Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
In Asia, Japan has taken the leading role in Open RAN commercial deployments, thanks to the large-scale efforts of Rakuten Mobile and NTT Docomo, in particular. Meanwhile, Chinese operators are active, but increasingly within their own definitions of Open RAN, and their own vendor ecosystems. The other superpower of Asian cellular technology, South Korea, has been influential in virtualization of the RAN, but less prominent in Open RAN specifically, but incumbent telco KT is setting that right by going public on its Open RAN strategy and boasting a deep cooperation with Docomo. KT says it has been developing its Open RAN strategy for almost three years, since it joined the O-RAN Alliance as a board member in 2018, and is…
Special Report: A new year for Open RAN Our first special report of the year focuses on the latest developments in Open RAN, and as might be expected in this rapidly moving and much-hyped area, there have been plenty, even in the few weeks of the holiday break. Behind all the political posturing and the barrage of announcements, we believe 2022 will see Open RAN vendors and deployers identifying the real commercial sweet spots for the platform and starting to sign deals and form partnerships accordingly. As we have analyzed before, initial deployments will come in private wireless and rural markets, as our special report indicates. By the end of 2022, we expect to see parallel ecosystems – overlapping…
Five years ago this week… CES 2017 saw Nagra debut a serious change in strategy, offering its own hardware root of trust in TVKey on both Samsung TVs and any TV built around Mstar chips. This marked Nagra trying to retrospectively compete with Rambus’ CryptoMedia independent security core, which had taken early advantage of the growing trend of every device needing a hardware root of trust since the arrival of 4K. In reality, not that much had changed at the time. Nagra had its own root of trust on similar chips for years, but it was then open for others to use, in particular the Widevine, Playready and Fairplay key servers. — The NextGenTV Consortium claims that ATSC…
Away from the CES noise, media technology engines are whirring into life, giving early indications of trends to keep tabs on through 2022. One of the earliest moves of the year has come from data center darling Xilinx, investing in a parallel compute platform provider called Bodo – with the aim of simplifying access to efficient media processing on FPGA-enabled clusters. Most of us will have heard of Python, the high-level programming language considered a suitable starting point for wannabe coders, yet Python and FPGA being used in the same sentence is a new one for us. This is because field programmable gate arrays are integrated circuits, so are created by hardware description languages rather than programming languages. However, the…
Faultline was half-tempted to reach out to the team at Plume asking whether the WiFi pod vendor’s technology is involved in the latest generation of Comcast’s XFi Advanced Gateway, or whether Comcast has grown bored and moved on, but the last time we dared doubt the great Plume we ended up facing a barrage of threats. Perhaps this time around the animosity will be traded for a word of thanks for remembering and crediting Plume for its work behind the scenes, considering few others seem to care. Treading carefully, we should safely assume that Plume’s cloud WiFi management technology is again instrumental in Comcast’s new WiFi 6E home gateway, on Technicolor hardware and based on Plume’s SuperPod design with a…
Hoping no one would notice, AT&T dropped its failed advertising arm Xandr just as the world shut down for Christmas. Microsoft is the hopeful new parent of the loss-making subsidiary, subject to regulatory approval. The question is now whether Microsoft can slim down Xandr to a few core pursuits and relieve it of its identity crisis by sidelining its video arm? The short press release made no mention of financial terms, but it is no secret that AT&T has been trying to flog Xandr for yonks now. When the price tag eventually surfaces in some SEC filings, we expect nothing more than a bargain bucket number. The details are still so slim that it remains unclear whether Microsoft is set…
Sports rights have been the lifeblood of pay TV for decades, and now it seems clear that sports betting will be ensnared by the old guard – starting in the US, and very likely spilling out into the rest of the world. Traditional outcome betting and the trendy new real-time micro-bets should be an excellent way to boost revenues, allowing the rightsholders to sign exclusive partnerships or advertising deals for the sports on show. However, the furious pace of this new expansion leaves significant risk for fingers being burned, by anticompetitive regulators, as well as the more philosophical question of the integrity of sports. The NFL has been furiously tweaking the rules of its game, ostensibly with a focus on…
CES 2022 was, as usual, packed with announcements, but this year was relatively tame. Panasonic’s wearable gaming speaker, the SC-GN01, was perhaps the daftest device we encountered in our trawl, but this virtual affair was full of exciting glimpses of the near future. Thankfully, the first few days of CES have not been as buzzword-laden as years past, although Yukai Engineering’s Amagami Ham Ham finger-nibbling cat comfort toy proved that headscratchers still make it through. Despite all the crypto hype, the blockchain crowd was almost reserved, and the drones on show seemed to have much more focused purpose – with Skydio’s autonomous cinematography something of a highlight. Metaverse might have been the most leapt-on new term, with Panasonic’s Shiftall subsidiary…
TV makers are investing significant sums into building proprietary algorithms to get an edge on the competition faster than any hardware-based R&D department could possibly churn out. CES 2022 has, in its opening few days, been littered with algorithmic muscle flexing to great confusion. Faultline has attempted to clear the air on what these algorithms are trying to achieve, how they compare, and how they work, although that crucial latter point is where most of the consumer electronics giants fall at the first hurdle. From where we’re sitting, some 5,000 miles from the Las Vegas Convention Center, LG has been the most vocal in the mathematical battlefield – three years since the South Korean firm first started talking seriously about…
While there is no better way to kickstart 2022 than with an actual in-person technology event, the hysteria synonymous with CES nearly always disappoints – as all the usual consumer electronics brands trip over each other to be first to showcase almost identical product developments. CES 2021, in its virtual format, was summarized here at Faultline as a miniLED minefield, while this year’s event is probably best encapsulated as an OLED orgy – signaling another step away from LED technologies for some major names. Regrettably, Faultline isn’t on the ground in Las Vegas this year, as we’re saving ourselves for NAB in April (touch wood), but among the weird and wonderful press releases to arrive in our inbox during the…
It is that time of year again when everyone who is anyone wants to push their unsolicited predictions for the year ahead straight down your throat. If you’ve had your fill, then stop reading now, but remember that most are either wrong or too obvious to be wrong, while almost all have an underlying agenda, and some are just downright silly. Bereft of bias, Faultline has been in the predictions game long enough to spot a phony forecast or two. Haters might say that we have an ulterior motive too, to sell subscriptions, which is true, but you would probably be surprised how many of our own regularly have feathers ruffled by these very pages. Before we consult our own…
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) in the USA has found no significant environmental concerns in the proposed buildout of offshore wind in the New York Bight. With the Environmental Assessment cleared, 800,000 acres of federal waters will be made available to developers, promising a potential capacity of over 7 GW. The US offshore wind boom was also boosted this week by both Massachusetts and Maryland, with each dishing out support for 1.6 GW of offshore wind in their respective states, across four separate projects. Avangrid was the largest victor of the solicitation, securing backing for its 1,232 MW Commonwealth Wind project off Massachusetts where Mayflower Wind also secured backing for a 400 MW project. In Maryland, US Wind…
The tortuous investment in Energy Vault has proceeded this week with another $50 million being found, through the PIPE set up by Novus Capital II, paid by Korea Zinc that says it wants Energy Vault to help decarbonize its refining and smelting operations at Australian subsidiary Sun Metals. Energy Vault has gone public in the US by way of a merger with a SPAC (Special Acquisition Company) called Novus Capital Corporation II which said that a PIPE (Private investment in a Public Equity) for $388 million in gross cash proceeds would be pushed into the company – while actually only $100 million has been injected so far into Novus II plus a funding round of another $100 million that was…
Senator Manchin has restated that he won’t support Build Back Better, the $3.5 trillion proposed spending bill which he’d already cut down to $1.75 trillion. The Senator says there are no ongoing talks with President Biden to bring him onside. This may simply mean Senator Manchin wants the bill further cut and reshaped to suit his interests – though a Democrat, he represents the right-wing electorate of West Virginia, which also has a strong fossil fuel lobby, not to mention his own family’s coal assets. Outright refusal throws away the easy leverage he gets as the last Democrat Senator of 50 whose vote would allow Vice-President Harris to cast her tiebreaker vote and pass the bill through the Senate –…
The results are in from the world’s first green hydrogen tender, with the Chilean government offering up 240 MW of capacity to a national subsidiary of Italian utility Enel, alongside regional power producer AME. With European stakeholders pushing their way in, this paves the way for an international approach that will be imperative to the early development of the necessary hydrogen market for global decarbonization. The $16.9 million awarded through the ‘First Call for Green Hydrogen Project Funding in Chile’ will dedicate funding towards electrolyzers in the first phase of the Faro del Sur project at Chile’s southern tip. Driven by locally sourced wind power, of which there is an increasing abundance in the county, the project will produce an…
Vodafone and Mavenir complete VoLTE call over Open RAN Vodafone UK and Mavenir, a provider of virtualized RAN software, claim to have completed the first successful data and voice call over VoLTE across a containerized 4G small cell Open RAN lab set-up. The pair are using Open RAN systems to expand in-building 4G coverage for medium- and large-sized enterprise facilities. The companies contend this is a significant milestone in the journey from physical infrastructure to a digital cloud-based environment. The plug-and-play small cell package uses radio hardware from Sercomm and Open RAN software from Mavenir, with Dell, NEC, Samsung, Wind River, Capgemini Engineering and Keysight Technologies among other partners in Vodafone’s wider Open RAN program. ARM and Benetel work on open…
The O-RAN Alliance has held its biggest plugfest to date, which was spread over seven locations/projects and involved 94 companies (some of them participating in multiple projects). This was the group’s third international event for interoperability testing and integration. “The expanded and diverse participation of companies from across the technology ecosystem is testimony to growing momentum behind Open RAN and its relevance for our industry,” said Deutsche Telekom’s head of technology Alex Jinsung Choi, who is COO of the Alliance. Plugfest tests were held in labs in four Asian countries – Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and India. In Japan, all four MNOs plus research park YRB were hosting activities. NTT Docomo undertook interoperability testing with Fujitsu, NEC, Nokia and Samsung products in…
Several important trends are colliding to create the current intense interest in private cellular networks. One, of course, is the extended range of capabilities 5G can offer to industrial segments as 5G Standalone, with the 5G core, becomes commercially deployable. Second is the virtualization of the core and RAN, potentially with open architectures such as O-RAN, which will take off most quickly in the largely greenfield cellular market of the enterprise. And third is the emergence of new deployers of enterprise networks, in scenarios that do not make commercial sense for MNOs, but where there is real demand for 4G/5G capabilities. Private network operators are coming out of their old niches in high value, but low volume, proprietary networks such…
The reallocated CBRS 3.5 GHz band has stimulated the private 5G-as-a-service field in the USA, although it is also on the rise elsewhere. The latest move has come from Geoverse, a Washington DC-based specialist in private 5G, which has partnered with WCI Technologies to deliver the latter’s private LTE and 5G core networking components to the energy, healthcare, and education sectors. The two will deliver both shared and licensed infrastructure over either 5G or LTE in the 3.55-3.7 GHz CBRS band. WCI Technologies, headquartered in Houston, Texas, first established a presence in the hospitality sector for private network integration from which it has expended into those other three sectors. This attracted Geoverse, which contributes its experience in deployments around licensed…
Bulk acoustic wave (BAW) is not a household phrase, even in many wireless circles, but as communications creep ever higher up the spectrum bands, it is going to be increasingly important. The rise of WiFi 6E and 5G mean that this new, pricier form of RF filter is going to be integral to future comms infrastructure. If we look at the relatively small pool of vendors producing BAW RF filters, one seems to be climbing the ranks fast. New York-based Akoustis has its eyes set on toppling Broadcom and Qorvo to become the new face of BAW filters as it moves into mobile handsets – if it can grow its production facility fast enough. BAW is a wireless transmission technology…