Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
One of the dilemmas of any open networks movement is how to deal with patents licensing and intellectual property (IP) ownership. This will face the Open RAN community, which is already grappling with how to reconcile Chinese contributions to various open platforms, with US technology sanctions against Chinese firms. And more broadly, a robust and trusted IPR approach will be critical to adoption, and to the willingness of vendors and operators to contribute and invest in evolving the fledgling platforms. One objective of many open technology initiatives in the mobile world is to lower barriers to entry for new vendors and service providers, and one aspect of this is to reduce the stranglehold of a few giants on standards-essential…
Operators in the USA have been on the receiving end of complaints from airlines and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) over potential interference from C-band 5G services to altimeters, and Verizon and AT&T were forced to delay 5G launches in this midband spectrum (3.7-4 GHz) until January 19. Now, the boot is on the other foot, in another dispute related to spectrum in the higher 6 GHz frequency range. There, AT&T has been at the forefront of a failed campaign to impose restrictions on WiFi 6E networks in unlicensed 6 GHz spectrum. Supported by some other incumbents in the USA, including the Fixed Wireless Communications Coalition (FWCC) and the Utilities Technology Council (UTC), AT&T has been lobbying since April…
Fixed wireless access (FWA) in the USA will gain ground significantly following the launch of C-band services on January 19, as T-Mobile and Verizon in particular step up their marketing efforts. There is clearly pent-up demand for reliable FWA in some rural parts of the country where compelling wireline options are unavailable, with the interesting question being how well they will compete in areas already well covered by cable or telco DSL networks, or even fiber-to-the-home. On this point the big three operators are divided, with TMO and Verizon quite bullish, while AT&T is more reticent and for now focusing more exclusively on rural households or businesses with poor wireline connections at present, or none at all. The fate…
Five years ago this week… Xumo was shooting for the stars, announcing that it would be deployed in up to 25 million homes by the end of 2017. This was a grand claim from a company that had just 29 employees, but the OTT platform and recommendation software firm’s confidence was boosted by a recent deployment deal with Hisense at the time. However, momentum soon faded with Xumo’s monthly active user count around the 10 million mark by the time Comcast acquired the company in early 2020. — NAB President Curtis LeGeyt is optimistic about NAB 2022 going ahead as planned in April this year following his time at last week’s CES. “All signs indicate that we are…
How is any industry supposed to take proactive steps towards solving challenges when executives spend their precious time on panels patting each other’s backs while cyclically agreeing that everything is just dandy? Nowhere is this more evident than in the advertising world, where discussions are almost always nauseatingly over-friendly – to the extent of muddying our core mission of reporting on informative takeaways from so-called addressable experts. This was the unfortunate first impression as Faultline tuned into the opening session from the TV of Tomorrow (TVOT) show, taking place virtually this week, which is otherwise a cracking little event that served as an ideal way to offset the chaos of CES. It took some serious sifting, but the feeling we…
“The open source winds are blowing,” declared Conny Franzen, CEO of Swedish broadband CPE veteran Inteno Group, via video call with Faultline this week. A developer of hardware-agnostic open source operating systems for residential gateways, through its software subsidiary iopsys, Inteno is seeing internet service providers opening up to the open source model. Getting there has been a slow burner, however, and Faultline has occasionally faced resistance by reminding vendors of the elephant in the room which is that higher-end ISPs prefer proprietary embedded software over open source. Open source advocates like Inteno want us to leave that opinion back in 2018 where it belongs. Indeed, Franzen quickly namedrops BT as a tier 1 customer of the iopsys open source…
Stepping into the new year with a branding makeover, French video delivery vendor Ateme has attracted long-term operator customer Canal+ to its NEA just-in-time packager product for low latency streaming – exclusively on the AppleTV OTT video platform. Like no smoke without fire, we rarely find low latency technologies without live sports – and where we find low latency streaming, we rarely see it in a real-life deployment. The Canal+ announcement is no demo, however, with Ateme emphasizing that this is one of the world’s first OTT low latency cases of its type. The Vivendi-owned operator deployment crunches latency time from 40 seconds to 5 seconds for streaming sports in HD and UHD via the myCanal SVoD application, specifically only…
Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) President Madeleine Noland used much of her time on stage at CES 2022 explaining the basic principles of ATSC 3.0 to an audience of a younger average demographic than your typical ATSC crowd. It wasn’t until Nick Colsey, VP of Business Development for Sony Electronics, asked how many people in the audience were from outside the US that things got interesting. “Wow, that’s a lot,” exclaimed Colsey, as hands sprung up across the Las Vegas Convention Center conference hall. This question was of course asked in the context of marketing ATSC 3.0 as an international hybrid video delivery standard, which is a tough job as ATSC 3.0 is seen as a technology intrinsically embedded in…
V-Nova’s mic-drop moment has arrived. The UK video compression specialist is about to go mainstream in Brazil, of all places – securing a single order that could be worth tens of $millions in licensing revenues over several years. Faultline has been sitting impatiently on this major development for a number of weeks, after we initially caught wind of a game-changing email sent by Brazil’s digital terrestrial television body – the SBTVD Forum – together with the Brazilian government’s Ministry of Communications department. While the gory details aren’t strictly public, we understand it involves notifying the legal departments of every TV manufacturer, silicon maker, encoder supplier, and every other relevant video component active in Latin America that they must support LCEVC…
Thyssenkrupp’s Uhde Chlorine Engineers will provide the 200 MW of electrolyzers to Shell’s green hydrogen production project at the Port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, which will be powered by the future Hollandse Kust North offshore wind farm. The project will use Thyssenkrupp’s 20 MW AEM electrolyzer modules, with construction to start in the coming months. Shell is expected to take a final investment decision to build the ‘Holland Hydrogen I’ project later this year, with commissioning expected in 2024. Orsted has acquired a 45% stake in Liquid Wind’s FlagshipONE methanol project in Sweden. The project aims to be the world’s first large-scale project to produce e-methanol by combining green hydrogen produced from onshore wind and CO2 captured from a…
Germany faces a ‘drastic backlog’ and will likely miss its own climate targets for 2022 and 2023, according to new Climate Minister Robert Habeck. As part of the country’s new ‘traffic light coalition’ government, which takes over from the 16-year reign of Angela Merkel’s CDU, new legislative packages are already in the pipeline to boost wind and solar output ahead of 2030 targets. The new focus will be on doubling the share of renewables in the country’s energy mix to 80% by 2030, at which point Germany has pledge to have reduced emissions by 65% from 1990 levels. Having missed its climate targets for 2021, “the task is big. It’s gigantic,” said Habeck. “We managed to cut emissions by 15…
Population: 19.17 million (+1.16% vs 2020) GDP Per Capita (PPP): $25,700 (+3.2% vs. 2020) Annual Electric Power Consumption Per Capita: 5,500 kWh Government Debt: 25.18% (-1.13% vs 2020) Kazakhstan is sparsely populated, has an authoritarian government, and it is thousands of kilometers removed from the world’s ocean trade routes. But the country does have significant fossil fuel, heavy industry and mining sectors, and its railways provide an overland route from China to Europe. The country is wealthier than its central Asian neighbors, as reflected by the fact that there are less than a million Kazakhs living and working in Russia. In fact, Kazakhstan itself has become something of a destination of Uzbek and other migrant labor of late in its…
At last week’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2022), the WiFi Alliance released WiFi Certified 6 Release 2 – bringing support for uplink Multiuser-MIMO to enable faster upload speeds, and three new power management features for improved power efficiency. WiFi advocates from across the industry have weighed in with messages of support for the latest release, including executives from Airties, Broadcom, CommScope, Infineon, Intel, MaxLinear, Mediatek, NXP Semiconductor, onsemi and Qualcomm. Such advances in WiFi will be important to keep US customers on these networks rather than shifting to 5G, at least according to T-Mobile USA. The MNO, which was once a global frontrunner in fixed/mobile convergence services based on cellular and WiFi, is now all-in on 5G and says the…
In a new route into the US private networks market, Nokia is collaborating with Ligado Networks, which has been building a neutral host 5G network in its L-band spectrum to support enterprise use cases. Nokia will bring Digital Automation Cloud (DAC), the centerpiece of its highly strategic private cellular business, to the party. The application platform supports edge computing and 4G/5G connectivity for enterprise deployments in licensed or unlicensed spectrum. Ligado will certainly welcome a heavyweight partner to kickstart its commercial offerings after years of efforts to be allowed to deploy its network commercially. In its original incarnation, called LightSquared, it planned to support both terrestrial and mobile satellite connectivity in its 35 MHz of Band 24 (1525 MHz-1660 MHz)…
The latest Open RAN milestone from Vodafone, one of the platform’s most active exponents and triallists, is a small cell trial using containerized baseband software with a small indoor radio/antenna unit. Vodafone UK worked with Open RAN provider Mavenir on a voice and data test in which the software used to control the radio unit was containerized. In future, the MNO said additional cloud-native software could be added, which would enable businesses to build customized features into the RAN on an ad hoc basis to support their specific use cases. Vodafone has been working with Mavenir for several years, having chosen the company, as well as Parallel Wireless, as ”leading candidates” to produce interoperable Open RAN solutions back in 2018. Since then, Vodafone has…
In August 2021, Rakuten set up a new business unit, Symphony, to house its Rakuten Communication Platform (RCP) and build up a full commercial proposition around RCP and associated integration services. Now it is separating Symphony further from its actual mobile operator, Rakuten Mobile, giving it greater agility and autonomy to pursue projects round the world. Rakuten will spin off its Symphony unit entirely under the leadership of Tareq Amin, who as CTO, guided the Rakuten Mobile deployment (architecturally very advanced, though to date, commercially lackluster). The parent company said in a statement: “The business aims to provide a future-proof, cost-effective, communication cloud platform for carriers, businesses and government agencies around the world by consolidating the products and services which…
There is a good reason why the only at-scale Open RAN deployments are currently by greenfield operators such as Rakuten Mobile and Dish Network. It is clearly far harder to move to a new architecture with open interfaces for an operator that has invested huge sums, in very recent times, in building a conventional, non-virtualized network from a traditional vendor, and also put in all the effort to integrate that new RAN with legacy 2G/3G/4G systems(or to replace the whole thing with a multi-RAT SingleRAN). Many operators are keen to introduce RAN elements with open interfaces as they make two significant next steps in 5G – one, to introduce virtualized RAN for the first time; and two, to expand the…
Neil McRae, CTO at UK incumbent telco BT, has been fairly skeptical of the short term potential of Open RAN to meet mainstream 5G network requirements, and has been dismissive of the need for multivendor RANs (though he does want to see the choice of vendors expanded). However, he identifies certain scenarios in which he believes Open RAN has reasonably near term applications and could help to fill gaps in coverage and to support alternative deployment models. McRae recently spoke about the potential role of Open RAN, especially when managed by the RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC), to reach rural locations and urban ‘notspots’ such as tower blocks, and so help to bridge the digital divide. “We’re very much looking at…
The neutral host model gained ground during 2021, largely because it is being seen as a good fit for a number of 5G deployment situations, urban and rural, indoors and outside. The emergence of Open RAN has also assisted by encouraging shared virtualized infrastructures that allow greater flexibility and freedom of choice, while avoiding contention over selection of equipment vendors when multiple MNOs or enterprises are involved. They are not a panacea though and it is important to distinguish between situations where they are desirable or feasible, and those where they are not. It is certainly true that their stock has risen with 5G, because the higher frequencies call for greater density, which increases the economic and logistical appeal of…
The CEOs of large telcos often talk about Open RAN for political reasons – to gain favor and possibly financial support from governments; to put pressure on traditional vendors to be more accommodating on price or technology. The stance of the CTO, while it will naturally reflect these concerns too, is more indicative of a large operator’s real intentions for a new architecture such as Open RAN. So the comments of CTOs tend to be taken more seriously when vendors are weighing the opportunity within each large operator. Of course, some operators are open books, especially the greenfields that are helping to create the Open RAN industry in the first place, led by Rakuten’s Tareq Amin. But the bigger rewards…