array) chips (Intel acquired Xilinx’s chief rival, Altera, in 2015). The AMD acquisition was cleared by Chinese antitrust authorities last month and on February 9, the mandatory Hart-Scott-Rodino (HSR) Act waiting period in the…
Nvidia’s bid to buy processor IP giant ARM from Softbank was looking increasingly unlikely to succeed, and last week, the US company threw in the towel in the face of opposition from US, European Union and UK competition regulators – not to mention hostility from many of ARM’s customers, who are also Nvidia’s competitors. The acquisition would have been the biggest ever in the semiconductor industry, at $66bn, but now becomes the latest in a line of major chip industry deals to collapse in the face of antitrust concerns. The failure highlights the challenges of getting any large-scale acquisition approved when the inherently global nature of the semiconductor industry collides with the national and regional sensitivities that surround strategic chip…
As well as possible consolidation in its home market of the UK, Vodafone is also embroiled in M&A speculation in Spain and Italy – both very competitive markets with at least four MNOs and increasing convergence between mobile, fiber and TV operations. But Vodafone has rejected a bid from Iliad, the French group that owns Italy’s fourth MNO, as being insufficient, and it may lose out to Orange in Spain, where it has been dancing around the fourth MNO, MásMóvil. Despite repeated reports of talks between Vodafone and MásMóvil, the smaller firm is now making plans with Orange to create a 50:50 joint venture in Spain, according to Reuters. There is little detail known so far, but ownership would be…
IBM’s recent acquisition of Sentaca, a telecoms consulting and technology firm based in Boston, USA, is another sign of increasing convergence of edge computing with 5G. IBM is set on becoming a major force among enterprise IT systems and services firms, which make up one of four principal categories of edge compute providers in telecoms – the others being hyperscalers, MNOs and mobile infrastructure providers. There is overlap, so that not all four of these categories are necessarily involved in, or required for, a given edge deployment. MNOs can be shut out by infrastructure providers working directly with enterprises, perhaps with the help of hyperscalers. Enterprise IT players such as IBM can in turn be denied a role by hyperscalers…
Special Report: 5G-era M&A Nationalism, or regionalism, are back on the agenda in the mobile industry, with potentially profound implications for the shape of the market in the 2020s. Of course, the geopolitical ripples from the tensions between the USA and China have been felt globally for several years now, with 5G technology symbolically at the heart of the disputes. The tensions over trade, cybersecurity and political ambition have sparked intensified efforts by both superpowers to become more self-sufficient in key technologies such as 5G and AI, and these trends have only been reinforced by the supply chain disruptions following the pandemic. But the race to build up 5G-related influence and intellectual property is not confined to the two biggest…
Maxlinear acquired Marvell’s G.hn business for a paltry $21 million, sending shockwaves through the home networking community. Maxlinear had only recently become cash rich, so with four or five cheaper sources for G.hn on the market, this was not simply a case of buying up the competition to shut it down. It seemed Maxlinear wanted G.hn as it saw a future in the powerline version of the technology as HomePlug fell into decline, but the bargain price raised questions about the profit potential of G.hn. Marvell was the ringleader of the G.hn community, and it looked unlikely that Maxlinear would be willing to take over that role, leaving the other vendors without direction. — WarnerDisco is ready to dance.…
Sustained global supply chain issues have hampered WiFi silicon production, yet FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks is optimistically projecting that more than 150 million WiFi 6E devices will enter the US market this year, mostly routers. Starks didn’t say whether his numbers are based on in-house research carried out by the FCC, or commissioned by a third-party forecaster, but what we do know is that this projection is spookily close to a recent WiFi forecast from our Rethink TV research arm, showing that the WiFi 6 install base will grow by 148 million in North America this year. Unfortunately, Starks did not nibble on our request for comment. Appearing fleetingly at the Fierce WiFi Summit this week, Starks pointed to devices…
Back in the middle of January, Faultline was invited to a sneak preview of Avid’s latest product that hopes to tap into the pandemic-led boom in remote and cloud-based production. Nexis Edge moves Avid’s stealthy storage capabilities to remote workers by creating playback and edit proxies of raw files which can be streamed remotely. Although often primarily thought of as a software house, Avid is also a huge storage company. Its flagship product in this segment, Nexis, has already been on the market for almost six years, providing storage to connect post-production workflows on-prem across all industry standard software, including Avid’s Media Composer and competing platforms like Adobe Premiere. Nexis Edge allows Avid to bulk up its value proposition to…
While it is accepted that the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics is likely to register the lowest viewing figures for an Olympics Games for a long time, the event’s opening week has been an opulent affair for anyone interested in immersive viewing formats and live 8K streaming. In the US, some 16 million viewers tuned into the opening ceremony last Friday across NBCU’s pay TV and streaming platforms, including Peacock, which is 43% fewer eyeballs than the 2018 opening ceremony hosted in the South Korean province Pyeongchang. It is possible this projected downturn in viewing for the 2022 Winter Olympics has encouraged content providers to experiment with experiences such as VR and 8K, including VR in 8K. However, while the overall…
Nvidia has now officially abandoned its $40 billion acquisition of chip designer Arm, which has left current owner SoftBank in the lurch. The Japanese MNO was looking to turn an $8 billion profit, after paying $32 billion for Arm back in 2016. Facing stiff regulatory pressure, Nvidia chose to ditch the vehicle that would have given it many expansionist channels. Nvidia announced its bid in September 2020, prepaying some $1.25 billion that is notably not being returned. Nvidia’s share price growth would now value the deal nearer $66 billion, as the deal relied mostly on stock. SoftBank is now looking to IPO Arm, with a deadline of March 2023, and will be hoping that the market values Arm in the…
As confidence in traditional TV measurement methods plummets further, first-party audience data is now the gold standard. But as data sources of all shapes and sizes begin to ringfence their assets, some players can have a hard time keeping on top of things. Take audience data broker and analytics house TVadSync, which has traditionally relied on automatic content recognition (ACR) technology as a streamlined source of viewership data. This data primarily came from smart TV OEMs, which embed this technology within their devices, however, the taps have begun to run dry in the past few years as OEMs began to acquire ACR vendors. Speaking to Faultline, TVadSync’s CEO, Ronan Higgins, recalls how the company was unable to sustain a productive…
Plume decided to detach itself from the next-gen operator WiFi panel discussion at the Fierce WiFi Summit, with the US WiFi specialist’s CTO Bill McFarland presenting solo instead of basking in the glory of two major operators on either side of the pond. In fairness, Plume would expect nothing less from its return on investment as the sole premium sponsor of the two-day virtual event. What Faultline gleaned from McFarland’s cameo is that Plume’s journey from cloud-based WiFi management system into a fully-fledged services platform is well underway – as evidenced by the demands of existing customers Liberty Global and Breezeline (née Atlantic Broadband until rebranding one month ago). Before we expand on McFarland’s musings (including some strange new terms),…
Japan has said that it will divert some of its LNG supplies into Europe in a bid to reduce any disruption that a Russian invasion of Ukraine could have on the continent’s gas supply. Several vessels, each carrying at least 70,000 tons of LNG, are already on their way to Europe and due to arrive this month according to officials at Japan’s Ministry of Trade, Economy and Industry. More are likely to follow in March and April, although the gesture is primarily symbolic of solidarity between Europe and Japan. Each vessel will only account for an hour and a half of average European gas demand. US President Joe Biden has renewed the Trump-era Section 201 tariffs on imported solar panels…
A report out this week from the Corporate Climate Responsibility Monitor assesses the climate strategies of 25 major global companies – and for the most part finds them wanting, with not one single company achieving the top score, which is calls High Integrity. And only one of those companies, shipping specialist Maersk, achieved the next level up of aware of “Reasonable Integrity,” due to its proactive efforts in the transport sector to decarbonize shipping emissions, mostly from bunker fuel, which accounts for 63% of its total emissions. While the company does not yet provide a clear trajectory to decarbonize, the report puts this down to the low availability of alternative fuels so far. It has set emission reductions from terminals…
Thales boosts IoT portfolio with secure connectivity modules French electronics and aerospace giant Thales has strengthened its IoT portfolio with launch its newly launched ELS62 series of secure connectivity modules incorporating a single antenna package, designed to accelerate deployment across various sectors. The modules offer a range of connectivity options and strong cybersecurity to IoT device manufacturers, with reduced size to address markets such as medical wearables, smart meters, and home alarm systems. The modules can be activated and managed remotely, with connectivity fallback to 2G to maximize network reachability. The modules are compliant with LTE Cat.1 bis, a new wireless communication standard enabling IoT devices to have a single antenna rather than two as with the current LTE Cat.1…
Antenna maker CommScope is the latest Open RAN player to join the Evenstar program, which is led by Meta Connectivity and aims to encourage a broad ecosystem of open radio units at many price points to accelerate adoption. Evenstar was announced in February 2020 under the auspices of the Telecom Infra Project (TIP), of which Facebook (now Meta) was a founder. Several products based on its reference designs have been created, including one by Vodafone, which was part of the operator’s trials and RFI process in 2020. CommScope’s focus will be on creating open reference designs for Massive MIMO antenna arrays and filter panels. This will aim to address a key challenge for Open RAN. This is how to support…