Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
LotusFlare, a specialist in telco support software, has won a deal with Deutsche Telekom’s network API unit, Magenta API Capability Exposure (Mace), which is set to use LotusFlare’s digital network operator (DNO) cloud platform. As a leader in network APIs, DT sets a promising precedent for LotusFlare to be a provider of software services for other operators keen to make the most of APIs. The LotusFlare DNO cloud is a cloud-native business support system (BSS) for MNOs. The software firm promises that “CSPs can innovate freely, better engage with customers on all digital channels, drive customer acquisition and increase retention and monetize network assets.” The offering also includes an API marketplace where third-party companies can create new applications and services that integrate with…
The long-heralded promise of hollow core fiber (HCF) for lower latency and more efficient data transmission over long distances has come closer to commercial realization after separate trails by ZTE and China Mobile. Both trials featured technology from Yangtze Optical Fiber and Cable (YOFC), including the cables, essential splicing services, and adapters for integration with single-mode fibers. Both demonstrations were also over 20 km links, in the latest ZTE case to demonstrate real-time transport at 1.2Tb/s over a single wavelength with 3W launch power, celebrated as an industry first. This came just three few weeks after China Mobile launched a HCF transmission test network operating at 800 Gbps, also over a single wavelength. Conducted in Shenzhen-Dongguan, Guangdong, China Mobile said this…
The road to full network automation, defined as Level 5 by TM Forum, and even the associated much-desired concept of cloud nativeness is longer than many vendors of relevant technologies pretend. They remain long term aspirations rather than near realities for most operators, eventually necessary to contain the complexities of multi-vendor 5G networks and to liberate the full benefits of Standalone (SA), such as dynamic network slicing. Both cloud nativeness and Level 5 automation have widely been touted as essential for effective orchestration and management of 5G in future, and yet these can in principle be implemented within an internal data center with no cloud connectivity at all. The new complexities come partly from changing the way operations are done,…
Belgium’s incumbent operator Proximus has been on a path to grow its international software business for several years and is seeing promising growth, through gains in existing business lines and via M&A. Proximus CEO Guillaume Boutin explains how the operator has been achieving the miraculous task of finding new revenue streams. Although he does admit that without a pre-existing global carrier network this might not have been possible. The CEO also dives into Europe’s new passion for sovereign clouds, preparation for 5G SA and the telco cloud. “We wanted to transform the company from our existing telecom markets into a ‘techco,’ where we could find a balance between revenues coming from geographies where we own networks and from geographies where…
Five years ago this week… Almost three years in the making, Harmonic finalized the deal of a lifetime – signing up cable behemoth Comcast to license its CableOS (now cOS) virtual broadband platform over four years for at least $175 million in software license fees. Comcast grew increasingly close to Harmonic after the operator completed field trials of CableOS in summer 2018. Although a 2016 agreement between the two made Harmonic the favored supplier of Comcast, the operator also deployed Arris’ E-6000 Gen 2 modules in 2018 for converged cable access platform (CCAP) architecture. A switch out scenario was not the likely option however, as Arris has been known for providing flexibility in CCAP, supporting both R-PHY and R-MAC-PHY. CNN couldn’t even secure…
Catching up on the captivating Croisette conversations that occurred at the recent Cannes Lions Festival, Faultline stumbled across a refreshingly candid advertiser panel hosted by the RTL Beach – which was not afraid to tell it like it is. The conversation, under the title “Claiming the living room”, started well when Tom Rozestraten, CEO of Ad Alliance (RTL’s ad sales house) Netherlands, said that he was “pissed off by the lack of speed” of innovation in Joint Industry Committees (JICs)—the collaborative bodies where advertisers, media owners and agencies present common sets of guidelines for measurement in advertising. Before noting that RTL Ad Alliance was recently tapped by WBD for HBO Max and also working with Paramount’s SkyShowtime in the Netherlands,…
Case study time. When Faultline interviewed Livepeer founding duo Doug Petkanics and Eric Tang in March 2024, we were told that a new customer called Fishtank was baiting multiple-million viewers. Many months later, it transpires that Fishtank—an interactive streaming platform—has only recently reached one million viewers. Despite the original overestimation, the numbers for this fledgling but fast-growing Big Brother-esque reality show are still profoundly impressive. We are still not totally clear if Fishtank’s one million figure is a cumulative one across seasons (currently on season 2.5), or if these one million viewers are specific to the most reason season. It certainly isn’t a live concurrent figure, we can tell you that much. Unfortunately, company representatives did not respond to our…
Matt Steffanina, an online celebrity dance coach, has just uploaded a rallying cry to his doting 13.8 million YouTube subscribers, admitting that creating dance videos for YouTube—after 17 years—is just not cutting the mustard anymore. “I want to do documentaries, I want a Netflix series,” Steffanina implores in a rags-to-riches video which is ultimately intended to direct dance enthusiasts to his dedicated dncr.com subscription site, far from YouTube’s clutches. This is the latest instance of successful YouTubers decamping – spending less time uploading content to the platform that made them famous, and injecting more effort into platforms that can make them money, serious money. Steffanina estimates that record labels have siphoned off $15 million in revenue from his content. “You’re…
If you ever find yourself in need of validation for how bleeding edge innovation is being brought to life in consumer entertainment experiences, look no further than the video games industry. This is all about bridging gaps; bringing people together in vast online communities where monetization potential is prolific – a lesson that the TV and movie industries could learn a thing or two about. Roblox is a global gaming sensation boasting some 200 million monthly active users and 77 million daily users. Plenty has been written about the power of user-generated content (UGC) in the age of the Tik Tok-rooted creator economy, and Roblox is in many ways the UGC of the video game realm – as a place…
M&A, IP, Patents Nokia has finally sold off most of its holdings in Alcatel Submarine Networks to the French government for around €100 million. Nokia will sell an 80% stake of the firm to the Agence des participations de l’Etat (APE) and plans to make a full exit in the future. Orange may sell its 40% share in Mauritian operator Mauritius Telecom. The operator has over 1 million customers for its fixed and mobile services and annual revenues of about $220 million. TIM plans to complete the sale of its NetCo unit to private equity firm KKR on July 1. Part of the funds will pay off TIM’s debt, but overall, the firm’s debt will increase by €1.4 billion to…
The Telecom Infra Project (TIP) has received the fourth batch of specs from the Open RAN MoU Group – a project consisting of Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefonica, TIM, and Vodafone. TIP will use the documents as inputs for its OpenRAN Release Framework (what is this). The first Release of Technical Documents (to use the clunky yet proper name) arrived in June 2021. It was followed by a second in March 2022, and a third in April 2023. In order, these covered the main scenarios and technical requirements, then a suite focused on orchestration and infrastructure, as well as energy efficiency and sustainability goals, and then Service Management and Orchestration (SMO) and RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) improvements, as well as enhancements…
Web testing firm Ookla has confirmed what we already knew: that 5G performance is boosted by the use of mid-band spectrum. But it goes a bit further by highlighting a link with consumer sentiment. All three major MNOs in the US have witnessed customer feedback over their 5G services improving in step with ongoing mid-band spectrum deployments, according to Ookla. T-Mobile stood out, the firm gained access only in March to over 2.5 GHz of spectrum that it acquired in a 2022 auction. This required legislation from Congress to clear the spectrum that had been held in limbo by regulator the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). At a stroke, T-Mobile’s median download speed shot up by 29.64 Mbps in March alone,…
The US government’s anti-China policies are damaging US firms and stimulating China’s domestic technological self-sufficiency. The exclusionary actions from the US are all well and good until they start to affect the global telecoms community. Further attacks against China could lead the discussion to the gates of the 3GPP standards group, which is well attended by Chinese firms, namely Huawei. This week, news leaked that the US is investigating the access that China Mobile, China Telecom, and China Unicom have to US data, through their cloud and internet routing services. The Biden administration is concerned that the operators can share American data with the Chinese government. The US Commerce Department have completed “risk-based analyses” of China Mobile and China Telecom, but…
Five years ago this week… Faultline’s 800th issue led with the emergence of the RIST protocol, gaining ground and muddying the waters in the search for a common low latency standard. First developed by the Video Services Forum (VSF), RIST gained momentum at least as fast as SRT was, and some of the same companies behind the latter standard were also among the 21 founding members of the RIST Forum in March 2019. Haivision, founding member of SRT was also one of the inaugural supporters of RIST. One key difference between RIST and SRT is that while SRT is an open source protocol, RIST is an open specification that was pitched as a common denominator for interoperability. Today many service providers, even among…
Ad blockers across the globe, your time is nigh. YouTube has (finally) decided to go down the path of server-side ad-insertion (SSAI), beta testing this method of ad insertion on a subsection of users – thereby making ad-blocking extensions virtually useless. This is great news for advertisers, which can rest assured that their buys on YouTube will not be sidestepped, should the pilot prove successful. SSAI is not novel, and YouTube has been one of the most adversely affected by ad blockers. Once it is fully implemented, this change will enable YouTube to funnel some users towards its Premium offering (née Music Key in 2014), but more importantly ensure ads are shown and not skipped. Depending on advancement level, some…
The consequences of widespread use of artificial intelligence (AI) are not reserved to the creation of Skynet, the Terminator franchise’s genocidal AI ruling over human beings in a dystopian future. A more pressing concern lies much simply in hyper-excessive power consumption. Awoken by the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November 2022, consumers have become acclimated to using genAI tools, and with the technology not only scaling rapidly for number of users, but quickly expanding from text-to-text prompts to image and video generators, datacenters are quickly outgrowing the grid while keeping in operation unsustainable sources of power, like coal plants. Organizations like the newly formed Digital Sustainability Alliance endeavor to tackle the issue, but a lot more attention and effort must…
Freely is off to the races. The newly launched streaming platform for the UK market—a collaboration between the top four British broadcasters—has signed up four additional smart TV OEMs to provide an imperative hardware push behind a joint venture which has arguably been overhyped before and since its recent launch in May 2024. Such was the hysteria around Freely’s unveiling last year, that overseas dispatches have been rushing to create copycat services – but it might be wise to wait until Freely has bedded in, lest it end up like Salto, the crestfallen French broadcast collaborative. Toshiba, Sharp, Panasonic, and Metz are the four new TV brands to have signed up to distribute Freely, a product of the BBC, ITV,…
The majority (42%) of content publishers will opt for just three or fewer CDNs today when supporting mass-scale live streaming events – marking a bloody bisection of multi-CDN set-ups from a majority (33%) of publishers which selected six or more CDNs in 2022. This is according to April 2024 data from edge node supplier Qwilt, conducting a survey of 259 publishers in North America and Europe (down from 310 respondents in 2022), which shows that only 13% of publishers would choose six or more CDNs today, while 22% would deploy four, and a similar number (23%) would install four CDNs. This is rapid turning of the tables in just two years – completely flipping on its head the weight of…
M&A, IP, Patents Accenture will acquire Italian networking firm Fibermind and offer “end-to-end network engineering services” to its customers in Italy. Fibermind provides fiber, 5G networks and engineering services. Financial details of the deal were not disclosed. Details of Vodafone’s sale of Indus Towers are now clear. The group will sell 484.7 million shares in the towers company and retain a 3.1% stake. Vodafone aims to raise INR 153 billion (€1.7 billion) from the sale and will use funds to repay some of Vodafone Idea’s debt. Kazakhstan’s state-owned incumbent operator Kazakhtelecom (or Kaztel) is selling its mobile unit to Qatari conglomerate Power International Holding (PIH) for $1.1 billion. HPE’s $14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks is under scrutiny in the…
Middle Eastern operator du has commissioned OSS vendor Comarch to overhaul its existing system. With du, part of the Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Company (EITC), Comarch is revamping the entire OSS deployment. New features will include infrastructure automation, and near real-time infrastructure topology stitching and refresh. It spans all cellular generations, both the mobile and fixed-line core, and the RAN. “We selected Comarch as our partner primarily due to their comprehensive OSS portfolio, collaborative approach, and high level of expertise necessary to accomplish this digital transformation. The successful implementation of this solution brings us closer to achieving du’s strategic vision of digital agility, reduces our time to market, and empowers us to deploy emerging technologies faster than ever before,” said Saleem…